If it comes right when you’re throwing down all your TCs, it can allow me to be quite a bit more aggressive, since I don’t need the wood for farms right away. Delaying that by even a few minutes can mean having a few extra units at the start of the first fight, and that can easily butterfly out to a long-term advantage. Especially since I’m collecting the food a LOT faster than I would with the farms, since I save on the immediate build time AND fish collect so much faster.
Thanks! I do like where your head’s at.
Well, the Dravidians advantage is being able to go more than twice as far with the shore fish and still harvest efficiently. A normal civ basically needs to put the TC directly on the shore fish to use them, but a dravidian player can put it much further away, on a woodline(like you say) but still collect the shore fish efficiently.
Honestly yesterday’s TC was just god-tier. I had it on gold, wood, AND had shore fish nearby. Glorious.
Let me do some quick math so I can figure out the exact distance a normal civ vs dravidians can go for shore fish, please hold…
EDIT: Okay, did some rudimentary excel spreadsheeting, and it looks like while a normal civ can only collect shore fish from about 5.8 tiles away while being as efficient as farms, Dravidians can go up to 14 tiles with the same or better efficiency! That’s with wheelbarrow though; oddly, the bonus should actually become much better with hand cart, because farms don’t get anywhere near the full benefit from that tech. More math to be done…
Okay, with hand cart a normal civ can go 10 tiles with roughly farm-equal collection rates, while Dravidians can go a full 21 tiles.
Well, no. All the eco bonuses stop after the fish are gone.
But that’s alright, Dravidians have quite a few potent effects at that stage. The skirms bonus alone is quite a bit better than the Byzantine version imo, since it boosts your population efficiency too. And wootz steel is pretty decent too. And Medical Corps gives them some staying power. They’re not S-tier at that stage but they’re decent enough.
At the very least, I’d want to see them actually get to their lategame comp more often before I bother buffing them there.
I truly dislike this tech and the timing it is available in castle age. You agree many elephants can’t be made in castle age unless you are malay. I see no reason for anybody to need this tech in castle age. I’m not buying this argument that medical corps effect is equal to 1 vill working on wood and its a economic boost. In that regard, Vikings have an even better economic boost since Beserkers generate 40 hp/min and move faster too by default which would be OP. Elephants and infantry are not meta. Regeneration on them will not yield any economic benefits to the civ. If necessary, I’d swap “Medical corps” with ‘wootz steel’ and replace ‘medical corps’ with an economy tech.
I like your other ideas very much though like +1 charge for Urumi and being faster to be able to kill sancity monks delivering a pair of charge attack. If the charge attack has +1 range, they could be a good counter to cavalry like Kamayuks. I would somehow extend that to Siege as well maybe with +2 bonus damage in place of building damage. They have enough charge damage against buildings. I find the +1(+2) bonus damage useless. The blast damage is just too gimmicky and does not actually provide any value. In real game settings, Blast damage is good against ranged units and works like a mangonel shot. But the unit just dies to skirms and there is no use of blast damage possible against any unit with ranged support. The unit literally has no place in the tech tree or playstyle of the civ. The unit is hands-down the worst designed in the game.
In order for that to work, they should give Dravidians the Khmer treatment and change this bonus to.
I included forgers to help against bad map gens too. Basically, if the food source cannot be herded or pushed and moved to a different location, then Dravidians don’t need to drop them off by walking long distances. Its not OP since they would need to build a mill to reasearch farm upgrades later anyway. But they can do without it for a while till castle age if needed. @vigunsta, @Pulikesi25, @filtercoffee488 and @DemiserofD Let me know what you think.
I do agree that you’re never going to be making large numbers of elephants in the castle age, but I do think many people are missing out on the potential of using a bare handful of them mixed with other compositions. Just today I watched as Hearttt_ lost a dozen crossbows to a mangonel that could have been taken down singlehanded by a single elephant archer. They win 1v1 with no micro required.
The nice thing about the tech is it can work retroactively. You don’t have to get it right away for it to have value, unlike a lot of castle age UTs. But honestly, I do think using it is key to long-term success as dravidians. If you don’t start taking advantage of it, you’re just going to be inferior overall as your opponents transition into whatever units that they have bonuses for.
