Civ Discussion - Mississippian

bengalryan9

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We’re almost to the end of the antiquity age civs! Next up are the Mississipians. The Mississipians are an Economic and Expansionist civilization with a starting bias towards Flat land near Rivers. Their associated wonder is the Monks Mound (adds food and increases the resource capacity of the city in which it’s built) and they unlock Hawaii, Inca, and Shawnee in the Exploration Age (but nobody extra in the Modern Age).

Their unique ability is Goose Societies, which gives all buildings +1 food adjacency for resources.
Their unique military unit is the Burning Arrow, an archer replacement that has +3 bombard strength, +3 ranged against siege units, and applies the burning status to tiles for two turns.
Their unique civilian unit is the Watonathi, a merchant that gives 25 gold per resource acquired when founding a trade route.
Their unique infrastructure is the Potkop, which gives +1 gold and +1 food for each adjacent resource.

Mississippian civics are:
Earthworks – unlocks the Potkop and gives +10% production towards constructing buildings. At mastery is unlocks the Monk’s Mound, the Shell-Tempered Pottery tradition, and gives +1 settlement limit.
Cah-nah-ha – unlocks the Gift Economy tradition and gives +2 resource capacity in the capital.
Waahih – unlocks the Atassa tradition and allows Burning Arrows to pillage within 2 tiles for 1 movement

Mississippian traditions are:
Shell Tempered Pottery – all buildings receive +1 gold adjacency for resources
Gift Economy – gives +1 gold and happiness for every imported resource
Atassa - +4 combat strengths for ranged units when defending

What do you think of the Mississippians - strengths, weaknesses, changes you'd like to see, strategies you like to use, etc. What leaders do you like pairing with them and who do you look to transition to in future ages?
 
Just realized I skipped the Mayans. Will come back to them in the next thread, sorry.
 
My main problems with civs who have a heavy influence on something (resources), are:
1. Buildings and the Potkop both get bonuses from being next to resources, so both want the same tiles
2. The food bonus for being next to resources goes away the next era, so your careful placements matter less (although you still get gold from the tradition, so you don't lose it entirely).

That being said, burning arrows are da bomb.
 
Don't have the time to comment on everything, but two things seem to stand out for me:
The Burning Arrows are ... effective ... as they are a devastating defensive tool, but at the same time have hindered my offensive movements by 'burning' tiles I would have progress over next in order to reach my target (= next town / city to conquer). So damaging an enemy-unit with Burning Arrows and then finishing them off with a melee unit has its price.
The Potkop I rarely build, as they do compete with science and production buildings - as @UWHabs has rightly pointed out! Often I find it more valuable to place these buildings down, so at most potkops appear on the outer rings of my cities, which means: a rather rare occurence. Not sure if they should be primarily placed in towns then, I'd have to try that ... hmm, I will try that :-D
 
I haven’t played them much, but IIRC they are not immune to their own burning tiles. This makes for easy mistakes…
 
Shell-tempered pottery: Great tradition, one of the best in the game. Adjacency bonuses for everything are great. One thing worth mentioning is that they give adjacency bonuses to your ageless buildings, so it is worthwhile to put specialists on those, which allows you to dig out of the age-transition faster. A lot of Missipians' appeal comes from this one tradition.

Burning Arrows: Great UU, great for defense. Good, but awkward to use on offense.

Monks Mound: Good wonder, would come very late otherwise, but Mississippians unlock it very early, so very easy to get for them, which is always nice.

The food bonus: will help you a bit, and you want to build next to resources anyway.

Everything else: Kinda meh.

Since gold is very versatile, they are very versatile and can work with any leader. But that also means, there is not really a leader which really wants to be Mississippians.
 
I'm a big fan of Mississippi. Their kit all feels pretty cohesive, with one big asterisk.

The good:
- Goose Societies - More food is always good, and this scales nicely from being an extra food or two per turn for early snowballing into usually reaching a pretty high number by mid-antiquity
- Burning Arrow - Fantastic UU. Good on offence and defence. Ranged unit with huge damage output due to the burning. Yuthahathi is the king of antiquity but imo the burning arrow is the only other UU that comes close
- Watonathi - Pretty solid civilian UU. Considering a lot of them are very nothing-y, with 25 gold per resource, it's pretty easy to get a few bursts of 100+ while it's still early enough in the game for that to be impactful
- Guaranteed Monk's Mound if you want it
- Cheap pillaging in the civics tree
- Traditions - Shell-Tempered Pottery is the obvious standout and one of the best antiquity traditions imo, generating high quantities of gold which scales well for the entire game, but the other traditions are respectable as well

The fine
- Civ unlocks - I don't care hugely for these. Shawnee are extremely easy to unlock otherwise, and Hawaii and Inca both rely on pretty terrain-dependent playstyles, so it's not necessarily likely you're well-teed-up for them from a Mississippi start.

