Don’t know what you mean. My post did not talk about what kind of UT I want.
My critique is that your UT design is clunky, not that it is new.
Only lithuanians are that fast to building docks. If Dravidians were also that fast, they would probably be OP vs most civs on hybrid maps. Dravidians don’t need another buff to help them on hybrid maps. They need a buff for land maps.
you can genuinely balance a game around 2 principles, max enjoyment, and max efficiency. Dravidians have enough bonuses to be at least somewhat efficient on some maps. As for enjoyment, not everyone is Hera, click and macro god, so yes, civs without Knight-line are harder to play, hence less attractive, most people enjoy easy wins.
also probably, they learned the game on 1 civ (say Lithuanians), and recognize now the weaknesses it has but don’t see the benefits it gives (e.g. allowing a 17 pop Scouts).
for Feudal, it’s a good bonus. More importantly, unlike most bonuses, say Teutons bonus (cheaper farms), it’s front-loaded, meaning you get the benefit immediately, while Teutons bonus starts to show in late Feudal (when you could have already taken damage). In the end, there are 2 ways to play extended Feudal, mass Archers and spears, and full Scouts. The latter is what Dravidians can do and conveniently it offers more flexibility because if it really becomes an “extended” Feudal you can sort of pick your uptime by dropping a market, which you can’t do with full Scouts (typically you are not so heavy on Gold and also Scouts take food).
It’s no mystery Dravidians aren’t even a top 15 Arabia civ with all these considerations, missing the Knight line hurts as it makes reaching Castle age first unrewarding, but it is possible to make them work. For me personally, I enjoy these gimmicky civs more than your average 1500 elo “drop 3 stables, sell the stone and go full knights while occasionally buying food to keep the 3rd stable not idle” which is probably THE easiest strat in the game and I dare call it a bit brain dead even.
The -50f is just a free villager, its not a penalty. And Mayans get close to 400 extra food from gaia, 150 from 2 boars and 2 deer.
The bonuses of all these eco civs would easily surpass the extra wood and skipping horse collar around 15 mins. And they have great military options and their eco bonuses grow stro#### and continue to last throughout the castle age. Dravidians have neither. If it were a civ that has knights, +100w, +150w in dark and feudal along with +175f/farm will be quite strong but for a civ like this its just barely sufficient.
Yes indeed. And the bonus grows stronger in castle age because heavy plow gives ~5% increase in farming rate which most players can’t afford in early castle age. And by mid castle age when that’s researched, cheaper castles begin to have an impact.
Knights simply are the best castle age unit and on any open land map, they add a lot of value. And even more for Franks with their +2 LOS. And even on other maps its still 500 resources extra until castle age and depending on map control importance, -162 stone per castle is significant as well.
The cheaper barrack techs is such an illusion - You can’t raid or push with pikes, if you make too little pikes, knights will just kill them and go get healed back by monks and if you make too many, opponent will just stop doing knights and you are just naturally behind because you’ve wasted a lot of resources into pikes, long swords in caslte age are impractical against all non-meso civs as well. The only meaningful benefit of this bonus is man-at-arm upgrade in feudal, champion and halb upgrade in imperial age. When you hit imp with 70-80 vills both the 200wood and these discounts are quite minor
Earlier extra wood gives more flexibility but I wouldn’t mind +200 feudal and +400 castle age at all.
AVERAGE on hybrid, GOOD ON WATER MAPS that no one plays. Hypothetically speaking if we had 4 or 5 different types of buildings on water, multiple economic water units, multiple navy units, some amphibious units that can pack or unpack like trebs to either fight on land or water, defensive water structures like Sea towers, sea walls etc, then water itself becomes an interesting aspect of the game. Right now its awful and almost negligible number of players prefer water.
You’ve hit the right point - those are amazing civs on closed maps with a mix of good siege, monks, bonuses on aggressive units AND yet they have knights. But Dravidians are below average on closed maps as well.
Fair enough for the late game what about castle age compensation for the lack of knights. Some of the no bloodline civs you mentioned still have knights.
He mentioned that in a context while talking about various ways of using knights to get value. When you do forward siege, its quite common to move to a different gold or stone far away from where the fights are happening. If you the cavalry player spot it, you can just use a few of your knights to quickly kill or drive away those villagers. He’s just talking about the advantages of having a unit that’s fast, has high hp and high damage output in a CONTEXT, as a counter statement to your comment that counters to knights dont end at knights and Camels.
