One major issue with native civs that makes playing them in the late game undesirable is the need to maintain both a full 100 vill economy and also manage the community plaza. It can be done by moving 20-25 vills from nearby estates every time one needs the war ceremony and then moving them back once it’s no longer needed. With the natives’ inferior economies, this is an absolutely necessary exercise. However, this is a strenuous macro effort, and it’s burden of which european and asian civs have no equivalent.
The solution is really simple. Give native civs (probably only to lakota and haudenosaunee who don’t get non-villager plaza participants) a Labor Ceremony that increases work rate of all villagers by 1.4% per participant. That’s a 35% work rate increase at 25 participants. 74 * 1.35 = 99.9. Using this number, this ceremony will only be efficient with a full 99 villager economy, so it’ll only be a late-game buff. This would drastically reduce the macro burden placed on native civs, and they’d be more enjoyable for everyone.
This is actually a great idea from a player point of view. You are not granting an extra bonus, but only a way to use the plaza more efficiently. And you can make it only available in age IV in order to not mess the eco balance
One of the things the DE devs have done really well is make slight changes to help out underutilized aspects of this game. I hope they do this and put some life back into the fire pit.
Personally, I think each of the Native civs should have their own way to cover 20 villagers worth on the plaza; The Aztecs get Warrior Priests, the Haudenosaunee can technically get 25 bonus villagers (IMO this should permanently increase their villager count to 124), but the Lakota are specifically left out of this.
IMO they should be able to put self-generated bison onto the plaza, up to 10.
Lakota skip on building House buildings, so they already have a good economic lead.
As Lakota, you can actually go all the way to Industrial without chopping a single Tree, since all you need is a Market and a Stables, and you can get Travois for that.
This means all your Vills will go to Food and Coin, and you can even train your OP Axe Riders which just break all other Colonial and Fortress Cavalry, and raid amazingly well.
I hope Hauds and Lakota Healer can also dance at the plaza and the rate of their work is 1.25 of a villager, so still lower than priestess 1.5, and warrior priest 2.0.
I think the Inca Moon ceremony should also be available for the other native through an age 4 card that also increase the build limit of healer, priestess, and warrior priest to 15 as well generating wood, as wood is crucial for Coyote, Kanya, Tomahawk, War club. For Inca itself should receive another unique ceremony instead.
it would be better and simpler to just allow all healers to use the community plaza, and make it cap out at 5-10 units instead with rebalanced rates.
this would allow easier balancing of native civs and their sometimes lopsided bonuses such siege/attack dance, while allowing their economy to be closer to other civs in the game.
This would be simpler IF the most complicated part, balancing, can be assumed to go smoothly and fairly. You also have to consider that this would open up xp-boom options for lakota and haude that they currently do not have, so balancing might be trickier than you think. If healers build at their current rate, it would be too easy to set up a full plaza. If their build rate is slowed too much, it might be difficult to actually spawn healers before the late game (this is the problem inca has w/ priestesses), and then the rebalanced rates would actually just be a massive nerf.
My proposal actually does not affect balance in any way. it just simplifies a difficult and unfair macro burden.
There’s also something to be said about the civs’ individuality. I personally don’t even like that the Inca’s priestesses can play the same role as warrior priests, simply because it detracts from the Aztec’s character.