I’m confused why Mexico civ has a limit of 85 settlers? Some other civs which has population limts are due to the fact that they have buildings producing resources (banks for Dutch or torps for Sweden) but what exactly Mexico have that warrants removing 15 settlers from total pop?
As far as I understand Haciendas are just another plantation/mill and requires villagers working on it to produce income or I misunderstand how they work?
I understand that it is due to 2 reasons.
The first is that thanks to its revolutions and some specific cards, Mexico can obtain many equivalents of villagers, which can be very broken in lategame (example Treaty or Teams), thinking little about the 3 factories in California and improvements recollection for the Hacienda, like Habanero Peppers.
The second reason is that Mexico has the ability to revolutionize itself multiple times, which always offers an army based on the number of settlers it has in the field. To this we must add that in theory, Mexico can quickly recover its villagers with various special mechanics.
Haciendas do produce resources at the rate of 1 villager by default without any villagers on it. They can also have cows working on them to produce resources. I haven’t personally done the math if max haciendas + max cows compensates for the missing 14 villagers though.
Each hacienda has a trickle of whatever resource it’s on even without revolts you can get 8 haciendas with a card each 1 with a trickle. You can also max out cows on 1 of the haciendas and ship the sheep from the age 3 card and put all those on another. There are ways to further increase the hacienda trickle and quite a few eco cards behind certain revolts, some of which still allow you to return to regular mexico and later go imperial.
I have had several games in a treaty with Mexico. I do not maximize the economic potential of Mexico (it is best to maximize the eco, but by personal preference I do not). The way I play it, I’ve never had resource problems; the cows work on the farms and the farms automatically collect feed from the cattle. With the above, it is enough to compensate the 14 villagers. But in addition, Mexico can get the cuatreros to gather food by hunting and cattle, with Yucatan you can improve the automatic trickle of resources from the haciendas and the Yucatan flag increases the work speed of the villagers. So if you play treaty, you shouldn’t have a problem making your economy one of the strongest.
Does it really matter? I try not to go over 75 villagers anyway so I can have more of other units and I re-assign them depending on my needs
That card doesn’t seem that good, as it forces you to make villagers strictly work on haciendas to benefit, and after that period, you only get 10% gather work rate in haciendas.
Es solamente por citar algunos ejemplos, creo que entre cartas de metrópoli y de revoluciones, puedes llegar a juntar muchísimas mejoras para la hacienda, que en mi opinión, cubre a esos 15 aldeanos faltantes.