You can of course do archers and pikes and be defensive while preserving your ranged unit numbers but you need a super strong eco like Chinese, Mayans, Vikings or Britons to do that and still hit imp much faster than the cav opponent. Otherwise you won’t have much map left and the cavalry player will wipe your army out after getting cavalier and +4 armor. And this is why all archer civs other than these 4 have poor win rates on land maps, never preferred in tournaments. And btw, they all have and many times do make knights (or eagles)
“Missing redemption sucks and they’re not a top tier arabia civ” is something that you can say for Tatars or Magyars or Ethiopians. This civ is just terrible on Arabia. Absolutely terrible.
Comparison to goths is the most appropriate one - they’re equally terrible as well.
You probably beat them with a civ like Mayans, Britons or Vikings. Not even Dravidians, just try picking Koreans or Vietnamese, don’t add a stable and try to defend against knights. You’ll drop 100 elo within a few games.
More like an average game point of view. Food is more valuable because all eco upgrades cost more food, military upgrades cost more food, villagers cost food, going upto next age also costs a lot of food and food is the slowest in terms of gathering rate. If you have 3 tcs - you’re spending about 360 food per minute just for villager production. Of course wood and gold are more valuable if you’re pushing with monks and siege and just a few knights.
20% faster attacking Camels, eagle-like uu, cheaper vills. Give Dravidians the old Indian camels with extra p.armor, they’ll be quite decent as well.
Turks have powerful military to end the game before late imp. They’re weak because the eco isn’t strong enough to get to that army soon on open maps. Teutons have conversion resistance and extra melee armor on their melee units as a compensation. Goths are bad and could use some eco buff especially for the early game.
At your elo and above, Dravidians have a 1.5% play rate on Arena and 1.7% on Arabia. Clearly none of you guys pick it. Why use terms like “beginner-friendly” when your own elo level players never pick it?
And what’s the point of having a civ like this which is not picked on any of the commonly played maps?
Inspite of being the newest civs, Bengalis and Dravidians are the civs with least pick rates across all maps at 1700+ since DLC release while Gurjaras, Hindustanis are highest. Imagine how abysmal should they be that good players like yourself never picked it.
Not the docks, I was talking about the center fish - the +15 fishermen carrying capacity is only 3%, so it doesn’t give you more food than your opponent.
I know that Dravidians will probably take the center and use the center fish for a faster castle age. This exact same thing happened in the Tatoh vs Hera game as well. But then what? Scouts and skirms defended against the crossbows and though slower eventually Hera did knights + burmese xbows + mangonels and won the game. If you’re Japanese, you go castle age and you can push with knights+xbows, Bulgarians can get +2 on knights fast and drop Kreposts, any left over man-at-arms will automatically become long swords and can pick off spears faster. Dravidians can’t do anything of that sorts. Only option is to stay defensive and boom with 3 tcs, take stone, drop defensive castles to avoid getting siege pushed and just hope it works out.
Yes you’ll hit castle age faster by a couple of minutes but without knights, you can’t end the game there itself. Eventually the ponds will dry out and the horrible tech tree will catch up.
yet they all lost with Dravidians while Tatoh picked and won with Lithuanians in the first round. Overall stats of Dravidians on this map from Grand melee 7 times picked 2-5 score, other civs used on this map - Mongols 12 times picked 9-3 score, Japanese 13 times picked 7-6 score. Other tournaments before that Dravidians were picked 6 times with 2-4 score. Overall an abysmal 4 wins out of 13 games it was used.
Those civs are good for a man-at-arm opening as well. Bulgarians get the upgrade for free, blacksmith techs are cheaper, Magyars get extra attack for free, also on their spears and scouts while they transition and Lithuanians get the extra food to be faster, speed bonus on skirms.
This could be a great way of making Dravidians usable and re-adjusting the meta and the balance. Base cost of militia line should get lower or base attack of maa should be 7 and upon hitting feudal age militia’s speed should raise from 0.9 to 1.0. Also the hp of houses should be lower by 10% in dark age and 15% in feudal age compared to their current values.
this seems reasonable to me. If 2.5% is the pickrate of a civ if all civs were equally represented, 1.7% seems pretty decent when you consider that there are Hindustanis/Berbers-only players in ALL elos. If those civs have, say, 5% pickrate, then 1.7% probably means that a lot of people go random so they are happy with getting Dravidians.
