Thanks fixed it. 20 chars
Finally. Yes, the strategies pros, especially who are full time content creators like Viper, do in regular ranked games also referred to as âmasterpiecesâ arenât optimal competitive strategies. Theyâre just a visual treat and a a gamble. Siege tower + teutonic knights, siege tower + gbetos, castle drop into chakram throwers and so on, not something that people can do and improvise. Heâs tried this urumi swordsmen strategy several times over the past year. It worked a few times, failed a lot more times. Its good youtube content.
And if Viper won by making unit x once against unit y and it worked, its not a proof that unit x can be made against unit y in the hopes that you can repeat the same thing that Viper did and win. Several people have brought this flawed argument based on one of his games where he made suboptimal 1v1 units like Ballistas or Mamelukes or in this case urumi swordsmen and won. And based on that one game, they think that those units are a fair option with that civ and well balanced. But actually its more like a gamble that paid off. This is where the âcontext of the gameâ gets ignored.
In a competitive RM game, any player looking to win with Dravidians canât go for a longswords opening into urumi swordsmen against a civ with good gunpowder or ranged units, which was the whole point against your citation of this game.
Sure. Its much better than Hussite wagons, flaming camels, siege towers. And very comparable to the likes of Karambits, Shotel warriors. But by no means its some unit that can address the huge tech tree shortcomings of the civ.
They are faster than militia line, halberdiers and some other infantry units but not as fast enough for how fragile or food-intense they are. You need a mass of more than 50 units, a situation like your forward castle or siege push to force fights, no light cav or some other cav unit to block and absorb the charge damage and the ranged units should be no where close to opponentâs defences. These are just very difficult to make it work given how Dravidians are as of today.
My vote for a lot of these questions are not cumulative but rather isolated. Like do Dravidians need bloodlines? yes, Do dravidians need redemption? yes, do they need both? not necessarily. Something along that lines for urumis, medical corps and economic bonuses.
But in similar vein you can also argue that any game posted as proof that the unit is bad cannot be used because itâs all based on one game.
My entire point with the video was that you can see how the unit does perform well against its supposed counters, not that you should always go for Urumis and that theyâre the meta unit actually.
Ok? That was never my point.
I never expected my thread to be this long and longlasting
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Nobody expected this glaring weakness to persist this long either.
How do you feel about Dravidians now?
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I have been on a hiatus since april. I donât feel anything about them, but people are still complaing so I guess Dravidians are still weak.
I thought you got suspended. I must be mistaken.
Exactly. Urumi swordsmen are not considered bad because some pro player made them in 1 game and lost. Theyâre bad because stats wise they offer very little value for the extra 20 food cost compared to militia line and thatâs something true for many infantry unique units. And most of the times Dravidians get into a losing position when the player attempts to go for urumis because they lack options unlike other infantry civs.
Situationally like many other melee units that manage to heavily outnumber and surround. But I was coming from this reply of yours to @benithisrael 's comment about urumi dying to skirms in castle age and you seemed to put forth the opinion that theyâre perfectly viable against ranged units which is not the case. Very difficult to produce, get all upgrades and use until late imp. And even after you get to late imp, usage would depend on so many other criteria.
Oh, I misread the castle age part, though⊠I would still say the same is true.
The only difficulty in producing them is needing a Castle, but they produce fast and they move fast, they can still very much so get the jump on enemy army, and the AoE attack will kill them in swathes.
But this is a weird argument anyway, since chances are youâre already doing Longswords not Urumis.
Heh, Viper posted the video of him against Matador with additional commentary at the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sjSzkUdAkw
We are all prone to external biases even the pros. The game he mentioned vs Jordan is also the same you mentioned. In that game, he had a defensible base. He had a shitload of BBCs. He lowered cavalier HP using BBC then used Urumis. For him however his finishing move of Urumi seemed like the highlight. Another pro player Hera however has a completely 180 deg view of the unit and exension the civ because he just stomps them with a single combination skirms->Knights->SIege against Hearttt a player similar to el matadorâs caliber.
( Game link is getting censored) ############################################################
Personally, I find a castle worthwhile only if I can make a unique unit from it or Iâm dropping it early on his base. Urumi just does not cut it there in caste age because opponent already has skirms or archers in numbers. They also donât do well against cavalry individually like teutonic knights can. Dravidian donât have stone bonuses, so a castle is not easy to pull out of the hat. Due to little economic bonuses, Dravidans play as a one-trick-pony civ. Once Iâm 3 TC to imp, I need castles to make trebs. I canât tech switch easily if I donât have the economy for it. And in my caliber, I canât spam castles like VIper to make masses of 60 Urumis every 5 mins. I do believe the unit cost does not justify with value in gameplay. I do make them to take out opponent trebs. But that is a hit or miss and is a panic move.
