Bengalis need a buff. I wouldn’t say the dravidians and the gurjaras need a buff too because they have something for them (dravidians have a good wood bonus and gurjaras have very strong camels and shrivamsha riders are very strong in some cases).
But Bengalis ? They just suck. When you are labelled as an elephant civ with no food bonus… Well it’s kinda bad. Their only water bonus is ship hp regeneration, which doesn’t help on hybrid maps, not like dravidians who have more efficient fishing ships. I don’t even understand why gurjaras can garrison ships in their docks. What’s this bonus doing here ? they’re a camel and cav civ, not water civ… This bonus should be transferred to bengalis, it’s the least you should do.
Bengalis have a horrible stable tech tree, they don’t have thumbring, no bombard canon, they have champions and halbs but not even the last defense upgrade… They’re so dependant on elephants archers or rathas but elephants or going unique units is not viable most of the time, they just get rolled by skirmishers and feel super unfun to play on most match ups because you have very little viable options in your tech tree.
Bengalis need an eco bonus other than 2 villagers each age, they need something on food to get to their core units a bit faster so they don’t die to most civs going knights skirmishers.
I absolutely agree on Bengalis, they aren’t that great for 1v1 and Tgs, they just feel like a worse civ of Spanish but with less options available (Only the Ratha).
Some Suggestions:
- Increase the Ratha ROF from 2.0 to 2.3, but Paiks is improved from 20% to 33%, so their Battle elephants are much better in combat, Ratha’s ranged attack can go up to 6/7 for elite, but then take away 1 PA so Rathas don’t become OP.
- Monks move 20% faster, but take away Fervor.
- Give them Knights, but not Cavalier (So Elephants and Rathas are the options to go in Imperial).
Their battle elephants are already very powerful, maybe already the most powerful.
With Paik they do more DPS than Khmer’s with Tusk Swords, with the same tankiness against their counters as the Vietnamese ones. On a side note, by attacking faster, they get one less hit from halbs meaning they not only get less bonus damage, but even less damage overall, this happens only for Elite version.
By making them attack at 1.51 speed (same as japanese champs) you don’t address the fact that they are extremely expensive, super slow and still easily converted and simply road blocked by halbs/pikes, I don’t think people don’t make elephants 1v1 because they’re not powerful enough, speed and food cost is the major problem.
Giving them knights would make Ratha barely used in castle age, and not worth the huge resources investment in the imperial Age, expecially since in ranged mode it shares zero upgrades (except husbandry and bloodlines) with knights.
I’d rather make Ratha more used in Castle, not less. Like cut the TT to 14s.
Adding knights to a civ that isn’t supposed to have them seems off.
What’s the point of that? What faster monks would achieve? I’d rather give them a wood discount on monasteries to encourage monk play. Or give them Illumination and/or Theocracy in castle age.
Give them Thumb Ring and Bombard Cannon.
Paiks wouldn’t affect Elephant Archers anymore and nerf the Ratha’s fire rate according to Thumb Ring but also compensate with making the Elite upgrade cheaper. Elephant Archers could benefit from a buff which would make Bengalis slightly better.
The Ratha is not as good as people say. It can’t carry games like the Mangudai.
Never knew that. That’s great. Doesn’t Khmer also kill faster with extra attack?
Yep. They are not supposed to have knights.
True.
No because they don’t do enough damage to kill halbs in 3 hits. They’d need 23 dmg for that (FU halbs), 22 for halbs that miss the last inf armor. But they do 21. Can kill only Tatars halbs in 3 hits. Also FU pikemen remain at 1 HP, after 3 hits, bar Vikings’ ones. So it’s 4 hits even for pikemen.
In big battles that’s hardly a difference but it can snowball combined with the more hits needed to kill. Bengalis elephants are super powerful if you can field them in good numbers, but that’s the main problem.
Rathas dps with Paik is 7% less than War Wagons with TR
For the elite, it’s just 3% more.
Elite Ratha’s dps is 38% less than E. Mangudai’s, 2% less than regular HCAs, and 18% less than E. Camel Archers.
It’s versatile unit, but far from OP, and the fact that even the melee version is hit hard by skirms makes the mono Ratha composition very vulnerable if some melee units block your front line, and they will because Ratha is rather clunky.
I find bengalis to suck way less than dravidians.
Eh you are aware they have one of the best ecos in the game? Just yesterday one streamer again was saying in resurregence tourney that if you lose 2 vils early on you’re basically dead. I find that exaggerated but how bad can bengalis eco be against that background? You have an insane boom with all that extra vils and this is what’s best for their expensive late game army. You wanna set up the strongest boom you can not just save some food in early game. Btw with mayana bengalis have arguably the best post imp eco.
Yeah sure the civ with powerful eco in general and best late game eco needs a third eco bonus. No maybe they need something but surely not another eco bonus. You could give eco bonus to khmer and vikings as well if you do that.
This way you’d buff the unit even more in late game. I think the idea behind that is good bc right now ratha is just a better version of elephant archer that excel when massed in late game. I think they should be cheaper but also less tanky to make them better early on but less pop efficient in late game.
I’m not a big fan of giving them bbc because if they get their super expensive but strong army bbc is such a powerful unit. Especially when you already have FU monks. Look how they took bbc away from khmer. However I do think giving them a siege bonus would be good as this would fit historically I guess (btw the user concept the whole dlc is based on had bengalis as elephant and siege civ) but maybe one that has more utility early on.
Maybe something like siege weapons receive less bonus dmg which would help mangonel play in midgame. And in exchange remove siege elephant from the current reduced bonus dmg reduction for elephant units.
I keep hearing that, but I still see no hard evidence for that claim.
