Dravidians are terrible

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1194

I think I pointed out your analysis is extremely flawed and it makes absolutely no statistical sense to add win rate vs time curves of 2 different civs even if their tech trees are approximately the same. Its more similar to econometrics and not elementary school math. And in this case, the civs aren’t even close to being the same. Slavs having a significantly diverse tech tree with great cavalry, mid game map expansion bonus with their UT, extra bonus on monks that otherwise have most of the important upgrades. So that misassumption of yours is completely invalid.

Second thing if you give double eco bonus to a civ its going to be faster and play out similar to a civ of approximately the same level of eco bonus, similar military tech tree. Closest to Dravidians after they get a food economy bonus like that is Vikings. But even they are much different because they do get knights with +2 armor in castle age but don’t get gunpowder or halbs in imp. So effectively you can’t compare Dravidians with any of the civs because of their awful tech tree and a long term food eco bonus would help them get to a point where their units suddenly seem quite good and usable…

If you have a civ with a set of units that can do well if somehow the player landed there but are unable to get there, you need to provide a good powerful mobile military unit like Mongol having lancers or a very strong economy to race ahead to get to that like Poles or Burgundians or huge military discount like Incas. Whenever a civ is buffed this way significantly, units that seemed normal or average will seem very strong, units that were underwhelming will seem usable. Remember how much people complained about Gurjara and Hindustani units and now nobody does. Likewise nobody bothered to play Malians but now they’re one of the most picked.

The same will become the effect with Dravidian units. With the farm bonus and 200 wood, they’ll match the timings of fastest civs like Mongols or Malay. Get tcs and monastery to get far ahead in economy or use the powerful food eco to go for 1 tc, infantry play. A mid game urumi transition might seem quite possible because they can use the villager lead with early tc addition to get stone and drop a defensive castle similar to OG Poles. Or simply boom fully and extensively to Elite elephant archers while getting sufficient map with guard towers or castles. The double eco bonus will support it.

The threshold number of urumi swordsmen you have mentioned will become viable for most of the players. And it won’t be just Viper masterpiecing against Matador. Once upon a time Khmer were a Viper masterpiece exclusive civ but now everyone is able to use them. Reason being the double eco bonus. Save the early wood from buildings and use the farm bonus for very fast uptimes. Lot of flexibility.

1195

Prove it? You can’t just wave it away. The rational conclusion is that if one civ bonus is strong in the lategame, and another civ is strong in the lategame, then if you combine both of them, it will become MUCH stronger in the lategame.

It’s just common sense, absent some other proof you can’t really provide, because it would require actually modding the changes into the game and testing them.

You ARE right that they may need some help to get to their ideal composition, but you’re completely wrong about how to get to it. If a civ has a powerful lategame composition, the LAST thing you want to do is give them a powerful long-term eco bonus, as that will only make them overbearing when they actually get there. You want to help them get to their powerful point, and then let that carry the torch from then on.

Which is why a while ago I proposed giving them a walling speed bonus. Walls are a potent tool that can delay games and allow a civ to get to their lategame comps more consistently, but won’t significantly help them on water or hybrid maps, where they are already quite potent.

That being the case, my current proposition would be:

Medical Corps: +50% universal healing speed, Elephants Heal 30hp/sec
Build Stone Walls 100% Faster
+1 urumi charge attack damage(to 30, allowing them to oneshot default monks).

This handily addresses all their current weaknesses while preserving their civ identity AND respecting their historical strengths in terms of architecture.

I think it’s relevant to note that Hera was recently talking about how stone walls are underused now, and he’s re-evaluating their use in games.

1196

Proof is from concepts like statistics, data analytics, data interpretation and visualization, theory of probability and data based inference. A winrate vs length of game is a multivariate distribution with each civ bonuses, tech tree, uu, ut, map features being different variables.

A strictly late game bonus is something like infantry doing double the damage or paper money effect. The benefit is strictly applicable after a certain point in mid imperial age. Then what you’re saying is true. It’ll be a good late game with a stronger bonus resulting in an even stronger bonus. But an extra dropoff by farmers isn’t a strictly late game bonus. And in fact it’s a better bonus for the early and mid game.

