Actually, the AoE2 timeline ends in 1598, per Historical Battles. So anything before the 1600s is free reign.
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Gunpowder Technology in Medieval India | Military History & Empire - YouTube Vijayanagara empire and gunpowder. they got gunpowder around 1450s for weapons.
Gunpowder was already there in india in 1200s but mostly for firecrackers and not used in battle field. only from 1450s extensively they used gun powder in battlefield.
Yes that is more to do with creative liberties than anything else. Like Romans being in aoe2.
I wouldnât use a youtube video as citation if I were you
My final suggestion
Team Bonus
Dock provides +5 pop space â Fishing Ship carry +10 fish.
Civ Bonus
Fisherman and Fishing Ship carry +15 â Militia line +10% speed per age.
Unique Techs
Medical Corps - Elephant units regenerate 30 HP/min â EA and Armored elephants +50 HP.
Wootz Steel - Infantry and Cavalry ignore melee armor â Barracks units ignore melee armor. Cost reduced 750 food, 600 gold â 450 food, 350 gold
Unique Unit
Urumi Swordsman +1 PA. Blast Attack on charge attack is removed.
Technology Tree
Fervor, Treadmill Crane, Architecture, Elite BE are added.
Check out my specs on dravidians in my mod (draft state). Published it so you can feel the changes better with playing. What dravidians lack is a cavalry (horse and elephant) and both have been added uniquely - Kaikolar (chola imperial army) and Airavatha (war elephant/elephant archer - similar to ratha).
Infantry and Naval civilization
Receive +200 wood when advancing to the next age
Farms +50% yield; Fishermen, Fishing Ships carry +15 â The only civilization in world to have 3 bhogams/crop harvests per year since ancient age (rest of the world has only 2 crop harvests per year)
Trade units yield +50% gold/food with Guilds research â Tamil guilds are extremely prosperous due to seafare SPICE trade (with arab and chinese)
Barracks cost -100 wood; Barracks technologies cost -50%
Warships, Siege weapons cost -33% wood built 50% faster â Exotic and good hardwoods available in south india used for ship and siege making (very evident during british rule where top ships are made from these exotic hard woods)
Skirmishers, Elephant units attack 25% faster, regenerate
Unique Units: Imperial Battle Elephant (cavalry/bayinnaug model - upgrade from elite battle elephant to enable recharges attack), Airavatha (cavalry/cavalry archer â Dagnajan elephant model with plate armor and can switch between melee and ranged mode similar to ratha of bengali and with hit point of 630), Senathipathi (cavalry hero/Rajendra chola), Kaikolar (cavalry/general araiyan â mounted spearman with attack bonus vs. cavalry same as spearman but still has high attack of 19), Thirisadai (warship), Saboteur (siege infantry), Sengunthar (town infantry/sunda royal fighter â that thrusts its spear similar to ghulams), Urumi Swordsman (infantry â area damage in normal attack, higher with special attack)
Unique Techs:
Velaikkarappadaigal (Foot military units +10 hit points; Elephant units cost -25%; Imperial age unit upgrades available (like elite battle elephant, elite elephant archer, siege elephant, onager/siege, halberdier, champion etc)
Wootz Steel (Infantry and cavalry attacks ignore armor; Skirmishers, Scorpions, Galley attacks damage unit armor (like obuch unit attack); Blacksmith upgrades on plate armor yields double effect) â we have armor/breastplate/cuirass/helmet made of wootz steel that are lightweight and stronger
Team Bonus:
Elephant units regenerate 15 HP per minute â helps all south asian elephant based civs
Docks, Markets, Blacksmiths provide +5 population room â medium benefit in land maps
Note: Also have an AI script that makes computer AI to auto-switch Airavathat from melee or ranged mode based on unit it is attacking similar to Ratha unit.
3 Likes
I donât feel like this would make too much of a difference.
I feel like this overlaps too much with celts AND makes their militia line too much like the urumi. Imo, they need to be more different, not more the same, or youâll never have much reason to build the urumi at all.
