Because we are already close to falling to 2nd page.. here are quick comments about our leader/civ pair and why we plan to keep it despite retep's excellent advice
Old Tourydra: Victoria (FIN/IMP) of Aztecs (Hunting/Mysticism/Jaguar/Sacrificial Altar)
Leader:
Nerfed FIN and improved IMP. I think neither of these traits would get many votes if we would open "what's the best trait in RBMod thread". However, they are both fine and together they form a solid duo. It's somewhat a cliché and in reality not that simple, but when you have one trait to boost your expansion speed and one trait to finance it, things should have a potential to work out. Utilizing the traits should also be quite easy, even boring, FIN is still all about cottage spamming and utilizing IMP's +60 % settler boost is very straightforward as well. However, that does not mean that playing well with Victoria is easy. I haven't played with fast early traits in my previous RB games (FIN/CHA/AGG/SPI) and for me the most intersting domestic challenge will be how to balance expansion. Can we manage to push out a continuous stream of new cities without stagnating our economy. If I'm allowed to decide we will be walking on thin ice in this respect with little room for errors and external disruptions, but let's see, a lot will depend on geography, neighbors, etc.
Civ:
We have a genuinely useful UB, Sacrificial Altar, which is something that many of the other civs can't claim. SA's whip-cooldown-reduction is kind of nerfed, because whipping in RBMod is less attractive. On the other hand, it makes it possible to "abuse" unnerfed 1-pop whips mixed with okay-ish 2-pop whips. What I'm really happy about is that SA is only a 90 hammer building compared to 120 hammer courthouse. Those 30 hammers make a huge difference reg how attractive courthouse is as a build and how easy it will be to build in young cities with high distance maintenance.
Jaguars (5 strenght swords with Wood I) are more niche units, but with RBMod's new +50 % city attack they can be quite interesting. With Wood II Jaguars it is possible to organize quite dangerous surprise attacks.. On the other hand, early warfare is not something that we are especially looking for and I will not complain if we don't start in the middle of jungle like in PB13, which might delay Iron Working a fair bit.
Aztecs have weak starting techs, yeah we have Mysticism, and that can potentially be a huge problem for us. In PB13 we managed to scout quite a big area, but really did not manage to get many huts. Let's hope this will be different, because one useful free tech could make our life a lot easier.
Overall:
So yeah, we are pretty happy with our roll. It's not stellar, these are not the absolute strongest traits+civ and we don't have real synergies between our leader and civ (although SA works with both of our traits), but I think we got an above average pairing. There are actually many good leaders still in the deck, lots of attractive ORG leaders available for example, but our Empress of Azteca is good enough so that I don't need to feel bad for not trying our luck with a new reroll.
Old Tourydra: Victoria (FIN/IMP) of Aztecs (Hunting/Mysticism/Jaguar/Sacrificial Altar)
Leader:
Nerfed FIN and improved IMP. I think neither of these traits would get many votes if we would open "what's the best trait in RBMod thread". However, they are both fine and together they form a solid duo. It's somewhat a cliché and in reality not that simple, but when you have one trait to boost your expansion speed and one trait to finance it, things should have a potential to work out. Utilizing the traits should also be quite easy, even boring, FIN is still all about cottage spamming and utilizing IMP's +60 % settler boost is very straightforward as well. However, that does not mean that playing well with Victoria is easy. I haven't played with fast early traits in my previous RB games (FIN/CHA/AGG/SPI) and for me the most intersting domestic challenge will be how to balance expansion. Can we manage to push out a continuous stream of new cities without stagnating our economy. If I'm allowed to decide we will be walking on thin ice in this respect with little room for errors and external disruptions, but let's see, a lot will depend on geography, neighbors, etc.
Civ:
We have a genuinely useful UB, Sacrificial Altar, which is something that many of the other civs can't claim. SA's whip-cooldown-reduction is kind of nerfed, because whipping in RBMod is less attractive. On the other hand, it makes it possible to "abuse" unnerfed 1-pop whips mixed with okay-ish 2-pop whips. What I'm really happy about is that SA is only a 90 hammer building compared to 120 hammer courthouse. Those 30 hammers make a huge difference reg how attractive courthouse is as a build and how easy it will be to build in young cities with high distance maintenance.
Jaguars (5 strenght swords with Wood I) are more niche units, but with RBMod's new +50 % city attack they can be quite interesting. With Wood II Jaguars it is possible to organize quite dangerous surprise attacks.. On the other hand, early warfare is not something that we are especially looking for and I will not complain if we don't start in the middle of jungle like in PB13, which might delay Iron Working a fair bit.
Aztecs have weak starting techs, yeah we have Mysticism, and that can potentially be a huge problem for us. In PB13 we managed to scout quite a big area, but really did not manage to get many huts. Let's hope this will be different, because one useful free tech could make our life a lot easier.
Overall:
So yeah, we are pretty happy with our roll. It's not stellar, these are not the absolute strongest traits+civ and we don't have real synergies between our leader and civ (although SA works with both of our traits), but I think we got an above average pairing. There are actually many good leaders still in the deck, lots of attractive ORG leaders available for example, but our Empress of Azteca is good enough so that I don't need to feel bad for not trying our luck with a new reroll.