I’ve a solution to castle age problem. The monastery’ for castle age can be replaced with a new building called “TEMPLE”.
Temple has all the building characteristics of a monastery like creating monk, keeping relics and research monk tech. Its special ability is it can HEAL & CONVERT like a monk as well. Temple can heal units at 4 range and convert at 9 with a LOS of 11.
This building can help do a static defense against a knight push. The skirms and arbs can fight around the building while ‘Temple’ can be used to convert heavy cavalry unit. There is a chance of turning the tables on an opponent who is trying to do the strategy Hera pointed out: “Skirm+ knight push will kill Dravidians in castle age”. Once converted, opponent knight can be set on their skirms. This is like a tanky, immovable monk. Temple will only cost wood which Dravidians do get easily as a civ bonus. Dravidians don’t get redemption. So Temple has an easy counter in siege. But then Dravidians can do their own siege when such a circumstance is faced. In late imperial, the building can help against raids by being placed like a castle in middle of farm economy. I think this building can help balance out the problem a fair bit.
Historically too, this will be an ode to Shaivite, Vaishnawite temples found all over south India and the ones later built in south east asia like combodia’s Angkor Wat.
A similar approach was used to buff bengalis with their “orthodxy” monks.
This is interesting, but can missfire easily. For example, what happens if one player spams temples in his city? How shoud the attacking player counter this? Or even worse, what if the dravidian player does a “temple rush” and spam them in your face?
One can balance the speed of conversion of the temples, or make them cost stone or gold, but caveats can make them too niche.
Thats easy. Make siege and push. Dravidians don’t get redemption. The counter is already there.
You can even push with anti-building units in late game like siege ram and siege onager . The building will melt pretty easily.
Even bengalis can use this and give up orthodoxy and redemption for a better buff for their civ.
To try on simulator, the scenario is like having monks walled on four sides by stone walls. You can try it out. Please don’t say Dravidian can do this “monk + stone wall” strategy. That would be gimmicky and not feasible.
Looking at the same problem of eco in the Bengali thread, I got an civ bonus idea
Instead of ‘+15 fish carrying bonus’, “Dravidian TCs create villagers 15% faster” could be a good bonus.
I calculated the bonus and the result was 3 more vills in Dark and Feudal age. It helps their eco to do better than normal civs and as good as rush civs like Aztecz. Dravidians being a rush civ can be very good in early game with this bonus. They could do a tower rush as well after M@A play instead of a predictable archer play. Otherwise they could wall and boom faster. It gives flexibility to play to their win condition. The problem in castle age will be there. But they could at least have a solid economy to either do a monk push or castle defense. Elephants will still be useless though. But at least to produce them you can have a better food economy with the extra vills.
This is similar to Persians. Dravidians are good in both dark and feudal ages, but bad in castle and early imperial.
What they need is a long term food eco bonuses or unit discounts.
What they need is a long term food eco bonuses or unit discounts.
You have quoted they need long term food eco bonus. But you can’t appreciate how good a +3 vill each age will snowbal eco advantage till castle age and accelerate afterwards with multiple TCs which will allow Dravidians to make elephants.
Dravidians are better than most civs in early feudal age only due to 200 wood bonus and 50% cheaper m@a upgrade. It does not end the game there.
The problem in castle age is mobile heavy cavalry. With current eco bonus, Dravidians can’t afford to make elephant archers and use them for raiding. It is equal to tossing them away. A cross-bow upgrade makes sense. To be able to make castles, siege defense or archer upgrades faster in castle age an early eco advantage is indespensible. Dravidians should be capable of playing turtle in castle age without grinding to a halt.
I saw someone say 25% faster EAs as ‘machine gun’ archers. I almost fell off my chair. EAs have poor damage output for the food invested. I would rather have cross-bow bonus or another bonus on the skirms.
Persian TC workrate were nerfed from 5% to 0% in dark age because they were oppressive. Now they have their old 10% bonus in feudal, 15% in castle age and 20% in imperial. Besides, persian have the extra 50 food and wood at start.
And you are proposing is dravidians TC working 15% faster from dark age… Just the comparisom with persians hurts. I dont like it, it would be a better bonus than persians in open maps overall (not imperial age and not docks)
I could consider faster creation rate for spears and skirms. Or maybe a food discoumt for those units (although that is somehow covered by byzantines). Or maybe extending the skirm bonus to pikes (pikes sttack faster). Also, extending the 50% discount to elite skirm could be negotiated.
Currently, there are a bunch of civs with “skirm and pike bonus”.
Lithuanians foot trash units are faster
Byzantines foot trash units are cheaper (together camels)
inca foot trash have more line of sight.
To this, you can add korean units having wood discount, which only affect these units and archer (and ships in water maps) until castle age.
So either extending the infantry or skirm bonus to the other trash unit seems reasonable to me.
Another possibility for extra buffs are the mentioned training speed or giving them extra HP, armor, regeneration or something, although some of them are partially covered by other civs (vietnamese skirms and viking pikes have extra HP, teuton infantry have extra armor, etc)
Persian town centers work faster in researching technologies too. The bonus I proposed is only for villager production. I initially calculated for +2 vills like Bengalis. But since the fish bonus had +15 and computed to 3 vills resources. So I used 15 percent. But the fishing bonus is a redundant bonus and should be replaced with staggered all food sources carry capacity like +5/+10/+15/+20 for all ages.