Bengalis are quite solid actually I don’t like how they play out but they aren’t a troll civ anymore on Arabia and probably top tier on Arena now.
why not? Crossbow + Pike + Monk + Siege is a good enough composition to win in Castle age. Before the huge Crossbow/Arbalest nerf, remember how everyone played the game in Castle age? Crossbow pushes were always viable.
from the 2 games I watched, Dravidians were 1-1 and the 1 loss, Viper vs guy X I forget the name of, Viper later admitted that “it was a huge mistake to not open MAA”, Viper sometimes likes to greed it up and iirc opened Archers (the reasoning being that Archers counter MAA which is the expected opening by opponent). In any case the fact alone that Dravidians were picked shows that people believe in them on that map.
yes, MAA is free, but no Xbow so no scalability, and no instant 200w so you can’t for example get Horse Collar or do early Blacksmith.
I am not sure why so many people are desperate to make the Militia-line a meta unit, 1.0 speed would make it impossible to kite Militias with Archers. Already now, Militia-line has like 2x the DPS vs buildings compared to Knights when you factor in cost. They trade evenly vs Knights in mass battles. Militia-line is fine. Archers are supposed to be a weakness so speed buff is about the last buff they need.
idk what version of Arabia you play, but I can’t recall the last game when either me or opponent full walled in Dark age and skipped Feudal. Current Arabia promotes Feudal play without making it a full Feudal game. It is one of the most balanced Arabia versions we’ve had in a long time. I am not sure why we would nerf Houses even more, if anything that makes the main offender of the meta, the Knight line, even stronger.
I’ve done it before, you need 3 and eventually 4 Barracks and have a very fine understanding of how many Stables/TCs opponent has but you can defend with Pikes alone provided you did some damage with Xbow in early Castle age and added Monks initially.
these are considerations that apply mostly at 2.3k+ elo. For common plebs like us, the TC idle time, the 3 lost vills from Feudal and so on trump any “this is a booming civ but that one isn’t” considerations. If you get 0 damage as Dravidians in Feudal, your boom won’t be good, yes. But unless you are going specifically vs Chinese, there are so many civs vs which you should be ahead as Dravidians, e.g. Berbers, Mongols, Ethiopians to name a few.
Cavalier is a bit too strong on Arabia yes, I am no fan of how strong Knights are atm, but Crossbow is harder to play and it’s not THAT far behind in terms of power. I think un-nerfing Arbalest, for example, could be sufficient in restoring the balance between Cav and Archer civs. As it stands now, Archer civs must add Pikeman to win in general but still even with all the nerfs, as an Archer civ you are supposed to hit Imp faster, you might not have as big of a window as before but it’s possible to win vs cavalry civs with the one you list.
In any case, many of the “Dravidians are a terrible civ” considerations boil down to “Archer-line is too weak on Arabia”. Idk if that’s true or not, when we had an Archer meta 1 year ago, people were very unhappy you couldn’t spam Knights, now Knights are meta and Archers are the underdog, yes, but then we should write that, and not say that Dravidians are bad when they are perfectly functional as a MAA → Archers → Xbow civ.
Yes, max efficiency is to be balanced over the maps.
And for me, the playrate (“enjoyement”) is a very good criterion to balance civs around. As weird as it may sound, I would literally not mind a civ starting with +1000 of every resource if there were only one player in the entire game willing to play it.
I just trust that many players are ready to play the most boring civ if it is OP and give them skyrocket their ELO (“civ laming” ?)
I feel that Mayans, Franks, Ethiopians, Burmese, Celts, Cumans, Japanese, Khmer, Lituanians, Mongols, Tatars, Portuguese, Hindustanis, Malians get a similar bonus upon hitting Feudal or in the minute following it.
Civs such as Bengalis, Teutons, Malays, Vikings, Chinese have may worse eco upon Feudal but you know they will outscale quickly.
So in the end, it is a good early Feudal bonus indeed, but not a great one and is already balanced by a pretty bad castle age bonus as most civs get a total of resources way better than 400w once in castle age.
So for a civ that is expected to deal damage in Feudal, it doesnt feel big enough.