Why nerf both of these? Feels like you just made them both weaker, especially medical corps, which becomes a duplicate of the original Chatras, which got a 200% buff by the end, but even on Wootz, which will take their cavalry options from being niche useful to completely useless.
Feels like youâre just making the urumi feel too similar to the militia line.
I donât feel like these would make much difference. They predominately need monks for defense, which means fervor is less useful, and architecture comes in too late. Treadmill crane WOULD be nice, Iâll grant you that.
Iâd love to hear your reasoning on these ideas.
4 Likes
I beg to differ.
I actually want the opposite. The diverse UU from the generic unit, the better. Did I really fail at this? My intention is making militia line better at raiding and against archer and siege. While Urumi stays good against melee.
Medical Corps nerfed? How? And Cavalry gaining Leitis ability feels totally out of place in their design.
And I made mistake. I forgot to give them Elite BE. Now stable is somewhat usable.
Strengthening their âInfantryâ identity and make their militia line closer to Eagle. And currently other elephant and cavalry bonuses are too niche. I want to make them more meaningful.
I have another design. Kind of similar but I hope more difference between Urumi and Militia line.
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I have to agree with @DemiserofD here, I wonât agree with a single change here except for the team bonus one.
Half of these are just straight up nerfs, and a few others are unnecessary.
Dravidians donât really need a unit like the Elite battle elephant, as they donât do anything dravs canât already do in a cost effective manner.
Militia for raiding is cool, but Iâd just use @GentleEvening5âs proposal of strike corps. It was a castle age UT which doubled the effe of all barrack techs.
Your change for urumis also basically slaters the unit. Yes, they are not particularly useful right now. But they are at least interesting .
1 Pierce armour isnât worth giving up trample damage for.
2 Likes
Good to know man. Thanks. If you can post the source, that will be amazing.
Now coming to the dev justification. If this is their sorry excuse for doing such as lazy job in designing the civ, Iâm not buying into this argument. If RoR had failed, they would have given the same reason for the civ and most of the forum would have bought it hook, line, and sinker. For duck sake, they had hand cannon since start and not bombard cannon. Why does a civ need hand cannon when they have one of the best infantry? They can talk a lot of smack about how difficult it was to design a balanced civ. But if you look at tech tree, you can easily make out that they took Vikings blueprint (and possibly pre-India DLC source code) and gave it an elephant flavour. They just sprinked some changes in their monk tech tree to make it even worse. Dravidians had access to best horses by trading. But they get practically light cav line that screams donât waste wood on barracks. Wootz steel is supposed to justifify this ridiculous design. But its hidden behind an imperial tech and not useful for normal players who barely witness any imp action. Due to current game architecture, Heavy cav or a replacement is mandatory beyond castle age. When devs needed a campaign unit, they introduced Rajendra as heavy cavalry. Why did they not design the unit as a light cav with 60 HP or a champion with woots steel blade moving at 0.99 tps? It should have hit at that point of time how ridiculous their civ design was. In terms of ideas, Iâm 100% sure they had a look at this guyâs ideas and got that carry capacity thing for ships. But they did not design the civ as extensively as he did. They pigeonholed it into a vikings knock-off: https://youtu.be/OyU-ec9w5B8?t=1023.
If light cav with woots steel can take over the role of heavy cavalry in castle age, then 75% of the problems of this civ will be resolved. But they would need a recurring food bonus which works for all maps. +200 wood is a pittance.
Nice work. Will check this weekend.
Agree with the celts bonus observation as well as the fact that you are replacing an economy bonus with a military one. If they had an economy bonus like Vikings, Mayans, Aztecs or even current Romans. It would make sense not to have any more economy bonuses.
We can give a straight discount and build speed on all buildings:
Blockquote âHouses, Economy and research buildings build 100% faster, 20% cheaperâ
Maybe this bonus can help for replacing the 200 wood bonus. Then you can change this recurring bonus to a military one.
