But the wealth of Mansa Musa is literally shown in the current Malian bonus where they get three gold bonuses baked in one. It’s… fitting. Yours isn’t, really. Also, it comes in way too late, so the bonus will just kill the civ completely, worse than before with longer lasting gold mines. Talk about harebrained bonuses.
I’m not a fan of the proposed dropping off fish more bonus either. I don’t think people really realise how strong that bonus would be. But in this thread in particular, people throw out bonuses that they’re seemingly so sure are the exact solution to the problem, but they’re not. It comes across as very narcissistic.
And when they see the proposed solutions in the feedback are terrible, they hopefully won’t implement them, no matter how loud select few scream about it. It’s true (if not a coincidence) that they seemingly get ideas for bonuses from forum suggestions, but this arrogant behaviour to see proposed changes implemented in the game is toxic. The devs must not bow to one single person demanding changes to balance their game. It creates huge issues and an even worse precedent.
You are basically saying if devs make a “harebrained” bonus, its fine. If forum members suggest it, it’s TERRIBLE.
Was it not shown correctly in the original version when they got gold upgrades for free? When they needed a new bonus for new civs for ‘dawn of dukes’, Devs removed that bonus and made it long lasting. What happened? Did Mansa musa’s fortune get invested in AAA rated US securities instead of chinese real estate with new DLC release?
The irony is definitely lost on me. You are 100% correct.
How do you even breathe when You have your nose so far up Ensemble Studio’s ass.
And what would your proposed solution be? Oh, instead of Mansa Musa’s wealth shown correctly with a gold bonus, we’re going to give them a bonus that’s useless! Yeah, that’ll show 'em. Even Tigui is better than your proposed change.
Rather than throwing around words, you should elaborate. Just calling names only makes you look juvenile.
Only gold is not the measure of economy or wealth in AOE2. The best economy bonuses are ones that give more food. Food is a far far >>> more important resource than gold. Heck wood is just as important as food if not more in early stages. 33% faster TC and market will be amazing if done after a castle drop. We can bump it to 50% for easy calculation and show how OP it is. You will get faster vills at the rate of 3 per min instead of 2 from every TC, wheel-borrow, Hand-cart and Imp upgrades as well 50% faster. You can’t even differentiate between a good tech and a bad tech. Imp timing saved will be little more than a minute. You can produce 3 more vills from 3 different TCs during that time if done right. You can compute for other techs.
I’m not proposing any solution for the malians here. Just making a point that +15% drop-off violates basic game mechanism. If they needed to buff Malians, there was a perfectly useless tech called “Tigui” that could have been re-worked. The 15% cheaper buildings itself is a super-poweful bonus with wide applications. 30% longer lasting gold was perfectly reasonable. It could have been bumped to gold and stone last 30% longer. you don’t need to build more mining camps and disrupt your economy for a while longer than most civs.
Pot kettle. First, I disagree that ‘hypocrite’ is ‘calling names’, but - to me what you said is hypocritical because you’re calling what devs have done a harebrained bonus, while suggesting what I’d say is a harebrained bonus yourself. The hypocritical part is you doing the opposite of what you wrote - that if forum members suggest one, it’s fine, but if devs do it, it’s TERRIBLE.
And yet it’s the existing gold bonus that makes Malians so powerful. It can already exist as a food bonus, as you’ll need fewer villagers on gold and thus more on other res (like food) to have the same collection.
But you’ll need a castle to get it, on top of paying res for it. This will come into effect VERY late, typically after you’re already reasonably boomed, with eco upgrades. The only place where this bonus will actually help is if you’re in a teamgame and you’ve gotten steamrolled (probably because you spent all your res on collecting stone for a Castle), so you’re rebooming elsewhere. That’s the only place this bonus will actually be effective.
Or your proposed idea forces Malians into a game plan where they’ll just slow down their initial booming and try to Castle drop, then get the new tech, and then start booming behind it. Congratulations, you have forced Malians into a very awkward one-dimensional playstyle that is very risky in of itself. There’s a reason why FC->CD strategies aren’t seen very often on Arabia. Or, you’ll just send few villagers on Stone to passively collect Stone when instead… you could just throw down more TCs.
Not to mention it still won’t help with food collection. You’re making them even more food-starved to actually make use of the bonus, while they also have to keep making any army.
Faster working markets is cute, sure, but you could just make more Markets to make more Trade Carts.
DId I say that its fine? If a few members endorsed his view, you need to put up your counter points like @DemiserofD does. Forum members can be harsh with Devs since they paid for the civs and Devs need to be held to a higher standard than casual players. Design and development mistakes as well as critical bugs will cost the game dearly. I’m sure devs would agree. You can ask @ DodoNotDoDo for his opinion on how devs take feedback.
