Dravidians are terrible

And I watched said video, and saw what was referenced.

I count 5.

Wait, that’s not what he was referencing. In this context, “pushing back” moving it away from your base.

Vinch was pushing with 3 mangonels. 3 elephants will just die to that. Even 5 will die to that. Now, 3 mangonels are more expensive than 5 eles. But, 3 or 5 knights would kill those mangonels.

The link and timestamp is given below. Just watch it.

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Nah, 3 elephant archers won’t die to that. 1v1, elephant archers will beat mangonels, so 3v3, with focus fire and proper positioning, the elephant archers will win even harder.

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Did you ever scenario editor test that? Answer me honestly, please.

1 ele archer isn’t beating 1 mangonel.

Or, just post a gif or something of 5 elephant archers beating 3 mangonels. The only chance you have of that is if you can micro so well as to keep all your ele archers within 1 tile distance of mangonels at all times. In a game, this is almost impossible.

If you don’t want to accept this, it’s fine. I’m not going to argue with you.

I’m tired of correcting people’s bullshit on this forum. Sorry, I’m not even getting personal with you. I’ve been doing so many scenario tests and know the general unit layout pretty well. It’s just a pain when people do this. You can just say something which is blatantly wrong, and I need to spend like 15 minutes gathering evidence. And you probably won’t admit you are wrong regardless. I don’t know why I do this.

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I actually tested it ingame, and yes, a dravidian elephant archer wins 1v1.

You should use the actual game over out-of-game resources.

image

5v3 it’s really not even close, I didn’t lose a single unit.

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Dravidians do with Medical Corps researched. Survivalist did the test even before official DOI release.

You had Medical Corps or not?

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That’s one way, or even a bare minimum of micro can achieve the same results; they only need to avoid like 5 damage, after all.

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Since you are the one saying that, I’ll post my gifs too. Give me a little while.

Yeah, I did the test without medical corps. According to surv’s video, that does mean that elephant archers lose 1v1. Even dravidian ones.

Also, let’s consider a reasonable in-game situation for a second. You will almost never send a mangonel without any form of support. In that very game, vinch had multiple scouts, and skirms on the way. Anybody who is actually doing this calculation for a game needs to consider this in that context.

Can you post a gif of that? or a video? If I am wrong, I’ll happily admit it. Screenshots alone don’t prove anything though.

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Or you could just go try it yourself. Honestly, you should just play the game more rather than theorycrafting and using simulators, you’d get a lot more practical knowledge that way.

Friendly reminder to use spoilers/hidden text when talking about tourney results that have been out ~1 day or less at the time of writing. Not much point in watching the Viper vs. TaToh set when I see people talking about the names of the two people in the MOA finals.

In general, I wish people wouldn’t reference tournaments quite as much in balance arguments and/or civ/unit discussions. 99.9% of the time whatever talking point y’all have can be backed up with other data and doesn’t need a hot-off-the-press tourney reference to showcase an interaction that has existed for a long time and is easily demonstrable in other ways.

And maybe the worst part is, I almost never see this kind of thing actually having any kind of impact on the outcome of a discussion, despite people habitually bringing it up (presumably as an appeal to pros’ authority/expertise and an attempt to settle the issue). People watching the same video will come up with different conclusions or exceptions and continue talking past each other, or pivot to alternative points of reference, so the functional effect of appealing to tourney results seems to be extremely minor.

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I think the “Damboli” tech idea, replacing Medical Corps, from earlier is a good idea, except I disagree with the effect. I think it should instead be “Mangonels fire 33% faster.” This is a less gimmicky and much more useful effect, and also synergizes supremely well with the bonus for cheaper siege.

I didn’t know how to do it at the time. I’ve since figured it out though.

But also, don’t tell me you aren’t the least bit curious as to how Viper loses to TaToh.

Absolutely. There are three main reasons I usually cite for not giving weight to tourneys.

  1. Low sample size
  2. Mind games and player specific strategies: If I know a player are their personal play style, I can exploit it with civs and counter strategies. This will bias the results.
  3. General difference in balance between high elo and other elo ranges.

Now that being said, I consider MoA in a special camp because of the random bans. Statistically, that evens out the playing field a lot. The random bans almost remove factor 2. Mind games are still a factor, of course, but you cannot prepare for specific civ matchups/counters, and you have to work with what you have.

One, If you want to rapidly improve at the game, simulations are super important. Two, you are pivoting away from the conversation. We aren’t talking about getting better at the game.

But also, some of us don’t care as much about getting better at the game. I enjoy theorycrafting and simulations, so that’s what I’m going to do.

It’s not that useful, unfortunately. This would’ve been good as a civ bonus, but it’s useless as a UT. Dravidians are weak to siege pushes in early-castle age. But, you aren’t getting your castle down by that point anyway. But this tech would also cost like 800 resources. You’ll do better by making like 6 mangonels and monks.

I think that it’s fine for dravidians to have a terrible early-mid castle age. Don’t remove that weakness. Instead, give them something better in early imperial to work towards. As is, the recovery isn’t good enough.