I agree with @SMUM15236 . The blast attack is too gimmicky. Iâd intoduce +1 range for the charge attack in place of blast and make the unit viable for use by players. Urumi can work like a one-time slower lancer. This will also help their anti-building bonus since they can target Vills walling behind or stack their attack on a single wall portion.
Agree the team bonus change is good. But the intent of other changes is also promising.
You know, a neat bonus that medical corps could give would be to allow slower units to move slightly faster when in a group of faster units. For example, right now, elephant archers move slightly slower than the Archer line, which is quite annoying. If they could just keep up, they would be a lot smoother and easier to play with.
A bonus like this could help them with their slower units, while keeping them from becoming inordinately agile as a civilization.
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Yup! Would also make light cav useful. Definitely a good change which can use the AoE aura effect like centurian does for infantry.
I feel like this bonus is much too powerful and also overlaps a lot with other civs. Bear in mind that Spanish only have a 30% bonus, and I feel that alone is quite decent. The bonus you suggest would end up saving something like 100 seconds of build time in the dark age alone, plus saving 60 additional resources, which would make them much too powerful in the early game.
Itâs probably more powerful than the Japanese arabia eco bonus, and thatâs all they get while being relatively balanced.
I certainly wouldnât want it to replace their 200 wood bonus entirely, thatâs a big part of their identity I wouldnât want to see removed.
Try to remember their bonus needs to be strongest in the midgame, not the early game. This change seems more like a change simply for the sake of change, not to actually fix their real issues.
I do agree that the blast attack is currently somewhat iffy, but I donât think removing it is the way to go. I would rather increase the splash radius slightly. The big problem right now is, it is too small to hit multiple larger units like cavalry or elephants.
The challenge is, this might make it overly potent against archers, where itâs already extremely powerful if you can get close.
What might work better is if instead of a splash attack, it just hit 1-2 extra units nearby, with a much bigger range. That would allow it to be more effective with less chance of being OP against tightly-packed units.
This could be accomplished by firing two invisible projectiles out at right angles, 45 degrees left and right, with a 1 or 2-tile range. This would miss the target unit but hit any units near them.
Personally, I think they miss the soul of the civ and attempt to make it too generic. Theyâre a fun civ right now, and that fun-ness needs to be preserved at all costs.
Dravidian Ele archers miss 3 important upgrades. Bloodlines, husbandry, and Parthian tactics. If they missed one, I mightâve been open to considering it, but they arenât FU+. FU+ means they do better than FU units for the overwhelming majority of common cases. Mongol steppe lancers are FU+ although they miss an armour. Dravidian Ele archer lose to bengali ones, even though they get medical corps and they do more dps. Also, Bengali ele archers lack thumb ring, so they are not even FU in this context (their UT doesnât fully make up for it).
This is not what youâd consider FU. What blacksmith upgrades affect fishing ships or villagers? Incas or Spanish villagers are FU+, dravidian villagers are generic. This entire concept only applies to fighting to begin with.
Dravidian lategame isnât overpowered right now. It isnât even good. In my experience, gold is the limiting factor in late game, not food. Early 5% extra food drop-off is like a weaker version of romanâs bonus. This bonus will actually matter during castle age. However, it doesnât give more options for them in castle age. Nothing in my proposal does.
Late game, what this will actually give is around 5-8 more pop-space. 10% extra drop off means around 15 more food collected per 100 food. Meaning, you can keep fewer villagers. Consider people usually have around 50-60 vils on food, that should save up some pop space, which is fine for dravidians, because they can just make a few more infantry.
I donât think this is as hard as you are making it out to be, it shouldnât even be that hard to balance. Itâs just extra food, which isnât that important in imperial age. People have never complained about slav bonus in late game. Itâs early game thatâs the problem, and I have addressed that.
There is a lot less on the map compared to, say, gold. But also, stone is one of the slowest resources to mine, and it still puts your vils at risk on top of costing extra 100 wood.
I donât see how my bonus of extra armour on walls strictly better than this one during all circumstances.
