How would you rework the Indians?

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the Indians, pre and post anniversary patch and a lot of people in the forums are not very happy with how they turned out to be. The critique is usually that they are very one sided, have no really strong options in late game besides camels and so on. After the patch they got another stable change that is very similar to other civs.
So hypothetically, how would you rework (and not rebalance) the Indians to be a more unique and maybe more viable experience?

Personally I would like to keep the camel identity and not having access to knights is a nice flavour to the game in my opinion.
To rework the Indians, I would start by switching the unique units. The Elephant Archer would be an archery range unit and the Imperial Camel would not be an upgrade to the camel line but rather a re-balanced castle unique unit. Maybe a unit that has higher base attack and higher armor but less bonus attack against cavalry. Such as 100Hp, 9atk (+3vs cav), 1/1 armor. (Just an idea)
That way they could be another UU civ that uses castles a bit more, instead of stables.
Also Elephant archers could be cheaper and weaker to be more of an affordable unit in 1v1.
In addition to this I would redesign them to be more of a defensive civ, having access to the keep and arrowslits upgrades.
Also the eco bonus is great and the sultans tech is also nice. The rest I’m unsure about. There could be a generic camel bonus that affects both the stable camel and the castle camel.

These are a few ideas I had that would make me enjoy them more. What are your ideas? :slight_smile:

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Indians already were an Unique and Viable experience, the only civ that actually goes for Camels offensively.

Just dial the changes back.

This incredibly bad design, as most UUs taht do not see usage, do not do so because iot is hard to get more than 2 Castles, and it makes it impossible to get them in numbers taht would actually affect the outcome of a battle.

UUs being in Castle, is actually a detriment to most of them.

Scrap Indians completely and rework them as several civs featuring the rich history of South Asia.

They’re honestly a bit a hopeless case when it comes to historical resemblance.

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I would like to keep the camel identity as well.

One of the main issue with Indians is that they are supposed to use the camel as mainly strategy.

This is actually very difficult to balance in TGs.

Currently I do not like the civ since it is good, even too much, on a couple of map settings (TG pocket and where you can use fishermen). Similar problem of Italians.

To rework the camel, one option would be to give it the same attack of a knight, but reducing the bonus damage vs them


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I would make it the first civ ever to be removed from the game

I may be one of the few who does not like the “no knights but stronger camels” identity. Generic camels are supposed to be an anti cavalry unit, but indians make them too strong vs cavalry, thought to take down with archers and stronger against buildings. It completely messes up the counter-unit system.
This does not mean the civ is broken (it is actually weak righ now) but makes camels the best option for every game. No matter the situation, no matter the matchup. It is just boring.

About your question:
I would certainly keep their villager bonus. Maybe turn it to something similar like “+2/+3/+5 villagers every age up” or smth like that.
I would throw away the camel identity (heavy camels only) and give them generic FU elephants except for husbandry. FU infantry except squires. Good monks, decent siege, decent archers and bad riding capabilities.
The point would be to allow them to have battle elephants and some kind of villager bonus to reflect that historical aspects of theirs. It could be achieved by making them a slow push civ, with good eco and strong but low mobile options.

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I think it is best to remove the camel focus entirely and instead make the civ elephant focused. Ornlu made some good suggestions regarding this.

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good luck, they clearly aren’t a fan of elephants in 1v1, so i doubt that happens.

Swich the 2 UU is a bad idea, they fill different roles, EA can work even in low numbers, while camels need to be massed.

Maybe a solution could be to completely scrap the last update (except for the reduction of the bonus damage vs buildings, that was good).

Camels get back their extra armor and hussars get back to be FU (but no extra PA on castle), to compensate that, camels get their bonus damage vs cavalry reduced (like about halved).

That would make their camels less of a anti-cav unit with a better residence to archers, and become more of a flexible unit, that compared to the knight, lose a bit of archers resistance (1PA instead of 2) for some anti-cav bonus, but not strong like other civs.

Then give EA +1 base range and substitute their food cost with a wood cost.

Another idea, could be to remove ring archer armor and give them arb, or even reduce the cost of EA, since they would be a bit weaker (but still fine with all those HP).

