so how come no one is actually admitting how strong Delhi actually is, like in the higher ELO’s 1600+, they have the most win rates, even more so than Mongols, anything lower than that ELO, they are at least 2nd on win rate% so what is happening with people not admitting how strong they actually are?.
3 Likes
I think people are happy with the state of Delhi, since the last patch I haven’t seen any new threads complaining about Delhi being broken.
Delhi is getting up there in the s tier in my opinion, people are still figuring out the meta and (for me at least) how to keep up enough food production to spam elephants.
I think the general consensus is that most people are happy with where Dehli are at balance wise and I agree!
Why do people not talk about them compared to Mongols? I think it’s due to the massive early game power spike Mongols have whereas Dehli seem balanced well with their strength.
Delhi is in a very good spot right now.
One could argue they are OP because of their pretty high win rate, but on the other hand, the patch came like a few weeks ago and it could be just a matter of time until people start to find ways to deal with them, specially since they were one of the least used civs, many people are now finding themselves playing vs delhi a lot more then what they are used to and sitll dont know how to handle them, kinda like a similar situation to french back at the genesis tournament.
3 Likes
what i feel makes delhi so strong is the fact they have anti cav elephants, anti spearman elephants, as well as some of the strongest man at arms in the game, as well as a healer that also buffs the attack speed on units, they can also capture sacred sites in the feudal age, delhi by far have more diverse strategies at their disposal, they can tailor to any unit type as well as counter them easily, sure elephants cost a lot, but its not until imperial age where they get countered correctly, the issue with delhi is all of the above make them very strong and a hard civ to even contend with, not to mention they are S tier on hybrid maps, they need some tweaks no doubt, i would tweak them in regards to fishing boats and elephants, the rest i feel is fine. also the elephants are much more useful than most infantry, they are tank and can make it to enemy siege with little health decrease, then pretty much 1 shot it, they are a lot stronger than most civs being that they are actually harder to counter than people think.
2 Likes
See this,
I think what’s making them seem OP, same with Mongols and to some level Chinese, they’re more complete than the other civs so in comparison they seem OP
I actually disagree, other civs just need to catch up.
They’re a good example of unique units that actually work, in my opinion elephants should be to some degree OP
You can still counter them with mangonels fairly easily, and springalds.
As it should be, in real life if an elephant trampled an artillery piece you really think it’d need to turn around and do it again?
Also it takes 2 hits minimum for springalds, 3 for mangonels, 4-5 for bombards, honestly I feel this is the damage ALL melee should do to siege when in melee range.
Edit:
Side note, I actually would like to see splash trample damage to infantry from elephants. Disclaimer: I am an Abbasid main, no bias here.
5 Likes
its not really a case of them being more complete, its just other civs have less to counter with and thats the problem, delhi have a lot of units to use to counter other unit types.
its kind of hard when horse archers took a big nerf from rus, but yet delhi got some real nice buffs, a lot of them improving their overall performance and made it sky rocket to an S tier civ, this i feel was relics way f apologising for breaking their research, you must remember, delhi get a lot more advantages than just the elephants, they can spare resources for those elephant simply because their research cost nothing.
that all depends on your enemies unit composition, as well as what siege they are also supporting their army with.
yes, but again as many people have stated before, this is a game, if the case was reality, then i think elephants would fall much faster than they do, some elephants have almost 2k HP, that is a lot, my opinion is they need some tweaks, that has been my opinion since release, but then they broke the research and delhi was not seen much, but now they have re emerged stronger than ever, i feel the devs are just letting the people who spent months complaining about them have some fun with them, which is not fair for those of us who want to enjoy a balance game design.
We Delhimen have suffered for so long with so much, from pool noodle spearmen costing us games against Frenchmen to not being able to complete any Imperial Age upgrades as our scholars debated whether the game was released in a finished state or not.
Now, after so long, we finally have a manifest destiny to fulfill by conquering the Mongols.
Allow us to face the same level of improvement to the other Civs as opposed to a culling of our freedom to succeed.
On a side note, once animation cancelling goes the way of the dodo, we will see the strength of elephants, at high level play, where animation cancelling is abused most, cut back by a great deal.
4 Likes
The last part is very correct
I think animation cancelling with elephant is responsible for at least 2% of the victories Delhi has in high elo
From my experience as a Delhi only player, I tried animation cancelling as I saw pro players doing on twitch streams with elephants.
The power to crush nearly any landmark, castle, or TC in about 5 seconds with 3 or 4 elephants is rather intimidating and opponents often left as soon as they saw that it was being done rather than even try stopping it. If it works for a low level player like myself, I can only imagine the dread amongst higher levels.
For that reason, I began to feel sorry, especially for English players, and stopped doing that.
