I’m surprised you still say that after 2k closed map games. Liereyy himself mentioned how Bengalis imp is OmegaLOL in the winner interview. Its not easy to push fast when your gold army options are Elephant units or Rathas and you have no canons. Any civ with hand canoneers or fu Arbalesters and bombard canons, Villese would have easily won. As time progresses you’ll see more such “misplays” with Bengalis which technically aren’t misplays but rather civ handicap.
Its not a grudge or anything, a civ has to be strong on some commonly played setting either open or closed. Why have a civ that’s unplayable on open and average on closed. ?
And that’s why I want Bengalis with access to Bombard Cannon.
Lol @ people always trying to make it an issue of “people just not knowing how to use them,” especially with Bengalis and Dravidians. Sure, the monk bonus was a significant buff to their already decent performance on Arena and some other closed maps. But the entire context of this thread is about their subpar performance in open 1v1s. Rack up some stunning victories on Arabia with Bengalis against players of a similar elo, and then people will be more open to the premise that they’re actually a solid civ behind this veneer of weakness. I like Bengalis and Dravidians myself, and am okay with civs that aren’t necessarily optimized for open 1v1s as long as they meet a baseline level of performance there (which they don’t, IMO).
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I don’t like that kind of argument like “every civ need to be arb+BBC civ” or “every civ need perfect trash including FU Hussar”
Then we have to give BBC to civ like Japanese, Vikings, Khmers, or Incas as well.
Bengalis seige are decent as is. Having seige elephant with bonus damage reduction is already great compared to other civ. I don’t think every DOI civ need BBC (Now Bengalis are only left one.) I would rather remove BBC for Gurjaras to make halb+seige can be viable counter against them.
Bengalis is more like designed as civ of slow and unstoppable push. But maybe still there elephant is not enough great that is what I agree with. But I still think buff their elephant bonus and/or general buff to elephant can make their elephant play viable.
But Rathas are not in need of buff. One thing I can agree is increasing Ratha’s bonus damage vs pike/halb (maybe same level of generic CA/HCA, they have relatively low pierce damage so it can compensate it.) but they receive bonus damage from halb/skirm just as every CA units. That’s non of the issue. Honestly Bengalis play in Regicide Fortress is just only Rathas which is boring to watch. We should make other options more viable. Asking to buff Rathas just because Bengalis low winrate is same as asking buff for Conqs because Spanish have low winrate in Arabia.
I agree with a lot of your post, but this is just a very awkward comparison. Saying Rathas don’t need a buff because they can be used on closed maps where you start with a Castle is far less sensible.
Conqs singlehandedly keep Spanish winrates afloat due to their performance on maps like Nomad (or basically any map where you can get a safe castle). Rathas don’t provide anywhere near the level of value for Bengalis that Conqs can for Spanish in early Castle. While I don’t think that giving Bengalis more generic units/techs is the answer, their EAs are already their most viable non-generic option, so the obvious candidates for buffs are the Ratha and the Battle Ele. Maybe EAs could get a small general buff (speed or slightly lower food cost), but the performance of Bengali EAs specifically is the constraining factor in how good the EA’s base stats can be.
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Well liereyy is the one pro that you honestly shouldn’t take too seriously on arena. He’s probably the most talented aoe player there is but his arena skills are just bad. I mean the whole ram push thing didn’t make sense at all. The guy literally plays zero arena. A lot of casters actually made fun of liereyy because of that early castle age approach.
Dude vilese was so much ahead that he simply could have gotten a forward castle. This basically ends the game. Couple of skirms don’t prevent that. Vilese simply went for a bad approach. There were so many possibilities to end this game fast. Who cares if you have thumb ring for your arbs or not? Mostly people even don’t get the tech to begin with when playing early imp push on arena. No bbc? Who cares, if opponents manages to not die fast and #### ### bengali make monks.
Villese could have even not pushed and easily won. He just could have gone for a slower approach and go full ratha and light cav. This hard counters everything burmese can do except for elephants which lierey wouldn’t have been able to afford.
The problem was villese went for some bad middle ground approach. He didn’t push in early imp and neither did he wait to get a lot of army. He made some army and then attacked without having both a full comp or siege behind. That simply was a bad play and it has nothing to do with bengalis. The civ is really good on arena bc it’s very versatile here.
Edit: Not sure why this was censored this time 11 I said when burmese get some bbc on the field.
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Villese and Liery were throwing the games back to each other. This game is a poor example to dissect and analyse.
I am propositioned this in other threads too. I believe it is elephant archer which is a weak link for Bengalis and Dravidians. We should buff elephant archers base stats. The costs can be hiked proportionally as well. It will help all EA civs. Currently EAs are an unaffordable yet terribly weak and boring version of the cavalry archer. We should make it as distinctive as possible from cav archer. If a civ has both, the player should feel like elephant archer is a better unit for defence than cav archer. The role should be apparent when training the unit. It should not be a unit created due to lack of alternatives and should have it own USP.