Isn’t that why you want to give Dravidians a strong dark age bonus ? To rush them and deal heavy damage while they are weak ? If you are not expecting to deal damage, then you should settle for a later but strong bonus instead of a smaller and earlier one. If you get that many resources at game start + upon hitting feudal and expect to not damage civs like chinese, vikings, bengalis, Malays, Poles while they are weaker, it is on you.
And they do not easily get 200f+450w at 15 minutes, they have to wait a few more minutes before “easily exceeding” Dravidians eco.
And Dravidians are supposed to be at their weakest on open land maps, so it is normal to be at a disadvantage against civs who are at their strongest on open land maps.
We just need a balance so that the difference should not be overwhelming. As said, if you have the upper hand for the whole game against civs like Franks, you will be smashing at least half of the other civs.
My point is that we should not give them at the same time:
But if you give up the starting wood, it should be no problem to give a super strong early castle eco. That’s why I thought it would not be broken on open land maps to give Dravidians free Ballistics.
(not sure how oppressive it would be on water maps, but the water map balance is a huge mess anyways, and other civs like Malays/Italians/Vikings would get the earlier castle uptime and earlier galley/bodkin-arrow anyways…)
I think it is mostly a matter of deciding whether Dravidians should kick stuff in early feudal or have a big boost in castle age to more confortably hold despite lacking knights.
So as said, for me it is either a castle age compensation for not having knights or an early game buff to damage the opponent (in addition to the current eco).
That is also why I am happy with the current key difference between Dravidians and Bengalis: Bengalis are supposed to outscale economically, and Dravidians are supposed to be aggressive without the 25+ min outscaling option.
We just did not reach the viability level yet, so we need some buffs.
Too bad that we cannot see whether the civ was a random pick or a selected pick. Above 1700 ELO the play rates are between 1.66 and 4.62, and I know that higher ELO players tend to play random… We do not know the “base” pick rate due to random picks. This would be interesting to see as well.
Over every ELO, Dravidians are at 0.72%, Bengalis at 0.61% (min), while Gurjaras are at 1.61% and Franks at 7.79% (max).
This is great except when they go castle make like 5 knights. That’ll clean up your entire archer line. They can also tower their woodline, making your archer play tough.
I do as well, except I need them to be viable for this. I can do this pretty well with mayans, both with their eco and cheaper archers. But most importantly, because I can easily add in a couple of eagles that will help massively against mangonels, knights, and every thing else.
Dravidians have literally nothing. I have a good feudal, I get like 30 archers, and get to castle age. Now what? I have one choice: crossbows. Nothing else is worth it. Compare this to other civs almost all of which have at least 2 opions, but likely 3-4 (archers, knights, camels, regional units). I don’t want all of those options to be always worth it, but it is important to know that you have a toolkit there.
Britons are a full archer civ. BUT, they have FU militia line and spear line, AND they have cavalier (but not all the upgrades). It’s not often that I feel like I have nothing when I play britons.
Goths are a full infantry civ, but they have serviceable knights, and cav archers. If I ever go against the byzantines, I have something to work with. With dravidians, there are situations where I feel I have nothing, and it’s extremely frustrating. Something like spanish conqs+knights+donkeys will just end you. You have nothing against that.
No, this tech is impossible to balance properly, and it needs to go. The only way I can actually think it’ll work is making it super high (like 40-60HP/min), but add a restriction of x seconds after taking damage before healing starts.
But I would prefer giving an eco bonus UT to dravidians, or giving them something to make castle age a bit easier. They clearly need something for the castle age and the best solution now is to give them a castle age UT to target for.
it depends, these bonuses are different, some kick in immediately, some not. Mongols for example you can largely consider it as the same as the Lithuanians bonus in how it plays out in that it gives you a 1-time injection of food at start of Feudal age. Mayans, they don’t get better gather rates, and before the 21 pop, they don’t even get an additional villager, so actually they start with less resoruces. Mostly people complain about Mayans because their Farms and hunt last too long so they always get easy sources of food, but Archers aren’t in the best spot now and Mayans aren’t that scary right now. Celts get 1 of best early game eco bonuses in the game yes, Tatars, again, gather rates are unaffected so the main benefit is that you delay farms. Overall, +200w instantly at start of Feudal isn’t so bad, if you put your head to it you can probably do some 19 pop MAA into Archers as well I reckon.
idk, 5 Knights don’t clear all the archers if you macro’d properly, you can get to his base with some 18+ Crossbows and 5 Knights don’t beat that, also because he won’t have +2 immediately. Importantly, if you are going forward, vs a Knight civ if you sense +2 Knights coming, the first building you add is Monastery and not Siege Workshop. With Dravidians you can also transition to Pikes easily, conveniently they are so cheap and normally the starting Barracks is enough if your main unit is Xbow, you need only about 1/2 the number of Pikes as you have Xbow to come ahead vs Knights, assuming you both have comparable ecos.
work on your Mangonel micro I guess. Like I admitted, the civ isn’t ideal but not unusable imo. I’d rather roll them on Arabia than Cumans or Persians or Goths for example.
this composition is countered fairly well with Xbow + few Monks actually.
