What does everybody else say?

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"If you cannot beat them, don't join them, instead corrupt them, make them join you, then throw them off a cliff."

I always seem to hit a point, after about the first five cities, where I'm pushed to be able to build anything quickly, and spending money on a wall around a city that doesn't have a demonstrated danger near it seems like poor use of resources to me.

I think the wall's defense bonus combines rather nicely with my frontier towns on forest/mountain/hill squares... I love it when the other guy forgets to do the math, and loses a lot of attacking units.

If you build them early, the cost in lost turns, when you could have built something else, is too great. The biggest potential cost is that you could have founded a number of additional cities instead of building walls. I would rather build four more cities and lose one, than put up walls to protect the six cities I already had.

A great feature of the great wall wonder is that by the time it expires, it only costs you a few turns to build real walls.

I play the ToT 4-map fantasy game, in which the considerations for building walls are somewhat different:

Underground and undersea, you can postpone walls a long time unless under heavy attack.

On ground level, you need walls usually before 1AD to deal with powerful barbarians.

In the sky, you need walls a little later, also to deal with very powerful barbarians.

Many of the tribes in the fantasy game have a good defensive unit that can really hold a city if it has a wall (unless attacked by dragon or Kraken barbarians early in the game).

The great wall ("Excaliber") expires earlier in the fantasy game, sometimes right after you build it. Also, in the fantasy game you are relatively likely to want to bribe a few expensive barbarians (250 to 500 gold each) around 1 AD. Where do you get
gold like that? When desperate, you can sell some city walls!
- toby

I build the Great Wall. What no-one's mentioned is the tremendous diplomatic advantage it gives you. People fall all over themselves to offer cease-fires and treaties. It lets you concentrate on growth and research.

During the Ming dynasty they had cannons, firearms, sidewheeler riverboats equipped with fireball-hurtling catapults, concussion bombs, smoke shells, beautiful bird-shaped incendiary rocket-bombs, and - coolest of all - anti-ship cruise missiles!

I saw a model of one of these two-stage missiles in a Hong Kong museum. The name translates as "dragon rising from the water". It looked like a torpedo with an elaborate, carved dragon's head and finned tail. Attached were four angled rockets which allowed it to skim above the water's surface. Once it neared the target vessel, a volley of rocket-propelled arrows streaked out of dragon head's open mouth. What a terror weapon!

For a short period in the early 1400's the Chinese could muster fleets of hundreds of ships. The largest were 12-masted giants, triple the size of the biggest American clipper ships. Imagine if one of these fleets, equipped with cruise missiles, had shown up off the mouth of the Thames in 1430! Probably we Americans would now be saying "Ni hau" instead of "Hello"!

- mindseye

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"I fear that I shall die a Prince."
-Edward VII, Prince of Wales

If i am conquering , there is no way i would waste resources on walls, hell even on an enemies home soil.

the reason why? Purely becasue my invasion force is usually so large that he wont get close, plus i attack in multiple fronts to confuse people and yes sometimes myself

Second is that if he comes with dips, the first thing to go are the walls as the newly conquered city is likely to have lost most but not always all of the other improvements, therefore i don't waste the resources on them.

If i am on multiple islands, ie any place building more settlers for expansion, then i will wall up my core island cities, ie the ones on the same mass as my capital. No point in leaving myself vulnerable, although city walls dont make the paranoid warmonger in me more complacent, especially since walls come down so easy and then your ripe for the picking, so i often have the huge task force awaiting potential poachers or glory hunters. However sometimes accidents occur and i have to fire the military advisor, after i rebuild my civ from ruin

Well its not quite that bad , but i have taken some damage at times, not even mongol armour is inpregnable

My first reponse when I see any barbarians is, "great, more recruits!"