Can’t believe a random bonus that I suggested for Bengalis has been agreed by 3-4 people already. I honestly didn’t think much about whether Bengalis is suitable for this or not. 11
That’s a good argument.
I’m really hoping we will get the June PUP soon. Maybe tomorrow with map rotation?
Would giving Dravidians trash battle elephants (i.e. replace gold cost with wood or additional food cost) be too strong? They are already missing a lot of upgrades so they seem to be appropriate to have such a bonus. It would also give them an option to fight late game siege, in theory atleast.
Yea I think it makes a lot of sense for a civ without knights (or eagles)!
Bengalis imo don’t need buffs. Their Castle age is the ONLY awkward part of the game on Arabia maps. Yes, their winrate isn’t great, but it’s more a L2P issue. People default to standard compositions these days, so if a civs can’t flood Crossbows or Knights, people panic. Buff their Castle age on Arabia and you have a civ that is good at EVERY stage of the game.
As for Dravidians, these ones are weak yes, and need a buff. Easiest one is give them BBC + Siege Engineers (but that’s also very boring), like many said they lack counters to Onagers but also I will add that they don’t have a true power unit past min 45 and they can’t get a decisive advantage in early Imp because they don’t have any bonuses to get there faster (like Byz cheaper Imp). Overall, they could use a power unit, maybe give them better Elephant Archers, the dmg resistance from Bengalis could be transferred to these guys, or the negative armor class (currently -7 I think) lowered to -6 for Elite version.
Civs with only “foot troops” never worked anyway, if the devs want to release foot troops-only civs, they need to address how they get destroyed by Hussar Raids, Onager and to a lesser degree Cavalier/Paladin on open maps.
I don’t think that is adressing their weakness really 
The problem with Dravidians is rather that they lack mobility and are therefore very vulnerable to onager. I think lacking BBC or mobility is the weakness that was identified earlier in this thread.
So from my understanding (I haven’t played them that much) is that you generally want to win before onagers are a thing. Meaning go all in long swords with skirms and siege, or use you FU arbs.
Will a slow moving unit work against mass siege though? Especially when scorpions have a massive attack bonus against elephants.
Dark and early Feudal age will still be their weak point. Also we have Lithuanians that don’t have any weakness in any time period of the game. They are an indeed strong civ but not OP. And Bengalis with a better castle age will never be as strong as them anyway.
exactly. Tbf its only champion upgrade where the bonus is useful. Halb upgrade discount is 150f, 300g which is quite small in imp.
Yes I’m not a fan of that either. My point was the only way other than giving thumb ring and making archer play feasible with Bengalis is to make Rathas stronger and the civ similar to other uu dependent closed map civs.
When you struggle hard to defend and mass 40 of them and then they melt to skirms, you’ll feel differently. The only things mentioned were to get them to 100% accuracy with thumb ring instead of boosting their rof with UT.
There are always ways to give buffs beyond these options. Like the free cav armor that was proposed earlier would make the civ more flexible. Other than that I still think giving them bonuses for siege and monks could be good.
I don’t even think rathas is the way to play them on closed maps. You don’t have much potential to push with them as your opponent can just boom abd nonk defense. The same way as mangudai are way better on open than on closed maps (although mangudai anti siege bonus is really good here). Imo bengalis should play boom light cav monks as opening (the civ is really good at that) and then probably open with arb siege and/or monk here in imo. Also you can justify elephant archers here sometimes. You can just go onager and be fine vs skirms (and monk vs bbc). The civ is really flexible on closes maps and doesn’t solely rely on rathas like on open maps.
yes, the extra melee armor.
Plenty of civs have these techs and have good units and good eco bonuses as well. Dravidians eco bonus is not better than any of the top 10 Arena civs and not “way” better than any of the top 20 Arena civs either. So even with these they’re not going to be a top tier civ on closed maps but would rather be a usable civ.
I was hoping for a serious post, after the second buff proposal just leave
Why do you think that is the only way?
Which? Not a single civ in the game has FU infantry, archers, siege and monks. There are a few civs that have 3 out of these (it’s even not too many civs) but none have all 4.
You get 400 wood free with fc build. This is more important than late game eco bonus. On arena you mostly care about eco bonuses when it comes to setting up eco. You can instantly drop monastery and tc while also affording light cav. Very good bonus. Sure nowhere near as good as something like khmer but easily above average.
The hypothetical civ with the by far arena tech tree isn’t a top arena civ? Highly doubt that.
when you switch to melee mode and shred them like they are nothing no, you’ll feel good since it’s something no other CA tipe unit can do. also they have a ton of HP compared to regular CA so no, skirmishers are not a hard counter to them, they are an amazing unit.
I’m starting to think this will be OP in TG closed maps pocket. Elephant that is resistant to pikes and monks with free armor, I can see BF and maybe even Arena players will start complaining.
Then what do you think about free Infantry Armor upgrades for Dravidians locked behind Castle Age?
(Instead of the 50% cheaper Barracks techs)
Also I suggest the free Cav armor upgrades be locked behind Castle Age as well so as to give drush and villagers a chance to fight them.
That is only true to some degree. Bengalis are channeled into Elephants and Raths. I would love to play Sword line in case Crossbowmen and Knights are not the options, but the civ should support my play.
I am not Hera who does Hun Longswords!
I get that their Castle age is awkward, it’s predictable to “open Skirms”. That’s the weakness of the civ tho, the “default” is Skirms/Crossbow into UU. Once you reach UU you are generally fine.
That’s a nerf. If you’re attacked by kts getting pikemen for less res is better than having a bunch of spears with armour, same with eagles and ls/m@a. And that’s also a nerf to their m@a rush.
If this OP then how on earth are Magyars scouts not terrorizing the ladder. At worst it should be locked behind a blacksmith, not castle age.
Idk if you have the res to tech into elite battle elephant spending some more for upgrades shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
the main counter is monks and halbs anyway, armour has little to no affect on that. this was proven with how effective malay elephants are(almost no armour), and specifically how bad burmese eles are (huge amounts of armour)
elephants need the fewest upgrades to be viable, therefore it actually makes sense that giving them free armour has the smallest impact. even korean free armour has a much bigger impact than this, and thats archers which generally dont care for armour, but due to skirms and WW…
did you even do the math on this one? how fast would shivs attack? and dont give them TR, we dont need yet another FU arb civ with an eco.
make EA less fragile and more accurate, make battle elephants more tanky
not a bad idea, interested to see how much that actually affects the majority of the player base who cant micro that well. certainly helps at higher elo at least. like the “melee” ranged attacks