Late game as in post-imp when gold runs low isn’t even their problem since they got pretty good trash. Still not the best at that point but actually decent. The problem is rather early imp when other civs can get cavalier or arbs (some even both) and Indians can get neither of them nor do they have a replacement for that (heavy ca doesn’t really do the job, here).

What would be the point of that change? Why have an imperial camel-like UU when it’s still comparable to the regular camel? Imperial camel in itself isn’t the problem imo, I actually kinda like the design to make it an additional upgrade because otherwise you get boring stuff like britons have extra range as a civ bonus and then their UU is an archer vs even more range. I’d rather keep imp camel. And elephant archer can be still be changed without making it a UU from the archery range.

Totally agree here. As you can see a lot of UU are great but still not often seen on arabia because going for several castles oftentimes isn’t escpecially effective on arabia (and I guess 1v1 arabia is the main talking point when it comes to rebalancing/reworking Indians). Like rattan archers and leitis are among the best UU in the game, yet usually you go archers/knights with these civs instead because you wanna keep the agression going and not fall back in military numbers in most scenarios.

Might make sense from a historical perspective but there is so many civs already and as you can see the more civs you add the harder it gets to balance all of them. I guess the would further distort balance - at least for like the next year or so.

But elephants are rarely useful in 1v1 anyways so this way you’d give them another powerful option for tgs and leave them playing out awkward in other scenarios.

Yes, giving them arb would be the simplest solution. That also would be my suggestion. But removing last armor on archers would be quite bad because against archers civs they rely heavily on archer units themselves so if you do that they’d still be bad vs archers civs in imp. Just give them arbs and they should be fine. Sure, they’d be a very flexible civ overall, then, but at this point so many civs have strong bonuses in the game that I don’t think it would be too strong.

  • give them arbalest
  • shatagni gives +1 range and 75% accuracy to hand cannon

Elephant archer:

  • Cost from 100F/70Gold to 90F/65G or 100W/70G (i wouldn’t change gold cost if the food changed to wood)
  • attack bonus vs standard building +3/+4 -> +5/+6 (at least it could break pallisade wall very quickly)
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Totally agree. However TG players may complain


Arbalest may be a solution since it is very good 1v1, while it should not change TGs


I think that now that their camels got heavily nerfed, it makes a lot of sense to give back them arbs


Nothing which can’t be fixed. I still wonder what this Palermo SteamDB DLC means though.

Thanks for your ideas guys! A lot of you seem to propse a change to the existing civ. The post was originally intended to completely REWORK them. So you could use your creativity for an elephant focused civ or anything else. I think @JonOli12 was talking about a unique thech with rockets or something before. Why not elaborate? :slight_smile:
Personally I would still like a castle camel (there are only camel archers and mamelukes, why not a regular “like a camel” unit, such as all the knight-like castle cavalry?), but thats just preference.
Because this is all hypothetical, you can go wild with your creativity :slight_smile:

In that case, why not completely scrap the name “Indians” as suggested by @Szaladon and @BouffantBloom32?

If the civ doesn’t have cheap vills and ImpCamels anymore, it’s confusing to keep calling it “Indians”. What’s the reason for keeping the name? Plenty of somewhere-in-India-civilisations have been suggested.

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Give them arbalest, paladin and SO, then indians cool civ again and restore previous imp camel nerf, thank you in advance.

If a comomete rework is needed I would make them an elephant civ
 Maybe by making their elephants faster to train. I would maintain the shorefishing bonus, because of Ganges river. I would make their initial TC spam a free villager upon advancing age.

In a less serious note: Make elephant archer a team bonus unit, like genitour. This way, at least some ally could make use of them
 (Shipahi, silk armor, steppe husbandry, recurve bow, etc would affect them, and also malay elephant discount, etc.)

As I wrote in another thread, I would try like this:

  • Remove the ’ Cavalry have +1 pierce armor in the Castle Age and +1 pierce armor in the Imperial Age (+2 total)’ bonus
  • But give them back the ‘Plate Barding Armor’
  • Give them the ‘Battle Elephant’
  • Make Shatagni a civ bonus
  • And replace it with something that gives elephants more + 15% speed.

Because some of us actually care about the historical aspect of the game and want to have indians in the game but in a way they at least slightly represent medieval india.

Indians as they are represented in the game is like having a Franks civs which would primarly use Cav Archers and nothing else in Europe.

The civ we have right now feels like a really rough umbrella civ:

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