2 Likes
Honestly, Delhi is probably still the most bugged civ by a longshot. They fixed a few critical bugs that screwed up Delhi’s feudal and Cast age completely, but there are still a LOT of bugs. For example, upgrades don’t affect the tower elephant archers (other than the 1 that changes them to xbows). Armored beasts doesn’t affect tower elephants at all. Using honed blades causes the Hisar Academy to produce almost no food (every time you produce a unit affected honed blades, it resets the Hisar Academy’s research counter to 1). Tower of Victory doesn’t apply the right stats to some units, and doesn’t affect some at all. You can delete a madrasa full of scholars and the research time improvement remains. Dock techs have the wrong research times. While technically not a bug, imp research times are still WAY too long.
Delhi is genuinely very strong on hybrid maps due entirely to their fishing ships shooting arrows. It frees Delhi up to do whatever they want (either boom or harass) in Dark Age and early Feudal without having to worry about defending their fishing like everyone else.
On the other hand, Delhi have quite possibly the worst feudal age in the entire game. They are possibly the worst civ in the game on pure land maps, and in the bottom 2 (with Abbasid) on pure water maps (because Delhi and Abba have the worst navies).
Their win rate doesn’t imply that (partly because it includes hybrid maps), but ALSO because Delhi’s army is so counter-meta that most people just don’t play correctly against them. I think there are 3 main reasons for this:
-
Nobody knows how to counter armies with elephants properly. Most Delhi players go elephant archer or elephant MAA. I see game after game where people are trying to counter them with things like spears, crossbows, archers, etc. Stupid. Absolutely stupid. You counter them with knights, man-at-arms and siege. Little-known secret: elephants are ABSOLUTE TRASH AGAINST MAN-AT-ARMS! I’d love an explanation for that, because it’s probably the single most obviously unrealistic interaction in the game, which is maybe why people don’t do it. But it’s true. The crossbow tower elephants do ok against them, but that’s not til late imp and usually requires kiting. In Castle Age, equivalent resources of man-at-arms obliterate elephants (both war elephants and tower elephants, though the war elephants fare much better, but are themselves very vulnerable to archer masses and especially xbows). Literally HRE can make just huge masses of MAA and Delhi only have 2 options: xbows (same as every other civ), or knights (which don’t do great against HRE MAA due to the HRE bonus against heavy units, and are easily countered my mixing a few spears in with the MAA). I think most players get geared up for playing against spear/archer (cause that’s all Delhi can do in Feudal) and just fail to match the tech switch to MAA/Elephant/Knight in Castle Age. TheViper recently lost a game with HRE to DeMusliM’s Delhi for this reason. It looked like a Delhi steamroll, but it wasn’t. TheViper just had the wrong units. When Delhi tech switched he had a large mass of archers (cause he was playing against spear/archer in Feudal, which he was beating) that did absolutely nothing to man-at-arms and tower elephants. If he’d gone straight man-at-arms instead he’d have taken the fight easily (he didn’t lose to the tower elephants - he lost just because he was badly outnumbered in the man-at-arms department).
-
Stone wall pushes are really strong. Every civ can do it, but most other civs don’t because they have other viable strategies that are more intuitive. It’s become a staple of Delhi play because it’s just a strong way to play in general, and after the horrible winter patch Delhi players had no other choice. Obviously Compound of the Defender plays into that in Castle, but Delhi players do it with vills in Feudal quite regularly. Anybody could. The other civs just weren’t forced to adopt that style to be competitive.
-
People grossly overestimate Delhi in Feudal Age, especially their economy. People buy into the myth that “Delhi gets free eco upgrades! All their upgrades are free and this saves them tons of money so they can make more army!” It’s true, but grossly misleading. The military upgrades being free is generally significant, but not particularly impactful in Feudal because those upgrades aren’t very expensive anyway. The free eco upgrades do make a difference for Delhi, but actually provide less eco boost than pretty much every other civ’s inherent eco bonuses in the first place. For example, HRE get 40% faster vill work rate starting in dark age. You make 2-3 prelates and your eco soars. Delhi get maybe 10-15% faster work rate several minutes after reaching Feudal when all the eco upgrades come in. French get there by just having more vills in the first place. Even low tier Abbasid can do the same thing with their Golden Age, AND get half price villagers, and don’t have to idle villagers while they’re aging up to Feudal. And at the cost of free, Delhi’s researches come in slower than everyone else’s. There are only 2 things Delhi can do uniquely in Feudal age, and none of them are game-winning: capture sacred sites for double gold a few minutes after getting to Feudal, and build palisade walls with foot soldiers. Every other civ can out eco and/or out-military Delhi in Feudal. The problem is people get all distracted trying to deny sacred sites and being careful with their units, when it is literally impossible for Delhi to have a larger army unless you screw up. Civs with early man-at-arms? Delhi has no Feudal counter at all. Great example to this is Beastyqt recently lost a game as HRE vs Grubby’s Delhi when he had by far the larger force, but didn’t attack because he thought Grubby had an army. Delhi NEVER has the army. Grubby bluffed and went 3TC then eventually outboomed his way to victory, but Beasty could have just killed him wiht man-at-arms. Just like TheViper could have gone all-in MAA against DeMusliM’s castle age push. People lose because they get scared of Delhi and don’t realize you can just push the base and kill them. Especially in Feudal.
