Right now many factions have one landmark they’re going to choose every time (council hall springs to mind) but in the Delhi’s case the landmarks are imbalanced at every age. At each age there is an obvious choice you HAVE to pick. Dome of Faith is a MUST. House of Learning is a MUST. At imperial age you have a choice at least, but Sultan’s Palace is still the obvious choice.
Feudal:
Scholars are too expensive base. They cost 150 gold, which to be fair is the same as other civs, but you need to invest in a lot of them. I suggest reducing the base price to 100 gold (same as the prelate) and making the Dome of Faith reduce the cost by 25%, keeping the DoF scholars at 75. It’s still a good choice then, but no longer MANDATORY.
Also, remove the requirement for Tower of Victory to move the units close to it. Just grant the buff across the board. Or make it a much stronger buff but only function when in the aura of the landmark, making it a defensive landmark.
Castle:
Most of the reason people aren’t willing to pass up on House of Learning is for Honed Blades. So one idea is to simply move that tech to the blacksmith. Then it wouldn’t feel so mandatory.
Another more interesting possibility is to make Compound of the Defender more tantalizing. What if instead Compound of the Defender offered a bunch of it’s own unique techs, so you had to choose? Maybe the infantry building stone walls and stone costs being reduced would be Castle age techs at the compound, and in Imperial age there could be a tech just as exciting as Honed Blades?
Imperial:
Simply put, if Hisar Academy offered gold instead of food, it would instantly become a much better choice. Currently it can save you some villagers on farms, but if it gave gold it would be much more useful to the late game.
Great ideas. I go for Compound of the Defender most games, but I like spearman stone walling the sacred sites and the slightly cheaper keeps. I do agree it the weaker choice though.
I may be totally wrong - but I feel Dome of Faith is less mandatory and more of a trap.
It works out as about a 2~ villager on gold bonus for as long as you are churning out scholars.
Its not bad for the first few minutes of Feudal - but it really drops off to nothing. Whereas the 10%ish damage boost from the Tower of Victory can continue to be useful through to late game (certain macro issues aside). I’m not sure its amazing - but its something - and I feel my spears+bows benefit from in early game skirmishes/counter harass.
I feel if you reduced the DoF saving to third of what it is now - so now the Dome of Faith is the equivalent of 0.66 villagers on gold while you are making scholars there - and the Tower of Victory was universal - it would be an auto-choice the other way. (Which doesn’t mean I wouldn’t prefer the ToV to be universal.)
Into Castle - as you say, Honed Blades is the draw. I don’t know if its mandatory - I’m not sure additional damage on MMA/Knights is ever game deciding by the castle era - but it feels nice. If you remove that, who is taking the House of Learning?
Cheaper Keeps is another draw - but you have to make a few for it to add up. Still, the ability to rapidly throw up stone walls is very powerful - if perhaps a bit situational.
In Imperial I thought the Hisar Academy was the go-to choice anyway. Yes gold would arguably be more valuable than food - but I don’t really mind.
Tower of victory gives .15 more attack speed, not 15%, and seems not to work on MAA
Hishar academy works only when you resarch tech, after a while, it doesn’t produce anymore.
You can build stone wall with infantry anyway due to a bug. Lay down the stone fortifications, take your infantry, construct a little palissade and they will proceed to build stone walls when palisades are done.
My point of view :
Feudal:
The first two are okay, tower of victory should be patched and maybe its aura should be bigger.
Dome of faith is a default if you don’t plan to use the tower.
Castle:
Yeah, the academy is a goto. Missing Honed blades hurt too mutch, I really think this tech should be mandatory for the civ, in university or blacksmith, watever.
Arguably, I was trainning a all in strat using the cheaper keeps, since it allow me to drop stone tower forward early castle which are just like early springalds for almost free.
Imperial:
I always hesitate. Even if hishar academy is bugged, w<hen i’m short on food it help. And the free production of elephants takes me pop I don’t whant when I don’t need elephjants in my composition.
I would suggest to have this effect changed to work on buildings, so the landmarks adds the buff to all units produced in buildings in the mosque influence radius.
Dome of Faith actually is much stronger then a 2 vill bonus on gold. This is mainly because mosques can’t train scholars and research at the same time. If you go with the tower of victory that means an additional mosque is needed if you want to go scholars and research. This additional mosque heavily impacts timing and your ability to produce your first few crucial units. This tempo setback can kill you expecailly since Delhi’s only signficant advantage currently is age 2 Sacred Sites. This need to be fought for in order for Delhi to keep up with every other civilization inside of the game. This effect is really similar to the Council House for English where it is technically only worth 2 archery ranges but it creates a massive tempo advantage and is one of the best Landmarks in the game.
I’ve seen so many times people go with Compound of the Defender if only for the lower stone costs of buildings (all buildings AND their emplacements). In fact, I’ve seen many people complain that the house of learning buffs are mostly unimpressive. Moving the honed blades out of the house of learning makes it absolute trash for a landmark.
