Make no mistake: Just because a technology was used in real life, doesn’t mean a tech with the same effect wouldn’t be gimmicky in-game. Defensive structures firing Trebuchet projectiles is a terribly gimmicky, not to mention, potentially overpowered, effect. I don’t care if that’s how it was used in real life. It’s still gimmicky.
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Skirmisher army. Again, the game - Vinchester never had a large number of Skirmishers and once game got to the point where he could’ve had some, Tatoh had made enough Infantry to take down any threatening Skirmisher army.
To get to that point, a few defensive Elephant Archers and your own defensive Siege did well enough.
What are you even arguing about now? Vinchester was Magyars, he has no battle elephants. At this point, there are so many random hypothetical scenarios brought up, about how one Knight would clear three Mangonels (it won’t with Vinchester’s archers nearby), but a Battle Elephant won’t because… it’s a meat shield against Elephant Archers?
Elephant Archers pushed back the Mangonels because unlike Crossbowmen, they can tank several hits and shoot fast enough to kill the Mangonels even in low numbers. With some basic micro, you don’t even need to tank the hits.
I didn’t say they were a counter unit to Mangonels. If you can’t understand the nuance, please take your own advice and
Cost efficient in what regard? Against mangonels, they definitely are. Sure, some other units might do a better job, but Dravidians don’t have access to them, so it’s kind of a moot point.
If you did not say that Elephant archers will beat Mangonels. Which dementia patient am I talking to who said this?
I was talking in general terms about elephants. You keep sticking to one game where Vinchester made a series of errors. You want to talk balance around only this game which is absurd. The main reason Tatoh pulled ahead so quickly is because he put down the 4th TC so early with an optimized build. You don’t seem to know what you are talking about. Either accept that Elephant archer are only a meat shield including medical corps or admit that you never play EA or as Dravidians.
Since Dravidians don’t have a direct counter to mangonels, Urumi or Light cav need to be buffed to act as that counter unit. U have to be pretty stupid to make a 90 food unit as a one-time meatshield against Siege and delay your imp timing. Light cav need to be buffed with bloodlines and woots steel need to be moved to castle age. Elephant archers are a late game unit and forcing them to be used against siege in castle age is a pretty poor civ design.
So you fail the nuance already. Elephant Archers beating Mangonels do not mean they are a counter to them, especially against Siege Onagers. In Castle Age, they’ll still take a favourable fight against them. For all your tirade about nuance you lack all of it, so perhaps you should indeed follow your advice and stop talking about this topic.
And you’re not making a high food cost unit as one-time clear-up against Siege that delays your imp timing if you were making a Knight instead?
They’re perfectly fine in Castle Age like that Tatoh vs Vinchester game showed you. Also, they’re not the only unit you can use against Siege. You have your own discounted Mangonels, you have Infantry units (very cheap to tech into). The only problem with Infantry is that they’ll die to Crossbowmen which Vinchester made, which Tatoh completely shut down thanks to the few Elephant Archers he made.
In fact, the situation would’ve been the same if he had Knights. But the advantage is, you do not die to pikemen, and Skirmishers are very easy for you to counter as well.
But of course, you would know this if you had played Dravidians yourself, but it’s apparent you don’t. 
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Who says they’re a 1-time thing? Dravidians have regeneration AND herbal medicine if they need it. Garrison them in a castle and you can regenerate a hundred hp a minute, that’s like having like 3 extra villagers while it’s healing.
And if you’re talking delays, even if you do lose the unit, they’ve still lost more and you’re still ahead.
I definitely don’t agree with giving them better stables, and the Urumi is not meant to be an anti-siege unit.
That’s also like you not having your military in the field. Let me first give you a bit of credit here. You’ve made some good arguments. I’ll concede to you that ele archers can take on mangonels 1v1 if they have bodkin arrow. That upgrade is super important. You still need to micro, but you can do it. I tried it in game.
Now that being said, this is a bad argument. When was the last time you saw pros picking up herbal medicine of all things?
Also, ele archers are insanely slow. Dravidians don’t even have husbandry. You want to move all your ele archers to a castle, garrison, and then come out? I’m sorry, nobody will do this.
They kind of are. In fact, I’ll bet money that devs intended them to be an anti-mangonel line unit. That’s why the charge attack is a thing. Even if the urumis die, you’ll still kill the mangonel. Now, it doesn’t work in practice, but that’s not the point.
I can cite a few games where that did not work in castle age. Am I right now? stop using single games as justification for something.
Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbMlgFqd-XM
Look up the latest viper vs yo series on nomad, and see how hera took on ele archers from a terrible position with monks.
Even in that Tatoh game, he was nearly at the point of clicking upto imperial, with a 4 tc boom. That’s not what you would call “viable in castle age”.
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Definitely gimmiky, Did Tatoh have a castle in the game? No. No medical corps or herbal medicine is possible without castle forward.