Also now that I think about it, Elephant Archers can actually do well vs Mangonels, hits that you take basically don’t matter because you have so much HP, and they do 6 base damage so with upgrades you need only 25 arrows to kill a Mangonel and not 50. You can also do the split maneuver with them and partial hits on them with Mangonels do like 10-20 damage instead of the full 40 in the center so that’s basically 0 damage considering the 230 base HP. I honestly think people are just sleeping on Elephants and other similar units just because Knights/Crossbows are:
a) easier to micro
b) have tons of YT guides about feudal BO, how many on gold etc. with EA for example I challenge anyone to give me the early Castle age macro distribution you need to make them from 2 ranges.
In the past I had good games with EA, once with Bengalis and once with Dravidians in Arabia RM 1v1. I got a slight lead in Feudal and at my elo people don’t rly know how to deal with MAA → Skirms perfectly but the funny part is that people don’t expect EA in Castle age so one time for example I was vs Ethiopians and he tried to go mass Camel (Camels are a poor counter because although they do 15 damage, they have 0 pierce armor and EA have so much HP that 15 damage looks more like 8 damage if they were attacking a regular mounted unit like a Knight).
I have to admit that if you fall behind as Dravidians, and you are the defender, you are probably in big trouble because defending with them seems hard especially vs a Knight civ like Berbers going all in on you.
The Maghrebi Camels haven’t upset the balance, and their elephants do still need buffs too.
I also love that there is an elephant version equivalent.
Improving mobility of ranged unit will actually make regeneration better, so regeneration with improved mobility for elephants can still be expected. And even with both the Husbandry and the +10% speed bonus I suggested, elephants are still less mobile and more expensive than camels, so having a regeneration rate higher than Maghrebi Camels’ 20 HP per second is something to consider.
Its the lowest pickrate. LOWEST. why else would a new civ have lowest pickrate at high level if its “fine” as you put it. That level of low play rate was always associated with the weakest civs in the game, all of which eventually got several buffs - original Khmer, Tatars, Vietnamese.
It was Liereyy. I think its the resistance to commit to man-at-arms and the doubt of playing something that’s probably expected because Daut revealed that strategy.
Watch the replacement qualifiers and Ro12. Those are the pseudo GSL for this tourney.
if you gain a 2 min lead by taking mid control you can drop forward Kreposts and end the game fast.
Isn’t that only the first 2 or 3 mins of feudal? If its that good players will just pick celts and do all-in maa rushes a lot but we barely see that. I’ve literally never seen or faced more than 5 man at arms, mostly 3 even with Celts.
Sorry if it wasn’t clear before, I meant cavalry civs as I was replying to your defend against knights with crossbows and pikes comment. Yes I know everyone gets tc idle time in feudal age but when averaged across several thousand games that should be roughly the same at the same elo level.
I can see Berbers to some extent but Mongols feel a lot stronger earlier in the game and I don’t think its possible on an average to be far ahead as Dravidians against Mongols.
Yes but you’d need redemption and preferably some monk or siege bonus for that.
I don’t complain about crossbows at all. Un-nerfing them will just tilt the balance and make Mayans, Britons insanely strong.
Definitely no. Its rather the militia-line or infantry play being unusable. And the fact that a civ that completely loses a very important line of unit gets barely anything as a compensation. If you buff the archer line, it shuffles the order - cav civs go down, archer civs move significantly up but Dravidians still remain one of the worst or slightly below average at best. I’m not saying every civ should just go knights all the time but they should have an “option” to make a few of those.
In the case that a civ doesn’t get that, eco bonuses should clearly be much superior to compensate for it. Many people pointed out how Dravidian economy is nearly the same as so and so civilizations but those civilizations have knights with +2 while Dravidians get nothing. Just the lack of bloodlines and husbandry is compensated with huge bonuses for Vikings. Something even more powerful and long lasting should be given to Dravidians in case they must remain a knight-less civ.