The biggest difference vs berserks is berserks have a much smaller HP pool. They die much easier, regen to full much faster, and so the eco benefit is much smaller. IE, in a normal fight they might regen 5 hp, while a dravidian elephant can regen three times that much just while they’re fighting! And then they’ll continue to regen for basically the entire rest of their time alive.
Plus there’s the fact it doesn’t just apply to elephant archers, but also armored elephants, another unit I think are sorely underused, especially for dravidians. Especially for a civ as lacking in food as the dravidians, I really think people are missing the boat here on the long-term value - as long as they’re properly used together with other units, and not trying to swap entirely into them and nothing else. The number of times I’ve seen people try to make a hard swap into elephant archers…I’ve tried that myself, it just never works. But adding 2-3 elephant archers to a larger army?
Anyway, I really like the tech, and don’t want it moved. Wootz steel wouldn’t even be that useful in the castle age given your limited options at that point. Your pikes wouldn’t be much better, your scouts would be marginally better, your longswords would still be pretty bad, and your enemy could actually save resources by being able to skip the armor techs!
Sounds a bit OP, at least for fishing ships. Even at ~6 tiles range, they already get a ~10% bonus over normal fishing ships. This would buff that to more like 20%, and more like 50% at 10+ tile ranges.
It might be a possibility for villagers though. I’ll have to process for a bit, I’ll get back to you tomorrow after a night’s sleep.
None of this would have impacted Dravidian gameplay and winning ability by even 1%. Elephants are abysmal. They’re so bad that even civs with fully upgraded Elephant units with extra bonuses like Khmer, Burmese don’t go for them. Dravidians on the other hand miss armor, husbandry. And it still won’t solve the lack of fast moving anti-archer melee unit.
That’s somewhat decent but still not good as a UT. But it’d be an amazing bonus both for defense and mixing with crossbows on the offense if it was a default civ bonus.
Wootz steel to castle age won’t matter but adding bloodlines will make them quite decent. They can have the option of playing a longer feudal age and somewhat decent option against enemy skirms. Wootz steel is 1400 resources for very little impact. Lack of husbandry and plate barding would still mean lower raiding potential.
This is an AMAZING change. All resources will flow in a lot faster from castle age onwards and the civ would have a very similar gameplay to Celts/Vikings. In fact this single change might make Dravidians a competent civ despite the mobility crisis.
Fish has to be 20 tiles away from dock for Dravidian fishing to be 25% faster. Its like somewhere late castle or imperial age. And that fishing advantage won’t have any impact either because it will be significantly slower than a handcart farm or fish trap. For most part of the game where deep fishes are a solid source of food income, fishes are less than 10 tiles away and its about 2-15% depending on the distance. Its almost always slower than Japanese.
Theoretically this is beautiful but beyond a certain distance, you can neither depend on deep sea fish without re-docking, as the food gathering rate drops much lower than a farm nor expect the fishing ships to be safe on water maps. Its usually much better to use traps in practice at which point the bonus drops to zero.
You forgot to include Islands there after which number of games shoots up to 2k but Dravidians go down to 17th. Anyways that list doesn’t have Malay, Vikings, Italians or Portugese in the top-10 list. Seems to be a very unuseful small data.
Functional late game bonuses are something like paper money, grand trunk road, vineyards, cheaper cav or infantry or trash units. Medical corps is garbage. Theoretically it could be a resource saver but in practice in an even game Dravidians can’t and won’t do elephants. Infantry and skirms or arbalesters would be the units used.
I think its actually good for the game. Some more randomness with respect to resource generation. An additional deer, or a shore fish or two somewhere near the berries on land like some of the DWC maps. You can see how different forest generations leads to different type of gameplay. This could add to the variety. Obviously a pond big enough to dock is a bad addition for Arabia but fish on land could be interesting.
