I’ve mained Inca for four months, until the kalianka’s bug 45 days ago (soon to be corrected, a dev told me), playing both ranked and casual games. It’s a great civ, i love to play with them in general, but it has a major flaw: it’s the only civ without long ranged anti-artillery. This makes them useless in the late game, because the opponnet can simply mass halbediers, doppels, or any other heavy infantry with four or five cannons behind, and there’s no way inca can counter that without making a huge (and ultimately lethal) sacrifice of troops and resources. If you mix huaracas (the short ranged inca anti-artillery) and some bolas warriors, they will either get killed before getting to the cannons, or destroy the cannons at the expense of total sacrifice. If you send chimu runners to kill the cannons, they will fall pretty fast to the heavy infantry’s attack. You only get a one time big button send of four light cannons, that could make the work, but just one single time and, of course, that’s not enough.
Moreover, Inca is the only civ withour long ranged anti-artillery (with the exception of lakota, but they have an effective counter). Euro civs, Otto, USA, Hausa and Ethiopia have culevrins; India has siege elephants; Japanese has flaming arrows; chinese have hand mortars; hadenosaunee have light cannons; aztecs have arrow knights; and lakota has rifle rider, which is effective against heavy infantry and it’s pretty much non affected by artillery, since they are cav. In short terms, Inca es the only civ with no effective counter against a bunch of cannons guarded by a huge mass of heavy infantry.
But, what should we do to Inca to solve this problem? I’ve thought two alternatives: the first, and the one i think it’s the best, is adding “captured culevrins” to be trained in Imperial Age from the native embassy. Inca already can train “captured mortars” from the native embassy in Age V, primarily because huaracas are very slow at taking down walls, you would need like 20 aprox. of them to do the job fast enough, and it’s not pop effective (since they take 2 pop). The culevrins will solve the problem, because you could easily kill the cannons from a safe distance, deterring the enemy from that strategy. The other one is making anti artillery ranged attack improved on the huaracas with the cachapoya support card in age four. Currently the cachapoya support card cost 1500 gold and give 22 huaracas with 5+ ranged against buildings, but with this hypothetical upgrade, they will also get 5+ range against artillery, making them almost with the same range of a falc or horse artillery. That way, Inca will be dependant on that card, but will make an effective counter. This is not my favourite option because i’m not sure if that would make Inca OP, but that could be tested.
Well, that was it, i would really appreciate the comunity and devs opinion on the matter.