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Maybe it can be bumped up to 50% then.

Absolutely, but not if the simulators are not simulating the game correctly. That’s why even with the simulators, it’s still important to go into the game and try things out for real sometimes. Often they forgot something, or aren’t up to date.

My general testing setup is to set up 4-8 identical copies of an engagement in the editor and run them all multiple times to see how they work out. For example, I tried running various comps of equal-cost setups of urumis and longswords vs knights, to see which one won. Interestingly, they ended up playing out almost identically.

IMO if dravidians need a buff anywhere, it’s to their unique unit. It feels like it SHOULD be really good, but in practice, it doesn’t seem to quite work out that way.

At least, no one can deny it has a cool moustache.

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Not as cool as the Boyar’s, though.

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1vs1, Knights will beat mangonels. 1 knight vs 3 mangonels with better micro Knights will still win. So Knights are a better counter. 3 ele archers vs 2 knights Knights will win. Elephant archers are also not cost efficient. Unless they have +3/+5 bonus attack like Mangudai. They don’t fit the bill.

Yes, this unit was ported from AOE3 and hasn’t been designed for AOE2 Dravidians. If anything, they should be a Knight replacement with high speed and HP. Then it makes sense for Dravidian player to construct a castle.

The +200 wood per age bonus can be modified to
“+200 to feudal, +200 stone to castle, +200 gold to imp” to guide their play-style.

Ideally, tournaments are places where the civ is played to the highest level. That’s a factor to consider, but also should be kept in mind that most players will not be able to play at that high level, especially when considering the balance of civs. However, I do not think that Tatoh did any sort of crazy micro in that game, so how Dravidians performed in that game shouldn’t necessarily be out of bounds for any weaker player to do as well.

Especially considering how easy it is to micro Elephant Archers vs Mangonels. Considering players have roughly same skill at some specific elo level, I’d always favour a player with Ele Archers taking on Mangonels, since it takes much more skill to continuously take good shots with Mangonels. And
 you can just spread your Ele Archers out. They will absolutely beat Mangonels 1v1, or in small groups against multiple.

The problem comes from your theorycrafting being limited to your skill, so you’re not going to have accurate results. I’m waiting for your ‘Chinese are terrible’ theorycrafting thread, btw.

Sure? One Dravidian Battle Elephant will also clear 3 mangonels. What’s your point? The point here is that Ele Archers can push back a siege push, even in low numbers. The biggest threat to Ele Archers in Castle Age is really just monks, which I was surprised not to see from Vinchester.

But I would argue that Dravidians adding in infantry (as they can very easily tech into Pikeman and Longswords) would deal with that, just like we saw in the game as well.

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This really depends. In some cases, yes. In some other cases, no.

So, here is an example. I am not that great at microing archers in a live game, because of my limited APM. However, I can slow down the game in scenario editor to nail it down to a great degree.

I can do this well enough to take down a mangonel with a single archer, take down multiple skirms with an archer, and other similarly ridiculous things.

If you want to make such an argument, make a specific one. If you want to disparage my general theorycrafting, put a bet on it. I will back up my words, if I am confident enough.

hA Ha HA ha haaaaAAAAaAAAAA. VeRy FuNNy.

If you want my opinion, here it is:

I usually do this as well. However, it is pretty hard to get results this way, unless you have an AI setup that can micro both sides. I can micro one side, can’t do both at once.

Urumis could use 1 pierce armour. But Dravidians in general require further buff imo. Their late game should be stronger, consider how weak their castle age is.

You can’t differentiate between a meat shield and a counter. A skirmisher army will easily counter elephant archers in terms of resources spent. Monks are not the only counters. Besides by game design, Archers should be the counter for monks. Before you shoot off your mouth, you need to understand all the complexities involved. A battle elephant is a meat shield against elephant archers only because of their marginal speed difference but they counter mangonels because of this exact speed difference. If you can’t understand such nuances, you should refrain from discussing these topics.

Coming to the issue of elephant archers of Dravidians, if Elephant archers are a proper anti-siege unit, then Devs would have never given BBC to Dravidians as the first change to the civ. It was that imperative. Don’t bring up this BS that elephant archers are a proper anti-siege unit. I doubt you play with the new civs at all.

Of all the techs in AOE2 like monks converting a building and a building with 10 hp burning forever. This tech was used in the real world. So its not gimmicky. It can be used as an effect for castles and TCs in imperial age. If woot steel was available in castle age, that itself along with bloodliness will make light cav a very good cost-efficient counter to Knights and siege.

‘Damboi’ despite being a good tech might not be what Dravidians really need in imperial age. What Dravidians need would be speed for their Elephants. Otherwise slow moving 0.9 tps elephant archers and battle elephants are just cannon fodder for hit and run archers. I would put the tech name as “Strike Corps” and it will grant 30% speed boost to elephants and Villagers. I’m sure Persians are losing mahuts and it can be reused here. This will be a good eco boost as well as defensive bonus. Regarding the effect of Damboli, we can work that in as a civ bonus.

“Skirmishers, Elephant archers and TCs fire 25% faster”

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