Take that with a grain of salt, the same was true at the start of the last patch, but it was just noise, and by the end of the sampling period, its win rates actually went up from the prior patch.
Given they did get a small buff in the price reduction on armored elephants, I’d expect their winrates to ultimately rise slightly this patch, as well.
Even during best periods, it has never been above 46%.
I don’t really think so. After considering everything, I think that the ram line is vastly superior to elephant rams in most cases. This is especially true after the recent patch which buffed rams quite a bit.
Think of it like this, Elephant rams are a more expensive, food costing ram which has a vulnerability to common anti-cavalry units. Also, you cannot garrison other units in them.
If I was designing these, I’d increase the cavalry class armour so high that halbs only get a +5 or +10. I really don’t like how both anti-cavalry AND anti-siege can destroy them. This isn’t a cav archer with a lot of mobility.
The way it is, gurjara ele rams are S-tier, while benglai ones are A-tier.
Eh, more accurate to say it’s never been over 47%; last patch it was at ~46.7. It’s in the bottom quarter, but by no means the worst.
They have some strengths, too. They’re less weak to villagers, for example. Plus they can be healed by monks. And they’re actually tougher against normal enemies, since they benefit from the armor techs; it takes 12 hits for a ram to die to a knight, but 15 for an armored elephant. And notably, they can be garrisoned, which is something I don’t think is being taken advantage of atm. One armored elephant garrisoned in a castle could repel almost any number of attacking rams.
I do find it a bit odd that they discounted everything BUT their armored elephants, however. As-is, Dravidians are really encouraged to use mangonels especially. It would have been nice if the discount were for wood AND food, but that feels a bit wordy.
On open land maps at high Elo? No. Especially at reasonable sample sizes, it has never been above 46%
This is kinda useless when you are close to a castle. Also, in the earlier game, I’d take a vil repair over monks because it’s far easier to get a vil than a monk. That changes by late castle/early imperial. But who uses rams in imperial age anyway?
Garrison a few pikes inside the ram. That’s kinda the point of that.
Not really true, because 1v1 of a ram and an ele ram is a toss-up. Healing by garrisoning provides an advantage, but 2-3 rams will always kill your ele ram. Also, this is pointless anyway. If you want to take down rams, use mangonels. Not other ##### You are once again proposing strategies which could be useful under certain niche situations, but are suboptimal in every calculated situation.Meaning, you should never make an ele ram to counter opponent’s ram. However, if you already have one and it’s pretty close, you can use it just fine.
I agree, there is no good way to phrase that bonus. Can’t give a gold discount because that’s OP, no general siege discount because slavs have that. So, what can you do…
If you restrict it to specific data sets, sure. Not exactly meaningful data, though.
That’s an interesting question, actually. Do armored elephants block castle fire like rams? Could you use an armored elephant to escort a monk close to the castle? That could provide healing for the elephant AND far more offensive power than a ram+villager combination. I’d test it myself but I’ve got stardew valley open and if I try to run both my computer will combust.
I was pondering perhaps a siege workshop building discount? That could achieve similar results but benefit all the siege workshop units equally.
Heck, maybe roll it into the Barracks bonus. ‘Barracks Technologies and Siege Workshops cost -50%.’
I honestly have no clue how the Dravidians are supposed to be buffed without improving their Stable options. The stuff they can do is actually pretty strong already. The issue is that the stuff they can do is very limited.
There’s a lot that could be done with minimal changes. Here’s what I would do:
See how that plays out; I’d anticipate a fair improvement, primarily from the fish pond generation, bringing them up to maybe 46-47%% on Arabia, more in line with other maps where fishing is more available.
I dunno. Viper is convinced that the Dravidians are good, enough to basically mock the premise of this thread. I feel like he has his reasons to believe that. I’d say arguably the best AoE2 player currently is more qualified to give an opinion on a civ being good or bad than basically anyone else.
Take any continous period of data on open land maps with a sufficiently large sample size. I think that it is extremely meaningful.