I disagree. Dravidian lackluster stable which has no bloodines and Hussar upgrade is justified using medical corps effect to its elephants. But Medical corps has been universally panned and will be removed soon. If we exclude medical corps, Dravidians can get bloodlines and hussar upgrade. I’m sure this poster below played with Dravidians and experienced the problem of Dravidian stable.
Urumi has no role currently in Dravidian win condition. A castle investment is not worthwhile to make them. So they need to be re-worked with a proper role. Dravidans need a good anti-siege unit. So there we have a role and a redesign to fit that role will be welcome.
Well put.
From my experience, I’m a micro nerd. But with Dravidians, Elephant archers are not that easy to micro like cav archers against siege. Dravidians need a straight counter to Siege which does not need a castle or they need cheap castles to produce siege counter Urumi swordsmen.
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It happens quite regularly with tankier archer units. Saw Hera do it just the other day.
It’s gotta be in the right time and place, of course, but it definitely does happen. It doesn’t make sense to do preemptively, though; you’d build the EA’s first, use them for a bit, and if they’re still alive, throw down the castle to hold for a minute while you garrison the archers. If the castle is in the right place, the archers don’t even lose any value while they’re healing, because they can still fire.
I dunno, their speed isn’t really high enough, and their HP is much too low. If you caught them by surprise maybe, but if they’re paying attention you’ll just lose them like you would any other infantry.
Sure, but as I said above, you’d do that after you get the EAs on the field; no sense in going for healing before having the units out to heal.
I’d be surprised if medical corps is removed. More likely they’ll buff it somehow, but even right now, it’s already quite useful on elephant archers, since they can survive long enough to take advantage. Just as one example, it’s a big part of what allows their EAs to 1v1 a mangonel without micro.
The core design of their civ seems to be based on having a bad stable, so if they do get buffed, it will almost certainly not be by giving them a better stable. Far more likely are buffs to the urumi, hopefully in a way to differentiate it more from the normal swordsman line.
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Whoops how did I not see this discussion. Just to chime in. Urumi are pretty much the same unit in AOE3 also. Highly situational and good for only fighting mass infantry. An anti siege role for them is only possible if you vastly increase it’s movement rate. Which would directly counteract it’s weakness to archer fire.
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Really, Urumis are really weird from a balance standpoint. I did a test just now where I gave three enemy knights 1000 hp, and then a champion and an urumi 10k and had them fight 1v3 one after the other. Even with the splash damage every 20 seconds dealing extra damage to the two non-target knights, the champion still killed the knights first.
To put that another way, even dealing splash damage to 2 other units in addition to the main attack, even with wootz steel removing the effect of enemy armor, the champion was STILL better.
Seems like the only place where urumis are going to be useful is in extremely short one-sided fights where they can outnumber and overwhelm their targets, but how do you even get to that point? What use is a unit that only works IF you have a significant numbers advantage?
Edit: I just tested it out and yeah, in a series of little fights, the urumis can broadly do better. Was able to concoct an experiment where equal value of urumis beat champions. But the difference was still pretty subtle. Up until the last fight in the series, they were pretty much equal. Feels like the only place the urumis would really pull ahead is if you couldn’t resupply your troops for some reason. They definitely seem a bit mediocre at the moment.
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Dravidians is the 4th highest picked civ in MOA. They have won 13 games out of 35 in MOA which is the lowest among all civs that have 30+ games.
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Thats a meme our fans invented. Dravidian civ was trolled super hard and lot of pro players like Yo and Hera hate Dravidian stable design and by extension the civ. Only exceptions are Viper and some GL mates. If the Devs double down on that as a civ identity, it will set a bad precedence for civ design and bad game design choices in the future. The least that should be done for Dravidian civ viability is bloodlines for light cav and woots steel in castle age.
I’ll address an important issue with the civ design with some arabia data for high and low elos.
This data for dravidians is on a decending curve from low to high. For less than 850 ELO, the 200 wood bonus plays out amazing till late game. But for 1900+, the game play and extra resource is spent very fast and does not translate into any economic bonuses after feudal. This makes buffing the civ overbearing in lower elos and nerfing the bonus will make it useless in high elos where a proper start is very important. I believe its better to modify this civ bonus to,
“Unit production and resource gathering buildings are 20% cheaper”
TCs, Docks, mills, mining camps, military production buildings including castles will be cheaper. This civ bonus be a better power spike which is not overbearing at any stage of the game. You can rush. But not with a production building and tower at the same time near to enemy base which leads to early GGs in higher elos.
I don’t think 46 games is particularly enough to infer too much about them. A more accurate assessment is prior patches, where they held around 47-48% at 1900+, which is reasonable.
