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. Theyāre bad because stats wise they offer very little value for the extra 20 food cost compared to militia line and thatās 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 theyāre 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, thoughā¦ 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 youāre 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 matadorās caliber.
( Game link is getting censored) ############################################################
Personally, I find a castle worthwhile only if I can make a unique unit from it or Iām 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 donāt do well against cavalry individually like teutonic knights can. Dravidian donāt 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 Iām 3 TC to imp, I need castles to make trebs. I canāt tech switch easily if I donāt have the economy for it. And in my caliber, I canāt 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 youāre 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 Iāve figured out why they wonāt 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 dĢ¶rĢ¶aĢ¶mĢ¶aĢ¶, dilemma. Or maybe both. 11
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I will say, excited for Viperās 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, Viperās insights on Dravidiansā performance in tournaments are really welcome in my opinion.
Though I wouldnāt be surprised if heās gonna do a more meme-y answer with āduhh I didnāt play longswords/Urumis obviously Kappaā.
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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, Iād 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 donāt need to force that.
For civ bonus, Iād 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 Viperās 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 itāll 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. Thatās 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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Double the effect of Medical Corps and add Redemption, done civ is fixed.
You guys are complaining that a NAVAL INFANTRY CIV is weak on open mapsā¦ This idea of pushing every civ to be viable on Arabia (which is understandable since is the most played map by a very large margin) is breaking civs in other mapsā¦ Just look at Portuguese/Malay, they were mediocre on Arabia but very strong on Water Mapsā¦ now they are both very good on Arabia but utterly broken on any Water Map.
I know Water Maps are not popular, I donāt enjoy them too much either, but they exist and the game is balanced considering their existence. If anything I want a DLC that completely reworks Naval Battle in AoE2, adding 1 or 2 more base ships and at least 1 water bonus per civ.
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Please explain yourself how Portuguese and Malay and utterly broken on water maps now??, Portuguese are still same as strong on water maps because the berry bonus only helps them on open maps (on water maps people often delay the berries) and if they are still too strong on certain cases is because of the freaking feitoria, that has to be reworked, as for Malay, how are they OP on water when they lit didnāt get any buff there (If anything they got a nerf long time ago when the fish traps bonus was changed) and the free infantry armor upgrades only helps them on land maps ( Also lost Gambesons one patch ago to balance that).
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I will let someone much more knowledgeable than me explain it:
Malay timestamp:
Portuguese timestamp:
Basically, civs that were already good on Water Maps receive buffs that made them balanced for land maps whilst making them even stronger on Water. Sure, you will delay Berries with Portuguese, but you will take them eventually and gain extra wood from doing so, which helps snowball an already strong water civ out of control. Its not very hard to understand the arguments for it, imo.
Hold on. The argument is that they are broken, and it is a bad thing. If their win rate on water did not change with their buffs on land, your entire point is invalid. A civ being in S tier is not evidence of them being broken.
Your claim was that the land buffs made portuege and malay broken. So, support that. This tier list does not do that for you.
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I mean, you re talking to someone who plays no more but open maps (both 1v1s and Tgs) so you can expect this kind of response jaja.
Iām still waiting for the claim that Malay are utterly broken on water maps since the free infantry armor upgrades.
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The last time Hera picked Malay before their buff in a 1v1 tournament was Hidden cup 4 and I think he never picked Portugese before their buff. As you might know several tournaments before 2023 had water and hybrid maps where his choice of civs were Persians, Italians, Vikings, Bengalis and Koreans. If they were that great already on maps with water why not pick them at least once. Thereās plenty of cases like Vietnamese, Khmer, Portugese, Malay which are now good civs but were abysmal before their main buffs but pros like Hera, Viper kept saying they are āfineā and yet never picked them in tournaments ever. When you draft 20 civs for a tournament and never even consider some civs in any tournament, how on earth are those civs āfineā?
And lets just say they are indeed very strong on water now. Thatās fine. 0.2% of the games are on water maps and there are less than 10 naval civs. So thereās no good balance on water either way and some random civ canāt compete with Italians, Vikings. Neither Portugese or Malay are broken wrt other common water picks. They are 9 wins to 11 losses in TTL this season and were 8 wins to 15 losses in prior seasons.
For Portugese, you get 25 extra wood per minute with 4 on berries for 10 mins so 250 wood in 10 mins, Vikings save 13 wood per galley which is at least 26 wood per minute, Dravidians get 200 + 25 per dock built extra which is usually more than 250 wood, Italians would have saved about 100 from fishing ships and faster uptimes, Japanese about 200 from all the camps and mill built. The change made them competitive. If at all they feel broken its because of Feitoria and the right thing to do is nerf those, not the berry bonus.
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