Possibly, but way more micro involved. With a ram, just garrison a villager. What do you do if your opponent attcks your support unit with, say, vils and archers, or knights?If you have a ram, garrison your vil inside. If you have a monk, you are screwed. If that monk moves, the castle will gun him down. If he doesn’t, he dies anyway.
I personally don’t like any unit discounts for dravs. I think they should be like teutons. Better units from almost every building, but no unit discounts.
I mean, there are like a dozen ideas on this thread already.
I want just two things. Give them redemption, Add light cav to the units benefiting from medical corps.
Although I’d also be okay with giving them DemiserofD’s idea of extra LOS.
Yeah, and he lost against Hera 3 times concecutively with them. 2 of those were in the last 3 days.
Look, I love theViper. I think that he is the GOAT, and Hera will need a decade to catch up to him, if ever.
However, you cannot take one player’s opinion above the numbers, ever. Especially when Hera repeatedly shows that Dravs are weak by winning against them.
Yeah, I guess you must be right. If the best player can’t beat a strictly inferior player using the same civ 3 times, then it must be the civ and not the player. Hopefully Viper realizes that.
You’re still ignoring most maps to get the dataset you want, which makes the data biased at best. I honestly don’t even think it’s open maps either; it’s really maps without consistent fish. Being open alone isn’t enough, it’s being open and missing out on one of their primary eco bonuses at the same time. Fix that, and they’d be halfway there.
Well, if they attack you with knights, you get at least one conversion off, and that alone can be enough to win a fight. Not to mention, you’re saving quite a few resources otherwise spent on repairs. It’s an option I haven’t seen as much, at least, and I think people might be sleeping on the ability to heal them for free, but that’s certainly not helped by the fact that they don’t get a discount on them.
Really, that wood discount kinda throws their entire gameplan out of whack.
Sorry, I meant on the building itself.
I’m talking about the single most popular category in 1v1s. It is also the majority of 1v1 ranked games. I think you are downplaying it.
As I said, I’m only looking for ~50% win rate. I’ll even settle for 48% for all Elo ranges.
Not against someone who can micro. If you try to convert, I’ll just garrison the knights in the castle, and jump out near your monk. Or use vils to attack the monk and then get the knight out.
I’ve seen survivalist use this pretty often. Ele rams are actually pretty decent in closed maps, when you go for monk and siege with militia for support. Unfortunately, that’s the only case where they are as good as, or better than rams.
Ah, got it. That might be good, but I still don’t like it. It doesn’t fit with the civ, and isn’t very cohesive. It feels tacked on, just like the siege discount bonus
What’s also funny is that Dravidians and Ethiopians are the only two civs with a full Siege workshop, and neither were known for great Onagers or scorpions, from a historical perspective.
I just think you’re missing the most important thing, is my main point here. If you assume they’re bad at all open maps, then you’ll buff them differently compared to whether it’s just open maps lacking fish.
Just by throwing a few shore fish spawns into the maps currently lacking them, you could significantly bridge the gap. Honestly, it’s strange they’re lacking them, given that sheep, hunt, and berries are fairly universal.
No strategy is flawless. Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work generally. I did test it just now though, and if they have murder holes the monks die, so that’s unfortunate. Maybe they should increase the height of the armored elephant hit box, that should be pretty easy.
Well, Dravidians at least were known for their architecture. Having some sort of building bonus wouldn’t be unreasonable. I’m uncertain if it should be specifically targeting the siege workshop, though.
My silly thought for changing their team bonus was ‘all buildings give +1 population capacity.’
Well, actually, one South Indian empire did use catapults and cannons called damboli in defense of their fortresses. So there is some historical basis for good siege, for the Dravidians at least. But the Ethiopians are total nonsense.
That’s not as bad as I thought. Then, their poor tournament W/R is the issue on high elo. I think we can just add Redemption and call it a day. However, the chance of that happening is lower than Dravidians tournament W/R.
