Ideas for Changing Medical Corps into an anti-siege UT

Dravidians weakness against siege is a well known issue ever since DOI release. Their lack of good cavalry unit really hurts them when it comes to killing siege. I personally find Medical Corps as an UT is not particularly useful. Elephants are very high HP unit and takes forever to regenerate. So I’m thinking changing this UT to address their weakness against siege units. Here are some ideas according to my order of preferences.

  1. Infantry units +5 attack bonus vs siege.
  2. Elephant Archer +3 attack bonus vs siege.
  3. All elephant units +3 attack bonus vs siege.
  4. Militia line +10% speed and +5 attack vs siege.
  5. Militia line +2 PA and +5 attack vs siege.
  6. Middle ground of 4 and 5, Militia line +10% speed, +1 PA and +5 attack bonus siege.

FYI, armor ignoring attacks don’t ignore armor of siege units. So Wootz Steel won’t give any extra attack against siege.

I think #1 goes nicely with their Infantry theme. #4, #5 and #6 are also good and will probably make their militia line a meta unit. Please share your thoughts on this.

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That gives them a clear weakness. Leave it that. Some civs need a clear weakness. Teutons are weak vs archers for example. And if the Dravidians weakness is siege, then that’s a very strong civ. You don’t need to fill the holes if every civ’s weakness.

Siege is very costly at any rate.

2 Likes

Ok, but Dravidians are clearly underpowered

I dunno, then. Give 400 wood per age then. XD

They have solid infantry (which ignore armour with IMP tech) and archers. With 200 wood per age, allowing for a nice archer rush.

Teutons at least have good siege, full armour skirns and paladins, so they are not hopeless. Meanwhile Dravidians against siege just die. Tbh they may still not be hopeless since their early game is good, but I would say buff ing their anti siege options is reasonable

5 Likes

Trying to compensate a civ’s weakness entirely through UTs doesn’t work too well (cf.Burmese) especially since you’re better of doing mangonels rather than rushing a castle for it in castle age, then after that if we are talking of mass siege you’re not cutting it with just flat bonus damage on the kind of units Dravidians are. So suggestion n°1 is out of the question, probs 2 and 3 as well (3 isn’t even better than 2 since Drav BE sucks and siege ele already has tons of bonus against siege), then 4,5 and 6 are basically making your champs straight upgrades from the Celts/Malians one without actually helping against guarded siege enough.

The concept of medical corps isn’t even that bad since you can grab all the other upgrades while waiting to be able to grab the UT and be mostly fine if you’re in a good situation for ele archers. Camel archers and berserks are perfectly viable without their respective regen upgrades.

What would be better is either give them redemption/BBC (I mean come on the history section goes like “advanced weapons blah blah blah” and then the devs give them HC (that they don’t need between their super good infantry, arbs, ele archers and the fact they don’t need an emergency counter vs halbs like ever) instead of BBC. If you don’t like the “tech tree filling aspect of this solution” then just swap the relevant addition with atonement/HC.

If you really wanna change the tech I think there is a way to do it with a new concept: make it so that siege eles lose the siege armour class. After all the purpose of upgrades is to make units better and losing an armour class is a way to do so that has never been used yet. Probably because 1-it’s OP for most units and 2- most armour classes are straightforward and make sense for the unit to have, a horse unit without cav armour would be weird, etc. But siege eles only have the siege armour class because they have the role of the ram, it can make sense for them to not have this armour class. Gameplay wise it would allow them to scare mangonels guarded by ranged units away without dying to attack ground. Ofc it doesn’t work if they use melee units instead but infantry can help then.

This is only there so that ignore armour units deal more damage to rams, since before this change the negative armour would be ignored as well.

True.

No idea what made Developers think of this tech, overall all BE techs are too luxurious to be utilized in a vanilla game, so they made a BE UT that’s way too luxurious and niche than every single BE UT in the game.

You can’t really inflate their Infantry with even more bonuses, they already have this Leitis feature and a discount, and on top of that an UU that’s pretty much a Militia with extra damage (arguably one of the worst UU designs in the game), you dont want Militia to end up too Urumish.

