This may also be interesting and makes really powerfull light cav in castle age. The problem is only that the difference probably wont be that big in tpurnaments levels since pros often do not invest into a castle.
I think there are many more alternatives:
- 300w per age
- free balistics
- barracks tech half price replaced with no food cost
- barracks tech half prince replaced with barracks+range techs half price
- Add redemption and fervor
- Skirms and EA are also produced faster
- …
It mostly depends on what fits how devs and players want the civ to be played, what part of the ge they need buffs, and numbers adjusting…
I am not convinced that you absolutely need camels or knights to survive a skirm + knight push…
An xbows based composition should be fine. If you can micro, monks+skirms or pikes+mangonels too.
True, Dravidians early game in land open random maps is argubly:
- worse than 13 civs: mon, jpanese, lit, fra, azt, may, chi, vik,cel, pol, hin, boh, eth …
- similar to 8 civs: burm, vie, malay, khm, ben, burg, cmans bri
- better than 20 civs: ita, por, inc, per, mali, kor, mag, sla, bulg, got, hun, teu, byz, spa, gur, ber, tur, tat, sic, sar
So they are just above average. Not enough to make early damage against most civs. And they are even behind compared to many civs.
They need better dark, feudal, and/or castle age to compete in land open RM.
This is wrong and twisted. Weak knights + regular xbows lose to strong knights + regular xbows. Civs without BL do not necessarily have better xbows and most civs with BL have good xbows already…
This makes little sense. Sets do not always use the same civs on both. Pro play civs with good eco. If the civ is mainly archer civs, they usually make xbows, if the civ is mainly cav civ, they usually go knight. We need a tournanent with single pick fir the whole set on maps where eth/brits are strong enough (eg arabia) to prove your point this way.