Overall, they’re a tricky civ to master, and require an approach most pro players just haven’t used much, so I’m not surprised they don’t do terribly well with them. Even experts tend to get caught in ruts and avoiding change. And since players will get a lot more experience at normal strategies than at Dravidians-specific strats, players will tend to get better AGAINST them than AS them.
That’s not inherently a bad thing, though. I like civs that play differently, and the last thing I want is dravidians changed into just another civ like any other.
Which is part of why I’m inclined against changing the wood bonus into a discount. Yes, that’s more broadly applicable, but it doesn’t force you to play differently the way a bonus does.
I would prefer to accentuate the unique traits of the civ, making them distinct and interesting for their own traits, rather than making them more like other
Civs.
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I’m not talking about garrisoning to heal. I’m specifically talking about getting herbal medicine.
There might be one game here or there where they do that I guess. But I watch a lot of games, and I’ve rarely ever seen it happen.
Kinda true, but you’ll get more dps by directly attacking.
I think the question is about how cost-effective it is, over how long it takes.
So, here’s something I’ve figured out recently. If you add roughly 1/4th of your infantry comp as urumis, the entire group suddenly becomes far more deadly. The initial charge+spash will leave a lot of units at low HP, which then can be exploited by champions/halbs. The reason why people don’t this often is that this will slow down the entire group.
You are mixing up some great points with completely irrelevant stuff in your posts, and that hurts the validity of the entire post. Also, the pioneers in a field usually tend to see more possibilities and are more creative. That is why I value Viper’s opinion more than Hera’s. Hera is an exceptional player, but he isn’t very creative.
All civs sort of play differently to each other. I can’t think of even 2 civs in the game which are completely alike. Dravidians do have their unique style, which mostly involves being really strong in early-mid feudal and being complete garbage in castle age 11
Okay, more seriously, though. The problem with Dravidians is that their “unique style” isn’t viable in most maps. That’s the whole argument.
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I’m specifically talking about herbal medicine. Saw him grab it just the other day. There’s very little point in garrisoning to heal otherwise.
Interestingly, that’s not actually true! Say you’re attacking a knight with full castle age upgrades, with an elephant archer, also with full castle age upgrades. The elephant archer will do 8 damage per attack, which is reduced to 4 by armor. Say you’ve got 10 of them, that’s now 40. Now you garrison those units in a castle; they give that castle an extra 6 arrows, each dealing 13 damage, which reduces to 9. So now instead of dealing 40 damage, you’re dealing 54!
I dunno, I did try some mixed compositions, and saw roughly neutral results. In my testing, pure urumis and urumis+champs tended to do about the same, while Champs did slightly better. It was nowhere near consistent, but over a few dozen tests, the urumi comps tended to get wiped out more regularly.
I think the problem is they really rely on the splash damage being effective, and it’s unfortunately common for them to path poorly and end up not damaging enough units with it.
I don’t think ‘isn’t viable’ is an accurate assessment. 47% win rates at 1900+ isn’t ideal, but it’s pretty dang close. On the whole, what they need is tweaking, not reworking.
I believe Dravidian flavor should be being a glass canon civ. It’s units should hit very hard. But be very vulnerable to their counters.
EDIT: That in no way should mean their stables are absolutely unviable late game( especially against blobs of siege).
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Sure. The point still stands though.
What you have said is absolutely true. I should’ve been more clear. There are two factors to consider here. The opponent’s unit’s pierce armour, and its HP.
HP is the simpler one to explain. If they have a unit with 50 HP, the castle will kill it in one volley, but a lot of it is wasted as overkill. Individual archers minimize overkill.
Pierce armour is more complicated to explain. I’m not going to write the paragraphs which are required to explain all details. But, the biggest difference is again with respect to overkill. After thumb ring, dravidian elephant archers have a reload time of 1.36 seconds, compared to a castle’s 2. Castle tries to accomodate this by adding extra arrows, but that will just lead to overkill after a point. In addition, you’ll do better by ungarrisoning when dealing with units like rams, which have extremely high pierce armour.
I saw pretty good results when I tested it a while back. If you did it recently, the recent pathing issues might’ve contributed to bad results.
I was being a bit hyperbolic there, sure. What I mean is, there are fixed strategies which will almost always work against dravidians in open maps. You go skirms+knights+mangonels+monks. The exact ratio is a bit different each time, but this combo will work almost always. That is bad design.
Glass cannons are high risk-high reward. Dravidians are high risk, little reward, in any land map game that goes on past mid-castle age.
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Yup! Thats the important issue that needs to be fixed. The civ that has had a less than 50% win rate across multiple patches. Despite receiving a huge siege discount, it is trending downwards. The Civ is a prime candidate for tweak and re-work. But a band-aid now iss needed to make it viable in castle age.
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Something has to give either give Dravidian siege more range or give Dravidian stables more speed and/or HP. You can’t be lacking in both because that becomes a very easily exploitable weakness late game.
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