EAs and Battle elphants should have the same speed of 1 tile per sec. Take away Husbandry from all elephant civs. This will help balance gameplay in team games and imply historical accuracy too. In addition, the changes will nerf gujjaras as well as Hindustanis too. EA should deal twice the damage they currently do with probably another rider on top firing volleys i.e one after another. Thus EAs become an unit harder to micro and micro against for players. If a target is not specified, the mounted archers should hit nearest enemy units automatically even when elephant is in motion. The rate of fire will be twice what it is currently and total damage will be double. These changes will be their USP not just hit points.
The gold cost should be equal to cav archer and the food cost should be 120 like before ‘Dynasties of India’. The CA armour should be -2 like before or 0. To balance battle elephant speed, the gold cost can be increased to 75 like knights. The halb bonus damage can be increased to balance B.E swarm.
You can refer this video. Ornlu says the same thing about elephant speed and cost. Currently no BE civs use elephants against knights since there are cost effective alternatives which Dravidians and Bengalis lack. Watch starting 08:40
Remove Arb. Give them HC and BBC.
I was also thinking the same. They have S.Elephant with higher DPS than Celts SR. Destroying building is not even an issue for them.
I’ll happily take that. Even if that doesn’t work, we can discuss further buff in 2023.
Heavily disagree. Ratha is way nowhere as good as Conqs.
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Ratha is good unit and it isn’t weak as it beats mangudai with ease, the main problem is the civ design, not having knight or camel puts them in an awful situation, battle eles are not viable on castle age and to make things better their post imperial army composition with no gold is just terrible, not even hussar, they don’t have good siege either.
Making rathas much more stronger is a bad idea, remember they can be just knights costing just wood and gold, instead they should give them hussar, their UT should use 13% to 15% less villager pop space cause 10% isn’t enough and the tec is expensive for what it does and all they really need for castle age to be usable with their economic bonus(extra vills) are just knights(not cavaliers), imo that would fix the whole civ without giving them bbc.
They are not gunpowder civ. Not every civ need HC, BBC either.
Maybe have to keep usable arb as civ without no knight, eagle and no HCA at all.
And guess what? Bengalis S.Elephant with Paik and Seige Engineer actually have better DPS than Gurjaras S.elephant. They absolutely don’t need BBC. Having top S.Elephant. seige engineer and BBC on top of that would be too much.
Yeah. Having more Bonus damage vs pike line is what I agree with.
I see. But Rathas are also good enough and don’t in need of heavy buff.
Their Post-imp composition is solid with Rathas, seige and elephants. Issue is more of castle age weakness. They have best Seige elephant, and not all civ need Hussar upgrade, having FU light cav is solid enough which is same as Chinese, Portuguese.
If they are infantry civ which have low-pop efficiency, it can be buffed further, but for elephant civ, they shouldn’t have too much additional pop spaces. And this gives nothing for their issues in castle age.
Elephant units need more buff, rebalance to usable in 1v1. They need to be reduced food cost and should be move faster, and maybe reduce HP a bit for exchange. Bonus damage of pike vs Elephant should be reduced and Armored elephant bonus damage reduction vs them can be readjusted to not make them too strong (They are already too good for significant bonus damage reduction.)
But that’s not really a good comparison. Lots of units beat Mangudai in a straight 1v1 microless battle. Are we gonna say Hussite Wagons are OP because they do that now?
Rathas have a really low damage output and die to Skirms. They’re are also slower and clunkier than Mangudais. The only benefit of Rathas is that they end up getting high PA, but that is in a late Imp situation (and even then, Skirms will still deal with them hard since they take so much bonus damage anyway, unlike Bengali EAs). They’re not a good unit in Castle, so Castle drops are unviable, and they’re too easily and too hard countered by Skirmishers to justify them later.
In fact, it is really funny looking at the aoe2 fandom’s wiki of Ratha, with the ‘Strong vs’ and ‘Weak vs’ section being basically only Archers, Siege, and slow units as their strengths and everything else as their weaknesses. 11
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While your statement is somewhat true, Hussite Wagons are not a good example. Elite Mangudai actually beat Hussite Wagon cost effectively because they have bonus damage vs seige including them. Ranged unit can beat Elite Mangudai is Tatars/Turks/Magyars HCA, Elite War Wagon and Elephant archer or Elite Genoese crossbowman in cost-effective side. You may want to use example as Elephant archer but I think Rathas have more advantage over them.
I don’t know why people bring out that Rathas beating Mangudai is an indicator the unit is great lol
I mean even Gurjara elite elephant archers destroy elite mangudai cost effectively, makes the ele archer a better unit than mangudai? no. Neither the Ratha.
