Suggestions for next patch according to chat GPT:
You can suggest that the Dravidians could use a better raiding unit in castle age. They could also use some long term eco bonuses or unit discounts. You can also suggest that the developers look into the win rate and play rate of the Dravidians and make changes accordingly. I hope this helps!
Best suggestions in the forum according to chat GPT:
Have a major eco bonus such that even if you lose a few vils, your economy can take it.
Moving wootz steel to castle age, and replacing medical corps with something better for imperial age.
Replace the monastery for castle age with a new building called âTEMPLEâ. 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.
I donât think so. The basic point is that you only get Herbal Medicine when it makes sense to get it, which for many civs is rarely the case, because they donât use units that benefit much from it. But Dravidians are a civ which could benefit from it, so the fact pro players rarely get it becomes irrelevant. All that matters if if theyâll get it for THIS civ, which would make a great deal of sense.
Broadly speaking, you wonât be shooting much at rams with archers in any case, but even with overkill taken into account, the extra arrows will still typically do useful damage, especially to dense groups of units. In many cases, having overkill levels of damage is actually quite useful, because adjacent units often absorb building damage and so nothing gets killed.
On the whole, especially if you can double-benefit by healing at the same time, I stand by my point that garrisoning them is a good choice.
Interestingly, infantry counter pretty much that entire unit composition, especially with wootz steel thrown into the picture.
This is speaking of mid-castle 1 tc push or late castle age 3 tc push. So, wootz is not even an option. Long swords do counter this (sort of) but a few scorpions is enough for that. At that point, it turns into a âwho can micro betterâ except they have advantage over you because knights are better at snipining mangonels. They mjght even have redemption monks.
You have highlighted one scenario where this might work. However, this is exceptionally rare in an actual game.
For this to work, 4 conditions have to be satisfied.
Your mass of ele archers went somewhere, and took damage.
They have a castle nearby
They arenât needed elsewhere. Meaning, your opponent is sitting still, and they cannot ignore this one castle and directly run to your eco
You have a herbal medicine researched
Castle push usually comes with trebs or bombards, making your castle archer fire totally useless. If you have the archers out, you can push forward and snipe their siege.
To wrap it up, I have seen maybe a hundred games of dravidians and played as them like 300 times. I mightâve done this like twice and seen a pro do it once. Regardless of your opinion, the evidence says that it isnât exactly viable in most situations.
I guess I just assumed you were talking lategame, since you had a 4-unit composition, which would be difficult to get rolling in any significant numbers early on. Honestly, infantry should still do pretty well there, because with 4 different unit types, none of them will have the necessary mass to counter an equal-value group of infantry.
Donât forget that dravidians have both a wood bonus AND a siege discount, so if it turns into a siege duel, theyâll probably win there, too.
Honestly, looking at where they start to drop off, Iâd guess that their biggest weakness is lacking siege engineers. Give them that alone and I bet theyâd be fine. They do just fine between 0 and 30 minutes, itâs only after that, during the gold-heavy pre-trash part of the game, that they really fall off.
Much to the contrary, Iâll regularly see Hera do it these days with cavalry archer civs. You donât need the castle or herbal medicine researched at all, just need to be able to predict when youâll need them.
All you really need is a mass of cavalry archers that are getting value, and the opportunity to place a forward castle to lock down your forward progress. So as youâre pushing with the archers, you build a castle behind them and research herbal medicine, then briefly pull back; their CA counters will run into the castle, and theyâll flounder for a little bit while you maybe hit them from the side or mass some siege to keep pushing, and when youâve got yourself positioned you ungarrison and repush.
Perhaps the reason people arenât winning as much as they could with Dravidians is because theyâre not using strategies like this. The thing about this civ is, it doesnât really have much in the way of long-term eco bonuses. That means if you want to keep up with an enemy who does have one, you need to maximize the units you have, and in this civâs case, that means healing. This is a civ with some of the fastest garrisoned healing in the game, it would be foolish not to use that.
You need to think about what I said in the context of an actual game. You donât start with all those units at once. If you have scouts from feudal, you go knights. Add a front siege workshop and make mangonel.
Hereâs the important part. Dravidian player only has one option to counter your mangonel. Their mangonel.
This is especially true if you are also playing an archer civ. But in that case, you should also have crossbows and skirms by this point. They simply canât go the militia line here, because archers counter that.
Dravs have 2 mainline options in castle age, crossbows or longswords. Ele archers and Battle eles are too expensive and too vulnerable to monks.
They go ele archers? Your knights should handle that, with support of mangonel. Ele archers are also super expensive. If they make make multiple, you go monk.
Of course thereâs a decision tree involved. However, itâs much smaller than the ones against most other civs.
This strategy was pointed out by hera a couple of months after the DLC, and it still holds up.
Thatâs a completely different discussion. Cav archers are far faster than ele archers, they heal far more quickly (lower health pool), and they are easier to mass. Not comparable.
Yes, because this is not a viable strat. You are ignoring that part. Also, this is a strat available to almost every civ out there. So, the point is kinda moot.
