[NFP] Maya First Look

An industrial zone with 4 adjacency (which is not that hard since you get +2 from a aqueduct), a workshop, a factory with Power and a coal Power plant with 5 year plan card and 3 specialist will give atleast 16 + 3 + 6 + 9 = 34 production which is enough to build pretty much every building in 10 turns and the district slot cost will not be a big issue for the maya because they have huge amount of housing.

Also even with farming Everything don't mean you wont get production from working tiles, plains and hills have production as base yields so you can still maybe expect to get +10 or so production from working tiles which mean cities can still have like 50 production without having a single mine or lumbermill.

Also going all out on farms do make all farms more productive due to adjacency bonus that farms have and Maya also get gold and 1.5 housing per farm which is quite a big deal. 10 farms and you have 15 housing from tile improvements.This mean you have population to fill specialist slots which increase the value of the buildings in districts, like getting out an extra 4-6 gold from a market or 2 production and 2 gold from a barracks do add up.
 
Zaarin said:
I made the mistake of glancing at the Steam comments on the First Look. Someone there wants Huayna Capac to lead the Maya. :crazyeye:
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There's a trope for this confusion
Mayaincatec.......:crazyeye:
 
Zaarin said:
Not Chichen Itza, ironically; the Maya are going to want to clear cut their jungles. If the stars align for them, the Maya could benefit from Pyramids, Jebel Barka, and Great Bath. Gunning for the Hanging Gardens and Angkor Wat seems like a no-brainer for the Maya.


Both Colosseum and Temple of Artemis would seem to synergize well with the Maya--though every Camp the Maya have is one Plantation they don't have.
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I agree on everything but Angkor Wat. I think Angkor for 6 cities is not even worth building at all. Also, it's definitely a wonder that is stronger for wide Playstyles, and building it later on. I typically get it at t120-140 or don't get it at all. I often get between +15 and +20 population from it, getting +6 seems absolutely trivial in comparison.

I think all the Great People Point wonders would be pretty good, especially with Pingala and the Oracle. Also, wonders for internal trade routes, because Mayans will have strong internal ones since they can get high pop cities with many districts.

AntSou said:
What map sizes are you people playing? I usually have 6-8 cities on standard maps by the industrial age, and any cities after that are land grabs on desert and tundra for stratregic resources. I do just finy on deity, so I'm a bit confused by people who say 15-20 cities are a must.
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you're completely right, 15-20 cities are definitely not a must. and not even possible all of the time on standard maps. you can definitely win Deity with 6-10 cities no problem, in fact you could probably win OCC. It'll just take a lot longer. Building/capturing lots of cities just is the metagame currently, because tall isn't very good. For all accounts, 15-20 cities is only necessary if you want to play for fast win times.
 
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Navelgazer said:
It didn't occur to me until now that if an opponent does manage to get through Lady Six Sky's turbo-archers and take one of her cities, it'll be useless for anything but razing, most likely. The housing cap will plummet as it changes hands, and the Observatory will revert to a Campus built with zero regard to Campus placement.
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Losing the housing cap won't cause any loss of population so if the population is decent then this doesn't matter.
 
Bug Repellent said:
And how many of these farms are you actually working? I usually get one farm triangle per city.
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All, farms produce much more food if you build massive farmland like in the screenshot and that farmland provide food to 3 cities.

A farm triangle is just +2 or +3 food per farm while a much larger farmland can get up to +4 or +7 food from some farms.
 
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AntSou said:
What map sizes are you people playing? I usually have 6-8 cities on standard maps by the industrial age, and any cities after that are land grabs on desert and tundra for stratregic resources. I do just finy on deity, so I'm a bit confused by people who say 15-20 cities are a must.

The way I see it I'll get +15% yields on essentially all of my cities, +10% yields on all my cities by maxing amenities and rushing colosseum. By the time I need more cities beyond 6 tiles I've already won the game...



I'm not sure which games are you playing where plantations are rare. And it seems pretty evident they'll get starting bias towards them.
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I almost always play huge maps... so usually 10-12 cities I'd say, plus any that I go and get by warmongering, depeinding on the kind of game I'm playing (civ etc...)
 
