13 attack Cavalry archer for persians

Persians:

  1. Mahouts replaced with Sasanian archery.
    Sasanian archery gives cavalry archer +3 attack.
  2. Elite war elephant +30% speed natively. (not war elephant and only elite. since elite so costly including this native speed is okay)

Dravidians:

  1. Medical corps new effect: (Elephants regenerate 40hp per minute and move 30% faster)

Persians were the first ones to use Parathian tactics. So they should be a cavalry archer specialist.

Even originally devs indicated persians a good cavalry archer civ, but missing bracer made them a bad cavalry archer civ.

+3 attack is compensated by persian cavalry archer lacking bracer. ie (1 less range and one less attack). so basically they would have +1 attack and 2 less range than a fully upgraded magyar cavalry archer.

For Dravidians, Cholas had one of the largest elephant army (60000) at one time. So giving them speed boost is also accurate and a good buff for their mobility weakness.

Note: Persians didnt have elephants natively and bought it from india for a big cost. So having UU as elephant is okay, but should not have regional elephant units.

What are your thoughts on this?

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Like I say every time this comes up persian CA are limited by their interaction with elephants since they cover each others weaknesses. Its why all of the other elephant civs have mediocre cav archers or mediocre elephants. Having both is risky from a balance perspective.

You could obviously risk overbuffing Persians but at the same time you might want to think carefully about the tradeoff since you might be forced to give up one or the other.

That being said if heavy scorpion ever get fixed to be a proper imperial age unit this tradeoff may not be necessary because they might counter both units decently.

Personally Id rather the war elephant and heavy scorpion be buffed first. Then adjust persian CA after the fact if needed.

Why do you think these buffs are “perfect” ?

Whenever I hear people saying that Persians and Dravidians are weak, they refer to the Persian late Feudal age and Dravidians Castle age on 1v1 open maps, right ?

But you are proposing late game buffs…

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These changes are for underwhelming cav archer of persians( historically they had very good cav archers) and the mobility problem of Dravidians

AoE 2 is not historically accurate, has never been not had ever meant to be.
AoE 2 design some civ around a couple of “key features” that a civ had either in reality or in folklore (eg. Turcs had great gunpowder, Britons had famous archers, etc…) and balanced in a way that makes it “special”, by covering a different playstyle strengths and weaknesses than other civs, as much as possible. These key features do not need to be 100% accurate or to fully describe the civ as it was.

If AoE 2 were to be historically accurate, I would give Chinese gunpowder units and paladin (either paladin, or if paladins must be the european unit, give them a very good heavy cavalry + removing paladins from Persians) before giving Persians better CA. I would also remove paladins from Cumans and Huns, remove trebs from american civs, give Arbalesters to Franks and Spanish, etc…

For Dravidians, I don’t see how they are having a bigger mobility problem in the laye game than civs like Malays, Bohemians, Vikings, Koreans, who do not have viable post imperial cavalry unit either. Some civs just have to focus on deathballing instead of raiding.
The lack of late game mobility has little to no impact on their win rate, no need to change it without other reason. The Dravidians lack of knights and strong castle age alternative (camels, eagles, civ stat bonus on other units) hurt them way more and should rather be addressed if anything.

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EWE +30% speed is reasonable.

I’d like to make the new Imperial UT give their cavalry a conservative late game bonus to allow their Paladins to have an unique effect as main power unit. For example, cavalry (or Knight line only) returns 15% of its cost when it dies.

Lacking the Bracer but giving CA additional attack power, I may be more inclined to give a new civilization such a design, like giving it to the Jurchens to reflect their heavy arrows.

To bring out the antiquity of Persian horse archers, maybe we could introduce a new feudal CA unit (or generic CA with worse stats) that automatically upgrades to normal CA when hitting the Castle Age, or, make Parthian Tactics available in the Castle Age as a new civ bonus.

I can’t be sure about this. Both of these are expensive strategies, so if activated at the same time, the costed resources could be used to overwhelm the opponent in any strategy.

I just learned that Medical Corps and Thirisadai are based on fake information on Wikipedia.

Make the Dravidians gain the Redemption, Husbandry and Elite BE first. Then, the new Castle UT can be “Payanam” — the admiralty and logistics of the medieval Chola army, which gives elephant units regeneration (EA 40 HP/min., BE 60 HP/min.) and +20% speed, and also Made the marak kalam (renamed from Thirisadai, possibly the largest type of ship in the Chola Navy) available in the Castle Age.

Urumi should have very clear functionality for this rather than being a pure strong unit, i.e. they should counter some type of unit and be countered by the others. On the other hand, making Two Handed Swordsman available in the Castle Age should ideally be a useful power.

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no ty I have no interest in playing vs a broken unit.

Persians are a very good civ on hybrid/water maps already, yes they are a bit underwhelming on Arabia, but this has nothing to do with them lacking Bracer or anything, it’s merely the absence of power spikes and their main strategy (3 TC boom) is also fairly predictable. I see no reason to buff them just for buffs’ sake though, Persians are already top tier for example on 4 lakes, frigid lake, etc.

More importantly, they fall a bit in the same category of Spanish, in the sense that yes they are predictable and they don’t have any huge power spikes (at high level with Spanish you can’t just do FC Conqs generally speaking), but also they have a fairly nice tech tree late game, including a full Stable, Halberdiers, Bombard Cannons, usable Skirms, Handcannoneers, hell, even when gold runs out they are above average in trash wars with FU Hussar and Trashbows.

Persians might be a bit boring and bland to play but I don’t see them as bad necessarily.