Sure they can go militia, they can then add in their dramatically better skirmishers to deal with the enemy archers.
Statistically speaking, their big problem is not in the early to Middle Castle age, but rather in the late Castle age and Imperial age, but before wootz steel kicks in.
Thereâs definitely value in discussing tournaments. My point was half about avoiding tourney spoilers when demonstrating something extremely banal that could have been shown in many other ways, like how Dravidian EAs can hold up reasonably vs. mango(s). Credit to you for hiding the reveal behind a spoiler though, but itâs frequently someone replying that spills the beans anyway. But the other half is that I wish that, more often, people would rely more on experience and/or their own games/stats that showed demonstrable relevance at their level, rather than pro games or simulations (both of which have their place, but I think are leaned upon too heavily).
Yeah, itâs been understood that Wootz champs are your go-tos 9/10 times. This is a poorly designed test though - it tells you nothing more than long-term theoretical DPS, which can just be calculated, and I think it undersells the impact of both the splash and the charge attack (frontloaded damage that kills units with average HP faster)âŠso it doesnât make for a useful comparison unless the devs create a civ that has 1000 HP knights. It takes 6 attacks for a Wootz champion to surpass Elite Urumi, so unless youâre fighting something with 85+ HP, Urumis will kill them sooner (and if you are fighting something with that kind of HP, youâre usually better off using halbs.) And in practice, itâs even better than this the more you can stack the splash damage. Even so, the convenience and durability of champs make them more viable in most instances.
This is way off base due to the failure to account for the (much) lower reload time of Dravidian Ele Archers relative to a castle. 1.36 vs 2.0, so the DPS of EA in that situation is 29.4 vs 27.0 for a castle. In practice the eDPS is much lower for a castle, since extra garrison arrows increase the reload time (e.g. an ungarrisoned Castle with 4 arrows fires about 18% faster than a garrisoned castle with 10 arrows, so in reality the eDPS comparison is more like 29.4 versus 23). There are reasons to garrison ranged units in a castle, but increased DPS is not among them unless youâre fighting units within a narrow range of high pierce armor (e.g Castle Age Huskarls with 8 PA, where an EA does 1 damage, but a castle does 4). And I agree with @filtercoffee488 that this kind of garrison micro is seldom practical with EAs, and certainly less so than any other ranged mounted unit. You can do it if you happen to be fighting right under one of your castles, or (sometimes) pull badly wounded units back from the front, but the mobility issue that people have pointed out from Day 1 makes it hard to reliably save units under direct attack.
Anyway, my brief take on the Dravidians is that theyâre decent, but far from great - at least for my purposes - after the siege discount, but do have some pronounced weaknesses that can be hard to work around, especially if you lose the initiative. Their lategame has a lot going for it, so Iâm wary of handing out much more than a small buff, but I continue to think that BL or Husbandry would be a reasonable addition. A Urumi rework would be nice, but I really donât expect it at this point.
Well, what it really highlights is the fact that Urumis are at their theoretical best against the unit that theoretically counters them; archers and other low-hp units. They sit in a design weird zone in that regard.
Doesnât matter, garrisoning automatically calculates damage, including their rate of fire.
This does reduce the benefit slightly, but you canât forget that units outside the castle also experience many other negative effects, including bumping and overkill, so overall any negatives on the one side are more than compensated for by negatives on the other side.
You might be surprised how big of a difference it can make. Consider infantry, for example; they now can get up to 4 pierce armor in the castle age, which means instead of dealing 8 damage youâre dealing 4, and garrisoning in a castle essentially doubles your damage.
Combine that with elephant archersâ extremely high HP, and their innate regeneration making them even more difficult to chase down, and they have as good or better a chance of getting to a castle compared to almost any unit.
It seems clear to me that taking advantage of healing and regen is a primary way the civ is meant to succeed; in a way, this is their big eco bonus in the midgame(each regenerating elephant, even ungarrisoned, is approximately equivalent to having another villager working), so itâs strange to me so many people are so resistant to trying to maximize its benefit.
Like I alluded to earlier, I think a tech replacing Medical Corps called Damboli, making the Mangonel line fire 50% faster, would not only be more interesting and less situational, but it would also synergize well with cheaper siege. Plus, itâs more historically accurate.
Iâve seen that, yeah. Honestly, I think thatâs a mistake, and I think thereâs a good reason they havenât buffed it too much. I wouldnât be surprised to see it get another little buff, maybe up to 36hp/minute or so, but I doubt itâll go much further, because eventually itâll reach a point where people will have to recognize how potent it is to have regeneration on a tanky archer unit.
Thatâs one of the classic mistakes; thinking you need to fully regen to get value from the tech. Their high HP means basically every little bit of regen is valuable, and it forces the enemy to make risky engagements to fully wipe you out, or their progress will immediately start to be undone. The only problem with the tech is that it encourages conservative play, which many people donât like doing.
Thatâs another misconception. Knights are power units. Elephant archers arenât power units, theyâre tanks. A knight does 50% more damage per second than a scout, while an elephant archer only does 14% more than a crossbow. Expecting elephant archers to fill the same role is a mistake.
