Ummmm… Since they are separated from the houses like your wish, no longer providing population, the Incas would have to pay additional resources to gain the food trickle they should own originally. The current Inca economy structure bases on the food trickle existing there, so becoming to lack the trickle and to cost more resources would make the Inca offensive delay.
On the other hand, they should not be similar to the Porcelain Tower. The Porcelain Tower is limit to up to only 1, unable to be rebuilt, its mix of resources contains less per type of resource, and its efficiency would keep low if it is built in the early game. If you wanna make them able be upgraded, they should have a lower initial food trickle and get better and better as Age gets advanced, instead of just making them generate other resources in as bad efficiency as the initial one. Anyway if generating other resources is expected, there can be a new card named Bursera Graveolens, which make Kancha House also start to generate wood by 0.35 per second and slowly heal nearby friendly units. This card is also listed at here.
I like the idea about llama, but I prefer to make your “normal houses” really normal than having other special ability again. The Kancha House can be set to able to choose the option between resource trickle and automatically generating llamas.
They would be similar to the Porcelain tower only in regards to producing a mix of resources (after an upgrade). Obviously they should be rebuildable and have a similar build limit to banks.
I don’t think Inca would be overly starved of food without Kanchas. And having to pay additional resources for the food trickle is kind of the point.
If you made the resource gathering building a reasonable cost and have them get lots of free llamas they’d do fine. Something like a cost of 200w 200f would be reasonable and allow you to reinvest the food they generate into more Qullqas. Shipments or age ups to send Qullqa builders could also speed things up.
I just think the design for Inca was/is too gentle and too broad.
It feels like the perks from a few concepts in Alpha that were all put together into one single civilization:
Highly effective cards that contemplate everything,
they receive an insane amount of travois,
they have (some of ) the best politicians (free upgrades, shipments, builder travois)…+ perks on minor tribes, booming, defense, + army as complete as the euro civ
Converting priestesses, military garrisoning, poison arrows, etc definitely feel like they were just thrown into the civ after the devs experimented with them and didn’t know where else to put them. All of these could be better implemented elsewhere. Conversions would make the most sense for Spanish and/or Portuguese Missionaries. Military being able to garrison in forts could be a unique perk for a Maori faction. Poison damage could be the ability of natives like Jivaro.
The insane amount of wagons and affinity for resource generating houses seems to be a common theme for the DE civs, not really just Inca specific and should really be toned down.
So to develop on this further, if we say that the kancha is the strength of the inca due to allowing them to turtle, what should their glaring weakness be, if we still want to keep their ability to turtle.
if the eco is too much we could either nerf the eco or increase their unit cost overall to put more strain on their ability to contest the map wihile still turtling.
Like if their raiding is what is allowing them to keep turtling, then a nerf could be to just remove most of the chimmu runner shipment, besides the support ones and also increase their gold cost, its 35 right now and could be 40-45. This would also incentive them to fight for the map or else they cant make their only cav unit.
the spearman cost is 90 food and 25 wood, could be 90/30 or 100/30 to make their massing a lot more difficult, same to the bowman which is 80/25, could be 80/30 just to make it a lot harder to both gather wood for military and kanchas and walls.
still, it’s very simple, from my point of view aoe3 is very dynamic because it contains fights which are dynamic and which require micro and skills (you see it when you do a blindly classic z move you generally lose your fights except with ashi (joke)), to give another example there is the snare mechanics which forces you to concentrate more on the fight and on your army right
And the problem with Inca is that this civ completely ignores these 2 aspects of the game which are very important, the chimus which are not snairable (even if it is a competence now but it is still stupid ofc) and to be able to put the garrisoned military units allow you to escape any fight allows you to engage any fight too, take archer bolas or huaracas or whatever you want out of the fort, shoot, and you put them in the fort etc etc so the cav becomes completely useless
The design of the civ goes against the basics of aoe3, I don’t know why they made it but it’s obvious that it’s broken xD and I’m not even talking about the bolas and huaracas which are completely unkillable for real, these units are just way too strong jeez and in addition they have a turtle power which is just too high, they can clearly camp for 1 hour if he wishes since the kanchas trickle is too much lol and they have a square shape so you wall with + the pathings that it can create, a card which gives 45% hp to the building and give atk damage to the tc (obviously it’s ridiculous lol it’s pretty obvious too) and a second tc age 2 like the civ can take gold safely on the map if he plays age 2, so i mean the civ is very clearly invincible because of its design, all of these things i quote are for me so obvious that I do not understand why we have this (and again I do not speak of the priestess who can convert units lol and of course they have so much hp that it is impossible to snipe them when we are desperately trying to rush an Inca and we have ridiculous age up or card with a ton of priestess cuz why not)
and people complain about jap or dutch but this civ really has a turtle potential which is much higher and which goes against the game design, when you play inca a minimum well it is just IMPOSSIBLE to lose tbh, the civ is invincible and I don’t even exaggerate, that’s why the civ has banned from all the tournaments that I can see on the game which is pretty sad right
We could just reduce the garison limit to like 5 or something, part of the gimmick is to reduce pop usage, so if the ability to move masses of units to different side is a problem, just make it less so.
tbh like bolas were just not a problem, even nearly useless even until the recent updates so its arguably overtuned but tuneable ( the biggest change was the move to allow them to be microed), some further tuning could be all it takes.
and yeah for eco either reduce the trickle or increase unit costs, I am more for increasing unit costs cause that more hampers their ability to turtle personally
In my opinion the Inca turtle play is very week if you know what to do. You go Imperial age, make mortals and Incas are doomed. It is strong if you try to win Incas turtle strategy with units.
Yes, it will not be a quick game, but from the other hand, the turtle strategy gives you the necessary time you need to do it. It will be a slow but easy win. If you try to rush without mortars and the opponent knows what to do you might have problems.
My bad, I was speaking about the Aztecs building turtle strategy, not the Incas. ( I read turtle game and my mind wend to Aztecs)
The Aztecs building strategy where you have the card for 100% more War Huts/Noble Huts and you have every card that buffs buildings and you manage to have 15+ Barracks with 300+ attack and 20k+ HP. (the azdecs have and a dance that buff buildings a lot, for that these stats)
Only in you-tube I have seen this Aztec turtle strategy. It is very rare. In this strategy, the opponent has the time to go to Imperial age if he wants.
I don’t think that Incas players stays in their base like Dutch players does. Native American civs plays aggressively. They have advantage at start but as the game goes on, if you manage to survive they have disadvantage because they does not have good artillery options. I think Incas is like Hausa. They have a quick start game.
They just buffed it for supremacy with those Kalanka unit changes and nerfed it hard in treaty. I hope they will find the solution to even it out in both game modes.
(joke)), to give another example there is the snare mechanics which forces you to concentrate more on the fight and on your army right