Second, Dravidians have a good, above average late game. But its not extraordinary by any means. Its gold composition, siege units are subpar compared to most civs. One of the worst light cav but that’s compensated by extra strong halbs and skirms. Poles and Slavs have at least equal if not better late game especially before gold runs out and they have permanent eco bonus. So its not game breaking either. Its going to be a compoff for abysmal castle age military diversity.

Its totally also fine to neglect the food eco bonus and give cheap military instead. Something like supplies impacting all military units. Then they become similar to the Incas but still without mobility.

medical corps unfortunately are not something of any value for a civ that doesn’t have the eco to support an elephant transition nor has conversion resistance. Suppose if Elephant archers were impacted by all barrack techs you could buff this as a reasonable option to make them viable. It’ll still not be sufficient but could be useful in some matchups at the very least.

stone walls 100% faster is still applicable only when you have a strong mid game economy. No matter how fast they build, you still need to spend considerable villager time and resources to stone wall enough of your map and by no means they’re invincible. You can’t stone wall and expect to jump to elite urumi with wootz steel directly or elite eleph archers. You still need some powerful mid game eco bonus to stone wall, boom, produce sufficient units for defense when opponent pushes with mangonels or breaks in with a forward castle.

Urumi +1 for 30 damage. At a stage where its a swarm of elite urumi with wootz steel, monks stay relevant only against Aztecs. So that’s not something that handles many use cases. If you get to 60+ elite urumi+ a bunch of elite skirms + canons, you’re fine. But almost impossible to get to this combination. And that’s because of subpar eco for that tech tree.

if you want to respect historical strength in architecture, ideal way to do that is with a strong defensive bonus. Buildings and foot units -30% damage from siege, towers increase rof of infantry, tower cost reduced based on current infantry count, some special type of building that slows down enemy units within its range or reduces damage from enemy siege.
All of these are bonuses related to buildings and they are quite useful for protecting the civ identity.

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1197

Sorry, but that’s just technobabble.

I stand by what I said. If you give one bonus that’s causes a powerful lategame, to a civ that has powerful lategame units, you’ll get a civ that’s not much better in the short term, but overbearing in the long term. It’s just common sense.

I don’t see much point in continuing this part of the debate, so I’m just going to leave it here, and let others be the judge.

Moving on.

Broadly, that’s why I want to buff it. Making it a universal healing multiplier could be a fun way to make them better as a whole, without becoming too OP.

Better to buff them where their current bonuses are underperforming, and make them good, than to add entirely new bonuses and neglect the existing ones.

That said, I still disagree with the idea you need an ‘elephant eco’. They are not damage units, they are tanks, meant to operate in tandem with other unit types. If you try to make 40 elephants in castle age, you are always going to lose. But that doesn’t make them bad, it means you’re using them poorly.

Well, that’s the neat thing about +100% build speed; currently, it costs about 6.5 resource-time to build a palisade wall, versus about 10 resource-time to build a stone wall. +100% build speed will cut that down to 7.5 resources, which is actually a more potent bonus than the Mayans bonus, AND they’ll construct 40% faster than palisades, so you can get your base protected much more efficiently.

The objective of walls is never to be invincible, it’s just to buy time, and for a civ that needs to get to the lategame, buying time is exactly what they need.

The reason I suggest stone walls in particular is multi-purpose. For one, it’s a bonus that isn’t seen elsewhere, so could be relatively unique. For two, it doesn’t make them completely unraidable in the dark age, or synergize super well with their wood bonus. And for three, it doesn’t make them inordinately more powerful on water maps. Making docks way more tanky, for example, could have big impacts on hybrid maps, where they are already extremely strong.

Hence, walls. Limited impact on water, delaying effects on land, helps to curtail the movements of faster enemy units and assert map control…to me, this seems like perhaps THE solution for Dravidians, over almost anything else I’ve thought up.

That’s the great thing about giving them the damage to oneshot monks; you don’t NEED a big mass to do that, you just need to get to them, and catching monks is incredibly easy with urumis. With the splash damage on top of that, urumis could be an S-class monk killer, which is exactly what Dravidians need at every stage of the game.

Side note, Wootz Steel is not a tech you should be prioritizing if you’re going for Urumis. The whole point of that unit is achieving critical mass so you don’t NEED wootz steel, and wootz is so expensive it basically prohibits reaching that point. Instead, you would be better off going for more urumis and destroying your enemy in one big, short fight.

