[NFP] Maya First Look

[SirMediocrity]

Due to the way adjacency text is coded, I'm 99.9999% sure that the Observatory Plantation adjacency stacks

 

[Sotof]

I don't know man, Mayan royalty tended to be depicted as a bit on the chunky side. The steele that has been posted here before, and that firaxis obviosly used as reference (if you look at the belt its the same) shows her as a bit overweight, or at least with quite some big flappy arms and broad shoulders, even more if you compare her to the poor sod being crushed by her.

That's fair, I just like for leaders to look good. It's an entirely selfish desire for more Tomyris-ish eyecandy.

 

[MrRadar]

It seems, Maya will have exactly 0 trouble to get that elusive Feudalism eureka. They will revere Liang and pray to have some iron and desert in the vicinity.
Unless some balance patch comes and spoils everything

 

[Zaarin]

That's fair, I just like for leaders to look good. It's an entirely selfish desire for more Tomyris-ish eyecandy.

Tomyris is gorgeous, but honestly so is Six Sky. Not being sarcastic: I find her very pretty.

 

[TheSpaceCowboy]

I hate this civilization design so much. It's yet more of the incremental stat increases emblematic of the base game civilizations than the novel game mechanics seen in Rising Storm. I'm particularly shocked that neither the Leader ability nor Unique Ability tie into the Mesoamerican Long Count, as with the Maya in Civilization V. I would have even prefer a copy/paste of that ability than what we got here. My own design for the Maya would have proved far superior.

 

[pokiehl]

I hate this civilization design so much. It's yet more of the incremental stat increases emblematic of the base game civilizations than the novel game mechanics seen in Rising Storm. I'm particularly shocked that neither the Leader ability nor Unique Ability tie into the Mesoamerican Long Count, as with the Maya in Civilization V. I would have even prefer a copy/paste of that ability than what we got here. My own design for the Maya would have proved far superior.

That's a tad arrogant and dismissive. I think their design is compact and elegant and interesting. I'm super excited. Yours is quite long winded and confusing to parse tbh.

Also I'm RELIEVED they didn't fall back on the tired cliche of "Mayan end of the world." Not sure why you want that to return.

 

[Brutus2]

guys, as far I understand this Observatory adjacency bonus:

2 bonus for plantation or plantations
1 bonus for each 2 farms
1 bonus for each 2 districts

Cornfields seem to be counted as farms, not plantations, therefore we don't have a case with two adjacent plantations. So it's hard to say if this bonus stacks or not. At least on information we got here.

I hope I am wrong here but I'm not sold on the observatory. Any other civ could have dropped a campus just below the chocolate and had the same +4 science without having to build a plantation and four farms first. This video was set up to show an ideal location. In any real game it has to be easier to find a good campus spot next to some mountains or maybe rainforest?

Also, it seems like you need to invest a lot of tiles and builder charges just to to get your housing and science up to the level everyone else is basically starting with (assuming they have fresh water) at at time when you also need to be building units, settlers and spending charges on strategic and luxury resources.

 

[Nevertheless]

So I guess you wanna have the capital in the center and all your other cities in a close-knit circle surrounding it as best you can? Feels a bit like how you did sim-city with Germany's Hansas but more on a city-scale basis instead of districts. Pretty fun

Also seems pretty dependend on a good starting point...

 

[Atlas627]

I hope I am wrong here but I'm not sold on the observatory. Any other civ could have dropped a campus just below the chocolate and had the same +4 science without having to build a plantation and four farms first. This video was set up to show an ideal location. In any real game it has to be easier to find a good campus spot next to some mountains or maybe rainforest?

Also, it seems like you need to invest a lot of tiles and builder charges just to to get your housing and science up to the level everyone else is basically starting with (assuming they have fresh water) at at time when you also need to be building units, settlers and spending charges on strategic and luxury resources.

Seems like it was set up to show a typical situation, not an ideal one. If they have a rainforest start though, then yeah it'll feel a little annoying that you could've gotten decent campuses anyway without investing in builders. But now you get to chop everything on the way there! And chopped food will still let you grow past that housing cap while you pump out more builders. And you'll already want to build farms for the housing, so your Observatory will improve momentarily.

I like how synergistic this is, and it works as long as you don't start on the coast, basically.

 

[sukritact]

I hate this civilization design so much. It's yet more of the incremental stat increases emblematic of the base game civilizations than the novel game mechanics seen in Rising Storm. I'm particularly shocked that neither the Leader ability nor Unique Ability tie into the Mesoamerican Long Count, as with the Maya in Civilization V. I would have even prefer a copy/paste of that ability than what we got here. My own design for the Maya would have proved far superior.