Denkt said:
An industrial zone with 4 adjacency (which is not that hard since you get +2 from a aqueduct), a workshop, a factory with Power and a coal Power plant with 5 year plan card and 3 specialist will give atleast 16 + 3 + 6 + 9 = 34 production which is enough to build pretty much every building in 10 turns and the district slot cost will not be a big issue for the maya because they have huge amount of housing.

Also even with farming Everything don't mean you wont get production from working tiles, plains and hills have production as base yields so you can still maybe expect to get +10 or so production from working tiles which mean cities can still have like 50 production without having a single mine or lumbermill.

Also going all out on farms do make all farms more productive due to adjacency bonus that farms have and Maya also get gold and 1.5 housing per farm which is quite a big deal. 10 farms and you have 15 housing from tile improvements.This mean you have population to fill specialist slots which increase the value of the buildings in districts, like getting out an extra 4-6 gold from a market or 2 production and 2 gold from a barracks do add up.
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I'm sorry, but this is a terrible strategy. Building your IZ + Aqueduct + Workshop + Factory + Coal power plant without having lumber mills or mines is inefficient. Your city will not build anything but this setup for 200 turns or so because your production is weak and the setup requires loads of hammers. This means you're not building campuses and their buildings, commercial hubs and markets, theater squares, wonders, traders, spies, units etc. Besides, when you get to apprenticeship, mines have 4 production. The workshops in particular is absolutely horrible. It gives you +3 production but it requires 195 production! They'll pay for themselves in what... 60 turns? That's unacceptable.

I play on deity excursively and I always have the housing cap at +2 the pop. Anything beyond that is unnecessary as your growth is at 100%. So if your cap is on fresh water, it doesn't need a granary until it gets to 4 pop. With the granary, it can get to 6 pop. Generally by now you're working 2 tiles that give you 0.5 housing (some combination of farms, plantations, pastures, camps) so you get to 7 pop at 100% growth. At this pop you can have three districts and IZ is too weak to be one of them. My first three districts are nearly always a campus and depending upon the victory condition I'm going for, the next two a combination of holy sites, commercial hubs or harbors, theater squares, encampments and the government plaza. If I go for an IZ, it will be the 4th district in a pop 10 city that has an aqueduct already so again, housing will not be an issue. I go for 8-12 cities and with this setup I'm already ahead of the AI in every game by turn 110-120. Yes, on paper the AQ+IZ+Workshop+Factory+Power Plant gives you lots of production, but it comes way too late and a too high of a cost. I usually win my games between turns 200-240 and the IZ+AQ+W+F+PP doesn't pay for itself by then.

Specialists also suck. Why do I want to put a pop in a barracks for 2P +2G-2F (one pop needs 2 food) when I can get 4 production from a plains hill tile (the hill tile has its own food that offsets the pop needed to work it)? Two production is way more valuable than 2 gold.

Denkt said:
All, farms produce much more food if you build massive farmland like in the screenshot and that farmland provide food to 3 cities.

A farm triangle is just +2 or +3 food per farm while a much larger farmland can get up to +4 or +7 food from some farms.
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So your 8 pop city (Nagano) works 7 farms and the furs for a total of 14 production in turn 171? You're researching flight, so presumably you want biplanes. They're 430P. It will take your farms 31 turns to churn one plane. This is so far from being an ideal strategy.
 
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Bug Repellent said:
I'm sorry, but this is a terrible strategy. Building your IZ + Aqueduct + Workshop + Factory + Coal power plant without having lumber mills or mines is inefficient. Your city will not build anything but this setup for 200 turns or so because your production is weak and the setup requires loads of hammers. This means you're not building campuses and their buildings, commercial hubs and markets, theater squares, wonders, traders, spies, units etc. Besides, when you get to apprenticeship, mines have 4 production. The workshops in particular is absolutely horrible. It gives you +3 production but it requires 195 production! They'll pay for themselves in what... 60 turns? That's unacceptable.

