The current bengali team bonus is 10% food from trade carts. This is pretty underwhelming, at best; the equivalent of about 4 farmers at most. It also doesn’t help at all for 1v1 games, and doesn’t really seem to synergize with their other bonuses.
What about this, instead?
Monk Healing generates gold. - Healing 100% of a unit’s health returns 12.5% of the unit’s build cost in gold.
This synergizes nicely with their monk armor bonus, works for 1v1s, and can be a pretty cool way to encourage more healing in longer games! It also synergizes nicely with other bonuses like the Byzantines.
You’d need to distinguish between friendly fire and enemy fire, that’s true. But honestly, you can do that already with the Tatars and teaming up, and it’s just not worth the lost pop space and effort.
reddit sub is down for a few days while they protest, but this is entertaining at least. Replace an inconsequential TB, with an OP abusable one, on a civ that is specifically borderline OP in cases where this abusable bonus would actually come into play.
For the sake of whimsy, villagers deliver food to the nearest economic building once collected. The Khmer would lose out on this one, but otherwise it would allow for some interesting setups, like Mining Camp farms.
A good bonus for Bengalis would be something related to Light Cav, something like Light cav have more 1/1 armor, or take less % bonus damage or something. That’s kinda the only problem Bengalis has, their stable sucks! (dravidians is even worse tho)
Or Light cav deals bonus dmg to cavalry or infantry, or resist conversion more, or moonwalk 5% faster, or something, idk.
Well, if we talk about closed maps: %15 food discount does not make much sense since eco is not that much a problem in closed maps. Bengalies are strong in closed maps bcs of their tanky monks.
Is not about if the eco is a problem or not, is about how you make an already broken unit here even more oppresive, don’t you even mind the Bengali ele archers take less bonus damage (take 40 elite skirms shots alone lol), can resist conversion, have all upgrades available (only lacking Thumb Ring but that doesn’t matter) plus the UT that makes them fire 20% faster (better ROF effect than Thumb Ring) so a mere 10% accuracy deficit is nothing.
You have an absurdly well rounded unit without drawbacks in the late game, there’s a reason why Gurjara ele archers lack Parthian Tactics and Ring Archer Armor (to offset their faster training time and the UT that mkaes them cost only 67 food, so we already have cheaper ele archers on food, ohhh and the UT that gives them 4 melee armor) and why Dravidian ele archers lack Bloodlines, Husbandry and Parthian Tactics (to offset the 25% faster firing rate and the UT that allows the to regenrate 30 HP per minute.
