[NFP] Maya First Look

[yung.carl.jung]

IMO if something takes that many turns to build (barring wonders) then you probably shouldn't be building it (consider chopping as an alternative) or there has to be something that has gone terribly wrong! 8-10 turns or so for hard-building universities is more realistic... and your capital/well-developed cities should do it in 6 turns (unless you've really been neglecting your mines, or your pop is too low to work many mines!)

But yes, with Mayan cities and their flat farms and lack of mines (due to wasted builder charges), it's understandable. Personally I cringe when I see my Mayan cities take 28 turns for a single university.

Really depends on how strong your cities are, which in turn depends on how many cities and how much military you build. In a game where I only have 10 cities and play peacefully, I might have universities online on T115 and they only take 8 turns to build, as you say. But in the games where I try to play optimally I tend to either settle or conquer at least 20 cities, which means delaying infrastructure (production is one aspect, libraries another) for settlers and military.

That is the reason why many of my satellite cities end up taking 20 turns for a university. it doesn't matter anyway, since as you say, you can chop them out, but also your cities will grow into production, so 20 turns transforms into 12-15 turns from my experience, as cities grow naturally. I tend to agree with you that 30 turns universities are not worth building. I often do not get them and build, for example Shrine into Campus Research Grants instead. Some cities have such low production you don't even want to get anything more hammer-intensive than a library!

But anyway, all of this is just more fuel for my argument, which was that Universities do come rather late (when going for optimal finishing times), and especially when playing as Maya they come late, so the +10% yield boost outscales adjacency also very late.

And while you're talking about early game, don't discount the fact that they're half the cost of a campus, and don't discount that +10% quite as quickly as you did. The observatory will be making science when the Campus is still a construction zone. Say my observatory at that bad +2.2 you mention comes online ten turns faster than your +4 campus. How long until the campus catches up? By that point my observatory will not be +2.2 anymore, but +3.3 (or better if I'm doing my job at cramming districts together in closely placed cities).

Like I said I've only done one game so maybe I either got lucky or am just leaning into the adjacency bonus more than I normally do but it seems pretty fine to me.

When you are playing fast, your Observatories will likely come online at +0, or +1 if you are lucky and got an early Holy Site or double farm or something. As others have pointed out, builders ain't free, Irrigation ain't free, et cetera. Yes, you will be getting your Observatories earlier than Campi, for sure. Because they are built faster. But them being online faster is irrelevant when they give you +0, or +1, compared to +2.

OTOH getting +2 on a Campus very, very early is relatively easy (as you say, +3 or +4 is rare, I concur), while getting +2 on an Observatory very early is literally impossible, because that requires either Irrigation tech, another district tech (and another district!) or 4 farms, all of which you are simply not going to have in the first 20 turns of the game, unless you rush irrigation (meaning no writing).

Everything about Maya is a trade-off, but mountain adjacency is not a trade off, and does not require techs or builders charges.

 

[kb27787]

Really depends on how strong your cities are, which in turn depends on how many cities and how much military you build. In a game where I only have 10 cities and play peacefully, I might have universities online on T115 and they only take 8 turns to build, as you say. But in the games where I try to play optimally I tend to either settle or conquer at least 20 cities, which means delaying infrastructure (production is one aspect, libraries another) for settlers and military.

That is the reason why many of my satellite cities end up taking 20 turns for a university. it doesn't matter anyway, since as you say, you can chop them out, but also your cities will grow into production, so 20 turns transforms into 12-15 turns from my experience, as cities grow naturally. I tend to agree with you that 30 turns universities are not worth building. I often do not get them and build, for example Shrine into Campus Research Grants instead. Some cities have such low production you don't even want to get anything more hammer-intensive than a library!

But anyway, all of this is just more fuel for my argument, which was that Universities do come rather late (when going for optimal finishing times), and especially when playing as Maya they come late, so the +10% yield boost outscales adjacency also very late.

If you indeed do conquer, then I have a feeling the -15% malus on the rest of your sprawling empire will outscale the +10% boost you get from your inner cities by far... A Vanilla civ would've been better...

Any cities that do build a uni means they've already had time to build a campus and library... (and if indeed it is still a weak city that probably means you've used significant resources to chop out the campus) but really you can't always count on city growth really helping here. A 15 pop Mayan city with all grass flatland farms and plantations and only 2 mines is not going to produce anything fast anyway, even if it grow to 20 pop!