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But why they are not? They are historically a gunpowder civ. And also badly in need of gunpowder.
Yeah after 1175 wood, 500 food, 275 gold and 650 stone, you get 4% extra damage than Gurjaras who got a free bonus. Really great.
Probably. But I’m unsure tbh. Other than attack bonus vs spear they may also need bonus archer armor.
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I never heard of any native Bengali gunpowder invention.
Educate me.
Bengal Sultanate got access to gunpowder thanks to Delhi Sultanate (In game Hindustanis). However, other than couple of AI name, in game Bengalis doesn’t have any element of Bengal Sultanate. They are almost fully designed based on Pala Empire which didn’t make into gunpowder era. In game history section mentioned a good portion of Bengal
I agree that he isn’t the best Arena player but he was talking about Bengali post imp game. His game knowledge about the strengths of civs doesn’t have anything to do with gameplay skills on a particular map.
He did drop a forward castle, it just wasn’t right next to Liereyy’s walls. For the spectators who see everything, we know there were only a few skirms and feels there must have been a forward castle but Villese wouldn’t know that. From Villese point of view, there could have been anything inside Liereyy’s walls…A bunch of Arambai, lots of monks, anything that could have stopped the forward castle or he could have been a few seconds away from imp and the castle could get trebbed down from inside the walls. Had he lost doing that everyone including yourself would then call it a huge throw and say he could have played like this (the way he played currently) instead. He did the safe thing of putting castle in the mid and pushing slowly.
Its literally used in every competitive Arena game. So EVERYONE cares. Its needed to snipe trebs, prevent onager plays, kill other ranged miltary from a distance. If you don’t understand the importance of gunpowder in closed maps, and especially on Arena, there’s no point in discussing any further.
Need to be either Vikings with arbs and siege ram or an arbalest civ with bombard canons for a fast push like that. Siege elephants cost food and much harder to mass and push with when you have less eco.
How exactly can someone win without pushing while having 0 relics and opponent has 5 and there’s no timelimit as part of the settings.
Exactly what he did. He pushed after 130 vills, full upgrades on light cav and rathas with 5 trebs but the Burmese halbs, few monks and skirms wiped them out. That’s a very weak unit for the amount of upgrades it needs and hence couldn’t fight halbs-skirms. That’s the whole point that game makes.
He pushed with like 30 Rathas and some light cav and trebs. That’s the minimum amount of army needed to begin a push against a bunch of monks. If he waits for 50-60 full upgraded military and Mahayana, Liereyy expands, gets forward buildings, takes control of the outside resources.
Villese played like how he usually does, most meta-oriented play.
Everything to do with that. Any good Arena civ and it would have been a 3-2 series. Bengalis just has a bunch of options which are either weak or improbable to mass and sustain production. Its still better than civs like Huns on Arena but just an average civ.
Post imp on arena is different from postimp on arabia. Bengalis have better post imp on arena than burmese until pure trash war (which isn’t that common on arena anyways).
Nah. Knowing when you can put forward castles and when not is one of the most important skills. Liereyy obviously had way worse eco so how the hell should he have had army at this point? In case ob doubt just scout it. There wasn’t any reason to expect a forward castle to get denied here.
Thx for the lecture. But I’m talking about this specific game where bbc wouldn’t have saved liereyy.
Nope. You rarely play arbs like that on arena. You’re thinking of it too much in terms of arabia. Pushing with arbs mostly happens early imp with forward castle and treb push. Siege ram is only relevant later on at which point arbs are pretty pointless on arena (with the exception of britons and maybe ethiopians).
You don’t need to sit back forever. Just a bit until you can get more army. Relics don’t matter a lot at this point yet. At this stage villeses eco and timing advantage was worth way more.
He had very few light cav behind. This was actually a waste of res. Would have been way better to just go rathas onager here. Or villese could have waited 2 more mins and engage with ratha light cav in proper numbers. But no, he had very few light cav and send his rathas into skirms. Ofc he could have just sacrificed his rathas for momentum but no no he pulled back in the middle of the fight which was just a bad idea.
Nope. This just shows that you don’t have a lot if experience on arena as you can’t identify why the game was lost. Bengalis isn’t a top civ on arena but it’s a pretty good one. Surely better than burmese for instance.
Summary of this discussion:
Some highly subjective argument around a single match, like it actually means that much!?
Rathas beat mangudai in some stale comparison, so they’re good???
Elephant archers are simultaneously OP and useless(this means the cost ratio is probably not right. Too cheap later = OP, too expensive early=useless)
Like the same stuff said over and over just from different people(or even the same ones)
Next patch: Beng/drav see no changes. Sicilians get a transport ship buff.
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