Only if you want to. If you are skilled and you have the APM, do it. I mean, dravidians have terrible win rates at the highest levels, and I think those guys can absolutely manage that.
That is not even true. Teutons do produce better than you. Teuton knights are better than FU knights, except when you need to run across the map. They donât just have extra armour, they are also conversion resistant. Teuton halbs are top of the line and trade evenly with faster attacking japanese halbs.
Teutons have way more units which are better than FU than dravidians: Champions, halbs, Paladins*, Siege Onagers, Heavy Scorpion, and bombard cannon. Ironclad is such a good tech.
âBuT ThEiR ThEMe Is BeING SloWâ
The intent might be, but I think that the execution is deeply flawed, in my opinion.
Letâs be honest, the current medical corps is so bad that you could do pretty much anything to it without nerfing it. However, you cannot implement this bonus because that would make dravidian elephant archers counter skirmishers.
Urumis have a lot lower melee attack than even the militia line. With the changes you proposed, they would be downright useless.
Eh, the idea is âthe steel is so good that it cuts through opponentâs armourâ. So it doesnât really matter if itâs cavalry or infantry. In fact, it would be weirder if cavalry didnât do it.
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And what is wrong with that? Their own skirms, or siege or LC not really work. And 30 extra HP is still not even close to Bengalis.
Iâll remember that. I think 3 speciality in 1 unit is too much. So I want to remove blast attack which is the most surprising one as it was never mentioned in the game.
Yeah I guess. But their cavalry is so bad that it doesnât fit. Also donât tell me Armored ele have steel tusk. 11 Anyway I think it can stay as it is. But reducing the cost only for infantry can also be considered a buff.
A straight comparison isnât particularly valid, because you donât generally use elephant archers against elephant archers in the first place. Medical Corps more than makes up for lacking Bloodlines, and their increased damage more than makes up for lacking parthian tactics, at no cost. Against other units they are broadly superior at everything except soaking up damage.
Again, I wouldnât hesitate to call them FU+.
Quibbles aside, itâs still a superior unit and still fits the theme.
They havenât complained about the slav bonus because itâs their only bonus. However, itâs still broadly viewed as one of the most powerful eco bonuses in the game. Comparing to romans is probably not a great idea either, since thatâs arguably one of the few eco bonuses even more powerful than the slavs, and a big part of why theyâre so OP at the moment.
I canât see a food bonus as an effective way of helping them in the castle age. Their biggest issue is getting to the boom in the first place, not benefitting from the boom once they have it. Extra food will only bring their win condition a little earlier, but it wonât raise their weakest point while theyâre in it. And like I said, it will make them much too potent on water maps, especially, where they are already strong.
Sure, thereâs less, but thatâs not terribly relevant early on. Stone is only moderately slower to collect as well, and nowhere near as slow as, say, farming.
The problem with your bonus is that the way they currently wall just isnât sufficient to get them to the win condition. With your bonus, theyâll have buildings that survive a little bit longer, but theyâll still get ranged to death off their gold and be unable to do anything about it, because it wonât help them wall up any more effectively than normal.
Even top-level players let a lot of that stuff go passively. If a bonus is only really halfway decent for Hera, itâs probably not a terribly practical change.
Fair enough, but Teutons are also one of the absolute best land civs in the game right now, and I donât think thatâs the goal here.
I do think thereâs a meaningful distinction here. Keeping their faster units slower while making their slower units faster is very different from just making ALL their units faster.
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I donât think there should be even a single unit that counters its counter unit. The only one in the game right now is Cataphracts with logistica, if you weigh gold and food equally. But I donât think even that should be a thing.
I respect it if you personally feel that way. However, I donât agree at all. For one, only 2 specialities are available for the unit for like 80% of 1v1 games. But also, the unit isnât really OP. If anything, itâs kinda underpowered.
The problem I think you have is that itâs really flashy. Itâs 3 different things it can do. In practice, that means very little. I would say that obuch is a far stronger unit than urumis in almost all cases. In fact, the strongest unit combo for poles in late game should be Obuch+archers/skirms.
