Bring Back the Camel!

[JoeCamel]

Is it just me, or has the loss of my beloved camel made this game very slooooooow? I understand that some people like to play games on huge maps with 16 civs that take weeks to complete. That's OK, whatever floats your boat, but my favorite way to play civ was early AC with rushed wonder building to increase science via SCC.
It appears that the only way to rush wonders is buy using a leader. OK, fine, so I pick a militaristic civ and flood my neighbor with 30 vet legions (hi neighbor ) Despite multiple victories with elite units, I have as of yet only made 1 leader in each game I have played. I ended up quitting early b/c the boredom of slogging through 10 tiles of jungle with my army that is slower than the 7 year itch just was too much for me. Conquest was never a fun way to play in Civ 2, and its no less appealing in civ 3.
Whining aside, I really want to give this game a fair shake. Civ 2 was arguably the best computer game ever, so I am assuming that this game can't be as boring as it appears. Please respond with ideas on #any hints or tricks on making leaders or #2 any other valid strategies for rushing wonders (please don't say planting and cutting down a forest, if anything that is even MORE BORING than ancient warfare with slow units.) Thanks for your consideration.

[Jason]

It just isn't a viable tactic anymore, wonders are too hard to rush. If you go all-out for normal research and sell your tech to the AIs, (allowing you to spend more on research, rinse repeat)you can build a tech lead and probobly beat them to AC quite handily.

To be honest, people would probobly be more upset if the old ways of winning were just as infallible. To each his own, I guess. I turn off every victory except total conquest, personally. 2050 retirement and nukes pose more of a problem then in Civ2 now that the AI stays in the research ballpark with me.

[EricWright]

You can increase the chance of getting a leader from a victorious elite unit if you build the Heroic Epic, a small wonder. Can't remember the requirements for this, though.

Also, the plant/chop forests won't work in ancient times. There's some tech pre-requisite for planting a forest (engineering???) that you won't get in ancient times.

There's not any other way of rushing a wonder though.

Good luck,
Eric

[Osprey]

Build the Heroic Epic wonder which will become available to you after you have formed an army with a leader and have used it victoriously in battle. Your chances of creating new leaders will increase significantly after that.

[Madine]

What's wrong with not being able to rush wonders?

[Grunthex]

Well obviously, if I'm the human player, and the other 15 civs are AIs, I deserve all the wonders. The computer is just there to entertain me, and has no business winning a game.

[JoeCamel]

Thank you all for your replies. I have read about the heroic epic wonder, but the problems are with it that you #1 need a leader to build an army to be able to build it and #2 you need another leader to rush build the heroic epic so that you can get more leaders easier.
I don't know if there is an answer to my question on how you get a leader any easier in the first place. I guess what I was getting at was if people had noticed any particular way or predisposing conditions of attacking with your elite units that was more likely to get a hero. IE: if your unit is reduced to 1 hp in the fight, is it more likely to become a hero? If so than combat strategies could be developed to try to attack units in a certain way to be more likely to develop a leader. I am just curious if people have any anecdotes from playing so far.
The reason why I want to rush build wonders is because I enjoy the beginning and endings of civ games. The middle tends to get quite tedious, IMHO. I think that a better gameplay change on the developers part would have been to allow (encourage?) some of the scientific civs to build caravans, or crawlers, or supply trains or whatever they would be called to help build wonders of their own, rather then to just junk the concept all together. This, along with the removal of firepower from combat, has IMHO caused the game to regress from the civ2/SMAC model. For those that argue that those things gave you too much of an advantage over the computer, I say changing the AI to try to take advantage of the concepts (like they have with expanding early in the game) would have been a better choice. Anyways that's just my 2 cents worth.

[Dis]

have your cities build palaces. when you get tech for a wonder, you switch that city over. Palace requires lots of shields, so this allows you to build up shields. But you still have to accumulate the shields the old fashioned way, but it will give you a head start over the ai (although they probably use this cheat as well)

[Dark Hawk]

Im pretty sure that you can't switch from any building to a wonder unless your switching the construction of wonders. So you cant switch a palace to the Colossus but you can switch the Colossus to the Great Lighthouse for example.

[Shiva]

Originally posted by Dark Hawk
Im pretty sure that you can't switch from any building to a wonder unless your switching the construction of wonders. So you cant switch a palace to the Colossus but you can switch the Colossus to the Great Lighthouse for example.

No, Dissident is correct. You can use a palace or hidden palace for the switch just like a wonder.

[T-Bone]

Originally posted by JoeCamel
I don't know if there is an answer to my question on how you get a leader any easier in the first place. I guess what I was getting at was if people had noticed any particular way or predisposing conditions of attacking with your elite units that was more likely to get a hero.

As I understand you can build only one Army per 4 cities, I don't know if that also means that you can have only one leader per 4 cities. So until you have 8 cities, there can be only one.