Exactly true. Every time a new strong civ comes out or some older civs gets a huge buff, it replaces the overpicked civs. Gurjaras and Hindustanis replaced Franks and Mayans when the indian DLC came out.
Yes but the options themselves are weak. If it were voobly times, its totally fine. Towers were strong, wood lines were 20 tiles away from tc, houses were more expensive and the latency issues made archer micro very difficult. You could just do maa-skirms and tower the nearby wood lines, deny all resources and choke your opponent in feudal itself. Not with the current meta though.
Its 200w + 150w in feudal right. Yes those civs match that in 15 mins with their bonuses.
Totally fine but in that case, give redemption, illumination and siege engineers to make them a solid closed map civ. Totally ok to be weak on open if they’re strong on closed like Bohemians.
Ya exactly, free ballistics is great as well. Its just a matter of whether you want to make the civ stronger in situations where they already are good and make them top tier on those or make them generically stronger. Like the last and last-to-last Portugese buffs (eco vs organ guns secondary projectiles more damage)
The problem is that an elephant has 280 HP. 20HP/min is 14 minutes of wait time. A 1v1 arabia match lasts like 30 minutes, that’s literally like half of that time. If you improve it to 30HP/min, it is now 9 minutes. The problem isn’t that it upsets the balance, the problem is that this is literally useless. It changes nothing, and you’d be better off spending the resources you spend on that upgrade, on getting a few monks.
A single halb attack does 30 damage. Even by your improved criteria, a single attack from a halb takes a minute to deal. A single attack. Make this like 50-60, and it will be worth something. (that is 5-6 minutes to fully heal). With 30 healing, I’d rather it goes entirely.
This is a UT that T90 called out for being useless and to make things worse, it is on a weak civ.
Actually 100w + 150w + 75w + 75f when invluding the savings from horse collar.
I mistakenly included the savings from heavy plow that other civs havent spend yet (and who would probably not spend at this point yet even if they had the opportunity).
After 5 minutes of feudal, 10 lumberjacks + 5 farmers (average when adding a farm every 25s starting from minute 11) gathered ~1250w and ~550f. I don’t see how wheelbarrow can provide this much, its value per minute increaese with time.
I am totally fine with that, they got good EA plus SO and BBC, so they are not supposed to be bad like Vikings on closed maps.
I am not into this talk (and don’t mind a huge buff for the tech or letting it useless) and my remark wont change much to the point , but… You surely meant a single spearman hit, right ?
Spearmen / Pikemen / Halberdiers are supposed to deal around 30/50/60 damage per hit to elephants.
Why is being completely being healed the standard? 20 HP per minute can already allow an EA to suffer one more attack from a knight every 30 seconds.
Ranged attack and mobility help to survive longer, allowing regeneration abilities to provide more HP. This is the main reason I think what they should really change is mobility than the UT. Of course, Changing to another helpful UT will certainly not be useless, or the higher the regeneration rate, the more helpful it is.
I can understand your consideration, but the mobility is the true point. Any cavalry unit (not just Elephants) does not be helped by a high regeneration rate as long as they are approached by Halberdiers and they can’t run. Even with a decent regeneration rate, Berserks will still be killed quickly by Hand Cannoneers or Cataphracts. Those units are meant to work that way, so to me that’s not a quite solid reason why elephants aren’t good for regeneration.
Because of how rubbish the units themselves are. One more attack is nice, but it actually does nothing. Dravidian eles barely survive 1 knights and all other EAs don’t beat a knight 1v1. The regeneration does nothing.
Also, the consideration isn’t healing or not healing, it is healing or something else entirely. Let’s face it, dravidians, as a civ don’t need this tech. It doesn’t do anything for them.
The point isn’t to survive a halb in a direct fight. I had made it clear in my first comment, by best buff would be 60HP/min, BUT you need to wait 15 secs after taking any damage before healing starts. The point is to get all of your low HP elephants that do survive a fight to get back into battle with full HP, and quickly.
The reasons elephants aren’t good for regeneration is 1) look at the regen rate as a fraction of overall HP. For berserks, it is 54%. For camel archers, it is 25%, for elephant archers, it is 7%. FREAKING 7%. But also, dravidians have some of the slowest elephants in the game. Your elephants are never running away from anything. Even if you had 30HP or 40HP per minute, this alone makes it worthless.