You need to get your reading comprehension skills. I’m sure even a bot will do better. Read what I replied to @LinedJoker18896 before you get on your high horse.
Read and answer.
Is it? If Malians 15% wood discount on buildings is removed and given +200 wood on age up. Do you think the civ will have any legs to stand on?
Wow! this will the out-of-box new meta for Malians just like Dravidians.
Jokes aside. Ever heard of balancing economy by practicing build orders with AI before playing it in ladder. You need to play to the strengths of the civ. You need to know your win conditions. Then play towards maximizing those win conditions. If you have to castle drop, then you find the best way to do it.
If the win condition is unviable, it will start showing up in win-rate stats. You can complain about it in forum and some ####### will come and defend the design by devs as supreme.
There are close to 1k posts in this thread, get off your high horse for thinking everyone’s going to remember every last post. Especially when you throw around awful suggestions left and right, it’ll be skimmed at best.
How does +15% drop off even violate basic game mechanism? You state this, but don’t give reasons why. Why is ‘three bonuses into one’ violation of the game mechanism? Would you say the same for bonuses like Poles mining bonuses, Vietnamese lumberjacks, and Burgundian farmers? Secondly, you do propose a solution, that was your Tigui rework.
What is this absurd example? If the Malians kept the gold bonus and instead their wood bonus was replaced with Dravidian bonus, yes - the civ will have legs to stand on. If you removed the gold bonus and they just (for inexplicable reason) got their discount on buildings replaced by Dravidian bonus, the civ will absolutely be a lot weaker. You can simply see how Malians were before the patch and after the patch. The new gold bonus made them powerful.
Yes, and your suggestion would definitely drop Malians further down. It’s basically like a much later and much worse version of a Cuman bonus, where you actively have to hurt your own eco and slow down your game to make use of it. Even if your gameplan is to boom, the bonus is stupid.
And how will you support your castle drop when your eco has been fit around collecting Stone for that Castle Drop, and you have no eco left to make army? Do you think your enemy is going to let you collect Stone freely? You have to make army, so you can’t comfortably collect Stone fast enough.
Agreed on both counts. The fishing bonus is a problem imo, but it doesn’t seem like they’ll fix that.
For now, I think that they should include light cav in medical corps, and give dravs redemption (maybe in exchange for block printing). That should solve some of the main problems.
Both useless. No husbandry, no elite upgrade, no last armor. No one is going to make elephants in imperial age with Dravidians even if its 30 gold because 110 food is still a lot and its not going to add anymore value than a gambeson champion.
It doesn’t. Its just 10% faster that matters. Pre-buff they were an abysmal civ even though they had 30% longer lasting gold. The 10% extra is useful around 55-60 min, a point where usually 90% of the games are over.
Carry capacity is a great advantage for farmers who keep walking around the farm quite often and lumberjacks since each tree is just 100 wood and woodlines get more inefficient quite soon. Gold mines however have 800 per tile and there’s no concept of inefficiency.
That UT is also quite awful and mostly a niche for late imperial team games. It never mattered because Hindustanis had an amazing eco before they were nerfed to the ground. But doesn’t mean its a broken bonus or anything. 10% gold drop-off is a well balanced bonus paired with their wood discount. 15% was a bit on the higher side but would have been fine if Malians didn’t have their wood bonus.
Well I’m not particularly advocating this bonus because it goes against the principle of balance by making them stronger on the niche set of maps where they are already strong while keeping them abysmal everywhere else. But with that being said its again just 15% faster for fishermen that matters, 15% longer lasting is good for fishing ships though.
Well for starters the OG Indian bonus was actually beneficial. This one is a gimmick because its like 2% for the first 3-4 mins, about 5% for the next 3-4 mins. By the time its significantly faster, fishing itself becomes very inefficient and there’s a need to rebuild a mill or dock and the benefit is down again.
That is true when you have a civ that’s otherwise balanced. Like lets say Lithuanians get something like that, then they have to lose their extra food per tc and if Byzantines get something like that, they’ll have to lose their imperial age discount because those civs have a great tech tree, wide variety of usable units for all stages of the game. Dravidians have nothing. You can totally remove the siege discount instead. That adds minimal value for a civ without cavalry or eagles.
What you could do is remove +200 wood in imperial age altogether, make it +150 wood in feudal age and +250 in castle. That and eco upgrade 50% more benefits is comparable economically to Vikings (imagine knight line removed), Malay (without free armor or redemption) and OG Aztec (imagine them without eagles and monk bonuses),
People have been posting about how terrible Dravidians for a year now. And same happened to Vietnamese for the first 2 years since their release.