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Produce fast but take 65 food, very difficult to afford. Move fast-er than militia line but not fast enough to be good at raiding.
Chances are youâre doing crossbows, skirms, monks and siege. Maybe pikes after a while against cavalry civs.
And in his commentary again he mentioned how he was better at decision making in the late game. Even in the Jordan game he talks about 50 60 urumi swordsmen against 30 40 chukonus. Like many infantry uu if you somehow hypothetically get there, urumis are usable in some matchups.
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I think Iâve figured out why they wonât change Dravidians. They are the most talked about civilization right now 1111
Also, they have been at the top of the most searched article on aoe2 wiki for a while. Controversy is good for publicity.
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Link you provided is not working
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The Dravidians d̶r̶a̶m̶a̶, dilemma. Or maybe both. 11
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I will say, excited for Viperâs follow-up video on this (if he makes one) as this has also been a point discussed here and since nobody here is an actual pro player, Viperâs insights on Dravidiansâ performance in tournaments are really welcome in my opinion.
Though I wouldnât be surprised if heâs gonna do a more meme-y answer with âduhh I didnât play longswords/Urumis obviously Kappaâ.
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Urumi needs +5 hp,+5%speed,+1 attack vs buildings and +1 or +2 pierce armour.
Medical Corps - Mounted units healp 30hp per minute and provides 30% more hp
Needs redemption.
May be hunsbundry, bloodlines or final armour.
Also they need crop rotation as per historical accuracy. They had the best farming methods. Will also help them in high cost food army in imperial. or all food sources 5% faster will be good.
Dravidians will be near to very good.
This is food part of Roman bonus.
The problem with Urumi rework is that Devs will try to fiddle with cost, HP and attack many times before touching speed or armour unless its a nerf. They will be quite useful if they started with base speed of 1.15 like Ghulum and chakram throwers. I understand they copied Beserker cost and some stats. But they could have given all the DOI infantry unique units the same speed and not make Dravidians the slow civ with the slow unit. Currently Urumi is an anamoly where it takes out units like Samaurai and Jaguar warriors which #### ###### ### to. The reason is the blast attack. To fix Urumi, Iâd remove blast attack, give the unit +1 range for its charge attack making it a Kamayuk like unit to take out cavalry. With the Range attack stack-up, Urumi can easily 3vs1 Siege and one-shot it with charge attack. This will make the unit practically usable instead of a one-trick pony which needs to be massed upto 50+ at the end of the game. For now, +1 pierce armour would be welcome change.
The poll demonstrates that people want to reduce wootz steel cost and bring it to castle age. That is what I would do:
Castle age unique tech : Wootz steel cost 400 food and 300 gold.
Add Husbandry to tech tree
Add Redemption and fervor to tech tree while removing block printing
This idea of a slow civ needs to be junked. Even with all speed upgrades added to tech tree, Dravidians due to lacking Knights and cav archers will still have slowest army in AOE2. The Devs donât need to force that.
For civ bonus, Iâd just leave the +15 carry capacity alone and modify the main wood bonus theme to an all around economy bonus:
The first bonus will give a smooth start on any map. The second bonus will fix most resource and tech tree deficit problems.
This idea comes from Viperâs opinion that Dravidians can make use of fast firing elephant archers. But from my experience Dravidian castle age economy does not allow for teching food on EAs. The attack speed is also not good enough to intercept cavalry or even pikeman with squires in small numbers. A pet idea of mine to make Elephant archers more useful is to make them even more powerful glass cannons
Skirmishers and Elephant archers fire 33% faster
This increases the ROF of Skirmishers to 2.25 and Elephant archers to 1.5. This makes Elephant archers 25% more effective against cavalry instead of 20%, which means you can do the same job with 4 archers instead of 5. If the above eco bonus is implemented and EAs are given a attack boost, then itâll give more incentives to go as a main unit for Dravidians. Elephant archers also miss out on +3 bonus attack against spearmen line though they have almost the same speed as foot archers.
Played the Dravidians today and I completely dominated against the Hard AI. Thatâs notable because I normally get wrecked by the Hard AI. I think the Dravidians might be seriously underrated.
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Hey hey hey, look who scrolled through this thread:
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