The bad
- Poktop - This is the big issue with Mississippi for me. As @UWHabs pointed out, there's a conflict of interest when civs want to put two things in the same place. Ultimately, buildings do more for me than poktops do, so I'm going to give priority to them, since once Shell-Tempered Pottery is unlocked the adjacencies are the exact same anyway. The problem then is that Mississippi is left as a civ with basically nonexistent unique infrastructure
- Flat bias - No mines

Food (in non-obscene quantities) and gold are pretty generalist resources so I think they pair well enough with any leader. I guess Patchacuti likes the food, though civs being good with Patchacuti is more about Patchacuti than the civ in question.

Mississippi are a very strong antiquity pick and I enjoy them a lot, but the rest of their kit does a lot of heavy lifting to make up for the fact that all my poktop tiles have buildings on them. I suspect they're probably even better now with the urban centre rework, since you can get more buildings into resource-dense town settles.
 
I think to make Potkops worth it you need Chalcedony Seal, and probably also Achaemenid Xerxes. It's not gonna give you as much culture as doing that combo with Aksum, but the base kit (UU, Fast city growth etc...) of Mississippians is solid enough that I'd say that game setup is just as good fun. And Xerxes' trade focus is solid for them too...

I don't think potkops should be played in competition with sci/mil buildings, but you often end up with 1-resource adjacency tiles and in that case, especially if you have the seal/Xerxes, it feels valuable enough to potkop it up.
 
I think to make Potkops worth it you need Chalcedony Seal, and probably also Achaemenid Xerxes. It's not gonna give you as much culture as doing that combo with Aksum, but the base kit (UU, Fast city growth etc...) of Mississippians is solid enough that I'd say that game setup is just as good fun. And Xerxes' trade focus is solid for them too...

I don't think potkops should be played in competition with sci/mil buildings, but you often end up with 1-resource adjacency tiles and in that case, especially if you have the seal/Xerxes, it feels valuable enough to potkop it up.

Yeah, it's not like they don't have use. You'll always have tiles that you can't grow urban districts to, or you just have a town with more resources that you don't need to cram buildings around. At least the way UI work this year they're never worse than the base tile. At least you can spam them, so if you have to bulldoze them later you don't really care.
 
What are the city names of the Mississippians beside Cahokia ?
 
Yeah, it's not like they don't have use. You'll always have tiles that you can't grow urban districts to, or you just have a town with more resources that you don't need to cram buildings around. At least the way UI work this year they're never worse than the base tile. At least you can spam them, so if you have to bulldoze them later you don't really care.
Yeah, you hit a point usually where there's nothing better to do... And with Seal/Xerxes a 1-resource potkop is giving you 3 gold, 2 culture, 1 food on top of tile yield. That's more than acceptable for a spammable improvement. Without that I'm less sold on them, but you can make them servicable.
 
I think to make Potkops worth it you need Chalcedony Seal, and probably also Achaemenid Xerxes. It's not gonna give you as much culture as doing that combo with Aksum, but the base kit (UU, Fast city growth etc...) of Mississippians is solid enough that I'd say that game setup is just as good fun. And Xerxes' trade focus is solid for them too...

I don't think potkops should be played in competition with sci/mil buildings, but you often end up with 1-resource adjacency tiles and in that case, especially if you have the seal/Xerxes, it feels valuable enough to potkop it up.
They're pretty good if you're looking forward to the serpent mound though. I wouldn't prioritize them early on.
 
I think Mississippians are easy to sleep on, but way better than they look from the outside. I'm not sure I've ever had a bad game as them, to be honest. I think the issue is that they take up a lot of the same space as Aksum, as an Antiquity trading civ with a unique improvement, etc., except that, as many have mentioned by now, the Potkop wants the same spots as the Mississippians' buildings do, which makes it not nearly as spammable as the Hawelti are. So yeah, Potkop is probably the least-impactful part of the kit here in practice.

But the rest of it is gangbusters. Burning Arrows are great (just pay attention to where you're moving! They're for sure easier to use on defense than offense.) Watonathi aren't a huge deal but they still give decent windfalls of gold pretty often (which I think is a better ability than ignoring movement penalties from wet terrain, à la the Khmer Unique Merchant, and more reliable than having a charge to set up a trade route, but requiring open borders and for the AI Civ's settlement to actually be set up for naval trade, à la Aksum's Dhow.)

