New strategy guide for Lady Six Sky of the Maya

[MegaBearsFan]

I've posted a new strategy guide to my blog. This one is for Lady Six Sky of the Maya:
http://www.megabearsfan.net/post/2020/09/13/Civilization-VI-strategy-Lady-Six-Sky-of-the-Maya.aspx
I apologize for this one being late. I was hoping to have it done it before the 2nd DLC had been released, but once Ethiopia released, I decided to do them first and come back to Maya.

Maya is intended to construct a tightly-packed core of cities that do not require fresh water to provide housing. Instead, farms provide bonus housing, and you'll get housing from granaries, aqueducts, neighborhoods, etc. Maya also gets free amenity for each luxury resource adjacent to the city center. This allows you to trade away early luxuries for extra gold, since you already get the amenity from the city being adjacent to it.

Once you've explored the area around your capital, I advise using the game's map pin feature to plan out the location of your cities and districts. There will be lots of overlap between the workable radius of cities, which makes careful planning more important. You can fit at most 12 cities within the 6-tile radius that grants bonus yield. In actual practice, however, you should assume you won't be able to build that many. Bodies of water, mountain ranges, foreign cities, and other features of the landscape will likely block optimal city placement.

Don't be afraid to settle or conquer cities beyond 6 tiles from the capital. The yield penalty is noticeable, but it's not a deal-breaker. You can offset the yield penalty with high amenities or by adopting certain policies. Even a penalized city can still be a productive or valuable part of your economy if it has good district adjacencies, access to luxury or strategic resources, or some other strategic value.

The linked guide goes into more detail, and also includes some tips on how to play against Lady Six Sky. As always, I'm eager to hear your strategies and get feedback. No matter how many of these I write, there's always tips, tricks, and strategies that I just don't think of. I also almost exclusively play single-player, so I'm always interested to hear multiplayer-specific strategies. Thanks for reading!

[brooklyncontrivance]

Hi MegaBearsFan. It's clear you've put a lot of time and effort into this and I don't want to dismiss that in any way, but I think the core assumption you've made in your guide is actually a sub-optimal way to play the Maya. Don't cram in two rings of cities within six tiles of your capital.

As you did note at length in your guide, doing so gives you the maximum number of possible cities within the bonus radius but causes problems with both district and wonder placement, as well as having enough free tiles available to build sufficient farms to elevate population in most of the cities beyond populations in the high teens.

The alternative I suggest is to build a single ring of cities within that radius of six tiles, with no overlap if possible (it rarely is, so minimal possible overlap is the goal in reality). Not only does this eliminate all of the problems you pointed out, for not neutering your cities for the sake of having more of them you get:
- Up to seven cities that each have the housing and food production to support populations of 50, which provides sufficient population bonus yields to culture and science to more than make up for the lost production from science and culture districts in the cities not placed (even assuming you have room to put both a theatre square and campus in those cities)
- Up to seven cities that each can have every district without placement headaches
- a gravitational black hole of loyalty that will effortlessly flip cities founded next to them by other civs
-unassailable religious pressure within your own cities that will convert your neighbors without effort
- the farm infrastructure of supporting 7 size 50 cities will give you a tremendous gold income as a by-product

Maya are the ultimate Tall civ, because only they get enough housing to hit 50 population in all their cities every time if you support it with your play. I've even won a game with them as a one-city challenge because of it.

Two other quick notes...

Hulche's main reason for existence is two fold: to prevent rushes from other civs while you're still getting your improvement infrastructure up and running, but also primarily for the express purpose of conquering or razing any city that is placed in a way that interferes with your placement of your ring of cities. They excel at this, and no civ or city state should stand in the way of you establishing your ring of cities as soon as you unlock them.

There are other means of increasing the range of your regional buildings than just the suzerain bonus for Mexico City. Probably the most reliable is the great engineer Nikola Tesla. He's late game, but acquiring him should always be a priority as the Maya.

[Schaffner]

I didnt check the content, but you should post your guides in the guide section.
In the forum it will just be spammed away after at least 1 or 2 days.

[Oaks]

Thanks for posting.
Long, long ago I stumbled onto your guides for Civ5 and really enjoyed reading them. Glad to see you are still at it for Civ 6. Keep it up.
Site bookmarked.

[MegaBearsFan]

@Schaffner:
My understanding is that the "Guides" section in Steam is for guides written in Steam. I would have to put the entire guide in the Steam topic. Instead, I write the guide on my personal website and then link to it from Steam, Civfantics, 2k, etc.. That way, I have more control over layout, and if I need to make changes, those changes all go in one place. I used to copy the guides to Civfanatics War Center for Civ V, but it was just too much work, and I didn't have time to keep it up.

Maybe I'll have to check the Guides section again and see if it's changed since last time I looked. Thanks for the advice.

@brooklyncontrivance:
No disrespect taken. Maya is one of the more complicated civs to play, and I've seen tremendous disagreement over how best to play them. Some power players seem to prefer the tightly-packed cities with bonuses. They argue that it gives Maya more of an advantage early, and their games don't last long enough for high populations and "tall" play to become relevant. It's a matter of personal preference and play-style.

Personally, I played Maya much more in-line with how you describe them, often ending up with a hybrid approach of a tight-cluster of cities on one side of my capital, and a single ring of cities on the other side. I focused more on luxury adjacency and good district-placement. But I would still try to pack in as many as I practically could.

I wanted the guide to explain that both approaches are viable, but I also wanted to show the limits of what the ability allows. I tried to emphasize that you should look for *good* cities, instead of just as many cities as possible. But maybe I didn't get the point through clearly enough.

For now, I've bolded the line "Do not let this penalty prevent you from founding or conquering cities outside of the 6-tile range." in the description of the Ix Mutal Ajaw ability. If you have specific suggestions for language that would make that point clearer, I'm open to revisions. :)

Civ VI is such a more complicated game than Civ V, and so much depends on the map, that it's very hard to cover every possibility. Otherwise, these guides would take months to write and take hours to read. Gotta edit them down somewhere. :/

@Oaks:
Glad to have you back. Thanks for the support.