100-700 CE
The Moche were a pre-Inca civilization of the northern Peruvian coast who built enormous adobe pyramids in the desert, irrigated the arid valleys with sophisticated canal systems, and practiced ritual sacrifice and divination with an intensity that permeated every level of their society.
The Moche were a civilization of the narrow desert valleys along Peru's northern coast, where rivers descend from the Andes to the Pacific through some of the driest terrain on earth. They built monumental adobe pyramids, produced some of the most expressive ceramic art in the pre-Columbian Americas, and maintained an elaborate sacrificial religion that connected warfare, agriculture, and cosmic order through rituals of blood. Chinese sources never heard of them. Roman sources never heard of them. They existed in complete isolation from the Old World, building a complex society on a strip of irrigated desert between the mountains and the sea.
The Peruvian coastal desert receives almost no rainfall. What makes agriculture possible is the network of rivers flowing westward from the Andes, and the Moche engineered these rivers into canal systems of remarkable sophistication. Aqueducts carried water across valleys, and distribution channels brought it to fields growing maize, beans, squash, and cotton. A farmer opening a canal gate to flood his plot in the Moche valley depended on infrastructure that required constant communal maintenance and central coordination.
The sea provided the other half of the diet. The cold Humboldt Current that runs along the coast supports one of the richest marine ecosystems on earth. Fishermen in reed boats worked the offshore waters for anchovies, sardines, and shellfish. A fisherman paddling a totora-reed boat through the morning fog off the coast, dragging a cotton net through water thick with anchovies, harvested a protein source that fed the inland population as reliably as the irrigated fields.
Moche warfare was intimately connected to religion. Combat between elaborately costumed warriors ended in the capture of opponents who were then sacrificed in rituals depicted in extraordinary detail on Moche pottery and murals. The famous "sacrifice ceremony" scene, repeated across dozens of ceramic vessels, shows captives having their throats cut, their blood collected in goblets, and the goblets presented to elaborately dressed priest-warriors. The discovery of the royal tombs at Sipan revealed burials that matched these scenes exactly: lords buried with the regalia of the sacrifice ceremony, confirming that the pottery depicted real ritual practice.
Moche political organization was probably a collection of allied valley-states rather than a centralized empire. Each major valley had its own pyramid complex and its own ruling elite. Cooperation and competition between valleys followed rhythms that are difficult to reconstruct without written records.
Moche religion was a system of reciprocity between humans and supernatural forces, maintained through sacrifice and divination. The gods required blood; in return they sent water from the mountains and fish from the sea. A priest on the platform of the Huaca del Sol, the largest adobe structure in the Americas, offering a goblet of sacrificial blood toward the setting sun, performed an act that his society understood as essential to the survival of the world.
Moche ceramics are the civilization's most eloquent legacy. Portrait vessels depict individual faces with a realism unmatched in the ancient Americas. Scenes of daily life, hunting, fishing, weaving, and sexual acts appear alongside ritual imagery. A potter shaping a portrait vessel of a specific man, capturing his scarred lip and broken nose in wet clay, created both an art object and a record of a real person whose name was never written down but whose face survives after fifteen centuries.
The Moche traded along the coast and into the highlands, exchanging marine products and cotton for highland metals, obsidian, and semi-precious stones. Spondylus shells from the warm waters off Ecuador were particularly valued for ritual purposes. The trade networks connected the coast to the broader Andean world, but the Moche remained a coastal phenomenon, their civilization tied to the river valleys and the sea.
The Moche decline in the seventh century may have been connected to severe El Nino events that disrupted both agriculture and fishing, the two pillars of their economy. Sand dunes advanced over irrigated fields. The Huaca del Sol shows evidence of catastrophic flooding. Whatever the cause, the Moche centers were abandoned, and successor cultures like the Lambayeque inherited their artistic traditions and their sacrificial religion. The portrait vessels, the murals, and the tombs at Sipan remain, a civilization that spoke entirely through objects because it had no other way to speak.
to gain that many faith cubes
, pay -2 
warehouses
In the game, the Moche channel sacrifice into prophecy. Destroying your own units generates faith cubes, echoing the blood offerings atop the Huaca del Sol, and excess faith overflows into product warehouses rather than being wasted. The prediction ability before any bag draw captures Moche divination: guess correctly and you ignore a hostile cube, turning ritual knowledge into battlefield protection. Fill your faith storage as quickly as possible. The prediction is short-lived but devastatingly effective, letting you spread religion cheaply, overcome adversities safely, and survive early aggression from cavalry-heavy opponents you cannot counter with spearmen. Like all New World nations, build cities early to replace the population you sacrifice.
No. The ability triggers only when you would "gain" faith cubes above your storage limit. "Transfer" is a different game term. However, you can destroy a unit to trigger the gain, transfer existing faith cubes to products first, then apply other effects.
You must state the exact number of cubes of each color that will be drawn. For example: "2 red, 1 yellow, 0 white." If correct, you ignore 1 drawn cube of your choice.
Yes. Ignoring 1 cube is mandatory. Since your cubes deal damage to enemies, this would hurt you. Always include at least one enemy cube in your prediction so you can ignore that one instead.
Yes. The ability triggers before drawing cubes from any bag, not just battle bags. This makes spreading religion and overcoming adversity significantly safer.