Shell-Tempered Pottery is the best of their traditions, but all are solid for carrying into Exploration, at least the way I play. I like to maintain peace for the sake of maximizing trade routes and resources as much as I can, warring when I have to but only to the extent that it feels like it'll be worth it and/or unavoidable. Mississippian absolutely rewards this playstyle, with a UU that works on offense but is much more effective on defense, a unique trader unit, and a host of bonuses that encourage quick settling around the most resource-rich pieces of land around. But the Burning Arrow can do work on offense when you need it to. Even if you're hurting yourself with your burning tiles, you can use the extra pillaging power to heal back up, which is fun. Plus the +4 on defense makes it that much harder for the AI to get you out of their territory.

Early access to Monk's Mound is great, since it's one of the hardest Antiquity wonders to get in my experience (and worse, is right in that sweet spot where I can usually get it started just in time to barely miss out on it.) It fits perfectly with the rest of the Mississippian package, and being almost guaranteed to get it is not to be ignored.

In addition, you get the +10% production towards buildings (a nice little bonus), the +1 settlement limit (which Aksum doesn't get), and some extra resource slots (always nice.) Once you've got Shell-Tempered Pottery (so, you know, pretty early on), the Potkop doesn't really do anything that buildings don't do better (it almost seems like they were designed imagining that UIs could be placed over resources, which would make the Potkop very viable) but whatever. Mississppian is one of my favorite Antiquity Civs even if their UI is kind of blank. (Does this make the Baray a better UI than the Potkop? It's a question I hadn't considered until now!)

As for leaders, Amina is super-synergistic, if you want just all the gold and resource slots and defensive power (with situational offensive power.) Achaemenid Xerxes works well, especially if you want to get real value from the Potkop. (You can also just use Chalcedony Seal with whoever, but Xerxes-A's other abilities synergize well with Mississippian themselves.) The game likes to suggest Tecumseh and for some reason Himiko towards Mississippian, presumably because Mississippian leads into Shawnee, I guess? Mississippian doesn't fit either of them particularly well (though as a generalist gold-generating civ, it won't hurt either.) Tecumseh and Himiko-QoW are both better off starting with Greece, IMO, and if you really want to go Shawnee, they're one of the easiest Exploration Age civs to unlock through gameplay, especially if you're playing a diplo game, and I'm pretty sure Tecumseh unlocks them automatically anyway. (Also, if you're set up to have a bunch of cities on navigable rivers, you probably want Songhai anyway, but that's a different discussion.) Pachacuti is great with Mississippian, though, building up the population and gold that'll help Inca blow up in Exploration.
 
I think it would be interesting to evaluate each civilization based on the phrase "I play X when I want to...". For example:
  • I play Carthage when I want to create all around powerful economic basis for future ages
  • I play Egypt when I want much more chances to build critical wonders
  • I play Greece when I want to befriend all independents
  • I play Maya when I want my core cities to have crazy production
  • I play Persia when I want heavy conquest game
The thing is, I don't have that strong answer for the other 6, including Mississippians.
 
I think it would be interesting to evaluate each civilization based on the phrase "I play X when I want to...". For example:
  • I play Carthage when I want to create all around powerful economic basis for future ages
  • I play Egypt when I want much more chances to build critical wonders
  • I play Greece when I want to befriend all independents
  • I play Maya when I want my core cities to have crazy production
  • I play Persia when I want heavy conquest game
The thing is, I don't have that strong answer for the other 6, including Mississippians.
I think this is, indeed, a solid and interesting metric here. For the Mississippians, I guess I'd say:

• I play Mississippians when I want to gobble up as many resources as I can to build high population and income for future ages.

or

• I play Mississippians when I want to create a trade empire that's not reliant on coast.
 
As for my thoughts on the Mississippians, well... I don't have many since I've only used them once a couple of months ago.

Burning Arrows are cool and fun. Yes, you have to be careful about marching your own units into tiles that are on fire but I think that's fair. I'd really love to see more units like this in the future.

As for Potkops, they're probably not great and they do compete with buildings for spots, BUT keep in mind that you can always build over them. Look at them as temporary improvements to put in tiles surrounded by resources until you're ready to put urban districts in those same spots. They're also likely to see use in towns, because you're not going to go Urban Center in all of them. I don't know that they're great UI but they have their uses.

I do think the automatic Hawaii unlock is a sneaky bonus to have as I don't know that I've ever "naturally" unlocked Hawaii... the question is, are the Mississippians going to get the kind of start that allows them to take advantage of it?
 
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