 

[yung.carl.jung]

If you indeed do conquer, then I have a feeling the -15% malus on the rest of your sprawling empire will outscale the +10% boost you get from your inner cities by far... A Vanilla civ would've been better...

Any cities that do build a uni means they've already had time to build a campus and library... (and if indeed it is still a weak city that probably means you've used significant resources to chop out the campus) but really you can't always count on city growth really helping here. A 15 pop Mayan city with all grass flatland farms and plantations and only 2 mines is not going to produce anything fast anyway, even if it grow to 20 pop!

I wasn't really talking about Maya there, but generally. How long your universities take is often a function of how many ressources you have invested into expansion versus getting your cities online in terms of mines, pop and district. Because I still plop down cities after T100 I very often am faced with 20+ turn Universities in those satellites. People that found their last city on, say T50, will never really have that, even their satellites had 50 turns to grow more than mine.

If you indeed do conquer, then I have a feeling the -15% malus on the rest of your sprawling empire will outscale the +10% boost you get from your inner cities by far... A Vanilla civ would've been better...

Yes and no. A Vanilla Civ would have been better, but a net benefit is still a net benefit. Maya gets less advantage from conquering cities, but it's still a huge advantage. For the same reason I would argue restriting yourself to 6 or 8 cities is completely unnecessary and only hurts yourself.

A Vanilla Civ gets +10 culture and +10 science for a conquered city, as example. Maya gets +9 and +9. Still much better than nothing, especially if you already have a standing army for defense anyway!

 

[PhilBowles]

Grassland and Plains are abundant, yes, but do not give the Maya any bonus. For that bonus to kick in, you have to invest additional ressources. The comparison is not fair.

It's perfectly fair in the context of map dependency, which is what we were discussing at this point. Plains and grassland are plains and grassland from the point of view of siting cities. Mountains provide no bonus without having to invest the resources for a district.

You do not have to improve a mountain tile for the adjacency, it is instant.

Upon completing a campus which - let's not forget - costs twice as much as an observatory in production terms. A farm or another district is something you want anyway (and in particular, you want farms adjacent to one another which also happens to be where you want them for an observatory), and you'll probably have the farms before the observatory because you want the housing bonus ASAP.

Also, farms are +0.5, while Mountains are +1, so farms are already much worse in two ways.

Mountains also prevent you from doing anything with the mountain tile. To take your earlier example, if you have a campus with two mountains you have +2 science adjacency, and that's it.

By contrast, if you have an observatory with two districts - say a Theater Square and a Commercial Hub - adjacent, you have a total of +1 science, +1 culture, and +1 gold from that triangle alone in addition to any other adjacency bonuses, as well as space for specialists (which is something you want if playing tall - the last thing a 30-pop city wants is unworkable mountain tiles eating up space).

Yes, Theatre Squares are amazing, I agree.

So why are you applying a different logic to observatories? Theater Squares give you no adjacency without additional investment.

You want an Observatory in every city, but not a Campus? If I am going for a science victory, I do want a Campus in nearly every city, Maya or not.

I don't personally. Maya want a few, powerful generalised cities that get bonuses to as many yields as possible - civs that go wider want more specialisation even though the district system doesn't allow cities to be strongly specialised. Those cities are also smaller so simply have less space for districts - most want a commercial district or harbour for the trade route ASAP, and you'll need some number of industrial zones, theater squares and possibly holy sites (of which people should probably build more than they do with nonreligious games - I know I tend to neglect them) so if you do get a campus in those cities it will be late.

I don't think anyone gets "hung up" on adjacency bonus, the fact that Observatories often have worse adjacency than the Campus until mid- to lategame is a big problem for the Maya, "supposedly" (I agree with you here!) a science Civ.

Yet as you note I'm pointing out exactly that they aren't a "science civ". Everything about them except the observatory boosts yields other than science, and as above the advantage of the observatory is not its science production but the very fact that it's better than a campus for boosting other districts' adjacency. Their farms give gold bonuses, and the bonus yields are at their strongest when your cities have high yields in multiple yield types.