There’s so much going on in your design I can’t keep it in my head. That’s a hard pass from me.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

I hope I am wrong here but I'm not sold on the observatory. Any other civ could have dropped a campus just below the chocolate and had the same +4 science without having to build a plantation and four farms first. This video was set up to show an ideal location. In any real game it has to be easier to find a good campus spot next to some mountains or maybe rainforest

Yes for a civilization that lived in the rainforest and using an infrastructure that previously needed mountains, it is quite strange.
Edit* Looking at it more closely El Caracol, the observatory that this is based on, was built in the Yucatan on flat land with no obstructions around so they could easily observe the sky. So yeah I guess it is fitting why they don't need mountains or rainforests and only farms and plantations are usually built on flat land.

I also think a Holy Site adjacency bonus though would make it stronger, and at the same time be historically accurate and could make them not a one trick science Civ.

For gameplay reasons, the same could be said for the Seowon, though this seems way more situational for the adjacency bonuses, not the initial placement.

 

[SirMediocrity]

Tomyris is gorgeous, but honestly so is Six Sky. Not being sarcastic: I find her very pretty.

Tomyris is probably my favorite looking leader.

Fun fact: the Massagetae (the tribe Tomyris ruled) was known to exclusively use brass/gold for armor/weapons due to the severe lack of iron and silver in their lands. That's why we see her wearing the armor she is. I'm glad firaxis had an eye for historical accuracy there (unless it was unintentional, which is entirely possible).

 

[Victoria]

Grassland tall civ with a bonus for lower production and awesome science.
She’s gonna one shot you with xbows the turn you get archers on deity.

 

[Sostratus]

Due to the way adjacency text is coded, I'm 99.9999% sure that the Observatory Plantation adjacency stacks

Only the CH's river bonus is incorrectly auto-worded, though I suspect that is a limitation from the vanilla implementation.
Most people commenting may not be familiar with what happens when you mod adjacency effects onto things. There's a table you add to that creates these in game tooltip lists for you - which is why some districts now have absolute tooltip gore listing Mountains (grassland) Mountains (snow) Mountains (Desert) etc.
If you add a row that says "+2 science per 1 instance of improvement: Plantation" it will create exactly the text we saw in the video. You then go to your district adjacency table and say "this district now gets this adjacency."
In order to make it be a one-off, you'd have to code in a modifier like the RND's off continent bonus. It's more work and more annoying; things added this way also don't get placed into that tooltip list of adjacency sources (and often don't show up during placement.)

 

[Sostratus]

She’s gonna one shot you with xbows the turn you get archers on deity.

The only risk is poor placement. But assuming the AI has a build preference for observatories and archers, Lady Six Sky is going to be a real AI devil. They don't need xbows - deity bonus+near capital+wounded target is already 42 strength.

 

[TheSpaceCowboy]

Not a big fan of how they have a fetish for making a lot of these leaders look fat and ugly though.

Couldn't agree more. And you're right that it seems to be a really freaky fetish. I certainly don't think Firaxis intend to offend, but the only other possible explanation is that the leader aesthetics (or lack thereof) are a subtle way of denigrating the civilization, but if that's the intent, why include them at all in the first place? So a bizarre, post-modernist abhorrence of beauty is the best inference from the facts.

 

[pokiehl]

I hope I am wrong here but I'm not sold on the observatory. Any other civ could have dropped a campus just below the chocolate and had the same +4 science without having to build a plantation and four farms first. This video was set up to show an ideal location. In any real game it has to be easier to find a good campus spot next to some mountains or maybe rainforest?

Also, it seems like you need to invest a lot of tiles and builder charges just to to get your housing and science up to the level everyone else is basically starting with (assuming they have fresh water) at at time when you also need to be building units, settlers and spending charges on strategic and luxury resources.

Can you clarify? I don't see any chocolate.

 

[Gorbles]

Couldn't agree more. And you're right that it seems to be a really freaky fetish. I certainly don't think Firaxis intend to offend, but the only other possible explanation is that the leader aesthetics (or lack thereof) are a subtle way of denigrating the civilization, but if that's the intent, why include them at all in the first place? So a bizarre, post-modernist abhorrence of beauty is the best inference from the facts.

This is such a weird way of saying "Firaxis are biased against a civilisation in some unspecified way".

Nobody everybody fits into classical Western concepts of beauty (and fitness). This fact only gets more evident as you track back through history, because the baseline even in Western countries has changed over the centuries.

 

[Zaarin]

Couldn't agree more. And you're right that it seems to be a really freaky fetish. I certainly don't think Firaxis intend to offend, but the only other possible explanation is that the leader aesthetics (or lack thereof) are a subtle way of denigrating the civilization, but if that's the intent, why include them at all in the first place? So a bizarre, post-modernist abhorrence of beauty is the best inference from the facts.

Yeah, she looks nothing like how the Maya portrayed her. Western standards of beauty are the odd ones out, historically speaking.

 

[Guynemer]

Couldn't agree more. And you're right that it seems to be a really freaky fetish. I certainly don't think Firaxis intend to offend, but the only other possible explanation is that the leader aesthetics (or lack thereof) are a subtle way of denigrating the civilization, but if that's the intent, why include them at all in the first place? So a bizarre, post-modernist abhorrence of beauty is the best inference from the facts.

Counterpoint: This is nonsense.