I am going to be straight here. This is the dumbest balance change I have seen since possibly the mummy nerf. Aztecs favor is incredibly weak, and there was one way to enjoy making myth units more than once in a game. You saw some people finding ways to avoid the incredibly low favor the civ offers and reach an average of below average amount compared to other civs in a game and decided that was too far and took it out back and shot it.
Lets start with the analysis of overall Aztec favor generation. The first option is sacrifice. The below is a table showing the flat favor gain from a sacrifice and the trickle you receive.
Most people sacrifice one early to get some techs and few more in heroic. If you are going a myth unit play you can maybe sacrifice up to 7-8 vills and not just outright lose. So how much favor does this get you? 99 flat favor and a trickle up to 11/min starting at the sacrifice. So assume you sacrifice one at 6 min for techs. You get 2 per min from there. At a fastish heroic 9 min you get your flat stash and 11/min. So at the time you are doing your myth unit push you get 105 favor to spend on myth units minus any techs you got. Say you got 3 avg 20 favor techs which you probably need. now you have 45 favor for myth units. That’s really quite bad compared to other civs, and now your rate from here on out is 11/min. Which is about what you need for myth techs for the rest of the game. Maybe 1 or 2 myth units from there. What you can do is pair this with the new fire ceremony or use Coyalxauhqui techs or play Tezcatlipoca. First thing is that does not affect the trickle. Below is some data for mythic age Tezcatlipoca with Coyalxauqhi techs and the New fire Ceremony on base favor.
So instead of 99 you get 153 in mythic age for a major god power bonus and a minor god and paying for the tech. That’s, really bad. New fire ceremony is much better. It occurs in heroic and only costs 3 livestock and nets 173 favor. Thats actually comparable to what other civilizations can get by this point in the game and is enough to make a real myth unit push. The problem is every other civilization has sustainable favor and can do another one. This is it for the Aztecs. Due to aggressive diminishing returns the sacrifice well is dry and there isn’t another way. They just peter out until they can no longer receive favor from this method. And the trickle stops at 17/min. To produce consistent combat units I typically shoot for about 60 favor/min in mythic age which is achievable on most civilizations. 17/min is enough for one mythic age myth unit approximately every 2 minutes. As the most easily countered unit type in the game this is simply not enough to get an enemy to even notice they exist. But they have tonalli to make up for it!
Lets talk about tonalli. This one I am not completely sure about but have done some testing and it seems it does not scale on anything and simply gives 0.75 tonalli per kill regardless of cost or population or type of the unit. Itzpapalotl can provide a minor flat buff to this to 0.95 and huitz can double it with shorn ones. Assuming 200 kills in a game is generous but lets just say you get that in a normal game. You get 150 favor from this. For the entire game. Say a game goes 25 minutes. and you got to 17 favor/min at the 9 min mark from sacrifices and used new fire ceremony. You got 476 favor in a game. Now to a lot of people this looks pretty good. Many people build one monument as egypt, have the 3 starting oracles on atlanteans, 1 miko and never more. So they are sitting about 200 favor in a game investing nothing. But realistically Aztecs are the same investing minimal sacrifices. The problem is if you are taking minor god techs for favor and trying to maximize your favor. An average civ easily is gettin 800-1000 in a 25 min game and can certainly do better at the civs with tons of favor generation options like Japan. Aztecs have literally no options to improve outside of tonalli as sacrifice diminishing returns make sacrifice favor techs worthless after about 10 sacrifices. And tonalli base is quite poor so Itzpapalotl barely moves the needle. Looking at like 30 extra favor in an entire game. Huitz can respectably almost double it using owls and shorn ones exclusively, but that is a bit rediculous.
But hey there was in fact one way to play the Aztecs if you enjoyed making myth units for more than one push in heroic. And that was through bloodletting. And lets be straight bloodletting was weak before you decided to put it in the ground. Utilizing 2 population space to generate 3 favor was an incredible investment. More than say 5 priests on 2 TC and you can’t win fights anymore because you took out too much population. And that generated 15/min. At 3-4 TCs you could feasibly get about 10 priests for 20 population space at 30 favor/min. So with the 17/min max from sacrifice, 30/min from bloodletting (on 4 TCs lol), and tonalli generation you were in the 50-55/min range on Quetzalcoatl. Which is actually somewhat respectable. Not the high end compared to other civs but you are about touching the average. It was enough to regular produce almost 2 myth units/min which is about what you need to create a critical mass that doesn’t get easily hard focused by heroes. It was still extremely inefficient and using the population space for human units was almost always a better strategy. But it let you enjoy the mythology in a game called “Age of Mythology”.
So I was having a lot of fun. I took time off work to enjoy this and spent 2 days grinding build orders and games to figure the Aztecs out. I made tamales. Last night I finally started to get comfortable. I realized Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli would never be able to make reliable myth units. Tezcatlipoca could do one push in heroic and if that doesn’t work he just never gets to make them again. And Huitzilopochtli can’t generate enough to tonalli to really compete in the late game. But Quetzalcoatl could. So I could enjoy a long game making myth units the whole game and enjoy the civilization I was most interested in mythologically. And the Aztec mechanics are amazing. I think last night was some of the most fun I was having in this game. My only complaint was that the favor was too low and I basically had to handicap myself to play a myth unit style, but it was close enough that I figured hey the design is good. With a few favor buffs this could be a great civilization.
And then somebody there decided to sit back and say, hey, it’s 2 days in. Almost nobody is using more than 1 or 2 priests for a couple min for techs on Quetzalcoatl. But I see one guy making 5, and 10 if he gets to 4 TCs. This is too much. We have to stop this. And you took the incredibly population inefficient method of favor gathering, and the literal only late game scaling option to produce myth units more than once in a game and killed it. I don’t know why you have done this but please for the love of god revert it and buff it. It was already quite low. Or you can buff the hell out of it and apply the diminishing returns later on. Realistically 10 population space should be able to produce 30/min. 10 population of oracles can get 60-70/min with techs. Mikos can get way more depending on resource availabilty but 60 is a low target. I get that they don’t have other means of generation but you cannot discount how big of a penalty missing the population space to generate favor is. And it’s not like you can just use them to fight when not generating favor. They have 40 hp at this point and are one of the squishiest units in the game already. Keeping a full health one alive is already a chore. Now they produce 11-12/min. For 10 population space!. And you did this 2 days in as a hotfix! What were you actually thinking? I was so excited to play today and I legitimately might just go do some chores or play another game. I just don’t get who put the numbers on these favor mechanics at all. The mechanics them selves are well designed and fun but the never-ending need to put diminishing returns on everything to cap favor below the point you can actual produce any reliable amount of myth units is miserable. I thought we learned from China when Japan was made and was incredibly flexible and allowed late game options for significant investment. But it appears we did not.
I know this is mostly an angry rant but please for the love of Quetzalcoatl fix this one.
spam priests. Or it was too bad