Indeed, it’s the first one.
But it’s quite obvious since no blast furnace means no possible FU cavalry or infantry, and missing the last archer armor means also no FU archer unit, Malians were spared because missing Bracer they could fully upgrade their Hand Cannoneers at least, plus after Farimba they could get more than FU Heavy Camel.
Well any civ with SO that has siege engineers will beat that. If you wanna play elephant archer onager you either need monks or bbc behind. Dravidians doesn’t have both which is why you can them only make work as bengalis (apart from the fact that bengali ea are way better vs halbs anyways).
Well they are weaker but also way easier to mass and also way less clunky. They are a bit too easily countered by skirms but apart from that I think the balance is fine. If you get 50 of them they still beat basically anything.
Yes Malians is the closest in Imperial but they have everything (except regional units) available upto castle age. (This is another trivia. No other civ have that). That’s why I didn’t mention them.
Better than Dravidians? Not in castle age for sure. In Imperial I need to see which kills faster, Bengalis with PT or Dravidians with +25% faster attack rate. Bengalis bonus armor will also help a bit but you’d rather prefer faster killing ranged units.
Well the dmg output vs halbs should be similar. Bengali have a bit more dmg with PT over faster attacking and again slightly more with ratha over thumb ring but they are also a bit less accurate. So the reduced bonus dmg should make bengali a bit better altogether.
Although tbf the biggest difference probably is that bengali eco is extremely strong while dravidians don’t have anything at this point. Besides that bengali have more pierce armor and the better supporting units so I don’t think there can be any doubt about who has best elephant arcbers.
In 1v1 Imperial camels were very rare. It was mainly strong in TG due to Indian team bonus and their eco. I think T90 and a few others were hyping it up because Camels took only 16 bonus damage from halbs back then and were capable of taking down buildings which was quite unusual for people who had played the game for quite sometime at that point. All they had to do was change the team bonus to the current bonus.
Yes that’s an awesome unit. That’s why for 1v1 the removal of p.armor doesn’t hurt much in imp if you don’t take much damage in castle age.
They’re not exactly as useful as eagles are but yes if they costed a bit low - something like 65 food, 15 gold and were available from Feudal age with their current castle age stats, they could be a useful mainstream unit.
I feel these riders should become a regional unit for the 3 civs and each of them should get some special ability similar to Battle elephants of RoR civs. Like Gurjaras one cheaper by default, Dravidians attack faster or regenerate, Bengalis take less bonus damage or dodge more projectiles.
It does beat and it is super pop efficient against that composition. In general in TGs skirms are not pop efficient because you need too many of them and they can still get wiped off easily by enemy cavalry. But for 1v1s, especially against weak civs like Dravidians or Bengalis, skirms are super good and should definitely be a part of your army composition.
Yes, its the first weak one of its kind. And many others lack one upgrade - either last archer armor or last cavalry armor or last infantry armor. Civs that lack more than one of these have really powerful military bonus for their cavalry or ranged units or siege or have a super strong eco. Gurjaras on the other hand miss important upgrades on ranged units, cavalry units, neither have pikes nor champs, and negligible eco bonus.
And still its the best amongst the three new ones. 
don’t remember saying this, I claimed once that Pikeman is a bit underwhelming in Castle age and I stand by that position, but Halbs I’m fine with.
it depends a lot on respective ecos, # of production buildings and respawn points, but in general I don’t see a problem with Bengalis mixing in like 10-15 Light cavs which kill basically infinite number of skirms, assuming the opposing player has all the advantages I listed above (close respawn, many production buildings, etc.).
The problem with Skirms has always been that they die hard to a tech switch and at that point you have no army, no map control, and no tech switch ready = you are dead.
So that is a light cav + EA combo right? The efficiency of skirms discussion was against halb + EA combo. Which is actually a bad combo.
At a point where you have Elite Elephant archers and halbs with all upgrades and you are switching into cav, its safe to assume your opponent will also definitely have the economy to switch into something else. The civs that field Elephant archers are super weak for 1v1 compared to most other civs. So this EA + halbs and then switching into light cav while opponent is stuck with skirms is almost never going to happen. If you did EA + halbs, you threw away whatever eco lead you had before that and now your opponent has moved ahead of you. So the skirm player is definitely not dead.
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Atleast Goths have FU Hand Cannons and practically FU Skirmishers too.
I agree. But they are also cheaper in terms of gold which is better in the late game.
That’s way cheap. You need to adjust gold cost. Units that cost more than 60 food face a hard time to be a meta unit. BE, SL and now EA all face this. Camel is more viable than them since they are a lot cheaper in terms of food. For S.Rider I still want to see their full potential, especially in Imperial age with 7 shield defense.
Do you mean I should lower the food cost and increase the gold cost? Its not cheap considering how fragile and situational these units are. I actually wanted to suggest something like 55 food and 20 gold.
Camel also has 45 more hp and is made as a unit to counter cavalry. So you run away from archers. Whereas this unit is made to counter archer units but with their current stats they need to outnumber them in order to do so.
It’s a complete waste of resources to do that upgrade. If your opponent sees that you have these riders, they’ll add some shield units. Any units would be good enough to kill these.
They’re completely unnecessary in late game. You can just go for 60 food hussars in late game with this civ. No need to make these units unless opponent has gunpowder and no halbs or hussar.
I think we should wait a bit more. Like 2-3 more weeks.
This one I agree with. My personal view is, we didn’t see enough Elite S.Rider in action despite being cheaper than non-elite, being the fastest land unit and getting 7 shields in 15 seconds. A very expensive elite upgrade is very likely responsible for that.
But hussar is slower, slower attacking, lower attack and dies to defensive building. Elite one is actually way better than Hussar in raiding imo. This maybe doesn’t help much as they cost gold. So maybe 75f/10g will be a better deal?
Edit : I actually changed my mind but not for Gurjaras. I’ll start proposing my thoughts on Bengalis and Hindustanis. And maybe Urumi for Dravidians. Gurjaras feels like okay and for S.Rider in particular, I still want to wait.
Why teching into E. Shrivamsha if you have access to the cheapest hussars in the game?
Maybe it’s better, but except for the special utility against buildings it actually adds nothing but even costs some gold. Hussars/light cav are also generally the last of the trash units to tech into, as there is much more need for halbs and skirms until gold is so scarce you can’t make cav/archer anymore. In this situation it is kinda understandable that people chose Hussars over Shrivamshas just because hussars cost no gold.
Shrivamsha are the hardest hitting cavalry unit the Gurjaras get, while both their hussar and camels can only have 9 attack at best without having a good attack rate. And as long as you’re up against an archer civ you don’t have that many other things to spend gold on, and it’s not a 20 gold unit that will prevent you from affording them.
But they don’t cost gold , have more hp and p.armor. After the charge is down, the remaining arrows are going to do a lot of damage to the Shrivamshas.
This would make them more usable in late game and less usable in early-mid castle age.