Over at Heavens Forum, blue_thunder started a thread asserting that perhaps Colossus is the best wonder. So what is the best wonder? Originally, I had said:

I like Pyramids. You get the food bonus and the +1 town bonus. Those are good early on. The Colossus is better but it's not as good as the SOL, IMO. You talk about wonders being a waste of resources - try upgrading a huge army!

But after running the Challenge Game, we've seen that wealth is incredibly important to driving knowledge, and knowledge is the single biggest factor limiting age advancement. Colossus gives you a +30% bonus to wealth, which means if you have +100 wealth already, it's payback on wealth alone will be in a little over 3 minutes. Total payback would be just under 7 minutes. So, I'm probably going to have to give the nod to the Colossus in the early stages. Later on though, I'm definitely going for the SOL.

UPDATE: There's an interesting Apolyton thread on Wonders. And I'm sure there are other "best wonder" threads out there as well.
posted by Tim at 10:10 AM