The more I play with them, the more I see urumis as a profoundly defensive unit for most of the game. If you have to choose between militia or urumis, militia will be more potent for most directly offensive purposes, but are terrible at defending anything. As such, they work great with slow, tanky units like elephants. By contrast, urumis have the ability to kill small groups of attackers very quickly, protecting weak units like siege or monks. This makes them great defensively, but with less of the weaknesses of halbs, and with actual offensive power as well. But since Dravidians lack Redemption, they need a counter to enemy monks, and that could be perfectly fulfilled by the urumis.

+1 damage would also take the number of attacks for a base urumi to kill a Sanctity monk from 3 to 2.

1198

So we got the grand finale from Hera’s part. Now waiting for TheViper.

Hera didn’t propose any ideas which is surprising. Guess he doesn’t have any clue.

Militia line gets the double the effect from Gambeson and Squires - this is my latest proposal. Maybe you can add Arson as it is just the effect of Wootz Steel against building. I’m unsure about Supplies though. 30f/20g LS with 3/5 armor as well as 1.08 speed sounds scary. It has almost the same stat as Romans LS under Centurion buff but at half food cost trading off 2MA. In Imperial Age the stat would be balanced if we just remove Champion. However again 30f/20g is too cheap.

Honestly we can just give this and call it a day. But that will never happen. That explains this thread with 1100 replies.

1199

None of that is technobabble. Its just math and concepts behind predictive analytics. But I see your point

That’s what the stuff I wrote below that is for. A food economy is not strictly a late game bonus. Its more powerful as a bonus from feudal age like Khmer, Slavs and Poles. Like how easy it was to get to Szlacha knight spam before the nerf but not that easy now. How amazing Slavs were before DE and how rough they are to use now in comparison. Farming eco is a bonus with major mid game impact.

The current bonuses are performing poorly because they don’t fit. A civ that doesn’t have knights nor any kind of usable cavalry needs at least 2 of the 4 very powerful foot archers, siege, monks, economy.

So no, its not better to buff the current bonuses. About the elephants, no its not something that you mix in low numbers simply because of vulnerability to conversions. In cae you don’t see any monks you can make a few to maybe take out a scorpion or mangonel and drive weak units away but not something you can consistently mix for value.
As the game goes on and hits later stages, a few castle age elephant units are not going to be worth their investment against imperial age units. It won’t make sense to get an expensive elite upgrade for just producing a few units either. So you either commit atleast moderately to it making 20-30 units with full upgrades and mix it with a complementary unit or you don’t go for it at all. That’s the only way you play elephants.

Mayans have cheaper walls and longer lasting stone. Still no one goes for it simply because it doesn’t buy you much time. You just fully give up map control when you wall tight.

If you try to wall through the middle of the map soon enough, you’re very likely to lose the walling villagers. Even otherwise the walk time plus build time and 250-300 stone invested is a huge burden on the economy even if its relatively lower in comparison with a generic civ. 7.5 resource per tile of wall puts you behind by another 300 resources. So you’re down by 600 resources that early. Whatever time you think you’re buying you’re just playing catch-up. Your opponent comfortably build, pickup all relics, occupy all mines and then break-in at different spots to raid.

This is why stone walling isn’t done. Its Palisades close to the base followed by houses behind when there’s an attempt to break-in.

No they don’t. Urumis are not a unit like conqs to go for in the early castle age. There’s no range or speed nor are they low food costing for fast return on investment. At that stage monk bonuses matter. Urumis much like other food heavy infantry are a late castle age or early imperial age unit. When you reached a point in game where you are able to produce lots of urumis from multiple castles +1 to kill monks sure might add some value but its not the main point of concern.

Maybe while against something like an Arena fast imp monk treb push or migration mid take over, this could be helpful. But not much otherwise. This could be a justifiable buff if they had extra powerful siege. Like if their siege units were harder to kill or always killed more enemy units. Celt SO, Ethiopians, Bohemian, Portuguese canons or something like that. Then it would pair well on closed maps. Otherwise some filler throw away units will shield the monks and the charge attack will just get used up on those or the urumi will just get converted before it reaches the monk circling around the block.