Why do malians need to be top 10 civ? Do the devs receive 10% extra revenue when Malians perform better?
Mlalians are an infantry civ. So they received a general buff along with other civs in april patch. But it was not that Malians were unplayable civ like Dravidians or Bengalis on release or any point afterwards. They got a buff on their bonus just because they are an infantry civ. Not that their design needed it. Dravidians instead got an 33% discount wood bonus because the estimated 200 wood was not enough of a bonus to play beyond early castle age. So the bonus is like a patch on a gaping-hole. What Dravidians needed was a re-work of the civ bonus and tech-tree. But that is still pending.
Did Malians really need the gold bonus? They had free pierce armour for infantry which has no historical context. But they were designed to play infantry by dev team. Yet they don’t play infantry beyond feudal age and get +5 attack to cavaly as end-game tech. why were they designed with more pierce Armour then? Can’t they do any off the meta infantry strat like Dravidians are advocated to play? When Devs can be generous with other civs, they need not be so stuck-up on their original wood gimmick for Dravidians.
Devs have given Dravidians unwinnable conditions for the casual player. So the play rate is low. And its not like chinese either who are top 10 for the best players. Both Malian eco bonuses starts helping in Dark age itself if mining gold is done. So, people in the forum are complaining for Dravidians to get better economy bonuses to play better from Dark age too.
Personally I’m against this type of 3 in 1 bonus. They keep pushing the ceiling higher for all strats. Mailians now neither run out of gold like a faster mining civ nor they get a more enduring army using longer lasting bonus for late-game. There is no window of weakness to exploit for the opponent civ. Devs need to be careful before introducing these kinds of bonuses and seeing the effect they should have removed it instead of nerfing to 10%. No wonder they are top10. They have a game-breaking bonus compared to others.
The 100% was suggested in a different thread when their winrate dropped to 32%. The suggestion was quite recent.
Why do any civs need to be top 10? Do Dravidians need to be top 10?
Well, Dravidians were being picked regularly in tournaments, whereas Malians weren’t. Not sure if that is ‘unplayable’. And Dravidians aren’t just an Infantry civ, they’re also a Naval civ.
Dunno, Malians have a wide tech tree, they can play in whichever way you want. I wouldn’t put too much stock into what their civ descriptor says. This is helped by their buildings costing less wood, making flexible armies more possible.
They aren’t meant as a civ with fewer, stronger options. Dravidians is a civ that is designed around having weak spots in their tech tree and supposedly very strong options to make up for it. They have a strong Archer play (with potential Elephant Archers as an actual Archer power unit, but that’s not seen in 1v1s or open maps as much), strong Infantry play, and decent Siege play until Imperial, as they lack Siege Engineers.
Mind you, the wood bonus on age-ups was already enough to get them picked in tournaments. The Siege bonus is a little out of place, but how would you balance Dravidians while keeping these parameters in mind? What eco bonus are you going to give them? Would you remove their wood bonus and replace it with your Tigui rework idea (and the Medical Corps can just become a civ bonus or something)?
That’s true for Archer civs in general. Dravidians is generally played as an Archer civ, though I’d hazard a guess if a casual player decided to just stick to Infantry and make Longswords, they’d make them work as well as Knights.
Malians have a pretty terrible late-game, though. Their best bet are Farimba Light Cavalry, as they only have Pikemen with extra PA (relatively useless, most of the damage is bonus damage) and Bracer-less Skirmishers. They’re similar to Meso civs, who generally have a weak late game and way stronger early game to make up for it.
Probably a terrible idea. How about changing Medical Corps into a monk tech, like monk can heal siege units for free? This will make them even more similar to Bengalis though.
Yeah, Dravidians are in a pretty exclusive group that way. The others I can think of are Teutons (who have bonuses for everything except archery range, including siege and monks), and Sicilians, who take less bonus damage for all units (and have extra strong cavalry).
Koreans and Portuguese have huge discounts which spans almost everything too.
What’s funny is how weak they feel, even after all that. Again, just goes on to show how dominant cavalry is in the game.
I agree with you. The problem is also that it is really not obvious how strong that bonus is, especially for new players. It is also a part of the Mechanics creep problem. Now that being said, I don’t know what to do with this now. It’s not like the devs will revert the malian bonus. The train has already left the station, unfortunately.
Or remove the siege bonus and let them make urumis from barracks as a civ bonus. That will let them snipe mangonels in early-mid castle age, albeit at a cost.
