I too have been rocking the early Egyptian production power. I find that the Harappas are also really good and possibly better if you're planning on focusing heavily into Forced Labor as the food production lets you swap some pop into science before you feed them to the forges.

I find I no longer stay in Neolithic very long, generally moving to Ancient on turn 9. I'll lay down an outpost in Kochab and Flegetonte (the region with Vinicunca, and the region just north of start with the insane river and mountain). The +5 influence per turn is pretty explosive, and you lock out one of the AIs very early on. I've currently 11 pops on the playthrough I just started, and I generally have 11-12 by this point (depending on wildlife).

I think the sticking point for the AI is the access to Runners and having the strong combat start that can be leveraged into aggression, rather than the food. Sadly, the AI isn't ever quite as aggressive with those Runners as I feel they could be.

I'm not sure I'd say Egyptians (or Harappas) are overpowered, but it's certainly my preferred start.

Yes because it is not working as intended, its bonus don't apply on just industry producing districts but all terrain that produce industry, same is the case with maya, harappans, celts and Joseon ED.

Goodluck wrote:

Yes because it is not working as intended, its bonus don't apply on just industry producing districts but all terrain that produce industry, same is the case with maya, harappans, celts and Joseon ED.

Do you have a Dev post to confirm? I don't see anything in Known Issues except some tooltips being outdated. If it's happening on every civ that grants bonuses like that, it seems less a bug and more a design choice that isn't correctly reflected in the tooltip; and outdated tooltips are a listed Known Issue.

I believe the AI personalities bias them towards certain picks. AI would occasionally pick Egyptians in previous open devs. I suspect with the full game and the personalities that accompany it, there will be more variety in AI culture picks every game.

FWIW I found Egyptians decent but not as strong as some of the other early picks in this particular scenario.

Jeriah wrote:

Goodluck wrote:

Yes because it is not working as intended, its bonus don't apply on just industry producing districts but all terrain that produce industry, same is the case with maya, harappans, celts and Joseon ED.

Do you have a Dev post to confirm? I don't see anything in Known Issues except some tooltips being outdated. If it's happening on every civ that grants bonuses like that, it seems less a bug and more a design choice that isn't correctly reflected in the tooltip; and outdated tooltips are a listed Known Issue.

It may well be an intentional design decision, but if so I would say those cultural legacy traits are extremely strong compared to many other legacy traits. In particular in the ancient era where many traits don't scale nearly as well.

They are meant to be strong industrially what you are describing is likely the goal of industrialist gameplay - build quarters like mad, struggle with stability a bit, get some wonders in to compensate cause industry output. It is what you are meant to be doing.

You can even offset said stability malus by running multiple cities instead, the star requirements are the same, so you will reach them more easily and you will maintain better growth.

I found the dev map intriguing in the way that even zhou can be picked and offer some good science output via emblematic quarters thanks to the mountain ranges. Every culture is meant to be "too good" at what they are doing, it is supposed to be a choice and there is supposed to be an advantage to having said choice first instead of camping more stars in an era.

I personally find the per pop scaling enormous, let's say Dutch for example, especially as you can merge into one supercity late and reap rewards off 100 + pop cities with multiple emblematic per pop quarters. So for example babylonian opening is very good for this gameplan. Carthagian -50% buyouts fit in nicely aswell.

coloneluber wrote:

FWIW I found Egyptians decent but not as strong as some of the other early picks in this particular scenario.

I think it really depends on where you settle. If you settle in high-production locations Egyptians are the first step to win the game without sweat because you can keep building districts forever without worrying about stability if you get the average district production time down to 2 turns. If you have a high production location and you disband scouts into the city very early you get everything you need to snowball: Influence from high-stability pop and district infrastructure. Their EU is also really strong, so it is hard to over-take them.

koxsos wrote:
Every culture is meant to be "too good" at what they are doing, it is supposed to be a choice and there is supposed to be an advantage to having said choice first instead of camping more stars in an era.

Yes! That! Fully agree. This is kinda why I think the Olmecs were nerfed too much in this build. They used to be the strongest influence-generators. Now they are not since stability is now a major source of influence and Olmecs don't get high stability that easily since the influence of their EQ is dependent on having more districts, which gets down stability. So that is kinda unfortunate.