Vikings have terribad knights that they use once in blue moon, so basically they should use most of the time the same units (xbows, skirms, mangonels), yet Vikings win rate is almost 8% more. Why is that? Either Bengalis eco bonus is vastly exaggerated, or the absence of knights and camels is truly unbearable in castle age.
My take is that’s a mix of both. Bengalis eco is not as strong as people claim, and they lack good units to spend that eco on. I wouldn’t give them knights, but I’d like to know what would happen if they got them.
That would defeat the purpose of the melee switch thing. Their HP and armor (and only after they’re FU with Paik) are barely enough to compete with knights/cavalier at the moment, if you turn them into bland cavalry archers you might as well just remove the melee transformation gimmick.
Rathas are not bad units, they need faster creation time because they’re the only semi-powerful unit Bengalis have in castle age, and you can’t have many castles in early castle age, plus Bengalis castles are weak without Hoardings (that concerns Imperial Age though).
What evidence are you expecting beyond player experience?
Win rates can be traced back to endless factors. First of vikings is an established civ, then vikings play out differently early on with maa aggression while bengali go scouts most of the time. Then winrates is tied to performance and not eco in isolation. Also winrates are all over the place. You see civs that are strong in the middle while not so great civs on top. Winrates do not reflect how good civs are imo.
Anyways bengali eco is insane for setting up boom with all that additional villagers. It’s not a powerspike eco bonus but it’ll give you continously bigger advantage over average eco civ the longer the game goes.
People compare it to vikings but that’s actually not really accurate. You’ll have more vils and therefore better eco long term but you’ll have less food and therefore less powerspikes in early imp.
This sentence doesn’t make sense. Eco is good or bad irrespectively on what units you spend your res on.
Let’s put it that way, with good economy you can build more troops, or better troops, right? With said troops you can win the game. As it’s very hard (or impossible) to win the game without troops, a civ that had 20% discount on ALL troops would have a very good eco bonus, but what happens if you have even a 25% discount, but on a limited set of troops, usually not good enough to win games? You can’t win with that, and indeed Byzantines are not regarded as the most broken civ ever.
Bengalis might have good eco, but their selection of viable troops is really weak and limited, either by cost and speed (elephants), or by resource (stone for castles), that means their eco bonus can’t be optimally leveraged. Just imagine giving free vills with age ups to Franks or Chinese instead 
That’s the meaning of my sentence.
As for the winrates, sure they’re not the best tool around, we’ve discussed that a lot of times, but they’re a good indicator, and even better, when you see the win rates over ELO you see that not only they’re consistent, but they even go down. And most important we’re not talking about something with 47% or 49%, but something around 40-43% which is terribad imho.
Yes, I’m not questioning full boomed late game performance with Mayahana researched and all, the problem is that probably you’d be dead before that, even Portuguese, Burmese and Malay (some civs considered bad for open maps) have more tools than Bengalis in Castle age.
So, to sum it up I see a couple of ways to address Bengalis castle age.
- Accept that Ratha must be the go-to fallback unit if crossbow play is not enough against some civs, but then you have to make it competitive against multiple stable knights => decrease training time, cost is already optimal imho, as it doesn’t even need food.
A castle is probably going to get built sooner or later in Castle Age, multiple castles…eeh, not so sure. - Disregard Ratha and think another way of dealing with knights, easiest is through monks, which Bengalis have, and almost FU. Then discount monasteries, or make Illumination researchable in Castle age (so you get faster faith back and can convert again), in short do something to encourage monk play. I also proposed castle age theocracy because monk micro is hard for a lot of people.
Or do nothing and keep the civ as it is: a team games closed map civ, and be happy with that.
This is very likely to cause unnecessary balance issues and make the Bengalis’ strategy overly skewed towards the monk rush. Just let the monastery get the discount first.
I liked the idea I suggested in another thread to make the archer armor line benefit the cavalry and remove the cavalry armor line. I think that would help players smoothly transition from crossbowmen to elephants on open maps, without making the elephant strategy more powerful on closed maps.
Bengalis should have either cheaper or faster moving elephants imho to make them useful.
Swap team bonuses with Gurjaras? Can slightly weaken their camels and armored elephants that may be too strong.
Yes sure which is why I’m saying don’t try to change civ by buffing eco. They lack good military option for midgame and that should get addressed. Otherwise bengalis will always play rathas and boom behind. It’s a good strat but it’s not a good civ design if there’s only one way to play it.
It’s not even about mahayana. The eco advantage you’ll have in late castle age is already considerable. And then you get another 5-10 extra vils upon reaching imp. Yes they lack tools for open land maps but they certainly don’t lack eco they lack units. And it’s not even about military bonuses. They lack 2 out of the three 3 standard midgame gold units and even the one they have lacks one key tech.
Then we agree.
We don’t need a civ that can only win due to sheer economic advantage by playing all the games in the same way, it would offer very boring and predictable gameplay.
Here are some ideas I have to buff them.
Blacksmiths techs are 50% cheaper. That will allow them more easily get the upgrades for their Ratha, or do some sort of rush in the early game with cheaper blacksmith techs. Get Hussar.
If anything those winrates charts are only measures of how easy a civ is to play, not their actual strenght, unless you’re fine with believing that Mayans are just midtier and civs like Aztecs or Tatars are bottom 10. So it just means at best that they should be made easier to play, and that’s why I agree with the idea to make their siege benefit from the ele bonus as well.
Massive overlap with Bulgarians
That’s a spiced version of Bulgarian and Spanish bonus together, not really as original as the other idea of having archer or cavalry armor act for both classes.
It would change nothing in Castle Age (well, obviously).
Less bonus damage? It’s extremely narrow and confined only to mangonel vs mangonel wars, imho really niche case, as the civ bonus already covers Siege Elephant and they miss bombard cannons. Scorpions…eeh, mangonels are almost always better.