Urumis as a defensive unit is fine against meso. But against the usual cavalry, its just going for something unnecessary. If they were having a base speed of 1.2 and 75 hp or more melee armor they could add more value over halbs to justify their use. But for their current stats you’re better off saving the gold and just patrolling halbs instead.

1200

Seems so. However, this is still the biggest issue for me. I don’t think there should be a civ in the game against which a single strategy will work 9/10 times (in hera’s opinion). Every civ should have an amount of unpredictability that makes scouting necessary on open maps.

This change is terrible imo. Firstly, you don’t get that much armour by castle age, and the upgrade will require over 2000 res in castles, upgrade, and units. Secondly, removing urumis from this is wacky and kinda weird. Urumis are a fairly weak unit already, this change will just nerf a weak unit.

Seems like Hera has locked the video to only his paid subs. I don’t think this is healthy for the community. I do occasionally sub to the creators I like, but this has completely turned me off from Hera.

While this might be true, they also cost 20 gold which can be substantial. Additionally, urumis aren’t as good as halbs against cav despite being decent. There was a game recently where viper was playing as dravs against lithuanians. He was struggling with urumis, and halb switch won him the game.

I honestly think that’s enough. There’s still a huge weakness in the raiding department. That is why my changes have remained more or less been the same:

  1. Give them redemption
  2. Give medical corps bonus to light cav as well
  3. Change the siege discount to Siege move 15% faster
  4. Give elite urumis +1 pierce armour and/or reduce their food cost by 5/10
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1201

As I’ve said before, I just don’t see it. Dravidian elephant archers are more than capable of killing monks as long as you have at least, say, three, and you have been paying attention to the fight enough to react quickly. Monks ARE a weakness, but nowhere near as major as for battle elephants, for example. Honestly, I’d rate dravidian elephant archers as more resistant to monks than bengali ones, simply because an extra second of conversion time isn’t worth as much as dealing 25% more damage in the same time.

Which isn’t to say monks aren’t an issue, but that’s why I’m proposing a buff to urumis to make them a better monk counter. Being able to one or twoshot monks would be a pretty big deal and make them a much riskier investment.

I know the justifications why stone walls aren’t currently used, but I don’t always agree with that reasoning. Earlier Hera was even saying that he thinks that stone walls are under-used now(which I agree with), and that would be even more the case with a major walling bonus.

Here, we’re talking about building your walls 40% faster than palisades, for a similar resource cost, and 10x the durability. Yes, they could siege you down, but then it’s siege vs siege and Dravidians win that. Yes, they could raid you early, but Dravidians have a powerful early boost, so they should win that, too.

Walls would really complete them in a way little else could.

I disagree completely! Much like Conqs, urumis are at their strongest early on, because of their charge attack. If you get out 7 urumis you can instantly kill knights, for instance. Urumis actually fall off as the game progresses, because they benefit proportionately less from all their upgrades.

Honestly, I think the typical approach is using them completely wrong. Urumi charge attacks(which is their main strength) benefit the least from armor upgrades, attack upgrades, AND wootz steel, so waiting for all those before using them is basically showing them at their weakest possible point.

The problem with going for halbs instead is, halbs are very vulnerable to skirmishers. I’ve seen MANY games where someone tries going for halb/skirm against knight/skirm, and I’ve never seen it effectively used. What inevitably happens is, they have to keep the halbs back to protect them from the enemy skirms, while the enemy can keep their knights forward easily. Inevitably, this results in the halb/skirm player making a tiny mistake, letting their halbs get too far back, the knights instantly clean up the skirms, and then the skirms clean up the halbs, and it’s GG.

And worst of all? Even if you manage to win the fight, you still only have halbs and skirms, and can’t actually do anything with them!

Urumis have all the instant damage potential of halbs(heck, MORE, thanks to the splash), but can also do everything champions can do. That’s valuable against far more than just meso civs. Honestly, given their mere 2 bonus damage against eagles, I would not describe them as particularly effective in that matchup.

Well, I think it depends what your enemy is using, to be fair. If they’re going pure cav, then yeah, Urumis aren’t going to be a great choice, and halb will be better. It’s in their versatility that they’re strong, the ability to be a halb AND a militia.

