Something I remembered I wanted to say but didn’t; I only mentioned factors related to air.
Warrior priests attack head-on, and they shouldn’t.
Priests are the mobile way to collect tonalli, but they’re terrible at it conceptually. They’re not great in combat, and especially in terms of survival, since they don’t have particularly high health or resistances. Being melee-focused, they’re very vulnerable to enemy attacks, whether projectiles, area-of-effect attacks, melee attacks, powers, etc. What I mean is that it’s very easy to prioritize them to prevent you from obtaining tonalli.
They approach danger when their mission should be to stay back, protected by the rest of the troops.
They’re the opposite of Egyptian priests, and that’s why they don’t quite work. Egyptians have weak attack, low health, and little armor, but they are the faction’s healers, as well as their only heroes that can be produced in large numbers, and therefore the only effective counter-attack against MU. This is compensated for by their ranged nature.
This way, they aren’t put at direct risk, since the enemy has to actively attack them with ranged units, try to approach the formation, or eliminate the melee units first. Meanwhile, the priests kill the MU from behind and heal the troops, making it actually harder to overcome their defenders. They are weak on their own and with specific tasks, very much in line with the rest of the Egyptian units, but they are so well designed that they are actually quite solid units.
It’s actually great that they’re so fragile and have such weak attacks, because if they were monster slayers, healers, and also fighters and tanks, they’d be too strong. This fragility makes their owner want to protect them, and makes their opponent’s priority to eliminate them.
Well, Aztec priests should be something like that, especially since they’re supposedly the active way to gain favor. Being a faction that should supposedly prioritize constant combat, the idea is to attack in battles you know you can win or in hit-and-run fights—anything to gain tonalli. And logically, to prevent the Aztecs from gaining favor, you have to prioritize killing the priests.
The problem is, they practically hand themselves over. Since they’re melee, the enemy has a wide variety of ways to kill them. The enemy doesn’t have to think much; the warrior priests position themselves at the front of the formations, so it’s not difficult to do much to attack them.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen these guys drop like flies many times from area attacks, ranged attacks, a mix of both, or simply because melee enemies wiped them out. You went in with 30 or 40, and came back with fewer than 6, all more dead than alive.
They should be a unit whose priority is staying alive, not the other way around. And again, besides everything else, the Aztecs’ almost nonexistent healing makes their favor collection and fighting style irresistible.
It works with the Greeks and the Norse, but that’s because the former have the offensive and defensive capabilities to withstand the wear and tear of battles even if you don’t choose gods that grant some kind of healing. They are strong units that kill quickly; the faster they kill, the less damage they take. And since they have high health and defenses, they can mythicize their damage.
The Nords compensate for this by being cheaper and faster, and in terms of favor, all their units gather favor when fighting, and their heroes generally gain favor constantly—minimal but present to mitigate their dependence on conflict and prevent them from stagnating if there aren’t enough battles. Not to mention the Hersir and the Godi, who cover the roles of both melee and ranged heroes.
The Aztecs, however, don’t have this. Their way to avoid stagnation is by sacrificing villagers, but since the favor received decreases, and the constant flow of revived villagers is ultimately more technical than tangible, you end up unable to create MU and accumulating mythical improvements that you can’t research.
It might sound exaggerated, but if the Tonalli is the only way to gain favor, it should grant a lot on each occasion, at least the favor gained in battle, a great reward for a great risk.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining myself clearly, but battles can be sporadic or more frequent, so the Aztecs need them to be profitable. Interestingly, because of how things work now, they aren’t good at making constant raids, because they never gain enough favor to summon many monsters with which to easily kill humans, while the others do amass monsters to kill Aztec soldiers.
Returning to healing, the Greeks are solid, the Norse strong and fast. Both have limited, situational healing, and you might run out of it if you choose gods who don’t grant it. The options are incredibly varied, ranging from healing as a power, with all the implications of being able to use it a second time in the future, to a building healing you, a fountain healing you, a unit healing you, healing only cavalry or hydras, to curious things like Odin healing you simply because he likes you, or Loki gifting you a valkyrie. But the options are never zero, and they never boil down to a single god.
As I said, I would make Aztec temples heal, either through a favor cost (if favor gathering were feasible) or by having them heal passively on their own.
That’s another option: have the priests and buildings that collect tonalli heal in an area like the tanuki—not a huge amount, but consistent.
It sounds logical to me. The Aztec gods want sacrifices, and they should give their soldiers the tools to obtain them without dying in the attempt. Or, if the sacrifices were already obtained, then they should heal after the conflict.
Another idea is that everything that collects tonalli should heal when it’s not fighting (attacking or under attack).
That, or the healing system could remain the same, but each Aztec soldier could be a Jojo/Viltrumite—very strong and resilient, in exchange for not being able to heal their own wounds.
And the healing abilities they have would just exist, because they’re not very effective.
These are ideas I have to improve the faction, to make them, I don’t know, SUSTAINABLE, so they don’t die every time someone gives them a dirty look, so you can actually summon SOMETHING.
The worst part is that I really like them. Many things need rebalancing, from having mediocre units to powerful ones, or making them mediocre but less expensive.
Someone said that the ocelots and coyotes don’t fulfill their purpose, and well, I think they’re right. I don’t think the ocelots are bad per se, but they’re certainly mediocre. They don’t do particularly high damage like the hoplites, their attack and movement speed aren’t as fast as the berserkers, nor are they particularly resilient enough to be effective simply by being more durable than others like the Dao. They don’t have bonuses to face every attack like the fanatics, and their camouflage and jump abilities don’t seem sufficient to me.
In terms of concept and design, I like almost everything. I wouldn’t eliminate any unit, but many things need refining, and others need to be completely changed.
And the “they’ll fix it in an update” excuse isn’t enough for me. The fact that it can be updated online isn’t a justification for releasing a broken product. It’s the same with Demeter; I don’t like that they’re limited to 10, but I hope at least the Amazons aren’t like Hippolyta. And curiously, when they were released, I thought the Aztecs worked wonderfully. Okay, they take too much damage too easily, and the priests seem poorly designed from the start, but they were functional. The Tonalli flowed, and at least I felt that each fight gave you enough favor to work with it, but not so much as to be excessively unfair to the opponent.
But they updated the game, and now the Tonalli is nowhere to be seen…
I just thought of something: is this an older version? Someone made a mistake and posted an older version as an update.
It sounds like an intern’s mistake; he was tasked with putting the update on Steam, he uploaded the wrong file, and uploaded a beta version instead.
