How Good is the Aztec UB?

[HermannLombard]

When would you ever have a 25 pop city as Monty?

How about for trying to get "10 size 20 cities by Turn 200" (which is probably impossible, but Monty might give a decent run for it.

 

[lolno]

I played as Aztecs in one game, made 3 Jaguars and kept upgrading them, the unique bonus (minor self heal when you kill) is not bad. Used it in combination with medic and march and I was able to kill several enemy units every turn.

Some gave 2 culture, most I've seen is 8 from I think horsemen or knights.

 

[Vordeo]

But the biggest problem with the UB is that watermills are something you wouldn't want to build under any circumstances had you been playing another civ; heck whether or not granaries are worth building is already highly debatable. This by itself already makes the Floating Gardens useless because you are wasting time that could have gone into building settlers or warriors instead. The UB of Russia suffers from the same problem.

They're different buildings though, so I'm not sure why you're making the comparison. The watermill isn't really worth building. The Floating Garden's food bonus makes it worth building.

One replaces the other, but is a significant upgrade.

I played as Aztecs in one game, made 3 Jaguars and kept upgrading them, the unique bonus (minor self heal when you kill) is not bad. Used it in combination with medic and march and I was able to kill several enemy units every turn.

Some gave 2 culture, most I've seen is 8 from I think horsemen or knights.

The UU upgrade isn't bad, but it's not as good as some of the bonuses other UUs get.

And the UA is just weak. After the first few social policies (and by few I mean 1-2)they're a drop in the ocean. Again, it's not bad or anything, and the culture you can get from barb farming helps, but it's horrendously weak compared to other UAs. Also, I believe the culture you get is the strength of the killed unit divided by two, though I'm not 100% on that.

Now the UB, the UB is awesome.

 

[Slvynn]

I used it in mp games to grow big city with lib, gp farm and settler spam.
Worked well enough - so building is usefull on certain food-rich terrain in no-CS mp games

 

[UknowsI]

15% food bonus is in fact huge. As already mentioned, the key point is that it's 15% of total production and not on growth. Additional bonuses just makes it better.

The reason why the building is not that great is that it's so difficult to grow large cities. If the food cost didn't increase so much when the city grows this building would have been one of the best.

 

[Slvynn]

well it contributes alot for SE GP farm and science... esp if you have few cities...that is important, assuming post- civil service food outcomes can be really big the bonus is quite big indeed

 

[alpaca]

His UA and UB make Monty one of the best civs for OCC cultural victory in my humble opinion. The ability gets pretty good once your artilleries start mopping up three modern units per turn from some annoying AI who decides to attack you and the UB lets you grow pretty quick.

Edit: His ability is also possibly the only one that gets significantly better as you increase the difficulty level because on deity you will kill hundreds of units.

 

[TheHarshax]

It's a great UB. Not only can your cities grow insanely large in the early game, but you can also earn points toward a Great Engineer by putting a civilian in it. Montezuma's UB allows you to focus on Great People earlier than most all other Civ's.

 

[Shind]

Its actually pretty powerful. Say you have +40 food you'll get an extra 6 food. Thats equal to three more people working your tiles/specialists in the long run.

The gains in a small empire are bigger than other unique buildings provided you have a river or lake.

 

[RedRover57]

After playing around with Aztec in an OCC game, I would have to say that this UB is pretty great. There is no issue with population growth. The main problems I am having, however, are money and resource availability. With regard to money, you can sell off all of your luxuries, etc., but eventually you will lose trading partners to war. Until you can get the gold buildings up and running money is very tight for emergency troop buying or CS bribing. You can potentially raise money by pillaging, but that brings me to problem 2 - resource availability. If you don't have iron or horses (or preferably both) within your city radius you are dead meat on Emperor or above. You can possibly get these resources from CS alliances (if you have the gold to buy them off), but if they are conquered by another civ you are in trouble. So there is a lot of luck involved with initial city placement in OCC. The planets still haven't all aligned for me yet to be able to do this on Emperor or higher.

 

[Varanid]

The UB rocks. the UA and UU are meh, but the UB rocks. And frankly, you're playing as frigging Montezuma which is an entirely awesome bonus itself