I like the 50% extra benefit from eco upgrades suggestion better. Either that or something like 10% more food drop-off are more balance bonuses imo. That kind of scales slowly but scales better over time. This one is more situationally broken like hybrid maps but otherwise useless kind of bonus. It can also result in a lot of berry or fish laming potential on pond based maps.
Two or three elephant archers would contribute nothing. Sure they might kill an additional light cav or a couple of skirmishers but there’s a bigger chance of getting converted or opponent two shotting with target attack from his skirms. Dravidian armored elephants are garbage. Gurjara ones are cheaper in castle age and do more bonus damage, net damage being same as a capped ram. Bengali ones are good in imp because they’re harder for halbs to kill, have their UT and siege engineers. And both of those civs have husbandry. Dravidian ones have no benefits, they take full 40 damage from halbs, move as slow as capped ram with no possibility of garrisoning units for extra speed, damage output is also similar to that of capped ram. Its too much resources down the drain.
Berserkers are cheap, move quite fast, regeneration is faster and doesn’t need a UT. More importantly they don’t get cheaply taken out by halbs and skirms and can get a fair trade against most other units except for a few like gunpowder or some unique units. Elephant archers are slow, cant run from an unfavorable battle, regeneration needs that UT and is quite slow, take 70 damage from halbs and I think about 10 from skirms. Its completely useless to do a tech for units which are useless themselves.
Thanks. I agree this will be an amazing bonus. If this bonus was conceived by last year ending, It could have replaced the +200 wood bonus and made 33% Siege discount unnecessary. But now Devs won’t change it. The civ bonus ideas could be reserved for “Tamils” if they are ever introduced in the future as an offshoot of Dravidians which shares same design philosophy.
I conceived it based on research and design work done by @MantisAoECivilisationConcepts for civ design called 'the cholas". The civ would be a pure economy, fishing and blacksmith civ:
Most likely Devs will steal this idea for their next OP civ to sell next DLC.
10% more food drop off from farms is stupidly OP. Its light years ahead of any existing food bonus in AOE2. But, my bonus is quite nominal. It will make the civ more useful than it is currently. Laming is indeed possible. But an unorthodox civ like Dravidians needs these quirky plays to be possible to surprise the opponent. Currently, they are very boring to play especially due to lack of any options beyond standard ones. The bonus is not gonna give +100 wood for the postponed mill either. It just allows flexibility in build order.
With this tech, Dravidian player can place a barracks after collecting just +75 more wood rather than 175 wood.
The barracks can be placed forward facing or it can be used to shield the berries like a mill placement. In dark age, an early barracks with a couple of militia can keep the opponent unsettled while you set your economy to transition to farms.
The mill can be placed in a safe space in the back of base to mill deer. The scout can take off earlier instead of pushing dear till clicking to feudal. It gives valuable scouting info. The same mill can house safe farms later. You could time “Horse collar” to come in effect from the very first farm with the +200 wood bonus.
Granted, their work rate may need to be nerfed by 5% like khmer. But, that is for the future if they end up oppressive. I see it as a better bonus all around than +15 carry capacity and more interesting to play. It enables the same play as the carry capacity by reducing movement. But comes with a quirky gimmick. It will be also palatable for the devs since the flavor of the civ has been maintained.
If we include fishing ships, then “Gillnets” may need to be removed. I don’t see fishing ships as OP since you can’t micro them all the time. The deeper they venture for deep fish, the easier they will fall prey to some opponent warship. Of course, they could scower around the map looking for any fish that is safe even shore fish. This could be the secret to their survivability instead of Armour or HP. I see it as an interesting change. Since water games are quite boring, I doubt people will complain. This mechanic is quite radical and will be interesting. Otherwise the bonus can be limited to fishermen and foragers.
Regarding cost, Woots steel cost will be adjusted and will be similar to chieftans.
You are definitely underappreciating wootz my friend. I know Urumi is not great for offense But they can defend base amazingly well. Woots will give Urumi an insane +24 charge attack against cavalry making them a great counter against Knight raids into Dravidian base.