Likewise, War Elephants are weak on 1v1 Arabia yes, but they do have some niches on maps like Arena and they are not bad in TGs, if you want to buff them, you also should consider how EWE would perform in 4v4 Black Forest, for example. I am an Arabia-only player, so if they buff EWE, I wouldn’t be too sad, as this unit is never used on Arabia, but not everyone is an Arabia-only player like me.

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Of course every unit should have some strengths and counterplay. Urumis already do, but the problem might be that their use as a unit does not fit what Dravidians need.
Anyways, I never talked about Urumis, as OP didnt mention giving urumis the movement speed of a (non elephant) cavalry unit.
If you meant that Urumi should fill the role of a knight, then why not, but I am skeptical avour having to invest early castle age into a castle to be able to have this “knight alternative”. And even then, 9s training time would probably not compensate for 2 or 3 stables training 1knight/30s, and I exepect urumis to not be pop efficuent against knights (due to the difference in unit cost)

I don’t know how much we would see 2HS if the upgrade were available in castle age (as it is “only” +3 damage), but I like the idea.
They would trade favorably against BL knights (45f/20g vs 60f/75g and 12 hits to 7 hits instead of 18 hits vs 7 hits for LS) and might be a good core of army, complemented by a few faster firing skirms (to counter archers) + a few mangonels (to counter archers and siege) + a few pikes (to counter knights).

Saying a strategy is expensive doesnt make a lot of sense. Theyre as expensive as you make them. I mean FU+ HCA & FU+ hussar has a high fixed cost but no one writes it off because you dont buy all the upgrades before you field the units. You buy the upgrades in the order they matter while massing units.

If either CA and/or war elephant get buffed the existance of a path something like CA into elephants + CA into elephants + trashbow should be taken seriously is all im saying. Especially vs weak monk civs (missing either block printing or sanctity).

Make it just +2 and not 3 and It would be good imho. Persians don’t need magyars levels of cav archers since they have much better eco, but with +2 they would have 1 more Attack than a generico CAbit 1 less range. This would make their late game CA viable and better than generic in some situations and worse in others

doesn’t cover their mid game weakness while buffing them further in the post-boomed situations. This would be a nice change for late game if they didn’t have Paladin upgrade or hand canoneers & ring archer armor. But now military options aren’t the problem. Its the slowness of the civ.

Numerically this might seem like a buff. In practice its still useless. Buffs DM, black forest 4v4 tg plays, that’s all. Otherwise Elephants in general and particularly for Dravidians are very less useful under most settings. Its ok to have if its a civ bonus but as a UT its just a flex upgrade.

If you want to buff these civs for open maps, some bonus thats good at any point between 15th-40th min of game time is needed. And if you want to buff them for closed maps, monk techs, or the extra resources at start need a buff. Otherwise it will be a “counterweights”, “detinets” situation. Something that looks good on paper but not actually useful for how the civ is played.

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The unit is not decent in this respect. The only thing that restrains this unit is its own cost.
A group of Urumi can melt any unit they get close to, no matter archers, cavalry, Samurais, or even Teutonic Knights. It is just purely strong unit.

Archers can’t keep a distance from them all the time. If the archers is to be an effective counter to Urumi, it must be such that Urumi cannot cause the archers to take so much damage even if it gets close to the archers. On the other hand, I also don’t like that as an infantry UU it cannot be countered by Samurais, Jaguar Warriors and Teutonic Knights.

For now, I would expect Urumi to be a melee equivalent of Huskarl:

  • HP: 40 → 50 (elite)
  • attack: 8 → 10
  • armor: 7/0 → 10/0
  • speed: 1.02

Can always cause the trample damage, but the charge mechanic is used to dodge projectiles instead of giving extra attack.

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And, to add to that: Something thats kinda dangerous to balance on other maps/settings. Saracen were already strong in lategame teamgames (memelukes are an insane unit if you have full trade, nothing really counters them), now they have good trebs and SO too. However, the change did nothing for them on standard maps.

That can be a overbuff. Persians suddenly having top level CA equivalent to Magyars/Turks. More attacks on ranged unit is huge that -1 range likely doesn’t matter for mobile Cav archer.

Persians are mostly fine in late game unit choice that they have Paladin, HC, Heavy Camels, BBC and Okay trash. They are just Okay. The problem is that some DLC civs are just outperform old civs that they need nerf like Gurjaras, Hindustanis, Burgundians or Poles. I would nerf these civs instead of overbuffing other civs.

I like it. It is similar to an idea I had before. Just a couple of questions and few spoilers.

  1. For speed, Is 1.02 tps the correct value or did u mean 1.2? Skirms will still kill Urumi let alone archers. Knights will run away from a unit which is only as fast as Pikeman.
  2. What will be the cost? The current cost is too high for the reduced attack and health.

Urumi with these stacks still does not counter Knights 1vs 1.
Huskarls work because they can be created from barracks. Urumi is needed at start of castle age and needs castle which takes time and resources as well as make eco fall behind. So without urumi being created from barracks like Eagles for this civ like meso civs, people will just make pikes to counter Knights.

Hey that was what I brought up in a different thread!
In any case, I’d love to see both of these changes. Persians without special cav archers is an abomination.

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well, imo, instead of just giving persian CA extra attack, giving them extra range in exchange for less damage is more fun. They can have +1 range per age, starting castle age and replace Mahout with a UT called mask man that gives them another 1 extra range (kinda like yeomen but for CA).

Its way too op dude.

Kinda great idea needs to be tested :slight_smile:

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Yes, I can accept it is op, but is it op considering this tech is for Dravidians