Best Civs for Turtling?

Hey, just wondering what you guys favourite civs are to turtle with and play very defensively and any strategies advice you may have?

A few civs I think are good and why:

  1. Inca
    Inca are basically designed to turtle, you have houses that generate you food with most of your units costing 80% food, age ups for free wood gathering techs to help spam warhuts and walls, extensive fortifications for more warhuts, monumental architecture for more building hp and town centre attack, strongholds to garrison your units, stealth card for your forts and war huts to avoid mortar fire, a card for a second tc in age 2. You can also raid constantly from the safety of your base with Chimu.

  2. Portugal
    Ports were my old favourite but have received considerable nerfs, their main benefit being those free tc’s on age up combined with CM and building HP, their lack of villager cards does open up more options and by building a tp in age 1 I’ll often send the 7 sheep + homestead wagon twice and go for a FI and Revolt. Ports are best on water maps though where you can quickly place your tc along the coast and take control of the water.

  3. Mexico
    I’ve been learning them recently and I love the card called barbacoa. I do a standard hacienda boom, the first 2 haciendas get set to spawning cows and the fattening upgrade researched asap. Then once I send the card for all the vills from the haciendas I’ll set 4 villagers on each of those haciendas spawning cows, by mid to late fortress you’ll start harvesting cows at an incredibly fast rate(like post imperial tech) and it all happens automatically. The tlaxcala age up also comes with a card to send an embassy which has a building hp tech which you can research in addition to sending building hp card. If under pressure you can send the card that gives your town centre a bombard cannon attack.
    There’s an age 2 card too that lets your explorer build outposts and reduces the cost of all fortifications and makes them build faster and increases fort limit by 1. Age 3 you can ship another fort, to reach age 4 you can age up and get access to another fort card and wood trickle card, for imperial there’s an age up that lets your forts attack buildings which is very funny but the age up that gives you a card that increases all units stats when fighting near forts is better and it also gives you a fort wagon. There’s another fort card in age 4 too for I think a total of 6 forts with each one at over 18k HP when fully upgraded.
    If you want to be really toxic you can send the card in age 4 to unlock the bastion tech for walls too. I also make good use of the padre to heal my falconets and culverins that are sat behind the walls.

Most of this obviously doesn’t work so well at high level where you need map control but it’s fun to do vs friends or in casuals.

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Aztecs with their building dance and double war huts are probably the best. Throw in some arrow knights to snipe your opponent from behind the wall.

USA deserve an honorable mention because of the tower wagons. It used to be way better when the wagons made towers ridiculously fast, but it’s still nice to spam cheap towers without wasting villager seconds. Plus you can combine it with some very boomy long payoff cards.

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Completely forgot about aztec, yeah they get quite crazy with the age 4 cards to increase war/noble hut limits and the increased range. Pretty sure I got each noble hut to like 18K HP doing the town dance with 10 priests.

USA are great too because of all their trickles I think, like the bank, xp trickle from spanish migrants, capitalism, pennsylvania gold trickle, 2 churches for more xp. It’s quite easy to sit in base forever, the age 3 factory helps too plus you can even go age 4 and just produce free vills like otto with california.

What about Dutch? Isnt it like The turtle civ? At least since always?

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Yeah it is, not a favourite of mine personally though I find them quite boring. It’s good with all the banks and not much food needed so easy to sit in base. It just doesn’t have much else unique though, it’s just build 5 banks, straight to fortress then skirm/ruyter.

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Yeah, i think Dutch is one of the strongest and easiest (to chill) cvis, both in Supremacy and treaty, i also like the best halberdier and the skirm and ruyter is also strong but i agree with you, although i have strong reasons to play them, often i get bored for what you said and ranged units are not my fab…

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Dutch are very good. Mentioned Aztecs are very strong and capable of building numerous defense buildings. On the fortside I guess US are champions (with French and Swedes being close, at least in the number of available forts), but I don’t think I would mention them as an answer. Incas have huge potential and offer interesting strategies, but don’t completely click with me.

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