You likely get Universities around 15-30 turns after Education, depending on the city. You do not get them instantly. I usually get Edu around T110-120, Universities anywhere between T125-T150. Games finish usually before T200. So in that specific case it really isn't all that.

My games rarely finish much before turn 350 and don't need to, as from experience it seems the Deity AI is hardcoded not to go for a victory before then. Conversely Newton or Jesuit Education are fairly common ways to get instant universities, assuming you don't already have the gold to buy them.

Also, early science matters much more than late science, same with culture.

Yes, that's very true and a point I made earlier on the thread. Nevertheless the difference seems much less pronounced in practice than I'd expected - on average you'll have 1-2 less adjacency in the early game than other civs, but you have campuses that come online earlier (and don't neglect the advantage of starting to put out GS points sooner) and your cities grow faster once you have housing in place.

Maybe it just boils down to Maya not being a great min-maxing Civ, or not a great "fast victory" Civ, but being much more dependable and consistent than others, which itself is a very good thing. How you rate the Maya ultimately depends on what you use them for. If your goal is to settle a few cities and turtle, they might be the best Civ in the game, the Civ 6 equivalent of Ethiopia. Me personally I always played Ethiopia as an ICS Civ instead

As I say, I'm not making a judgment as to where the Maya fall relative to other civs - apart from anything else, I don't see any real value in that sort of evaluation in a single-player game in which you can win easily enough with any civ. What I can say is that, in a Maya game where I had 6 cities until at least the Industrial era (and subsequently conquered seven more) on a map which was probably about average overall and below average in terms of plantations, I won at about the same time I did with a TSL Arabia start where pretty much everything - city state identity and placement, and the specific geographical arrangement of other civs - strongly favoured me (beyond the fact that Arabia has a naturally poor site for the capital) and I exceeded 20 cities.

"Dependable" may well be a good way to describe them - they can perform with most maps, and as with tall vs. wide in Civ V going tall is a 'safer' strategy in the sense that you will always be able to go tall, but won't necessarily be able to go wide without building up an early military. Maya basically give you a free production boost if your situation or playstyle tends to stick you in a corner anyway.

 

[steveg700]

I've had no problems finding big adjacency observatories. One thing to note is that it's not +2 for having a plantation but +2 per instance (or should I say +2.2).

Well, here's the thing: players frequently have no problems finding big adjacency campuses, so is Maya really beating the odds other civ's are presented with? Probably not significantly, right?

I've played Maya, and even got lucky enough to be able to place one campus in the middle of three plantations. Great. But then again, I don't see how that will be any more common or useful that ensconcing a campus in mountain ranges or next to fissures.

Seems highly argumentative to champion a unique replacement that just swaps out adjacency bonuses. It actually should come out ahead.

One thing I noted was that the entire area with city spots within 6 tiles of my capital contained a grand total of one banana resource (and it wasn't in the capital). All my other district adjacency has had to come from farms and districts.

On my first play, I was fairly swimming in plantationable resources, so I thought Maya might have some implicit buff in the form of a generous starting bias. But further games have shattered that delusion.

Not a good civ in its current state. I think we just have to wait for devil's advocates to tucker themselves out trying to vindicate Maya by straw-clutching with all these little niche, catty-corner situational advantages. When @Zaarin stops liking every post that sticks up Maya, I will consider the dust as having settled on the discussion.

 

[PhilBowles]

Players frequently have no problems finding big adjacency campuses, so that's not really helping the devil's advocate case.

I've played Maya, and even got lucky enough to be able to place one campus in the middle of three plantations. Great. But then again, I don't see how that will be any more common or useful that ensconcing a campus in mountain ranges or next to fissures.

Seems highly argumentative to champion a unique replacement that just swaps out adjacency bonuses. It actually should come out ahead.

A district that costs 50% of anyone else's shouldn't come out ahead - it's just what players have become accustomed to because their unique districts have an essentially free discount. There's no reason it should be better.

People are treating the Maya uniques in isolation, when they're all basically part of a single package aimed at reducing dependence on specific map features. They get a unique science district not so they can have a better one, but because the basic campus is too dependent on specific map features that don't play well with the Maya playstyle - you don't want mountains using up real estate, and you don't want to keep jungle on farmable tiles. If the Maya didn't have a unique science district they'd be forced to settle areas that aren't good for tall, farm-heavy cities.