As for the Palace of the Sultan, I’ve seen many people go for the Hisar Academy. But considering the food gain cap of 700 per min is inferior to the 400 food + 600 gold value of the elephants produced at the Palace of the Sultan (fully garrisoned) considering that gold has a higher value late game than food.
delhi are quite awful probably worst civ right now overall along with china for early. the civ requires major buffs to eco and feudal if you want anyone to play this competitively or even recreationally without outright frustration against other more powerful viable civs.
right now it is not viable to build the priests from mosque in dark age or even feudal because castle age is their only real power spike (tower elephants + xbow + archer + springolds) where they can compete against other civs without outright resource disadvantage. and yet ironically you are required to build priests and mosques in dark/feudal because your techs take way too long to research and without them (7 minutes like wtf) so your eco is actually the worst in entire game. your early is worst in game (at least china gets defensive landmark) and sure techs are free, but id rather pay for techs than be griefed into longer uptimes where i am the worst civ for early aggression and have to choose between trying to win the game (fast castle) or actually having comparable economy to my opponent (building priests).
again to reiterate: the way they play isnt fun or competitive because if you want any decent eco you need to build priests for mosques and that denies your civ uptime which means you just lose. if you want to take advantage of their sacred site cheese tech (which tbh is quite powerful) you are also denied fast castle power spike because you have to build priests (again like awful eco requirements) and then wood to tower the sacred site and worse yet if feudal knighted or siege rammed you just autolose because you’ve now forced yourself into not fast castling.
i suggest: delhi obviously need massive eco buff to dark/feudal right now and tbh whilst we are at it for a civ labeled as defense they sure do suck massively against any type of aggression before castle age. maybe give their feudal towers ballista upgrade or more armor/range or something like landmark in feudal that shoots.
My opener on a standard land map with 3 sacred sites.
5 workers to wood - collect 100 wood, then go to gold, collect 400 gold, then pivot back to wood.
1 to mosque->house->2nd Mosque->berries. 1st Mosque on sanctity, 2nd Mosque on 2 scholars.
New workers to berries.
Flash forward a bit, and with some map dependency, at about 4.15-4.30~ you can have 3 scholars on (or close to) all 3 sacred sites in time for Sanctity to tick over. Your opponent has to push out to take some back, but until they do you have a lot of gold flowing in and time to churn out spears/archers (who can easily pick up the ToV buff) at your base as per what civ you are facing. You are therefore in a strong position to hold the nearest one. Then open up however you would normally.
Doing it your way you have one scholar - and a second turning up 45 seconds after you’ve finished the Dome of Faith. Which tends to mean you get those sacred sites a lot later unless you dedicate an awful lot of villagers to it.
This is probably better on a map where there’s only a couple of sacred sites, or you are focusing more on holding one while simultaneously warding off raids from your base. But I feel the tempo of 3 sites producing 200g a minute until shut down far exceeds the saving from DoF. Now admittedly I feel if this became “Delhi meta”, opponents would just make a few scouts early game and shut it down, but its working for now (and arguably such scouts would not be free).
Compound of the defender and hissar academy aren’t bad landmarks.
Saving pop lategame (what hisar academy does in reality) is a decent bonus, especially since elephant archers are very situational late game. Could it give more food and still be balanced? Absolutely but in its current state its still worth getting.
Compound of the defend is incredibly powerful, especially because it makes a single small stone give you 2 keeps. If fast castle builds were popular right now it would be an S tier landmark but it’s less usefull with the heavy emphasis on feudal that exists right now. On maps like king of the hill or black forest it can still be very strong to get 2 keeps out before 15 mins to control holy sites or choke points.
Nerfing dome of faith to save 25 gold every 45 seconds seems pretty heavy handed. At that point it would be more powerful if it just spawned a single villager. The main reason it feels good right now is you need a second and a third scholar ASAP in feudal for sacred sites / boosting production so you save 225g in the first 2 mins of feudal. A point in the game where those resource really count. If you believe you are garuanteed to survive that period of the game IMO the attack speed buff is always better.
They should give tower of victory a universal 15% attack speed tech of they can’t fix the bug , they can give 15% attack like other techs , instead of moving army closer near always .
Also I will like to see scholer boosting tc production as well . May be not 100% but like 50% . Right now india has no booming options .
All they can get is free tech , but that are basically free resources over long period that doesn’t make much difference as other civ can boom and have enough resources to pay for those tech . Tech cost is never a issue in most games .
Imo a more interesting booming option would be if the removed the tech requirement to train villagers from keeps. Then you could fast castle, build 2 castles and start a 3 tc boom while they get trebs.
Their other option for a castle age landmark discounts them to 600 stone. Anyways it probably would still be quite slow compared to abbasid or Chinese booms
My concern is that this isn’t particularly interactive. Scholars boosting military production is engaging because you need to switch them between different prod buildings and mosques based your current needs. If you can get a vil production speed boost from scholars you are just going to garison a scholar in your town center and leave it there till you hit 100 vils. It’s not a bad idea but I’d prefer something that is a bit more active.
I don’t want to open a new thread, so I will comment here.
I think it’s time to say that Tower of victory needs a rework or something else to make it worth using. Currently, that 20% AP bonus feels like nothing. Without the scholar landmark, Delhi feels much weaker. So for me, it feels tower of victory not just weak but also cut the potential of Delhi maybe by 30-40 % because of the loss of scholar training time and price.
Well, I don’t have any idea, how to balance it. Maybe we would be able to train units from barracks and archery in tower of victory with a faster train speed if 1 scholar is in the building.
Anyone else? What’s your opinion and idea about the tower of victory?