Urumis are glass cannons and you are taking away the cannons. If you want to nerf urumis like that (and you can try it out, itâs a huge nerf), you need to give them more HP, and at least 2 Pierce armour.
Also, just remove the charge attack and keep the splash damage in that case. That makes more sense anyway.
I was gonna say exactly that 11
That is fine, but you would be factually wrong according to criteria I laid out. If you want to change the criteria, then we can talk about that.
FU+ means they do better than FU units for the overwhelming majority of common cases
I addressed this already, why are you bringing it up again?
Thatâs where the 10% extra food ##### ### ### need roughly 17 villagers to keep producing villagers out of 3 town centers for your boom, with a little excess (assuming no wheelbarrow). With this bonus, that number is more like 14.
Also, you canât simultaneously say that slav bonus is OP, and this doesnât help. Those two ideas are contradictory. Is this OP, or is it not? If it is, during what stages? I alrady addressed feudal age, and imperial age.
How? They have literally no water military bonus till imperial age. The only reason they are even good is that water is a lot more snowbally. If you were to remove that 200 extra wood bonus, they would be perfectly average on those till they hit imperial age.
Also, this bonus is weaker than their current fishing bonus on open water maps. Iâm proposing this as a replacement, so it should even out. If anything, this should be a bit weaker in early game.
Look, if you donât like this bonus as a matter of personal preference, thatâs fine. But I donât think any of your arguments so far show that this isnât helpful, or that this is too OP and canât be fixed by tweaking a few numbers.
I donât even get this argument. How did your opponent get in? How did they range anything to begin with? Did you not wall? Did you not use your better skirms?
Because there is no benefit to doing so actively. You are making it sound like a ridiculously hard and complicated task. I can do this, and I have an average APM around 45-50. Iâm sure that pros can do it.
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Your criteria are incorrect. You donât measure units in niches that are irrelevant to their purpose. You donât look at Teuton champions, see they die in the same number of arb shots as everyone else, and use that to say theyâre not FU+.
Because you donât seem to have understood what Iâm saying yet. The slavs bonus is balanced for the slavs, not for other civs.
Itâs an either/or scenario. The balance point is impossible to reach, because it will always be useless at some stage and OP at another stage. Reducing the power of the bonus will only make it useless in too many places. Increasing the power will make it OP in too many places. There is no point at which it is fairly balanced.
In this case, they will still be too weak in the midgame, where they currently die, so it wonât fix them there, because the extra farm income wonât come in fast enough to change that. But in the lategame and on water maps, where they are already top 5, it will have a much stronger effect.
Your change needs to be more tailor-made to their weakness, otherwise it will just make them stronger where they are already strong, without fixing them where they are weak.
Again, removing the 200 wood bonus is not even on the table. At that stage youâre completely remaking the civ, which simply isnât going to happen.
So youâre talking about adding this ON TOP of the existing bonuses, which is completely broken in some stages of the game, while useless where they actually need it.
The exact same way they currently do. Itâs not like you tear down buildings that fast in the early game in any case.
Without a powerful build speed bonus, that wonât change.
Pros use that APM for other more vital things, like keeping their armies alive. The main benefit of spamming hussars into your enemyâs eco is that you can do it cheaply in terms of both gold and APM. Take away the apm cheapness and suddenly itâs nowhere near as valuable.
Sure, I didnât phrase the entire thing properly. Let me repeat that.
FU+ means they do as well as FU units in all cases, and better FU units in at least some cases. Most often, they do better than FU in some specific niche of the game.
This is meaningless. You could say that about any bonus. You need to address the bonus.
I showed you how it does. What are you talking about? If you play dravidians properly, you should always have a slight lead when you get to castle age. Then, make 3 tcs, and you will need fewer farms to get your boom going. You can use the extra wood you get on age up towards one TC. After that, the extra food will go toward getting techs, getting to imperial for the actual powerspike, or one more tc for a ridiculous overboom.