I was typing a whole lot of things clarifying and trying to explain his misconceptions. But you’ve put it really well and clearly.
I’d prefer if it acted as some kind of armor instead of attack. Like infantry ignore attack upgrades on enemy units or just blacksmith attack upgrades. Making only scorps and gunpowder and maybe some ranged uu effective against Dravidian infantry.
Not sure how to interpret all the 3 at once simultaneously but they could continue having their same mechanics if Wootz steel was replaced with a pseudo-armor or if they traded dodge shield for charge attack in a progressive way like a previous message in the thread mentioned. If people are hell bent on keeping them as a glass canon unit, they should cost much lower, like 40 food and 15 gold.
Yes this is very important and necessary.
This will actually become the new worst UT in the game by far, worse than even Aethism, Hussite reforms and Nomad. Why would you want to spend any resources on such an awful unit. Its not a Khmer or a Burmese or a Vietnamese elephant to have a good use. It would be much better to just keep doing halbs instead of 110 food 70 wood Dravidian BE.
Ideally this should be replaced by some very strong bonus on siege imo. Like a secondary projectile with 0.25 second delay that does 50% damage or something like that.
Exactly. That just means, its not a bonus that’s as good as it seems on paper. Its totally ok for a civ like Lithuanians to get an average skirm bonus since skirms are just a complementary unit for them. But not otherwise.
Again all of it just means slightly better trades in feudal forcing a couple of more units from the opponent. A skirmisher bonus is never going to be enough to compensate for several design handicaps.
And will continue to do so. Its not just a low elo thing to laugh at. He could get ahead in eco and micro the way out of some other opponent, but when he meets his someone his level, he will lose.
It just means any player will lose to an opponent his skill level. Doesn’t matter whether he wins or loses to someone weaker. There he’s expected to win.
Chinese have the best winrates at the highest level and worst at the bottom. And their winrates progressively gets better with elo. For Dravidians its just the opposite. That means when players learn the game better, Dravidians keep getting worse. Which simply implies the title of this thread.
This is great to hear, because its something that I always mention. But Dravidians are bottom 5 in the past 1 year of stats. They had like a bottom 15 but not a bottom 5 winrate in one of the patches which lasted for 3 weeks but that’s about it. They were, are and will remain an awful civ if no balance change comes through.
That’s just a change for Gurjaras and Hindustanis all-in castle age play and a flex for a fully boomed Bengali player, in case they get there. Don’t think anyone should ever do Armored elephants with Dravidians.
Yes. And Hindustanis B tier and Dravidian C tier.
Its more meaningful if you restrict by elo and map category. For example. If you took the overall stats of a civ like Spanish from last year, it could be 50.5% or something like that. It might look completely balanced but when you check individual map categories, you could notice they were a bit weak on regular start but OP on Nomad. And hence they got severely nerfed on Nomad and buffed a bit on Arabia. OG Vikings, Italians plenty of other examples.
Wow, the whole thread has been discussing that. Better economy bonus, alternate raiding unit, rework of urumi, some new unique building, tower related bonus, rework of medical corps, rework of elephant archer usability, dozen other things were suggested.
He was convinced OG Khmer were good, OG Portugese were good too. Both civs got 2 huge buffs and 1 small nerf to actually become good. Sometimes being the best player and frequently playing against weaker opponents, you get a misinformed opinion about the relative strength of a civ. It’s the whole reason he suffered through NAC4 with Bengalis.
This is Viper himself about his opinion on Bengalis after the tournament ended:
So next time when a pro player says a “this is a great civ”. Just don’t blindly follow that. See whether the player who said its good is picking that civ in tournaments. Is he able to win with them? Was the win against an opponent who’s equally good? (Like Hera, Liereyy, Yo or Tatoh for Viper) Was the win always on a certain specific map or a map category? (Like is it a water map, where several docks and galleys/fire galleys are produced. )
Not necessarily; it could just mean their strategies are different enough to not synergize well with meta strategies. The thing about Chinese is, they are basically tailor-made for high-elo players who know exactly what to do and have the skill to execute at high speed. Dravidians, by contrast, have strengths that are very unusual. Ignoring armor is unusual. Healing on elephants is unusual. High-dps elephant archers are unusual. Charge attack splash damage is unusual. Lacking any high speed units is VERY unusual.