I know that post is recent and I’ve also participated in that discussion but I wasn’t talking about the recent change which is more like a follow-up change after neglecting them in the big patch. They were already an average civ and a dozen other mid-tier civs got buffed, which made Vietnamese relatively much weaker.
Dravidian situation is more like first 2-3 years of Vietnamese, Khmer. Terribly weak from the beginning but almost no useful changes to their gameplay for quite some time.
I can see where you come from with this point but it depends on how much importance do you give to water maps. In competitive tournaments there’s usually civ bans and 1 water map or maybe a couple of more hybrid maps with more water play and Dravidians are usable there. Whereas none of those maps are usually on ranked and there’s no concept of civ ban. You have pure water maps like Islands, Bog Islands with a repetitive gameplay and there are better civs for that.
Any civ shouldn’t be top-10 on every setting but some setting commonly played. Either meta open maps like Arabia or middle control maps or closed maps. Dravidians should either be a top-20 on all or a top-10 on one of these. Hypothetically if water gameplay got a major rework and water became equally popular as land, Dravidians can be left unchanged.
Archer line is generic, Elephant archers are terrible worthless units, one of the worst bonuses for infantry with no improved stats on produced units like Japanese, Burmese, Teutons, Romans or Celts have, siege bonus is average at best for a civ with no cavalry. None of the civ’s bonuses address the severe handicap. Several civs like Slavs, Malay have bonuses of equal value to play infantry but much better tech tree.
Its a bait and unless the map requires a double dock + land play or full water play, its not as useful as you’d think. Its on par with what most other average civs get, much lower than top-tier civs and definitely not sufficient to compensate for the lack of cavalry options.
Simple
give them a cavalry unit to make use of discounted siege and faster shooting skirms or
remove the stupid siege discount that doesn’t fit and give them a strong economic bonus to make them much far ahead than others like Malay or
a very strong tower/castle related bonus to make infantry + towers or infantry + castle drops usable or
super strong ranged units (like archer line benefits from barrack units, extra projectile, extra default speed etc)
very good monks or some unique building to make raids on them less effective or a heavy rework of unique unit gameplay like Indians–>Hindustanis.
Not at all, its for naval civs usually. And that’s why Portugese, Koreans, Vikings, Malay have received good buffs. Britons, Ethiopians, Mayans are all archer civs very strong and very good.
Doesn’t matter at all. 90% of the games end before trash wars. And the longer lasting gold pushes that even further. Its almost pointless to have a benefit from that stage onwards while remaining weak throughout the entire mid-game.
In the absence of cavalry, those are the most important units. Archer line on open maps, gunpowder in closed, monks on both.
And light cav which is the biggest problem. They don’t even get bloodliness. So they are not even viable in castle age let alone imp. The reason given is “Medical corps” would be OP with bloodlines for elephants. I don’t believe that 20 HP on elephants means a lot. But it does help light cav. So I’d remove medical corps and include bloodlines to tech tree.
Unless its a water map where their fish bonus also comes into play, their winrate has been quite abysmal. I’d atleast modify the bonus to give it a land angle too. Atleast somewhat like old malians bonus, “Fish and Berries last 30% longer”. It can give the same benefit of carry capacity without forced drops.
Medical corps is a very much a tech that needs to be removed due to the above “bloodlines” issue. It does definitely help to replace it with the TC bonus I mentioned.
REMOVE “Medical Corps”
REPLACE “Spice Trade” TCs and Docks work 33% faster. TCs fire 33% faster.
This would help Dravidians do a comeback when they fall behind in castle age. But they would need a castle which would need to be mined and built faster while sitting on a single-TC. So, we would need to modify their eco bonuses too. I’d take away both the +200 wood and 33% cheaper siege and give them this bonus below. They would need to need to remove Shipwright from tech tree as well.
The first bonus gives them the resources needed for a smooth start. The second bonus helps with wheelbarrow and handcart making their faster working TC tech ‘spice trade’ useful when Dravidians need to stay on single TC or 2 TCs and push back opponent. With a good economy, you can play a good game even without cavalry like aztecs and mayans. If the civ is modified to have a good economy like malians, they can definitely play without modifying the fishing +15 carry capacity too. So a re-work can defintely fix the civ with their existing tech tree not modified except for ‘bloodlines’. The civ will become an economy civ with a powerful trash army in late game with wootz steel.
A big band-aid would be “Bloodlines added to tech tree and wootz steel in castle age”
I’m have definitely tried this. But Urumi get killed by E skirms in castle age. Only times I’ve used urumi are on team games.