Got a link to the game btw? Always happy to watch a dravidians game!

1202

Here you go! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSjk7tAZZ8s

It’s not that urumis are totally useless, it’s that they are too expensive and don’t do anything that halbs/champions can’t.

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1203

I think faster speed is better like 1.15. Countering Skirmisher is Dravidians’ Champion job. They can be good combo together, Urumi is siege killer and Champion is tankier one.

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1204

You clearly don’t understand what the resistance bonus means nor impact of probability per conversion interval. Its 1 extra second of minimum conversion time AND 14% lower probability of conversion each second. Expected conversion times for Bengali elephants are about 3 seconds greater because of that. Second thing is the speed difference being greater which makes running away or charging on monks better.

Now according to your opinion, elephant archers are not something to mass as a main army but just mix a few of them. Monks are used against a few elephant archers like that in the early or mid castle age. Like 20-30 mins. While Urumi swordsmen numbers grow after 35 or 40 mins. At that point 5 or 10 nonelite elephant archers don’t add any value to
whatever ranged units you have otherwise and only mess up the ability to maneuver the group. Your opponent is not going to make dozens of monks to convert those 5 castle age elephant archers when you have dozens of urumis and other ranged units.

Urumi swordsmen getting extra benefit to kill monks is rather a bonus to protect canons from conversion than to make the negligible value castle age elephant archer addition feasible. You either go full elephant archer with your own monks which is possible if you hypothetically have a massive eco lead like maybe in a hybrid map. That’s the only way Dravidian elephant archers add value.

Hera’s point about stone walls is in imperial age when ranged unit civs push from center, cav civs buy time by raiding from different areas. Stone walling a part of your base limits raiding. That’s the underused part.
Its 100% guaranteed to lose low elo approach to stone wall the entire base before castle age to just boom.

Palisades are 3 wood. Wood is 30% faster gathered. And the palisade wall is just meant to prevent damage from feudal surprise attacks. Its not meant to protect until fully boomed imperial age army is out. Siege vs siege Dravidians aren’t guaranteed to win. Its not a celt siege nor do they have extra range or blast radius or projectile speed. They’re just cheap. Mangonel by quality is still generic and mangonel vs mangonel is still a random outcome.
And if they could raid you early 200 wood is not going to magically make Dravidians win that. Knights or similar cavalry will do plenty of damage and force idle time if your walling or defense failed and cavalry raids began. If you want to stone wall and get compensated without much loss, the Dravidian will need a bigger eco bonus. Either food or something like eco bonuses have 50% more impact like @benithisrael recommended.

No one has ever gone for a fc castle drop and caused havoc with urumi ever. They don’t have RANGE. Conqs have RANGE, SPEED. It is NOT just dps that makes units like conqs deadly. They can kite, kill a couple of knights and run back to regroup with reinforcements. Strictly speaking knights are just used to drive away the conqs to get enough monks or ballistics on ranged units or get stone for a defensive castle.
Urumi will kill a few knights and then die themselves if they are in low numbers, so you lose the mass. If the urumi numbers are high, the knight player WILL NOT take the fight…Knights are 30% faster. Knight player will add a few scorps and take the fight later with sufficient knights. Until then the knights will be used to kill reinforcements.

Elite urumi have 5 extra hp, 5% extra speed and same p.armor as halb in imp. There’s effectively no value in terms of resilience. Everything you have mentioned will happen the exact same way with urumis as well. If the numbers are excessively high, congratulations you’ve achieved the near impossible of defending and getting to 60+ elite urumi, a blue moon situation.
If you’re talking about castle age, there’s no way you can afford a castle, enough mass of urumis to kill knights+ skirms…You have to use pikes, monks, skirms and your own siege and just hope the pathing, monk rng and siege hits workout in your favor. Which is the exact drawback of Dravidians mentioned both by the thread’s OP and repeated by Hera in his video.

1205

I don’t think the conversion resistance is typically very meaningful, tbh. If they don’t get the instant conversion, it usually doesn’t happen at all, so that’s what I’m most concerned about.

Anyway, the point of this idea is that you don’t need a large mass of urumis. This isn’t a case where you need to outnumber the entire enemy force, just enough to get through and kill the monk. And if that can be done with 3 units, then that’s a heavy damper on monk use.

