I haven’t played with Dravidians but Medical Corps seems useless. Not because it’s too expensive for what it offers but it has so much negative synergy with the rest of the Dravidian tech tree that it confuses me. They lack Husbandry, Bloodlines, Elite Battle-Elephant, 3rd Cavalry Armor, and PT (for EA) giving them the undisputed worst elephants in the game, but they also have a UT that encourage them to go elephants.
Replace MC with a new UT.
Buff MC to be more powerful.
Buff the Dravidian Tech Tree to make elephants more viable.
Do nothing if MC was viable then Dravidians would be OP.
The catch is that only their battle eles are the worst, not the other two. Their ele archers have the best damage output and while not better than the other two their siege eles still get the same advantages over rams, still being faster and being upgradable to not have negative armour despite the missing techs. So it’s probably worth giving the tech a chance and making it better.
I think when you make a tech like that, you can’t think about how much the healing is, you want to think about how long it takes to heal the unit back to full health (Assuming it could reach 0 without dying). I think 5 minutes is the most reasonable max time for an average healing tech, but maybe we could go a bit higher for an elephant unit. If it can’t heal a unit within 7-8 mins max without being over the top, then I think the tech would need a full rework.
Elephant archers don’t benefit Wootz Steel but because of their high survivability they do benefit more from MC, though I don’t think it is enough to offset Bloodline, Husbandry, and Parthian tactics. Armored Elephants do benefit Wootz making them holdup well vs melee units, but they also have too low survivability to fully benefit from MC
I play Dravidians semi-frequently in TG when I don’t feel like tryharding with a stronger civ, and I don’t think I’ve ever researched Medical Corps. It’s an overpriced tech that probably gives less value over the life of the average unit than bloodlines. Its effect needs to be at least tripled, if not reworked entirely, to make it worth getting. When an EA is under direct attack from Onagers, Halbs, Skirms, etc, it maybe gets 5-10 HP worth from the tech. Its uselessness is compounded by the fact that, lacking husbandry, Eles don’t have the ability to meaningfully run away from anything when wounded, so you’ll get more value having them fight to the death than to taking a 14 minute T/O to regenerate. The tech description might as well say “Makes Elephant Units 1% stronger” so that everyone would know to never research it.
Instead of healing 20 HP per minute, it needs to heal 50 HP per minute. Then, for most of the elephant units, they fully heal in about 5 minutes, rather than 12-13 minutes.
I would like the tech to be replaced with something that gives Dravidians trash BE as I think it is unlikely the devs will add any more elephant civs. Dravidian BE certainly miss enough techs to justify giving them trash BE.
Only reasonable way to address weakness to siege is by giving them BBC.
True but giving them BBC is the easy solution coming up with something Unique is much more interesting. Imagine if Turks just got Elite-Skirm instead of +1PA on their scout-line