They are the ultimate anti-meta civ, and so it makes perfect sense for them to be more challenging as you get to higher skill ratings, where the ability to make split-second decisions on instinct can win or lose a game.
Doesn’t necessarily imply they’re bad though. Remember that Hoang singlehandedly inflated the Celt winrates for years, and it TOOK that much to get people to realize how good they could be in the right hands, with the right strategies. I would not be at all surprised to see something similar here, but we will never find that from a meta player, because they just don’t take the time to sit down and run the same civ over and over a hundred times to experiment and figure out exactly how to play it.
Technically yes but to make their strategies competent, a dozen other changes need to be made to the game. Cost, hp, repair time, repair cost of palisade walls, houses, cost/speed/base hp of militia line, food collection rates from farming, base cost of a farm, archer production time, effectiveness of forward towers, position and amount of mines within wallable areas etc.
You could see how a lot of players play heavy into the feudal age sometimes when opponent has limited wood or gold and stone are forward. But such feudal friendly generations are rare and you can’t play Dravidians assuming you’d get such a generation. Even when map generations are like that, Dravidians are not the most optimal civilization. Magyars, Bulgarians, Khmer, Burmese would do better.
Its not about speed. There are 2300+ players with less than 40 apm who comfortably win with Chinese. Its a good set of bonuses, very good tech tree and high elo players know how to use that to their advantage against any other civ. The bonuses are more fundamental and benefit the player irrespective of army decision. You have extra villagers working throughout the feudal age, you’re able to collect much more resources than most other civs. Once in castle age you can go for multiple military upgrades or eco upgrades or monk techs or switch armies and the tech discount bonus is always applicable.
What you refer to as unusual is just mediocre and incompetent. Ignore armor is ridiculously expensive for a bonus that Burmese get for free. Elephant archers are not a castle age unit and lack important upgrades to scale well into the imperial age. Healing on elephants at that rate is awful. Charge attack, splash attack, ignore armor everything is a copy from other civ’s UU/UT. And those civs have better bonuses, monks, amazing tech tree.
It didn’t take anything. Celts are quite a mediocre civ on 1v1 land maps as well. Yes hoang picked them and kept winning quite a bit. Imo, he was just better than the players he was able to consistently succeed with that strategy. Despite the fact that he artificially boosted its winrate, almost no one ever picked it in tournaments. They are a little less terrible compared to Dravidians since they atleast have knights, a long lasting eco bonus and a fast moving uu. The only thing that was problematic was militia line getting extra speed in dark age and once that got balanced, the ######## stopped picking it.
Anyways its such a terrible thing if a civ is forced to do some kind of all-in like that all the time and can’t compete otherwise. Lithuanians, Berbers are very good for laming and villager rush. But they’re not forced to do that. Except for a few every civ has good usable options.
Its ok to experiment and figure out different ways to play a civ. But there should be something good for it. Good eco, game reversing uu, crazy good monk bonus, anti-conversion bonus, lower damage from siege, strong ranged units, towers something. If everything except skirms is generic, there’s nothing to figure out.
I honestly don’t understand why you bother presenting such a false image and then tearing it down. Anyone who plays the civ knows none of those things are true.
Dravidians have issues, yes, but their strengths and uniqueness are not their problem.
But honestly, this does elucidate my point pretty well. No matter how good a civ is, it’s impossible for it to shine if people deliberately blind themselves to what it has, in favor of what it doesn’t. The number of times I’ve seen players even ignoring the most basic of bonuses, like not taking nearby shore fish, boggles the mind.