It all kinda synergizes together, really. Getting the castle allows Urumis, which counter monks, and Medical Corps, which helps elephants, and defends the base, which is also needed due to poor speedy options.

You’re forgetting the time spent building. The seven seconds it takes to build the palisade costs villager work time, which equals resources. So increasing wall build speed IS a resource bonus, in practice. Plus it allows you to wall your base faster, or wall more of it.

You wouldn’t stonewall EVERYTHING, but just being able to close some obvious avenues of attack is going to make a big difference to a civ unable to chase things down.

Sure, conqs have range. They also cost about twice as much(ish). Honestly, I’ve never seen someone try a spanish conq rush style approach with dravidians, but I’d be interested in seeing how it works out. I’d expect pretty decent results.

You’ve forgotten the bonus damage. Urumis take 22 hits to die, vs 10 for a pike.

1206

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do this, but something happened and I’m really annoyed. One of my posts got flagged. In this post I quoted lillyjuliet’s post, I mean that user who is obviously an AI, and then another user’s post in which he mocked that AI. I put some laughing smilies and said “the AI attacks again”. With that joke I was referring to lillyjuliet. Why did it get flagged? This is meant for whomever flagged: I was making fun of the AI user.

1207

Castle age urumis have 8+12 attack, +1 is not going to 1-shot monks. Also, sanctity is much easier to get to than Urumis. In Imp, monks are not much of a problem anyway.

FYI, devs have been nerfing turtle strats in various ways since DE was released. I really don’t think they are going to reverse themselves just for Dravidians. The broader community would demand nerfs immediately. People hate playing against walls on arabia.

On a different note, has anyone tried the Roman YouPudding strat except with Dravidians instead of Romans.
Reasons why it could be good:

  1. Dravidians get lots of extra wood to help with getting the market, blacksmith, siege workshops built.
  2. Dravidian scorps have a big wood discount, not as big as Romans’ gold discount but could be enough?
  3. Dravidians can add discounted mangonels to support scorps if required.
  4. In the video, YouPudding did not keep vills under the TC. This is a vulnerability - they are needed to stop enemies from walking under it and invading your base. The problem is that there are not enough straggler trees to keep vills working for long while keeping up with the wood demand. But Dravidians need less wood overall so they could keep a couple of vills working on straggler trees most of the time just in case.

Reasons why it could be bad:

  1. The strat required rams to kill buildings, but AE cost a lot of food. You would have to rely on the market a lot and it might be too expensive.
  2. Dravidian vills work slower than Romans, so the timings could be too slow for this to work.
1208

Oh my God, 1108 replies of a never ending argument.

1209

Just goes to show…
Dravidians are terrible.

1210

I mean, if the thread length is an indicator, it’s that Dravidians are controversial if anything. If they simply were terrible, the thread would be over already as everyone would agree on them being bad.

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1211

Most people do agree on them being bad. The controversy is about how bad they are and how to fix them. I’d say that a lot of it is also just venting. The issues with them were identified a year ago, but devs still haven’t meaningfully addressed them.

1212

It doesn’t synergize at all in terms of game situation. When you have a castle and almost close to clicking imp, 5 elephant archers mixed with a big group of ranged units adds negligible value. Its pointless to invest a lot of food into urumi swordsmen to protect them. You’d need that food for chemistry, bracer, thumb ring, two handed or halb upgrade etc.

When you have 5 elephant archers with 15-20 crossbows, those elephant archers add decent value but you won’t have a castle up at that stage. So there’s no urumi swordsmen to protect Elephant archers from monks. You just have to use your xbows or starting scout.

The most logical use of value for urumis getting an extra attack against monks is when you have a castle up, having a treb canon fight and redemption monks are trying to convert your canons. Or you have onagers, opponent has a civ without canons but is trying to convert.

I get that faster walling means extra villager work time. I’m explaining to you the purpose of palisade walls. When someone does 40-50 tiles of palisade walls in feudal age it’s just to avoid late feudal age or early castle age army from causing a lot of damage to your base by directly hitting your wood or gold without enough time for you to react. Palisades are enough for this purpose of buying time to react and its not worth spending 200 stone for the early game protection.