If Dravidians are not getting a food eco bonus, then Kshitriya bonus of 25% food discount to all units should be applicable to Dravidians as a civ bonus. Gujjaras already get the mill bonus for food. They can be nerfed in castle age with a different useless tech like Medical corps.
Blockquote I could consider faster creation rate for spears and skirms.
I believe instead of changing the Dravidian Elephant archer bonus, we should buff elephant archers base stats. It will help all EA civs. Currently EAs are an unaffordable yet terribly boring version of the cavalry archer. EAs and Battle elphants should have the same speed of 1 tile per sec. Take away Husbandry from all elephant civs. This will help balance gameplay in team games and imply historical accuracy too. In addition, the changes will nerf gujjaras as well as Hindustanis too. EA should deal twice the damage they currently do with probably another rider on top firing volleys one after another. It becomes harder to micro against elephant archers. If a target is not specified, the mounted archers should hit nearest enemy units automatically even when elephant is in motion. This will be their USP not just hit points. The rate of fire will be twice what it is currently and total damage will be double. The gold cost should be equal to cav archer and the food cost should be 120 like before ‘Dynasties of India’. The CA armour should be -2 like before or 0. To balance battle elephant speed, the gold cost can be increased to 75 like knights.
You can refer this video. Ornlu says the same thing about elephant speed and cost. Currently no BE civs use elephants against knights since there are cost effective alternatives which Dravidians and Bengalis lack. Watch starting 08:40
For Dravidians. the tech tree of monks should be opened to have redemption and Heresy. Currenty Monks can easily counter a mangonel and monk offense/defense by Dravidians where as Dravidians lack both counter techs in monk tech tree.
I guess other than giving them attack bonus vs spearman, non-elite one may need a HP buff as well.
Maybe 230 → 250
Hopefully TG players won’t complain that Bengalis is OP now.
I don’t understand why they don’t have greater range. Elephant archers, who are literally firing from a higher position, have lower range and the same damage. You are spending almost double the price of a foot archer for the same DPS, lower range and a bunch of HP. The problem is that that HP isn’t worth it because it lacks mobility, and it is highly vulnerable to the spear line.
Halbs will deal with EAs much easier than arbs (In terms of cost-effectiveness) It’s ridiculous.
They should either have the same range as crossbows and +1 damage, or something else to really compensate for that extra cost.
Elite EAs lose to Heavy cavalry, halbs, skirms, any and all anti-archer units (they lose to huskarls 1v1 easily), and they don’t have mobility. What is the point of this unit? What role does it fill?
It’s such a cool concept. Historically, you had like 4 people on top of a single elephant. It was basically a walking tower, raining arrows on everything from above. But it is completely butchered here and that makes me sad.
Its so much redundant with persians. I agree with your point that the civ needs eco benefits to fit their ideology of being an infantry rush civ but faster villager production like Persians is actually good for booming.
A few ideas I saw from these posts and my own:
-75w for Barracks OR
first unit produced from each barrack is free OR
barrack techs cost -50% and militia-line upgrades available an age earlier OR
Military building techs cost -40% instead of barrack techs cost -50%, Elephant units impacted by barrack techs (supplies and squires)
Infantry ignore armor by default and Wootz steel is a speed bonus to infantry OR
for eco, either their lumberjacks generate food at like 6:1 or 7:1 rate or gold-miners generate food at 3:1 rate.
It wasn’t and like many pointless nerfs, this one was also unnecessary and just made Persians niche for hybrid and nomad maps.
I guess they do have the same damage as a cavalry archer. However, they lack the bonus to spear line that the cav archer has. Bengali’s castle age UT isn’t relevant here, since we are talking about the base unit. But my point still stands. They simply aren’t worth it in most situations.
For a very tiny window from December’19-February’20. How many games was that? And civs like Tatars were unusable back then. CA were horrible, the OP new released civs got overnerfed to the point where they were unusable. Kamandaran crossbows were cheaper than now, the upgrade was also extremely cheap.
And cost more than 2x than foot archer while being slow and vulnerable to conversion. His point was they don’t do enough damage for the drawbacks they have and their cost.
That in itself gives flexibility to either boom rather than just send militia over right. But the first thing they need to change about the Civ is its fishing bonus to a better eco bonus and there are so many to go around. It should preferably be a food bonus.
How about “Food sources carry capacity like +5/+10/+15/+20 for respective ages”? It will be helpful to create food heavy elephants or age up faster.
I think more than anything Dravidians need mobility in castle and imperial age. Maybe the Skirms and Ele Archer firing 25% faster should be replaced with a movement speed bonus.
Archery Units move 10/15/20 percent faster in different ages.
Dravidian archers could be like chakrams for Dravidians to counter cavalry. It will also help their identity as a rush civ in feudal age. Lierry might micro the crap out of them. But it’ll be fun.