Light cav can engage Knight cost effectively across the map and will definitely kill skirms and even archers with +2 attack bonus from ignoring armour. Light cav with bloodlines can be a very effective counter against skirm+Knight play against Dravidians. They can also shut down Monk+Siege push. It will delay imp timing of Dravidian player. But that is the downside of any counter unit. So its not a problem. Light cav are certainly better than making Armoured elephants or battle elephants for the cavalry role in castle age.
No matter the discounts, I doubt infantry can play any useful role in castle age unless you have malians bonus of +3 pierce armour or romans +4 armour. Archers or E skirms would have been fully upgraded and will wreck both pikemen and long swords. What I see as the solution to Dravidians is “Light cav with bloodlines” and “Wootz steel in castle age”
If opponent does not upgrade armour due to wootz to save cost, it’s his mistake. Dravidians get fully upgraded and armored Arbs. They will chew up every unit other than palladins if they don’t get last armour. Raiding will also become hard for opponent since defensive buildings will do +2 damage per arrow. It will be a self-goal not to upgrade armor. Dravidian light cav still engage archers and skirms like it has atleast +2 bonus damage. Light cav can counter heavy cavalry as well based on resources.
If your enemy is going purely into skirms then yes, absolutely. But if your enemy is going purely into skirms(which they’d have to if they’re one or two-shotting your EAs; it takes 26 FU eskirm hits to oneshot), they’re not very smart, since your skirms will beat their skirms even with less numbers, AND you can just do something else with the saved resources!
And if they’re going into pretty much anything else, the extra HP of the elephant archers will dramatically improve the performance of pretty much any other composition you might choose to use. That’s their big strength, after all; it’s what you’re paying for: Extra HP. (Although interestingly, in the Dravidians case, EAs are actually more cost effective against skirms from a damage perspective than crossbows, too. Castle age crossbows do 1 damage per hit to a FU skirm, while EAs do 2, and EAs fire 25% faster, so an EA costs 60 resources per damage compared to an xbow at 70. Anyway, just an interesting sidetrack. But it DOES show that EAs can be pretty dang effective even against massed skirms IF you can get enough mass of them! But not typically relevant for the earlier parts of the game.)
Even against a mangonel, a FU castle age EA can 1v1 it with zero micro.
Monks are the one true weakness, but even there, two EAs have a better than even chance of killing a monk before it gets its conversion off. The real challenge there is spotting the monk approaching, which is why I think +LOS might be a decent addition.
My point being, it’s not that EAs suck, it’s that people are using them wrong.
They’re also produced at a castle, which is why they have all those things, and you have to mass them up significantly for them to make any difference, which combined with being low-hp makes it easy to lose them. EAs, by contrast, are best in smaller numbers. Yes, EAs take a lot of bonus damage from things like halbs, but if you’ve got halbs knocking on your EAs, something else is going very wrong, like you’ve made the bad choice of trying to go pure EAs way too early. You cannot do that; they just don’t have the damage per resources to hold off most enemies. You’re paying extra for the extra HP, you can’t assume that will just turn into damage in the early game before population efficiency comes into the equation.
Though now that I think about it, going for EAs VERY early(like, right at the start of castle age before you’re at 200 capacity) could actually make a lot of sense. Save on building some houses for a little bit and invest the extra resources into economy or military while your enemy is busy building lots of houses to afford more trash.
Anyway, my original point was just to evoke why the regen of berserks isn’t as much of an eco bonus as Medical Corps.
Trouble is, you’re investing heavily into your melee already - melee techs, a castle, wootz steel - you really wouldn’t be able to afford to make a big tech switch from melee into ranged at that stage of the game. That means they win a few big fights instead of losing them, and that can easily cost you the game.
On the whole, I much prefer Wootz Steel as a lategame powerhouse, AFTER the enemy has already teched into all their armor upgrades.
The reason he didn’t go for elephant archers is probably because he was not at all invested into archer upgrades, so just going for a naked elephant Archer would not be a very practical investment. Fortunately for him, the game ended before his initial Advantage faded. But if it had faded, he would have needed to make a swap into something like elephant archers in order to hold his ground.