If/when people finally figure this out, Delhi are going to need buffs. They already need Feudal buffs for land maps. The meta just hasn’t caught up to it yet.
3 Likes
Delhi demands that you play differently, but they are far from op. Especially their feudal. If you stop their early push and prevent them from capturing more than one sites, they fall apart.
1 Like
Delhi have a 61.3% win rating against the English Feudal powerhouse, their best matchup btw.
Apparently it’s not that difficult to hold feudal with Delhi.
Abbasid, Chinese and HRE struggle to hold on in the early game far more than Delhi does.
Delhi overtakes the English at 15 minutes, which is only beaten by the Mongols who start out stronger than the English.
1 Like
At ratings over 1600. It’s 50.7% across all ratings. And there’s no way to filter that by map type. So it could be due to hybrid maps, or maps that are easy to wall in Feudal where Brits can’t push well. Delhi tower elephants and MAA are quite strong vs standard British longbow meta in Castle. If I’m Brits playing against Delhi, I’m not going super heavy into longbows.
Each of the university’s technologies costs a thousand resources, 700 in gold plus food, among the majority they give 5 thousand resources, equivalent to 20 lancer knights or 20 manual artillerymen. Therefore having an army and 5 thousand resources must take a long time. The 12 scholars count 1800 gold, it is the cost in the mosque, with the dome of faith it costs half, if I compare with some technologies only the cost of gold is 700, with 3 technologies I have spent 2100 gold without counting its price on food. With 3 madrasahs I have 3 techs in 6 minutes as if each tech was researched in 2 minutes.
Matters, because those people actually know how to play and exploit imbalance, which is why it’s far more unbalanced at 1600+. This is despite them also watering down imbalance in the stats by strategically picking civs for specific maps to a higher extent than lower elos.
doesn’t matter
over 87% of English games at 1600+ elo were played on land maps
This in no way addresses my argument. You showed Delhi wins by map type (note 44.8% on dry arabia), and stated most English games are on land maps. You cannot show (because AoE4 world doesn’t have it) stats for English vs. Delhi on land maps only. You can get by civ or by map, but not civ and map.
Furthermore, as I cited in my argument, the pros aren’t countering Delhli properly. I showed 2 examples of both Beastyqt and TheViper having the advantage with HRE but straight up playing it wrong. You can’t look at win rate to say Delhi is strong if people are literally losing because they’re making the wrong counter units or failing to attack. They’re playing it based on how they feel Delhi is, rather than doing the objective math and realizing they can just push to win with MAA.
Mathematically, Delhi has a weak Feudal. Period. Maybe the absolute weakest on land maps. There’s nothing they can do the other civs don’t do better (other than fishing boats). Delhi meta just broke the overall meta cause the winter patch forced Delhi players to use better strats period (for lack of alternative), whereas people are still using the standard strats that worked before on the other civs. It’s not that other civs couldn’t do the same thing Delhi is doing - they just aren’t. It’s no different that the Rus win rate plummeting, despite the fact that Rus is still quite strong. The Meta just hasn’t adapted yet. Or the HRE win rate being low because their absurd eco bonuses goad players into being too greedy instead of doing the exact same strats as their opponents with blatantly stronger ecos behind them.
English have a early man-at-arms. They should be abusing the crap out of those against Delhi in Feudal. But everybody goes longbows because English…
I believe your math is incorrect because it’s bugged. I might be wrong, but I don’t believe 12 scholars gets you university techs in 5 min 28 seconds. Go actually play a game and test it first. Also, don’t neglect the cost of the madrasas in your analysis. They are quite expensive. Building 3 of them is over 1000 resources just to get more techs in at the same slow completion time. Plus all those scholars take up pop. So you have to consider the resources if you would gain if you made more villagers for 50 food instead of making scholars for 75-150 gold.
The issue isn’t that it doesn’t save tons of money. Or that you can’t get all the techs at the same time as the other civs for less. It’s that you can’t get the first couple KEY techs quickly enough. Say for example you are in a stalemate with both you and your opponents having knights and archers. You both imp at the same time and build a madrasa. Your opponent gets the tech of their choice (biology, incendiary arrows, etc.) a solid 4 minutes before you and gets a 20% damage or health advantage. Now your have a MASSIVE disadvantage. It’s why if you look at the AoE4World graph, Delhi win rate plummets after about 32 minutes, then doesn’t come back up til 50 minutes.