Based on some computations the most cities the maya can have within 6 tiles of their capital is 9 - because of the 3 tile exclusion zone around a city, you can't layer them 2 ranks deep (you'd need 8 tile radius for that.) Building a ring of cities with 5 tiles between them and the capital gives you 9, although it's radially asymmetric. Basically just place a city at that distance and then go every 3 tiles around the hexagon. You can move some of the cities inwards 1-2 tiles, but you cannot fit 10 cities AFAIK.
EDIT: you can get 12, i was being hasty and didn't play around enough before I posted.
But that's still a lot of cities.
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The seowon is probably better overall combined with Three Kingdoms. But maya ALSO has rock solid defense - it's hard to overstate the incredible ability to have UNIQUE ARCHERS that deal both more damage near the capital and more damage to wounded units. Korea relies on raw tech rate to defend, but that only gets you so far on deity. Actually having essentially a 33-38 strength archer is crazy. It gives you a lot of safety you can exploit to get your 8-9 cities up.