As far as skill is concerned, no, I broadly couldn’t do things as well as viper, but the other player also wouldn’t be as good, so it all balances out.
As far as armor upgrades are concerned, the relative value has to do with how many infantry you have out on the field. Romans can justify getting the armor upgrades much earlier, but dravidians can afford a lot more, so they can also justify them, just in a different way. You just need to know when to do so.
In general, I think this game really demonstrates the sort of counter-meta thinking needed to make dravidians work.
This is a cool game and all, but let’s be clear here. We are just doing patchwork with this. This is basically saying "oh, we have literally no land eco bonus, so let’s use what is supposed to be a military powerspike as a land eco bonus. Vivi’s castle timing was delayed just because he made scouts. If he played similar to viper, he would’ve been up soon as well.
And less powerful that what many other civs get. What is your point?
Power is relative. Berbers don’t get any direct eco bonus, but they have a huge discount on military to make up for that issue. Teutons have a huge discount on farms which is borderline broken. Mayans have both stronger eco and a military bonus. All of these are contextual. Dravidians get a slight boost in feudal, but feudal is supposed to be an aggressive time for them. Not to mention that the bonus doesn’t scale well to castle, and especially imperial age.
You said they get no eco bonus. They clearly get a better eco bonus than quite a few civs.That’s my point.
I think the issue with dravidians has more to do with macro than micro. They use a lot of relatively innovative stuff, and lack a lot of common stuff, so it makes it difficult to learn, especially if you’re only randoming into them.
What I really want to see is a Hoang type situation, to see what their true potential is.
No, my point is that they don’t get any good land eco bonus. That’s still true.
“Better than quite a few civ” is irrelevant, is my point. You need to look at the civ first. That is why I gave the example of berbers.
Speaking of which, tell me 10 civs which have worse eco over the entire game dravidians, on land maps. You said quite a few civs, so 25% shouldn’t be too much.
Bro, are we lawyers here? Are we machines who need to stick with every word? Can you please interpret what I mean instead of taking all of it literally?
Literally everybody knows that 200 woods is something. I have said it like a dozen times in the past. You get 3 farms, or 2/3 of a tc. The point is, it is a power spike (or eco spike). And it isn’t even a good eco power spike like the viking’s free wheelbarrow, or the vietnamese bonus.
Now, answer this. If you can’t give 10, give as many as you can. The fewer you can give, the weaker your argument, though.
Also, I still want to know how many games you’ve played as dravs, and what your winrate is. I can’t find your profile by searching your name. Just curious, because I feel that the way you treat this civ is as a novelty. You see it as an interesting and fascinating thing, rather than something you usually play.
IDK, lots of players are doing that, even on lower levels. To lesser extent, but just as much Vivi’s scout micro and all is not to the level of pros either. Watching the game, Viper was for the most part very chill with micro. Lower level players can just end up shortwalling themselves fully, not leaving things open just to quickwall later.
Don’t worry, they’ll move the goalposts again. Apparently, they know better than TheViper.
I’m sorry if that’s the impression I’ve given. My viewpoint is that elephant archers cannot be used as a hard transition. You cannot make a sudden swap into only making elephant archers, because the damage per resources just isn’t there.
However, it is perfectly viable to make a slow transition into them, even in the castle age. In fact, I would go so far as to argue this is possibly the ideal way to play the civilization, if you can. Unlike other civilizations, you can preserve your forces for long periods of time, meaning a slow transition is actually viable. And once you get more than a few dozen elephant archers on the field, you become very difficult to stop.
The challenge is getting to that point, which requires a delicate balance of different units depending on the enemy composition.
And if persians can get a few dozen FU war elephants on the field, they also become very hard to stop.
I directly asked you two questions. I’d appreciate it if you can answer those, or say that you can’t answer.
No answer? That fine too, I guess. That is an answer in of itself.
What is funny to me is how they rely on pro players, but only when it is convenient. Pro players don’t make EAs most of the time, unless they have a huge eco with like 3-4 tcs and over like 90 vils. That’s mostly imperial.
“Viper knows better”, “except when he doesn’t”. Mostly talking about my stalker here though.
