Civ 6 Wonder Placement Guide

Great Zimbabwe

Required neighbors are shown on the map — the remaining tiles can be anything.

Placement requirements

Must be adjacent to: Commercial Hub (with Market)
Must be adjacent to the Cattle resource

Unlock & cost

Technology: Banking
Production cost: 920

Wonders that compete for the same tiles

From the placement data: these wonders share a placement requirement with Great Zimbabwe. A city meant to hold both needs a separate qualifying tile for each.

Big Ben — both next to a Commercial Hub

Is it worth building?

Trade-route gold that scales with nearby bonus resources, plus a route slot — one of the highest raw-gold wonders in the game. Trade empires can double their best route's income with it.

Placement & timing tips

Commercial Hub adjacency near cattle — a resource-rich grassland city is the natural host. Keep the bonus resources unharvested; they are the multiplier.

When to build it — and when not to

Build it when: Build when your trade-route count is already high and a Commercial Hub city sits amid unharvested pasture country — the more routes you run out of that city, the harder it compounds.
Skip it when: Skip when your empire runs few routes or the cattle country got harvested long ago — plain Banks and an extra trader convert renaissance hammers into gold with none of the siting demands.

Which city should build it

The ideal host is a grassland city that was settled for food rather than production: cattle beside the Commercial Hub, sheep, wheat and other bonus resources scattered across its work radius, and a river so the Hub earns its own adjacency. That profile rarely describes the capital, and it does not need to; the gold multiplier is tied to routes leaving this city, so a mid-empire pasture town with a Market is the natural home. Check that the cattle tile is genuinely adjacent to the Hub and has not been covered by a district or another wonder. Because renaissance wonder costs are steep, that food-heavy city will need help: an Industrial Zone with a Workshop nearby, or a Great Engineer, rather than waiting for a farm town to grind it out alone.

Winning the race

A mid-level contest. Trade-minded AIs such as Mansa Musa, Cleopatra and Wilhelmina build it whenever they have cattle, but many AI capitals never satisfy the adjacency and quietly skip it, so it often survives into the industrial era on lower difficulties. The main risk is timing rather than rivalry: Banking sits off the main science path for most players, so decide early whether you are detouring for it. Once committed, prepare the host by pre-building the Market and leaving a couple of woods standing for a Magnus chop, and consider holding a renaissance Great Engineer for it. Gothic Architecture from Divine Right is the policy to slot. The tell that you are losing is a rival with Banking and a Market-equipped Hub beside visible cattle; if that city also has a Workshop, switch to something else.

If you lose it: alternatives

The route slot is trivially replaced by another Commercial Hub or Harbor somewhere in the empire, and the raw gold by a Bank in the Hub you already have plus Triangular Trade in a policy slot. What no building copies is the bonus-resource multiplier, so an empire that loses the race should stop hoarding unharvested wheat and cattle and let builders harvest them for food and population instead. Redirect the hammers into an Industrial Zone chain; the renaissance is when Workshops and the Factories behind them start returning far more than a gold wonder, and a Great Merchant such as Zhang Qian or Marco Polo restores the lost route. If the plan was to fund unit purchases, Big Ben later in the tree provides the extra policy slot and treasury boost that buy the same power.

Planning a district next to this wonder? Check its adjacency bonus →

Other wonders of the same era

Related guides

Last reviewed: 2026-10-03