that’s just one civ. and as for knight line replacement - they end up with 2 total melee armor, as opposed to the knights 5, and they have less total pierce armor too. they get by due to having an insane eco though.
and remember - they still have lackluster attack vs anything not cavalry. Camels fair worse against non cavalry then knights do. their only advantage is being cheaper and easier to mass up, and against cavalry and buildings.
Play aoc to see how camels were designed to be only counter units, they would melt to town centers or castles, they had less attack, even if it was unfair for 13 years the camel remained as they were intended to do, counter cavalry and being even faster than them, being cheaper and killing paladins preventing any raiding was somewhat balanced.
Camels on further expansions became in a cheap knight, that was good for raidings, even they changed the name, reduced upgrade time and cost i guess, removed ship armor class, so they can now withstand arrows under tcs or castles, they added +1 attack and the silly +6 vs buildings for indians, as result they made the knight counter a very offensive unit being cheaper than knights, the unit design was only to kill mounted units, not infantry and less archer line, so the unit was changed, they even had to increase halb bonus damage because they were winning fights vs halbs well i am talking about imp camel, just look they made all camel line weak vs pike line just because of the imperial camel and indians.
Mameluke got a lot of hate from the devs, they removed the 0 frame delay…yeah nonsense for a 85 gold unit, the halb bonus vs them was increased even if they decreased it in further patches, the mameluke gets more damage vs halbs than in AOC, so if you add frame delay to a 3 range unit, congratz you have the most expensive unit that is no longer good other than killing solo elephants and light cavs, cause even paladins trades way better vs DE mamelukes than aoc mamelukes and to make things worse imperial camel kills them with like 4 hits…so even if you like camels you are going to choose the stronger camels+strong economy and cheap units over the original camel civ.
Farimba camel is a quite strong unit same as the cheap berber camel, but imp camel is superior and indians have better economy than those 2 civs, as you can see the poor civ design from indians changed the game in a bad direction.