During naval battles, it’s very difficult to gain Tonalli, even if I build religious buildings along the coast.
When I use Jaguar Rider for raids, killing villagers doesn’t generate Tonalli, and it’s not feasible to bring slower Warrior Priests along to collect Tonalli.
Why not design the major gods’ incarnations to gather Tonalli instead? Warrior Priests could transform into each major god’s respective symbol (build limit: 1).
Huitzilopochtli let Warrior Priests transform into a Hummingbird.
Tezcatlipoca let Warrior Priests transform into a Black Jaguar.
Quetzalcoatl let Warrior Priests transform into a Feathered Serpent (the little one with MC in campaign.)
These animal counterparts could also transform into Teixiptla on land.
Hummingbird (Hero) Flying Unit without damage.
Hit Points 99(II) 112.5(III) 130.5(IV)
Speed 6
Line of Sight 20
Hack armor 20%
Pierce armor 40%
Crush armor 99%
Ability
Tonalli Harvester
Sunshine (Target ally units and transport to the position.) CD: 30 seconds.
Reborn (When it is killed by an enemy, it should respawn at the Temple, or after a Temple has been rebuilt.)
Black Jaguar (Hero) Amphibious Unit.
Hack Damage 8.8(II) 10(III) 11.6(IV)
Hit Points 99(II) 112.5(III) 130.5(IV)
Multipliers Myth unit: 7×
Speed 5.5
Line of Sight 16
Hack armor 20%
Pierce armor 35%
Crush armor 99%
Ability
Tonalli Harvester
Ambush Attack [charged]
Amphibious Stalker (Ahuizotl’s ability: can swim and enters stealth mode near trees and in shallow water)
Feathered Serpent (Hero) Amphibious Unit without damage. Healing unit.
Hit Points 99(II) 112.5(III) 130.5(IV)
Speed 5
Line of Sight 18
Hack armor 20%
Pierce armor 30%
Crush armor 99%
Ability
Tonalli Harvester
Heal (Heal rate 5 HP/s, range 10)
Amphibious (Obsidian Butterfly’s ability: can traverse both land and water)
These incarnations could have reduced the efficiency of favor from Tonalli for balance, but I would prefer not, since Tonalli just generates a little favor.
This brings up another issue: the Tonalli system is weird. I understand that Norse should be better than Aztec to gain favor through combat, since Aztec has another way to gain favor by devoting Settler.
The Aztec system of gaining favor through combat is similar to the Nordic system. It starts decreasing the favor generation when a certain amount of favor has been gathered.
For Norse, gaining favor is based on damage dealt: 1 favor per 80 damage dealt, and this even includes damage dealt to buildings. For Aztec to match this efficiency, the target unit would need to have fewer than 56 hit points, which is realistically only possible when killing Set’s small animals.
If a Norse player attacks a Titan with 28,000 hit points, they can gain up to 286 favor, with a minimum of 175 favor. But Aztec can gain only 0.7 favor. Doesn’t this create a balance issue?
By the way, although the wiki states Tonalli generate 0.75 favor per unit, based on my own testing, killing 20 units only gained 14 favor.
My personal suggestion is that Tonalli favor should be calculated based on a unit’s original population cost, using the formula: 0.35 × pop = Tonalli favor. This should include Villagers and Caravans as valid sources of Tonalli.
A few units with no population cost, such as Age IV god power that summoning heroes or myth units, could instead be treated as worth 10 population.
Titan’s Tonalli should generate at least 140 favor.
Flowery Wars (myth tech): +0.2 favor per unit → +25% Tonalli’s favor