Are they worth building? Most of them are! There’s one of them I have yet to build, and another I tried once and don’t think I’ll ever use again. Which is which? What are they worth? Let’s take a look.
Most of the Wonders are huge, meaning a big footprint — as much as 6×6. They require a good bit of space somewhere in your base that isn’t crowded by frickin’ Mills all over. One thing Wonders have pushed me to do is to stop planting Mills in the first available space, because Mills, really, are 4×4 buildings. They belong against mountains or lakes, where half their required spacing is eaten by impassable terrain and the other half is somewhere you’d leave a walk-path anyway. But, ok, back to the Wonders.
Besides being big, all of the Wonders are insanely expensive (around 14,000 gold plus 200-400 each of stone, iron, and oil), and sometimes they payoff is mostly vanity points.
Let’s take the Silent Beholder. Yeah, it’s nice to see the whole map. How much would six Radar Towers cost? 1000g for the research, and around 1100g each — that’s 7600g total. You don’t get an extra 1000 VP and you don’t see all the nooks and crannies of the map, but is it worth 6400 more gold and hundreds and hundreds of resources to peak into crannies? If you like seeing the map it could be useful, but from an economy perspective it’s a bust. It’s the sort of thing you buy when you have money coming out of your ears. I thought I had money coming out of my ears and this was the first Wonder that I bought. I love seeing the whole map. I’ve continued to buy it in subsequent games despite the cost.
What about the Crystal Palace? Per unit food, it’s on par with the other sources of food, except that it provides a lot of food. Hence it’s grossly expensive and takes forever to save up for. It requires 200 stone, so you’ll need 3 warehouses before you build one — and in fact I’d suggest 4, because having a bit of extra slop while you’re saving definitely helps. Ultimately, I think it’s really only worth building if the map you’re on has few sources of food; if you’ve got places to put farms and huts then do that. Only if (or when) your option is going to advanced farms should you instead invest in this behemoth.
Let’s consider the Inn here as a mini-Wonder. It sure seems hella expensive — 100 food? -30 wood every tick? But it provides three benefits: +10% gold generation (which was worth 500g per tick in one of my late-game cities), 100 workers (rather than just the 50 that you’d normally get from housing bought from 100 food), plus the ability to purchase Veteran troops just out of the gate. Given the extra workers and the fact that it takes something like 3 days to pay for itself I think the Inn is kind of a no-brainer.
The Academy of Immortals provides a somewhat intangible return, in that all troops become Veteran. It more than doubles the effectiveness of every troop you have (without consuming more tower space, but without adding more hitpoints either), but conflicts with the use of the Inn (which is also handy in that it provides a 10% gold boost). Once you have an Inn and a bunch of Veteran troops that you used to clear out VODs and the map, do you really need the rest of your troops to be veterans? Just 14,000g more! Plus days of material gathering! Personally I think this is the weakest of the six Wonders, in heavy part due to the presence of the Inn and the fact that it doesn’t affect any of the Engineering Center units.
The Lightning Spire, like the Crystal Palace, provides a competitive cost for providing energy, but again with the caveat that you’re stuck paying for it all up front. Plus, once built, you’ll be paying for a lot of energy you’re not using. I think a more useful benefit is the 30 cell range, which means you can stick the Spire (way) behind your trickiest chokepoint and not have to worry about Tesla Towers getting spat on by Venoms. Or building more Tesla Towers. Tho the trick is getting walls up before the next swarm hits. Maybe if you could see the whole map it’d be easier to make this decision? Hmmm.
The Victorious provides +20% gold production in nearby buildings. If you somehow manage to get the bulk of two towns in range, that’s something over 1500g per tick! That’s huge. Hyuuuge. But that’s really all it does, except for providing some extra bragging rights.
The last Wonder is the Atlas Transmutator, which converts plebian materials into oil. This is definitely a late-game tech, and, further, the sort of late-game tech you’d invest in if you get to the “late game” before halfway through the game clock. On some maps, wood or stone production can be very difficult to find — and there’s no Advanced Sawmill to help out, tho Advanced Quarries can. Sometimes getting enough oil to fuel the big boys means sticking oil platforms way out in the wilderness beyond my walls, and that’s icky; the Transmutator fixes that but at quite a cost.
The Spire and the Palace are, to me, great investments. I love seeing the map, so I usually build a Beholder as well. The Inn mutes my interest in the Academy, but my never-ending quest for moar gold makes the Victorious very tempting. I haven’t yet gotten good enough, I’d say, to have enough end-game troops (and, actually, gold) to justify a Transmutator, especially with heavy demands for stone walls and towers.
Inn: -30 wood, -100 food, +100 workers, +10% gold generation, veteran troop purchase
The Crystal Palace: +800 food, -100g, +1500 VP
Academy of Immortals: all troops are Veteran (-50e -50w -120g), +1000 VP
The Lightning Spire: +800 energy, 30 cell range, +1500 VP
The Silent Beholder: see the whole map, +1000 VP
The Victorious: -10 oil, +20% gold production
The Atlas Transmutator: -20 wood, -20 stone, -10 iron, +40 oil, +2000 VP