The question isn't 'is the Observatory better than the Campus/Seowon', it's "is the Observatory better *for the Maya* than the Campus/Seowon" - and the answer is yes.

 

[steveg700]

A district that costs 50% of anyone else's shouldn't come out ahead - it's just what players have become accustomed to because their unique districts have an essentially free discount. There's no reason it should be better.

I disagree on a 50% discount being sufficiently compelling by itself. Particularly in this very case, because the build strategy with Maya isn't to keep expanding and spamming districts. You'll have your cluster of cities, and they'll all have their observatory by the time you hit the Renaissance.

And yes, we're accustomed to seeing districts be better than just a 50% discount because other civ's do get something better. I'm not sure how that's a supporting argument for Maya. "This unique district isn't bad, it's merely below-par"? Being on the inferior side of a mean or median is a pretty compelling reason that it should be better.

 

[KayAU]

But then again what Civ isn't "an absolute beast" when all things fall into place and the stars align? That's why most people agree that the stronger Civs are the ones that have bonuses that always matter, not just under specific circumstances. Like the Mayan cheaper Campus, +15% bonus in the cap and better Archers. These are the things the Maya have going for themselves. Everything else is highly situational.

True, although I wouldn't disregard situational bonuses entirely, they obviously vary both in how impactful they are, and how likely you are to take advantage of them. An extreme example, I think, is Spain in Civ 5. If you started near a natural wonder, their bonus was absolutely amazing. If you didn't, they practically had no bonus.

The Mayans aren't that, though. As you said, they have some bonuses which are pretty much always useful. I would add to your list the +5 combat strength within the capital hex, which helps greatly in making the Maya defensible. Then you have some things which are more a bonus/malus affair:

• No housing from water, but more housing from farms
• No Observatory adjacency from Reefs, Fissures, and Mountains, BUT adjacency from plantations and farms

I don't think either of these are quite as problematic as they are sometimes made out to be. The housing issue is most noticable in the beginning (which is of course also when it counts the most). After you are more established, it is not much of a problem, and Mayan cities will generally have more housing than other civs, thanks to their farms. Of course, once you get an Aqueduct, the malus is completely eliminated, as those are always +6 housing for the Maya.
The Observatory adjacencies are where things get the most situational. If you have a good number of plantation luxuries, you can easily get an average adjacency around 4-6, which makes the Observatory the best district in the game. If you are less lucky, but each city is close to at least one luxury (which can be shared), it will still be easy to get each Observatory to 3 or 4. If you are unlucky enough to not get a single luxury, it would still be possible to get a +3 in almost any city, although it would require more effort.


EDIT: I do wonder if our differing perspectives are somewhat influenced by game speed. I always play on Epic, I think that might change the evaluation a little bit.

 

[lotrmith]

Upon completing a campus which - let's not forget - costs twice as much as an observatory in production terms. A farm or another district is something you want anyway (and in particular, you want farms adjacent to one another which also happens to be where you want them for an observatory), and you'll probably have the farms before the observatory because you want the housing bonus ASAP.

I don't generally want farms, especially in the early game.

Also a half cost Maya campus plus a full cost district and one or two builder charges costs net more than a full cost campus by itself for any other civ.

 

[PhilBowles]

I don't generally want farms, especially in the early game.

Also a half cost Maya campus plus a full cost district and one or two builder charges costs net more than a full cost campus by itself for any other civ.

If you're playing the Maya, you want farms - you want cities to be large, you want housing, and the gold is useful. Again people keep making the mistake of looking at a civ that by design plays differently from others and saying "this is bad because the usual way I play isn't as effective with it". If you want to play a civ that plays identically to any other that has free upside, you have Nubia. Again, "how is this good for the Maya?" is a more relevant question than "how is this good generically?"

 

[steveg700]

If you're playing the Maya, you want farms - you want cities to be large, you want housing, and the gold is useful. Again people keep making the mistake of looking at a civ that by design plays differently from others and saying "this is bad because the usual way I play isn't as effective with it". If you want to play a civ that plays identically to any other that has free upside, you have Nubia.

Sorry, Phil, you (and likely anyone putting a like on your posts) are the one missing a viewpoint here.