An elephant archer, however, is fully capable of absorbing huge amounts of damage for a group of archers or infantry. 2-3 can easily repel an entire group of archers a significant distance without losing a single unit. And itâs exactly in that role that their regeneration is applicable.
You definitely shouldnât be getting medical corps too early, I agree. But mostly because of the same reason you donât get wheelbarrow at 20 pop; itâs an inefficient investment at that stage, not that itâs a bad investment at any stage. You need a certain number of elephants to justify the cost, just as you need a certain number of farmers to justify wheelbarrow.
But unlike wheelbarrow, this is a bonus that directly reinforces itself; getting it means staying alive better, which means more getting onto the field, which can create a feedback loop.
Perhaps, but on the flipside, as you get further into the lategame, youâll have progressively more and more elephants, which means a larger pool of health and more damage, which means you can go further and handle bigger threats. The effective coverage of a castle increases.
Iâm not saying that you should be running back to heal after every single engagement, to be clear, just that itâs an option that dravidians really should be taking advantage of, moreso than other civs. Keeping their elephants alive is a key strength they need to/should lean into.
Damboli was a self-defense weapon for stronghold structures like castles and forts. This effect can be replicated as a civ bonus.
âSkirmishers, Elephant archers and TCs fire 25% fasterâ
âInnate regerationâ? Its 500 resources which would have been already wasted making Elephant archers. Itâs cheaper and faster to make crossbows and team them up with 5 monks for the desired effect. They can garrison inside TCs and donât need a castle either.
Fun fact: Cross-bow are faster in movement than Dravidian Elephant archers. So a better raiding unit. Not to mention higher dps for total respurces. And wait a minute, Dravidian elephant archers mixed combo will only slow them down.
I want to address the issue pointed by @SirWiedreich âif you lose the initiativeâ. The primary issue with Dravidians economy compared to any infantry economy is the lack of resource collection bonus or villager production bonus. Someone can argue that we can start more farms with the +200 wood. But you seldom have villagers to spare for those farms and their M@A playstyle doesnât allow for that flexibility. With unupgradable scouts, there is no point in going a scout rush either. The culprit I see is the +15 fishing bonus. It does not contribute to land play which is fine if it were a team bonus. But as a civ bonus, its a hole in the civ design. We can make that into a Team bonus as âFishing ships +5 carry capacity.â We can introduce a new bonus in its place:
âEconomy buildings are built and repaired 50% faster except starting TCâ
Itâll make TCs, Market, Mill, Lumper, mining camp, farm and fish trap construction faster. As a civ theme as well, it suits south India whose architectural heritage is far more renowned than rest of India.
This bonus will give a lead of +37.5 sec during TC construction and a 2 TC boom will give +3 vills over opponent. It will give +9 sec of resource collection time for every resource drop-off building like mill, dock and mining camp.
As a bonus, itâll make up for lack of âTreadmill craneâ, âarchitectureâ and perhaps âSiege Engineersâ in mid-castle to late game. Itâll also address the Dravidian weakness to monk Siege push to an extent by making TC repairs faster.
For the next patch though, I agree with chat GPT. "bloodlines for light cav and woots steel in castle age"
This change will even the unsurmountable odds that Dravidians face against Knight spam in mid-castle and Hussar spam during imp.
Just differentiating from garrisoned healing. And yeah, you donât want to get it until youâve got something like 10 elephant archers, ideally ones that are already damaged.
Sure. EAs arenât an offensive unit, theyâre a defensive unit, so keeping them with your other archers isnât going to be a great idea in any case. Youâre paying more for extra durability, not extra damage, so you need to use them in places that can take advantage of that extra tank. IE, by separating them and bringing them back together as needed. Otherwise you just end up with one mediocre composition rather than two strong compositions.
I think thatâs one of the biggest errors people make with them; people try to go pure EA long before they should, canât mass enough DPS, and just get crushed by superior numbers. In castle age, your army should primarily consist of archers and swordsmen, not EAs.
That said, EAs do have some dang decent DPS for dravidians thanks to their faster firing rate. Against a knight theyâll do 77% more. So if you balance that out for cost, youâre only really paying about 26 extra resources for an extra 195 hp.
Trouble is, they are supposed to be weak to archers, but that will make them pretty strong against them instead.
Itâs already the case where if you can get five or six of them up next to a tightly packed group of archers, you can kill them almost instantly, I donât think itâs a good idea to make that process any easier or they would quickly become the new huskarl.
Perhaps I have a solution here. One quick way of giving Dravidians an economic bonus on both land and water maps could be instead of docks increasing pop cap maybe a house increases the pop cap by 10 instead of 5.
Edit: And keeping with the theme of naval focused maybe their team bonus can be their trade units can generate 10% wood along with gold.
Speed and splash. 20% more speed would make them 20% faster than huskarls, and you would only need four of them to get close to a tightly packed group of archers to kill basically the entire group.
A nice point of view actually.
If a unit is easy to kill due to its low HP, a high rate of regeneration wonât be noticeable either. Conversely, a unit that is not easy to kill will continue to benefit from regeneration as long as it stays alive.