I play on deity excursively and I always have the housing cap at +2 the pop. Anything beyond that is unnecessary as your growth is at 100%. So if your cap is on fresh water, it doesn't need a granary until it gets to 4 pop. With the granary, it can get to 6 pop. Generally by now you're working 2 tiles that give you 0.5 housing (some combination of farms, plantations, pastures, camps) so you get to 7 pop at 100% growth. At this pop you can have three districts and IZ is too weak to be one of them. My first three districts are nearly always a campus and depending upon the victory condition I'm going for, the next two a combination of holy sites, commercial hubs or harbors, theater squares, encampments and the government plaza. If I go for an IZ, it will be the 4th district in a pop 10 city that has an aqueduct already so again, housing will not be an issue. I go for 8-12 cities and with this setup I'm already ahead of the AI in every game by turn 110-120. Yes, on paper the AQ+IZ+Workshop+Factory+Power Plant gives you lots of production, but it comes way too late and a too high of a cost. I usually win my games between turns 200-240 and the IZ+AQ+W+F+PP doesn't pay for itself by then.

Specialists also suck. Why do I want to put a pop in a barracks for 2P +2G-2F (one pop needs 2 food) when I can get 4 production from a plains hill tile (the hill tile has its own food that offsets the pop needed to work it)? Two production is way more valuable than 2 gold.
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The combination of good advice with the dismissive and patronising tone makes this post a diamond necklace wrapped up with rags and a barbed wire bow haha!

I don’t disagree with most it, but I don’t think the poster you are quoting was necessarily saying to beeline to those only, just pointing out that production lives in other places if you are pursuing unorthodox strategies
 
Bug Repellent said:
So your 8 pop city (Nagano) works 7 farms and the furs for a total of 14 production in turn 171? You're researching flight, so presumably you want biplanes. They're 430P. It will take your farms 31 turns to churn one plane. This is so far from being an ideal strategy.
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I think he means that if you build, say, 6-7 farms sharing adjacency between several (ie 3) cities, then each city can work 2 or 3 farms each but those farms provide 6 or 7 food per due to the adjacencies.
 
My cities are not only work farms, what I said was that all farms was worked. By placing farms in such formation you maximize the amount of food each farm and thus each pop produce which lead to faster city growth and ability to support more food poor tiles like plain mines and specialists. Generally I work the farms first to speed up my cities growth and then population will start to fill up other tiles such as lumbermills and mines. The cities in that game produced between like 50 production up to like 200 production.

For industrial zone payback time: The buildings cost a total of 825 production and the district cost at most 540 production for a total of 1365 and if you get 34 production per turn out of it, you will get back the production cost in 40 turns. Obviously the exact amount of you get out of an industrial zone is variable with stuff like industrial city states, great engineers, opportunity cost have influences here. If you need to save space, like something you probably will have to do if you want to get 13 cities as Maya, industrial zones will help alot since they much more productive than a mine. You can use mines and lumbermills to build up an industrial zone and then give them to another city to do the same.

Also a single mine or anything else in middle of your farmland can cost you up to 13 food per turn, 7 from the tile in the middle and 6 food due to giving adjacency to other farms. I don't think 3 production a mine give with industralization is worth 13 food and 0.5 housing and even less so for Maya who have more to gain from farms. The basic farm triangle with 3 farms is only worth at most 9 food to get an idea. If you want 3 farms per city it is better to combine the farms of 3 cities into a single large farmland, thus all cities will produce more food, grow quicker and be able to work more tiles.

For Maya farms will likely be the majority of your tile improvement, the housing, gold and observatory adjacency all make farms more important for Maya. Also specialist offers a way to increase productivity while packing cities very close together, a single district allow for 3 citizens to work a single tile, thus saving 2 other tiles and for Maya space may be limited. 3 specialist is still better than a single normal hill mine from what I can tell.

And for Maya housing will be easy to get, 10 farms and your city will already be like 20 housing.
 
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Lady Six Sky's Agenda is "Solitary." She dislikes encroaching civs and she tries to keep her cities in a cluster near the capital. But this one doesn't go as far as the "Paranoid" agenda; she won't look at your military strength as long as your troops are keeping their distance.
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https://twitter.com/EdBeach23/status/1261752398860689408?s=20


She'll be a fun neighbor.

Unit: *exists*
Lady Six Sky: GET OUT OF MY BORDERS!!!!
 
I've made some analysis of Maya and ready to share my conclusions.