That entire paragraph of your says nothing. You are just repeating. Show numbers, strategies, and play styles. I already showed you how. You get your continuous villager production 3 villagers early, which, including inefficiencies, is 2-2.5 minutes. For hitting imperial, you should be able to it with 5 less farms, which, again, is 300 wood saved. But it is also maybe 1-1.5 minutes saved. That timing will let you then make trebs earlier, and the extra food will let you transition to elephant archers much earlier.
Which stages? be specific. I already asked you this. I have explained how this is useful in castle age, not too powerful in feudal, and okay imperial. If you disagree, point out how my arguments are wrong.
Who said they should? I said if they were to do that. I said that to illustrate the point that dravidians donât have anything really strong on water. Not until imperial age.
Same for stone walls then. If they get in, itâs over in either case. This argumentation line doesnât make any sense. Donât speak about what happens after they get in, speak about how they will get in, and how much you can spend to stop that. Thatâs what my bonus is for.
Just out of curiosity, what is your average APM? And what is your average maximum APM. You are speaking of pros and what they can do, and I donât think you are familiar with it at all.
Viper had the time to quick walk in a villager from a wolf while fighting in two other places simultaneously. Some light cav micro is almost trivial.
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I think they fit just fine, then. Bengali EAs are specifically designed for tankiness, while Dravidian EAs are designed for damage against normal units, so comparing them isnât an accurate depiction of their strength. If they were designed to pierce through armor, theyâd do +25% damage, not fire 25% faster.
You might as well be testing against Huskarls and pretending thatâs valid.
No, because the Slavs have their entire tech tree and unique unit, all of it, designed around that bonus. Dravs do not. Without rebalancing their entire civ around the new bonus, it simply will not work.
If they can keep their early power spike going like you describe, theyâll be ridiculously OP and completely unstoppable, because they already have a top-tier early game. If they can rush straight from that powerful early game to an equally powerful lategame, no civ will be able to stop them.
By contrast, if it ISNâT that powerful, if their food bonus takes time to kick in like I predict, theyâll still die hard in the midgame, because they still lack the ability to protect that economy in the midgame, the exact problem they currently have. Better farms mean nothing if there are no living farmers working on them. So theyâll simply become powerful much too late for it to matter. Their 45+ winrates will climb, but the number of times theyâll actually get there will still be so insignificant it wonât matter.
And of course, theyâll go from top 5 to best in the game in water maps, no question.
The bonus is either OP or useless, there is no balance point.
I really have, multiple times. The lategame, and in water maps.
Wait, what? Youâre talking about if they didnât have their water bonuses to make the claim they donât have any water bonuses? Wha?
My bonus also allows them to erect their walls in a significantly reduced time, which means they can push those walls out further, rather than basic miniwalling on woodlines. With wider walls, they can protect their gold and wood from ranged attacks up until siege enters the game, compared to standard walling, which typically has significant weak points that can be exploited.
Nobody is tearing down buildings in the feudal age in the first place, so extra armor is irrelevant at that stage, and in castle age, siege is used for that instead, so at pretty much all stages of the game, bonus building armor is a very niche bonus of minimal benefit.
The principal bonus of my bonus is the faster speed of getting them up. The only reason itâs stone walls and not walls in general is to prevent early hard turtling and allow enemies to raid them effectively.
No idea tbh, never bothered checking. Fairly decent though, Iâm regularly running into issues of trying to press multiple hotkeys simultaneously and accidentally canceling actions from moving too fast. Problem is I used to do the hardest content in the game in Elite Dangerous, and in that game you use 4+ buttons at once! Habits are hard to break!
I donât think what Viper does is a particularly relevant comparison, though. He does many things that are sub-optimal, because he is mostly just enjoying himself at this point. And he doesnât do that in serious situations in any case.
Atop that, youâre not talking about some added benefit here; youâre talking about a dramatically higher APM requirement, just to match the normal, apm-cheap standard. Thatâs a downgrade by every metric.
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