Stone wall’s use on the other hand is limiting the areas from where you can get raided from mid castle age onwards. Your opponent army especially cavalry can attack from multiple sides. If you are stone walled that would limit the raiding ability.
Its useful to stone wall with a civ that lacks good cavalry but the faster build time doesn’t add much value for a civ like Dravidians. You’d have like 60 or 70 vills gathering about 1500 resources, if you do 40 tiles of stone walls, you save about 2 mins of gather time which is about 50-60 extra resources. That’s negligible value.
If its a civ like mayans or vikings or malay which has the momentum and guaranteed to have the eco lead against most other civs, this could be of high value. You’ll be in imp and start pushing from a hill with +3 ranged units. Opponent will be forced to raid to buy some time and the faster walling will be useful.
Either ways its a minor bonus that complements a strong economy civ.

Its like 40% more cost, not twice.
And conqs have SPEED apart from range. You hit from a range and you can run away if it seems risky. That’s high value for the resources invested. If you ever paid any proto try that against an equal opponent they’ll either refuse or the result will be nothing close to decent. At best you can drive your opponent away from neutral gold mines or a stealthy lumber camp and maybe kill a couple of extra vills than what some other unranged infantry uu might.

That just means knight player has to pullback and dodge a few more seconds.
it’s also multiple barrack production vs one castle production if you’re talking about mid castle age knight/skirms. And if its late imp, its 20 gold vs 0.

1213

Elephant archers add more than you might think. If you compare an army of 10 crossbows, to 8 crossbows and one elephant archer, you sacrifice 5% of your damage, but gain 35% extra HP, and closer to 50% durability after you account for armor.

That aside, I don’t think this is exactly the circumstance where you would be building urumis. archers are already more than decent at taking out monks.

Rather, it would more likely be in tandem with battle elephants, likely as a continuation of a scout Rush. Dravidian battle elephants are perfectly decent in the castle age, but they need something to protect them from Pikes and monks. Scout Cavalry can defend them from monks, but push the enemy into pikes. Militia can protect them from pikes, but do basically nothing against monks. If urumis could effectively counter both Pikes and monks, it could instead Force the enemy into archers, which could in turn be countered by elephant archers. Meanwhile, the offensive power of the battle elephants could allow urumis to withdraw and recharge periodically.

Obviously this is all in ideal circumstances. But on the whole, I think making them more effective against monks is a reasonable direction to take them, given the profoundly elephant nature of the civilization.

Anyway, as far as walls are concerned, I think the most important thing is whether you can get your walls done in time or not. Time is critical in the early feudal age, so being able to shave off just two seconds per wall tile can make a big difference in how effectively you protect your economy.

I certainly wouldn’t expect people to use stone walls for the entirety of their defense, but with a bonus that makes it faster to build stone walls than Palisades, it could be very reasonable to use stone walls in many circumstances. Not only will they be up faster and be effectively indestructible for the entirety of the feudal age, they will also retain their effectiveness for most of the rest of the game.

Basically, my main goal here is to alleviate the fact that dravidians tend to lose their games in the mid game. That’s exactly where stonewalls are highly effective, and the skillful aspect would be determining where to use these cheaper and easier to use Stone walls, and where it is better to instead use Palisades like normal.

Returning to Urumis, my main point of comparison with conquistadors is that they both have powerful stats right from the start. They definitely have differences as well, but they both serve approximately an opposite role to a unit like, for example, the konnik, which requires a large number of upgrades to become effective, but then becomes highly effective in exchange.

As a result of these proportionately higher initial stats, they are proportionately more potent the earlier you can get them out. Waiting until you have full upgrades would therefore show them in the worst possible light.

This is further accentuated by their utility. They can offer the functions of a Pikeman, but without the weakness to skirmishers. They can offer the functions of a swordsman, but with dramatically higher speed, enough to evade archers. With a few small bonuses against monks, they could even offer the approximate services of a scout cavalry, but without channeling the enemy into Pikemen of Their Own.

Basically, I am of the opinion that this is a broadly useful unit, which is currently being used almost exclusively for its endgame potential. But I think, much like Serjeants in the current Sicilian strategy, there is some serious potential here that is not currently being exploited.