In 1v1s, dravidians have an excellent feudal, with the extra wood, cheaper m@a, and faster firing skirms. But their castle age is one of the worst. This is reflected in the stats. But unlike other civs which have a weak middle (Khmer, Burgundians, Goths, Incas, Italians, etc), it doesn’t go up enough in Imperial age to compensate.
For all the people complaining about Wootz steel on cavalry, they can just make it an infantry only tech. That wouldn’t be a huge nerf. The main issue is the lack of a raiding unit, coupled with lack of any major defensive bonuses.
In early castle age, you have to protect your vils without compromising their work time, or raid your opponent to make sure they lose an equal number too. A third option is to have a major eco bonus such that even if you lose a few vils, your economy can take it. Dravidians lack all of these options on land maps. Your eco is weak (dravidians don’t get stone and gold shaft mining, they also lack crop rotation), you can’t raid them effectively, and even if you raid with crossbows and god forbid, EAs, they can raid you back quite easily.
Also, can we talk about how garbage EAs are(in castle age)?
They are weak to both spear line and skirmishers, they are slow and cannot avoid them like knights can, they are more expensive than knights, have lower dps, and die to knights. To make things worse, even if you increase their damage, knights can just run away and not take the fight. You’ll see that while almost everyone uses knights in castle age, while almost nobody uses EAs. Population efficiency is the biggest advantage of EAs, but that doesn’t matter at all in castle age.
The devs have decided not to give Indian civs knights for some reason. Fair enough, but then give a reasonable alternative.
I have the following ideas:
- Villagers can garrison in resource camps
This gives your slower units a chance to keep up with raids. Knights will still destroy your lumber camp if you give them time, but you have some time to get your pikes. This is still worth it for the knight player because it still idles your economy. - Buff EAs a LOT, but slow them down: Say you increase their range by two (1 more than the archer line), and increase Medical corps to 40hp/min, and slow them down to a bit over Armoured elephant speed. This would make it so that your opponent needs to move his vils to avoid your elephants. Since they are slow, they get time for saving their vils. He can make pikes, but your elephants will snipe them from further away. So, he needs to make a ball of pikes (or skirms). Since your EAs are slower than pikes, you now need some strategy to save them. This is way more interesting than what we have rn.
- Give them husbandry and hussar, take away wootz for stable units. Don’t give cavalry attack at blacksmiths, but give defensive ones. Spanish already have access to Champions, ES, and hussars, so this isn’t anything new. This is the least interesting option to me, but it gets the job done very well. These hussars will be extremely weak, but they will work as raiding units which can take a bit of tc/castle arrow fire.
But do something to fix this please.