Observatory

[Charlemagne]

After an initial enthusiasm, I've become disappointed with the Maya Observatory. Superficially it seems cool, but although it gets boosts from farms and plantations, it loses the boosts from mountains and jungles that the science district has. No matter how you place it, with other districts, farms and plantations near it is difficult that you will get more than a +3.
It seemed strange to me that whenever I was building an observatory there weren't practically any good tiles.

[brooklyncontrivance]

Yeah, it's hard to get it to top out better than the best adjacency bonuses you can get with other civs. The upside is that the Maya are really map-agnostic. Don't need or benefit from fresh water, so you can just plop their cities in places you never would with another civ. And virtually anywhere you can do so, you can at least build farms - so you'll almost always be able to get at least some adjacency bonus with the district.

Maya are a really interesting civ in this game. I'm still not sure if their bonus to cities within 6 tiles of their capital is quite strong enough or if that needs a little tweak upwards, but otherwise I'm quite happy with them.

[Charlemagne]

One big strength is the combat bonus within 6 tiles of the capital. Makes defending from AI rushes real easy.
Regarding the observatory, I think that we need to discard the notion that Maya is a science power. Their science district is just... different, well adjusted to their peculiarities perhaps but not more powerful.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

If the available terrain permits, this works fairly nicely:

C ? ? ? ? ? ?          Key: C  City
 ? ? ? ? ? ?                O  Observatory
? ? F C ? ? ?               G  Government District
 F O O F ? ?                F  Farm
C O G O ? ? C               ? Unspecified
 F O O F ? ?
? ? F C ? ? ?
 ? ? ? ? ? ?
C ? ? ? ? ? ?

That will give you three observatories with +3 bonuses and three observatories with +4 bonuses, without needing any plantations. The three +3 observatories can be increased to +4 by placing a district at the adjacent ? spot.

[Aeekto]

Just place districts around the observatory to make it a +6 ... and if there are plantations near it it even gets more.
if done right you will get more out of it than any other civ, especially they wont get boni at places you can.
You basicly have to forget everything about playing civ 6 and see this civ from a different point of view.... you don't play wide anymore but try to cramp you cities as much as possible.
Build 3 obvervatories next to each other, thats already +2 each, then place other districts around it (unless you have plantations).... it's somehow like playing a mix of germany/japan but with science.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by Aeekto:

Just place districts around the observatory to make it a +6 ... and if there are plantations near it it even gets more.

...

Build 3 obvervatories next to each other, thats already +2 each, then place other districts around it (unless you have plantations).... it's somehow like playing a mix of germany/japan but with science.

Observatory doesn't get +1 from districts it gets +1/2 like normal districts do.

[Charlemagne]

Yeah it's all situational, there is potential to get a nice observatory bonus but it isn't frequent. For example, if you happen to have three plantations around a given tile. Except that in that case, you might want that tile for a city because of the +3 amenities.

[Synavix]

The half production cost is why I like the observatory. Even new cities can usually plop it down with reasonable construction speed. The only big downside to it is that the Maya have a start bias towards several mine/camp luxuries in addition to all the plantation ones, so it's hit-or-miss if you'll be able to get the adjacency bonuses from that.

On every map I've started where I've had plantation luxuries, the observatory has been crazy strong and felt really good. On every map where I'm stuck with furs or gypsum it feels....really bad.