Both units cost equal amounts of gold (32).Īnother important advantage lies in the fact that all the blacksmith technologies, except those dealing with cavalry, are open to you. The difference in cost only amounts to 14 wood.
The dilemma you face is whether to build archery range units and take advantage of the savings and firepower or build plumed archers and take advantage of their speed and extra hit points. While the feudal age 10 percent reduction doesn't amount to a significant savings, by the time you reach the imperial age, the cost has been reduced by 30 percent. The Mayans produce reduced-cost archery range units beginning in the feudal age. This also means that expansion and exploration become somewhat less important, since you can make your existing resources last longer. Armed with this benefit, Mayans usually rocket through the first couple of ages. What this means is that Mayan miners can extract 960 gold from a standard 800-resource tile of gold or 168 resources from a normal 140-resource sheep. Mayan civilizations have the potential to become economic powerhouses due to the 20 percent bonus increase in (in-ground) resources. Within the first minute or two, the -50 deficit is more than made up by the second villager with no slow down in villager production due to lack of food.
The Mayans, with the extra villager, can assign a second villager to start harvesting food right from the start. The fact is that most non-Mayan players begin the game by having one of their villagers chop wood, another build a house, and the third look for food. However, because they also start with -50 less food, at first glance, you might conclude that the two even each other out. The Mayans begin each game with an extra villager (four instead of three). The Aztecs, with their unique jaguar warrior, favor a melee-intense ground game, while the Mayans are more inclined to use ranged weaponry in the form of their plumed archers. Archery range units cost 10 percent less in the feudal age, 20 percent less in the castle age, and 30 percent less in the imperial age.Įl Dorado: Eagle warriors possess 40 additional hit pointsĬost of wall and palisade sections is halved (3 stone/wall, 1 wood/palisade).Īs you might imagine, the two pre-Columbian civilizations in the game (Mayan and Aztec) are very similar in make-up, and yet there are some subtle differences that drastically change the way each civilization should be played.