Yup! They are an honorary meso civ in all but name. Elephant archer with the fire boost and thumb ring has pretty low DPS compared to a knight and does not justify its creation cost. Its skirm armour shoud be zero then atleast it will become a counter to skirms+knight push. Knights should be used as counter to Elephant archers and not the other way around. Maybe Dravidian Elephant archers kill knights 1vs1 without bloodlines. But those fights will never take place in actual games. Since Devs are never going to add ‘husbandry’ or bloodlines. Elephants don’t need 20 HP to be viable.But they need time and speed to run away from hard counters like monks to make them a viable unit. Devotion has helped with this to an extent. But it has helped knight civs more than Elephant civs. The elephants without knights weakness has to be fixed using an unique tech for Dravidians.
CHANGE 3:
REMOVE - Medical corps
REPLACMENT - "Mahouts or Strike corps" Elephants and Urumi move 30% faster
This will make the civ even more unpopular among players facing them and make it into the priority civ for nerfs. Then their barrack discount will further be trimmed to 33% instead of just removing the last change. I’ll repeat it. Castle age halberdier would have fixed Dravidians cavalry problem and champions with gambersons would have fixed mangonel problem. Your strategy could also have been performed with ‘feudal age longswords’ to a limited extent. But those gimmicks belong to Armenians. Even this bonus which was given to Armenians came from “Dravidians are terrible thread”. The bonus is wasted on Armenians. This one change could have made Dravidians a true infantry civ with no need for knights. But devs seem to have lost the ability to think creatively and are just stealing ideas to make lazy civ designs.
The fact remains ‘nomads’ is not even in the 1vs1 map pool. In team games, nomad is in the map pool and +5 dock bonus is a problem there.
Dravidians get +150 wood after building their first TC. Which means only after atlleast 100 seconds or roughly 2 mins of game time. Persians will have queued 4+1 vills and 1 fishing ship by then. Dravidians will have queued 4 vills and 2 fishing ships. Persians will have faster working TCs. Dravidian player will be force dropping food to keep TC working. If Persians are not a problem civ on 1vs1 nomad, then giving Dravidians +150 wood at the start will not be a problem. I am ignoring house build time since both Persians and Dravidians will have to do that after the change to dock pop space bonus.
They will take 4 more years and still not realise Elephant archers as well as Battle elephants are both useless while continuously nerfing ‘Armoured elephants’
The only other bonus which I found in a forum post which does not alter their civ identify is:
This keeps the feudal play the same. It helps Dravidians castle age by making sure they have options to turtle if they fall behind or sell stone to go up without any gold miners and boom before opponent. They can castle drop opponent or they can protect some vital area of map on home base. Urumi can be produced to act as a deterant against cavalry raids into other areas of base. If Dravidian player still keeps falling behind to economy civs like bohemians, Armenians or vikings. Then 'Mahouts or Strike corps'can be researched to make Elephants which are faster to disrupt them like a surprise offensive strategy. Regardless, with the unique tech, Dravidian player can do all in castle play since their imp still sucks compared to most civs.
OG Japanese were quite similar to Dravidians and they sucked. Japanese have had their stable techs added to make sure they don’t suck as bad now. They play as a cav archer civ now.
Vikings have an X-tier eco bonus. Yet they have got recent buffs and an new unique tech.
Italians - How to fix Italians?
So Dravidians need fixing just like Japanese, Vikings and Italians.
You have to elaborate more.