I really wish we saw more civ's that are valid alternatives to vanilla gameplay. I defend civ's like Phoenicia for that reason.

The thing is, the devil's advocate cases here are decidedly not proving Maya valid. Where in your response to @lotrmith is the argument that demonstrates how building farms early with Maya is at least as good a way of getting housing as another civ settling next to a river? Since the former requires a builder and the latter doesn't, there's a cost just to get to a break-even point. Not even get ahead, just break even. And that's a theme that continues with the observatory, and with the crummy +10%/-15% yield "bonus". As long as devil's advocates ignore the house strategy and just try to keep analysis in a vacum, then they're just skirting the issue.

Again, "how is this good for the Maya?" is a more relevant question than "how is this good generically?"

A far more relevant question is "how is this helping Maya gain an advantage over the baseline performance offered by generic gameplay?"

If the answer "it doesn't really, it's just a different style of play that may well be inferior to the house strategy", then this is merely a handicap civ. Let's land on that page at least.

The thing that really gripes me is that the dev's couldn't up with anything more exciting than +10% yields to make the wagon-circling strategy distinctive.

 

[PhilBowles]

Sorry, Phil, you (and likely anyone putting a like on your posts) are the one missing something here.

I really wish we saw more civ's that are valid alternatives to vanilla gameplay. I defend civ's like Phoenicia for that reason.

The thing is, the devil's advocate cases here are decidedly not proving Maya valid.

I've won as the Maya on Deity - so have plenty of other people. I've done so using a relatively tall strategy; others have reported doing so while literally never going outside the 6-tile radius. Evidently the civ is "valid", as is playing a "non-vanilla strategy", since "can you win with this?" is the only definition of 'valid' that makes any sense.

Where in your response to @lotrmith is the argument that demonstrates how building farms early with Maya is at least as good a way of getting housing as another civ settling next to a river?

Again, you're taking part of a synergy design out of context. Farms give you housing, but also observatory adjacency and quick gold that contributes to the +10% multiplier. These are not discrete bonuses - the civ design is entirely based around every unique supporting every other.

A far more relevant question is "how is this helping Maya gain an advantage over the baseline performance offered by generic gameplay?"

If the answer "it doesn't really, it's just a different style of play that may well be inferior to the house strategy", then this is merely a handicap civ.

I think this fundamentally misunderstands the point both of the Maya and of different civ design in general, at least as it applies to Civ VI. As in the example I gave earlier comparing my Maya game with an earlier game as a different civ, where I played a more conventional strategy, I achieved victory on almost exactly the same turn in both cases. Civ VI is not a difficult game and you can win as easily with Georgia as with Nubia using a range of strategies - if you adopt an optimal wide strategy you're going to win with anything without any challenge. The point of the Maya is to provide a bonus for playing differently - doing the same thing every game is simply boring because it's not hard to win at the highest level and it makes little difference to playstyle which civ you use. Yet again I've explicitly refrained from making any judgment on where the Maya fall in terms of overall power, whether a "handicap civ" or not, I'm pointing out only that people are not approaching the question correctly because they're too stuck on an incorrect image of the civ (as a 'science civ') or they're trying to evaluate different parts of a synergistic design in isolation from one another, or through making inappropriate comparisons.

 

[steveg700]

I think this fundamentally misunderstands the point both of the Maya and of different civ design in general, at least as it applies to Civ VI. As in the example I gave earlier comparing my Maya game with an earlier game as a different civ, where I played a more conventional strategy, I achieved victory on almost exactly the same turn in both cases. Civ VI is not a difficult game and you can win as easily with Georgia as with Nubia using a range of strategies - if you adopt an optimal wide strategy you're going to win with anything without any challenge. The point of the Maya is to provide a bonus for playing differently - doing the same thing every game is simply boring because it's not hard to win at the highest level and it makes little difference to playstyle which civ you use. Yet again I've explicitly refrained from making any judgment on where the Maya fall in terms of overall power, whether a "handicap civ" or not, I'm pointing out only that people are not approaching the question correctly because they're too stuck on an incorrect image of the civ (as a 'science civ') or they're trying to evaluate different parts of a synergistic design in isolation from one another, or through making inappropriate comparisons.

