Aztecs need a serious economy buff

The Native Civs (minus the Incans) have always struggled in the long-term game. They were never intended to be useful in treaty games - they can’t access RNG elements like the Saloon or passively produce resources via Factories or similar.

All three need a major rehaul to make them more on-par with the other civs in the game. I’ve gone over ways to make the Lakota a decent treaty civilization, and all three could use a wood-production Ceremony or a way to produce it passively from one of their buildings.

The Aztecs have such an insane farming rate that their gold rate needs no buff, but a way to passively produce wood would be a boon - if nothing else, let them passively produce wood alongside food and gold.

Or, a borderline game-breaking method would be to give the Native Civs the ability to regenerate forests over time. Considering the history of Native Americans and the world around them, it would make more sense for them to produce food exclusively through hunting and forest management, where they would also produce wood - Historically, Native American (especially the Haudenosaunee) agricultural methods had little in common with the western ideology of plowing a field - rather, they would cultivate entire forests to grow abundant with food for them, while keeping only small patches of earth near their homes for things that grew better when cared for more, like maize, beans, and squash. (This could be reflected by giving Longhouses passive food generation, alongside the Kancha House, or letting 3-5 villagers collect food on mini-farms outside Longhouses instead of normal farms.)

Otherwise, cultivating food forests was the go-to method of agriculture. There’s a reason that, when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, they described it as a garden of Eden because of how the Natives in the area had kept the forests filled with edible plants.

We didn’t cut down trees en masse (mostly - there’s also the distinct possibility that Native American logging is part of what caused the little ice age over in Europe in the 16th century), but rather cultivated entire forests as best we could and only took what we needed, never killing the plants off. Keeping them alive kept us alive.

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