The berber bonus is actually only decent because of how fast camel archers are.
I’ll take Elite battle elephants with bloodlines and husbandry over garbage designs like Wootz steel, SLOWLY HEALING battle elephants every single day. I don’t know what the devs were thinking when they made this civ. The more I think about it, the more pissed off I get.
It actually serves a purpose for lower hp and mobile units. As far as elephants is concerned medical corps with any amount of hp regeneration whether its 50 or 15, is not going to be of much use for open maps. If you got a big mass of elephants and complementing units you’ve already won the game most probably. Its still going to remain a closed map TG unit and greater the regeneration stronger the push gets in those niche situations where they’re already quite decent.
Its ok to remove it, change it, leave it as it is, as it practically does nothing for most of the standard games between same elo players.
If you seed farm every 25s starting from minute 11, you should have atleast 8 farms by minute 15. Anyways its probably going to be an additional 50w 70f, the non-viking clicks wheelbarrow around that time which is 225 resources. And if they don’t, the next layer of farms at 3+ tile distance from tc, and the 2+ tile distance of woodlines become more inefficient and the resources gathered are much fewer until wheelbarrow is researched.
I could play at least one game with these useless techs and garbage units before I tilt resign. But not the horrible punjabi folk theme that plays over and over again. That drives me nuts. They could have just taken some old south Indian Carnatic music score. The design work done is terrible even on the aesthetics.
Regeneration is meaningful on units with mobility. Low HP Berber camels and camel archers can escape a fight and regroup at a castle because they are fast. Castle protects low HP units from dying and also adds its own healing rate. Also, last time I checked AoE4, Franks regen knights were OP because they could fight spears down to 1 HP, retreat to heal back to full and then rejoin the fight along with other knights. This made spear defense totally ineffective as the spears would quickly get overwhelmed by knight numbers.
Regeneration is not meaningful on elephants because the enemy chooses the fight. Elephants cannot retreat because they are so slow. Low HP elephants are easily micro’ed down by faster enemies.
Also, retreating with elephants gives the enemy plenty of time (due to slow speed and high HP to heal) to tech into their hard counters and any other units he wants. So, it is basically all or nothing when going mass elephants. This is not an issue in TGs where trash units are less common, but a big problem in 1v1. Only byzantine team bonus is useful for healing elephants because the healing rate is so high. Viper shows this off with Bengalis in Black Forest Bengalis Pocket - YouTube. The problem with increasing the healing rate on medical corps is that regen AE would become OP if the rate was higher than it is now, but this rate is too low for other elephants.
Berserks actually need a buff because they are now the main unit carrying Vikings in late game since they miss Thumb ring. It is not okay that they are still killed quickly, but that is separate discussion.
Yes, they should definitely change the music. It is not about horrible or not, but the music should definitely represent the culture
I have disabled AoE2 music entirely because I’ll destroy my speakers if I’m forced to listen to that music ever again.
So, I’m trained in both carnatic and hindustani music. That makes it particularly grating for me. The first part of the music is vaguely hindustani, but I can tell it wasn’t composed by a trained Hindustani musician because it doesn’t have a proper raaga structure. It is too western, despite the gamaks used in it. It is clearly also not carnatic. Even a single gamakam will give away carnatic and it isn’t even that hard to replicate if you know how to.
AND THEN, THE PUNJABI MUSIC. Why oh why must it exist.
I feel you on a spiritual level bro. I actually found a couple of decent ones some peoples composed and posted on here. I wish there was a mod to replace the default one with any of those.
Dude, just zero out background game sounds man. There are a dozen things terrible about this civ but can’t complain about music man. One of the civs I think Mongols or Vikings make a fart noise if I remember correctly.
That alone is a enough to make Dravidean a top 5 civ on nomad
Might be strongest Eco in the game on its own. it’s almost like getting free horse collar and heavy plow in DA while still being able to research. Also change to +175 food to avoid confusion
So take goth give them the strongest eco in the game
cheaper transitions, Stone walls, +10% speed, Plate Mail Armor, ability to ignore enemy armor, and replace huskarl with the urumi swordsman. With the only downside being missing Cheap halbs and fast creation speed. Missing huskarl is not too big of an issue due to faster skirms, plate mail armor.