From what I've seen argued in this thread, the synergistic design is paltry, and the bonus for playing differently struggles to be even a break-even proposition. Stating that being able to win a game with a civ proves its quality is the ramshackle refuge to which crumbling arguments retreat. Winning a fight with a broken arm doesn't sell a broken arm as an asset.

It is not for one tell to tell others what points they should set aside or to dictate what is the correct image. People will stamp their verdict will be based on their standards, their lens, their frame of reference, not someone else's presumption of being attuned with the one correct and ultimate truth. Trying to argue that something looks good within a vacuum is going to tend to reinforces the opinion that we're talking about a lemon.

I'm not the guy who plays Nubia. I don't have current interest in playing Columbia. I should be the target audience for Maya. It just hasn't moved the needle due to a very underwhelming portfolio, and the arguments for it are just working to further neg it, sorry to say. Handicap civ. Awaiting the drawing-board discussions.

 

[The Civs 6]

Looking at this from the other side of the coin:

You could easily rephrase that, rather than not *needing* fresh water, they simply don't *get* fresh water. Yes that frees up your city placement but only because every city you settle is going to start out equally *awful* in terms of housing/growth. Your capital has growth penalty at pop 2 and all expansions start with a growth penalty at pop 1. This is a seriously terrible malus as it sets your snowball back significantly that in many ways is not made up for by the science output or proximity bonus.

Also you have significantly less freedom with district/tile placement. Where everyone else just plops a campus down by mountains/jungle/reef/vent for 3+ and then forgets about it, Maya has to plan around initial bad adjacency for every campus and strategize how to get to 3+. A single plantation, alone requiring a particular resource subset, Irrigation, and a builder charge, only gets you to +2. You need a second, adjacent plantation along with a second builder charge. Else, you need two *adjacent* farms, for an entire builder's worth of charges (presuming the land is already clear). If you can't do that, then you need to combine your city center and other districts to help get to 3+.

That's sort of how I felt when thinking about other Civs. If you are thinking about the Maya against simply not having abilities at all, sure, the observatory is better than the campus. but think about the Dutch, the Indonesians, the Koreans, the Japanese even, who all get pretty reliable bonuses to campus adjacencies that do not require that much work. It looks like to me that the observatory does not get adjacency bonuses from other districts at all which is also kind of a bummer.

To me it again boils down to how much you like farms. I liked farms in Civ 5 quite a lot because pop was really good in that game. Mayans get better farms, and the gold early on is a real difference maker. but if you have a decent city that is pop 5 you probably are only working 1 of those farms, whereas you need to build 3-5 just to get the housing. it's not until feudalism, in other words, that you even want to work those tiles that you have to develop. at least with the Japanese, who get adjacency bonuses from non-core districts (which makes you want to build them), they also get half priced districts.

maybe the Japanese are simply too powerful and I shouldn't be using them as a model - but I feel like the Maya should get some buff for farms. maybe farms are half priced in terms of builder charges, or they can be built on hill tiles early.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

It looks like to me that the observatory does not get adjacency bonuses from other districts at all which is also kind of a bummer.

They do get adjacency bonuses from other districts. The problem is the plantation bonuses are a lot better and you don't necessarily want to build other districts around those plantations and farms are way better for the housing and gold for the Maya anyway.

 

[The Civs 6]

They do get adjacency bonuses from other districts. The problem is the plantation bonuses are a lot better and you don't necessarily want to build other districts around those plantations and farms are way better for the housing and gold for the Maya anyway.

are you sure about that? i'm reading the civ wiki entry and it doesn't say anything about getting them.

 

[Kmart_Elvis]

are you sure about that? i'm reading the civ wiki entry and it doesn't say anything about getting them.

@Alexander's Hetaroi is right. You get the typical bonus of +1 for every two districts. The wiki just hasn't been updated correctly yet.

 

[Larsen]

Played the Mayans a few more times and I still think it's an F-tier civ unless you're willing to restart repeatedly in order to get the right kind of land. And you could do that with any civ and frankly get a better end product. It's not hard to get the mountains/fissures/reefs for +4ish campuses in most of your cities if you restart a few times. It's certainly easier than getting clusters of plantations in multiple cities for observatory adjacencies. I feel like people are cheesing the map generator to get unusually good plantation configurations and then calling the civ good at science when you could easily do the same (and better) with civs like Australia and the Netherlands, or in literally every game with Korea. The Mayans don't even get anything that helps a science victory beyond their unique campus. I wouldn't place them in the top four of science civs, there's a lot more to science victories than campus adjacency--and doubly so if you're playing with a limited number of cities.

