Hello, time for feedback on the mazatl (and a little of the cualli)
Firstly, the terraforming - since it seems to be a big(ish) issue which contributes to their OPness.
So, I know that the terraforming is underway on balancing, and I've actually played games with it being slower, and also games with the nomoreterraforming module by milaga. The slower terraforming is definitely welcome, by the way
I like the terraforming, but currently they're getting a lot from it with very little counter-benefit. Here's a handy list of stuff like that:
- +0.5 health benefit from jungle
- assured better-than-grassland terrain (marsh+jungle is 2
,1
, and buildable in)
Remember also that for a good proportion of time the terrain will be normal grassland with slower autoterraforming, so it's not instantly uber but still grassland is always welcome.
- autospawning farms in jungles (swamps - which get better at tracking)
It's randomly spawned, so you can't necessarily rely on it, but it seems excessive - why not have them replacing farms/buildable?
- combat+movement bonuses. This comes with the lizardman racial.
- increased workrate in jungle, which offsets the innate workrate loss from lizard workers. the cualli workers aren't very good outside of jungle with a whopping -65% workrate, whereas mazatl only have -25%. Is the difference supposed to be the slave labour thingy? slaves units are actually unusable for improvement building as the cualli.
- Lost lands. In it's current form, it's going...right? Hopefully soon, the mazatl never struggle for hammers, food or happiness usually, given that they're no longer agnostic. I never use the civic anymore because I feel like I'm cheating when I use it, and my cities have performed to levels that on average still exceed most other cities.
To me, it seems like the lizards get only bonuses from their home terrain. I'm not sure this should be the case, and this applies for all the terraform civs. The malakim get combat, movement and commerce boosts in exchange for production loss. I figure that each terraforming civ needs to give up or lose functuality in something or other to balance the gains. This includes illians and D'tesh, although it needs to be done in different ways for all of them, preferably.
I'll just suggest a few of my ideas that might help this..
- Make jungle+wetland tiles equivalent to grasslands, or even plains. Swamps could be uncommonly spawned to boost the tile yield to 3 2 1
or something good like that. It would be cool to have a different effect for the cualli though, maybe something military linked like free XP per swamp.
Would mean that the lizards actually have to build improvements like every other civ in order to do well, but swamps would still give them a bonus superior tile when they spawn.
- Keep the combat bonuses. Maybe not the movement, have that just rely on trails.
- Drop the health benefit from jungles, just make them neutral to health. Maybe allow a happy increase like they used to have from LL, new health system now naturally limits them better than before.
- Drop the culture output of cities. Terraforming takes place inside culture, so each city will have to terraform itself rather than relying on partially terraformed land from another city's extended culture radius. Just another way of slowing the process basically. I'd justify this by saying a lizard's realm is typically going to be within jungle borders, so the process of expanding borders requires expanding of the jungle - which takes time.
- Increase maintainance of mazatl/cualli cities. It's hard to contact other cities with swathes of jungle between them, lizard or not. Also negates some of the extra gold they're getting now that they didn't have access to from before religion.
Now for some other stuff that isn't terraforming...
The kalshekk priests are a bit too strong in that they really don't need all the kilmorph spells in addition to their unique ones. Divine hammer and the shield or whatever it is is probably a bit too much buffing. Despite the following of the same god under a different name, I always thought that the mazatl version had different style of priests as well and so don't share exactly the same abilities. I do like the new change to allow religion though
Omorr is just plain outclassed by kalshekk at the mo. This might be a problem with empy rather than a mazatl thing, but other than that I'm always running kalshekk to counterbalance all maintainance and to get the better priest out of the two.
Feel free to criticise!
