Mahayana makes villagers cost -10% population space, or in other words, every 10 villagers you have, it’s like having only 9 population space. Or in other words, with this tech you can have +11.1% villagers for the same population.
This means that if you have 100 villagers, you have +10 population limit, which is exactly the same as what the Goths get for free. Now that does sound bad, but hey we don’t have 100 villagers in post imperial.
We sort of have 100 villagers or sometimes less than 100 villagers in PI situations.
In 1vs1 land maps, have 140 villagers, and 74 military, all well and good. You are basically playing with +14 population.
But what about other settings? Fishing ships, trade carts and trade cogs fill the same role as villagers, and so replace villagers but they don’t get the population discount. So we get a trade off. With 100 villagers and 40 trade carts, you are getting essentially only the Goth bonus with a massive cost and stone investment.
I suggest including Trade Cogs, Trade Carts, Fishing Ships and even Transport Ships to the technology, while keeping the percentage same. I also suggest including Monks, since Mahayana is a name related to Jain religion. Late game monks aren’t seen that often, so it won’t matter much, but atleast it will have some relation with the name.
Making trade carts and others could make them broken OP in some ways.
Having some extra villagers is fine. You get one extra villager per 10 villager. That means you have 10 extra villagers from 100 pop.
If you were to make it 1 villager per 5 villager than it would be broken. That already has a small effect, less pop space taken from villagers, could even allow you to make more trade carts.
It 100% deserves to affect civilian ships, after all Bengali are supposed to be a naval civilization. The monk idea is good as well, goes well with the fact they have the best monk tech tree among new civs, I also don’t think it would be OP on trade carts as their TB is just a worse version of the Spanish bonus.
Well I agree to extend it to fishing ships but tbf your title is somewhat misleading as you basically say yourself how powerful that bonus on land maps. +15 pop for a civ that at least in theory would like to go elephant units is insanely good.
the maths nerd in me would like to correct this:
if you have 100 vils, they use up 90 pop space
if you have 110 vils they use up 99 pop space
so with 111 wils you use up 100 pop space (99.9 to be exact)
so at 100 vils it’s technically better than the goth bonus (except for having to research it)
admittedly none of this matters, so everyone should just ignore me
Yes on fishing ships but i’m not sure for trade carts… Another way of buffing the unit could be to just add a flat + to max population like +15
It would not be the same as goth because goth have that bonus specifically because infantry is their win condition in late game and infantry is not pop efficient, while with this civ you could have potentially much stronger late game units which means that that +10 pop, while equal on paper, is plain better, simply because 10 EBE are more dangerous than 10 huskarl most of the time
Iirc it doesn’t round up numbers. The extra pop space counts as one every 10 vils. So with 110 vils you get 11 extra pop space, the same as with 119 vils.
It’s mathematically the best late-game eco bonus in the game, even better than Goths one or Slavs/Khmer.
We can argue about this concept of hyper-late-game eco bonuses, about its necessity, but no way we can ignore the facts, it’s clearly overpowered at what it does.
It’s basically goth’s bonus but worse since it only affects villagers and you have to pay for it on top in imperial. Meanwhile, the goth get it for free without that villager restriction.
In no world is “this civ has to pay for something else another civ gets for free!” a robust argument by itself. Everything must be viewed within the context of the other bonuses and unit/tech availability of the civs in question.
Not every UT needs to be amazing (think Mongols nomad tech). That said, this tech is quite strong in enough situations already, and in team games, the Bengali Team Bonus already provides a comparable effect to what you’re asking for for trade units, (since they provide a bonus 10% of the trade gold as food for the whole team). From that viewpoint, their carts basically already get the Mayahana effect for free. Asking for this tech to apply to trade carts as well feels like double-dipping on that bonus, and the Bengalis are in no way underpowered such that they need this, or any other kind of significant buff.
To put it in perspective, since you mentioned the Goths, yes, they get 10 free pop in Imp (woo-hoo for a civ with lackluster, pop-inefficient units in Imp). The only other eco boost they get is instantly researched loom, which is not even as good as a free villager. Bengalis get 2 free villagers every age and despite lacking some late-game staples (hussar, bomb cannon), IMO have more tactical flexibility than Goths and better power units.
For 200 pop, sure. +14 is a solid boost on 200 pop, and (unlike the Goth bonus), it only goes up from there. I typically play 250 pop, where 160-180 villagers is normal. So there you have 16-18 extra pop if it’s a 1v1, which can give you a very significant edge. In team games, yeah you’ll get less of a direct bonus for the tech, but that is compensated by the trade team bonus, as outlined above.
So basically, worst case scenario (100 vills), this tech bottoms out as being as good as the Goth bonus (which is free, but on a mediocre one-trick civ with a much worse eco), and best case can be around 1.5-1.8x as good. The most I would ever suggest it be altered to not make it (situationally) OP is to perhaps include fishing ships, since they function as villagers and don’t benefit from the trade bonus.
its not a bad tech though, and bengalis are pretty decent in the right scenario, especially at that stage of the game
if anything eles in general (BE/EA) need to be ever so slightly less countered by trash, or be more effective to make up for their fragility, which will in turn buffs bengali anyway
no it’s actually one of the best UTs in the game imo, the true problem is that Bengalis struggle to get together a decent army composition, particularly in Castle age but in Imperial the low range of Rathas and no Thumb Ring also holds them back.
In 1v1 you get 120 vills, so 12 extra pop. In TG you get food from trading carts, then you don’t need as many vills on farms as other civs without that TG Bonus. So, every villager you don’t need thanks to trade is a full 1 extra pop to you.