But the housing issue is just too much. Every city has to have a builder or granary instantly in order to function. This is such a huge disadvantage that it completely erases everything else this civ has to offer. If their farms got +1 production or something so that you actually want to work those farms you have to build, that would be one thing; but they don't, you're forced to build useless trash farms that basically mean those builder charges are wasted until Feudalism because non-Feudalism farms are some of the worst improvements you can work. So every settler effectively comes with the additional cost of a builder or granary in order for the city to not be garbage for the longest time. It's a bit like having -50% production toward settlers. And you cannot settle anywhere that doesn't have farmable land.

How big of a deal is it really to be able to settle in places without water? There's water everywhere. This ability barely changes anything about city placement. The map generator is specifically designed to provide sources of water in such a spatial configuration that it matches how one might settle, at least in 90% of cases. You will almost never start in an area whose land grants you more cities by settling without water than another civ could get when tied to water sources. And since you're severely discouraged from expanding far away, you can't even take advantage of those far-flung stretches of land far away from start locations where there isn't water. The game literally makes you start near water sources, and you're still encouraged to settle near them (or at least mountains) in order to get aqueducts, so there's very little to be gained for the Mayans. This so-called bonus does not amount to any meaningful advantage.

The unique archer is very good for early defense, but an ancient era unit doesn't carry that much weight for a civ whose only valid victory approach is science. You're strongly encouraged to rush aqueducts anyway, so you'll arrive at crossbowmen quickly enough that a strong archer replacement is not some kind of godsend.

 

[PhilBowles]

From what I've seen argued in this thread, the synergistic design is paltry, and the bonus for playing differently struggles to be even a break-even proposition. Stating that being able to win a game with a civ proves its quality is the ramshackle refuge to which crumbling arguments retreat. Winning a fight with a broken arm doesn't sell a broken arm as an asset.

Once again, I'm not saying anything about the civ's quality. I don't see anything meaningful about power rankings for a single-player sandbox - you might as well argue that Dublin in Crusader Kings II is worthless because it's a weaker start position than the Holy Roman Empire. It completely misses the point of the game. Now I'm not a fan of the fact that they've gone for a sandbox approach with Civ VI rather than what I'd see as a 'purer' strategy game, but that is the framework we have so it's only really useful to discuss civs in that context. This simply isn't Civ IV or Civ V: once you know most of the game mechanics you can reliably win Civ VI on Deity, and you don't need to follow any particular strategy or tech path to do so. I still follow what I describe as largely a random walk through the tech and culture trees and have yet to memorise all the tech progression or eurekas.

The bottom line is that in Civ VI you can win with any civ by doing basically anything. Choosing individual civs makes no real difference to anything except flavour and whether or not it boosts specific playstyles - not because it makes those playstyles comparable to any other in terms of win percentages (which will be about 100% whatever you do for an experienced player), but because it complements something you'd prefer to play. If you want to play tall, Maya or Khmer are about the only options that give you any real advantage for doing so - and there's a tension between tall play and the Khmer's religious focus that doesn't exist with the Maya.

It is not for one tell to tell others what points they should set aside and what they should consider or to dictate what is the correct image.

That obviously depends very much on what they're trying to assert. If someone is just saying they don't like the civ design that's fully subjective. If they're ranking the civ relative to others in a vacuum, then as I've noted that's entirely outside my area of interest. If however they're trying to make direct comparisons based on yield outputs, that has an objective answer. If they're arguing "I don't want to build farms because my usual strategy doesn't use farms", there's a logical flaw in that argument that can be pointed out.

Trying to argue that something looks good within a vacuum is going to tend to reinforces the opinion that we're talking about a lemon.

Which is one reason I've been cautioning against evaluating the Maya in a vacuum.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

are you sure about that? i'm reading the civ wiki entry and it doesn't say anything about getting them.

Yes the wiki hasn't been updated. Edit: it does say minor adjacency bonuses from every farm or district

It's in the Civilopedia article in the game.
Also you can see it at 0:56 in the First Look video in the tooltip.