First and foremost, this is not a Tier S civ. In a game like Civ 6, early game advantage and tempo is the key to hold through timing pushes and get key civics/techs in time. Maya have issues with scouting and growth:

1) They need to build workers to gain housing. They have only 3 housing in their capital (2 base + 1 from palace), so without farms it will be hard to reach 4th population and build a second district. If you want to maintain early game tempo, you have to construct a builder first. Consequentially, if you build builders that early, you have to sacrifice second early game unit, which means less scouting, less golden age points, less free cs envoys. These factors hammer Maya's progression.

2) When you get another settler, the situation gets even more oblivious. You can hardly grow your second city past 2 population because it will have only 2 housing without farms. And building workers in new cities with little production takes a lot of time. I can see myself getting a pantheon for free builder and using him with pre-build settlers to build a first farm or two in newly founded city. However, the optimal strategy might be to use the first builder for 1 farm + 1 plantation in first city and 1 farm in second city to give it some growth space.

3) Other civs with more population early game will have more science and culture for population only; which means, Maya will have to fight their tempo back somehow.

Things get much better with Ancestral Hall (and given Maya's desire to build ranged units and builders, their gameplan for culture is pretty obvious (craftsmanship into govt plaza civic). Free builder in every founded city is a game changer: you no longer lose tempo when founding cities, but you don't gain anything for it (outside of a few coins for farms).

So.. what's good about this civ?

I believe Maya's gameplan for most situations is pretty straightforward. You can always rely on your UU for defense (33-38 Ranged Strength is no joke), so you can go full greed with your civic and tech choices early on; no one (except for Kongo) will be able to punish you until knights.
On pangaea, it's best to go into campus + commercial hub, attempt to rush a golden age (you have UU and UD for some extra era score) and grab "Free Inquiry". This way you'll be able to enjoy a lot of early science and gold, possibly leading you into a conquest in the second half of the era. You have to get to more powerful units earlier than your opponents, and "Free Inquiry" allows that. The aim of the conquest is not only to grab good cities for yourself, but to hammer others' progression later in the game, as I believe Classical Era's second half is when Maya are at their strongest. By killing your neighbors' tempo you land a path to victory through conquered cities (even reduced yields shouldn't hurt you that much).

Alternatively, you can try a peaceful play with this civ if you have enough land. This route completely relies on your landscape (you need many plantations, like 10+) and your ability to balance around different resources and concepts of this game. +10% to all yields bonus works best when ALL of your yields have relatively high output, so don't forget to invest into science, gold, culture and faith; and don't forget that production and food are boosted as well. Don't forget military. If you feel like your land allows you have a decent amount of farm/plantation science (your adjacency bonuses summed across your cities should be 30+ without modifiers), you can go this way. You need 7+ cities with potentially decent science output. Try to build many farms as early as possible; invest into Pyramids and rush feudalism to bump those free builders from ancestral hall; plan your Observatories for high science output. Use government plaza's adjacency bonus for other districts to bump up those yields as well; putting at least 2 theater squares between Government Plaza and a Wonder seems like a good idea to keep up culturally. Don't forget rivers for commercial hubs and aqueducts/dams for IZ. By the way, I wonder how aqueducts will affect Maya's housing...

Overall, this certainly looks like a straightforward, but interesting civ to play. For some reason, it feels similar to Japan in terms of playstyle. Feel free to add or contradict; I'm really looking forward to everyone's feedback.
 
kotpeter said:
Overall, this certainly looks like a straightforward, but interesting civ to play. For some reason, it feels similar to Japan in terms of playstyle. Feel free to add or contradict; I'm really looking forward to everyone's feedback.
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Not sure it will play out like Japan. Sure you might be rewarded for creating tight District circles around your Campuses like you would with Mali, Germany, or Japan, but ultimately I think your city placement will be dictated by farmable land and Luxury placements, and since all your cities will need at least 1 worker earlier than other Civs, you might want to have cities that have more room to grow individually. Most of your other points I think are going to hit true. Looking forward to test out timings, curious as to how difficult or easy it is to offset that early housing penalty. Half cost campus alone can do a lot of work.
 
Between the Aztecs and Maya on a TSL map La Venta will be doomed.
 
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