You try to force Darvidians into this impossible identity of being a puristic Infantry civ, you basically murder the civ, just like the original Developers did with Goths.

It’s not too elegant, and definitely not playable.

i’d rather buff their siege, which is an interesting one, they have Siege Onager, Heavy Scorps and Siege Elephants. However without Siege Eng nor Husbandry/Bloodlines.
I’d give them a passive civ bonus rather than change their UT’s (which both of them are so bad):

Siege Units move 10% faster.

The ability to snipe siege is slightly better now, and it’d be the only viable SO that doesnt have Siege Eng.
It doesn’t interfere with Mongols Identity/UT, since it’s a passive bonus, and quarter the amount.

Though I appreciate your idea to change their UT, they both need to be replaced, as well as some major changes to their UU. This civ is far from being polished.

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Tbf they aren’t. They have a very decent eco, excellent arbs and super skirms. The siege elephant line is generally better than rams as well.

Goths ONLY have an extra vil when opponent takes loom, and infantry discounts. That’s it until BBc (gives them an edge over certain civs) in imperial they’re worse than generic civs with eco bonuses

So while drav can tech into infantry easier, their eco still supports a broader playstyle. So even if you give them a UT so infantry counter siege, they can still use their good archery range to do the meat of the work. Which doesn’t happen with goths unless you want to lose out 100% on your eco bonus

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there is a very easy way to “fix” Dravidians and that is by giving them best EA/most durable Elephants in the game.

To accomplish this:

  1. give Parthian Tactics (this is a must) and possibly Husbandry (their Stable will still stay trash and this tech will be used only on EA anyway)

  2. buff Medical Corps to be an actually useful tech, right now it heals a pitiful amount, it can easily go to 30-40 HP/min, this will still make little difference in battles but will mean you can’t just ignore this tech altogether and have to commit fully into countering EA AND killing them.

Alternatively, you can give them BBC/Siege Engineers and whatnot, turn them into a copy of Malay sure, but my solution is more elegant and preserves civ uniqueness and flavor.

I don’t think their infantry needs buffs, their “infantry flavor” comes relatively late game with Wootz Steel, sure, but technically it’s basically a Burmese bonus at the very least, sometimes better (for example, Halbs vs Elite Skirmishers do 10 damage and not 7, and obviously vs armored units it’s yet better).

2 Likes

Ofc it doesnt turn them into Goths, it takes 1 eco bonus to play safe when it comes to civ design, it will never end up as awful as Goths, however, it is a “Gothic” thing to do, overcommitment to a very narrow aspect which is usually not even this viable.

Do you really expect Longswords to kill Siege?
When THS get close to the Siege, the Siege is already dead.

Same logic goes for the Gothic bonus for Infantry vs. Buildings, pointless.

Maybe because the UT was in Imperial age. This one will be helpful as it is in castle age.

I proposed speed and PA as well.

I’m out of ideas honestly. You are more than welcomed to come up with one.

Yes but they are not a good UT either. It is okay to have it but fine without.

So is EA. Especially when you have as much DPS as Mongols CA.

I’m fine with addition. I prefer redemption over BBC. But I feel like this will make very similar to Malay. NGL, this is the biggest reason why I came up with this idea.

Keep HC. But remove atonement. They actually have very good potential to be strong in Arena. Not having Atonement will prevent that.

Very creative.

I don’t think so. There should be other way to fix this. Also doesn’t Leitis attack vs Dark age house is fixed now? So they don’t ignore negative armor any more.

They are an infantry civ. They should have infantry as their main unit.

All are useless against siege anyway.

Agree.

Urumi with 0 PA will stay remain good against melee as it is. Militia line depending on which UT you choose among 6, will be good against siege and slight resistance against archer.

Useful only in mangonel vs mangonel fight in Castle age. In Imperial without SE and BBC this will not help.

So why is this impossible and why giving an infantry civ more infantry bonus is murdering the civ?

It doesn’t work like that in AOE II. Unless you have Eagles.
You cant romantisize this game.

I’m glad we agree on this one, so maybe the solution could come from this direction, a whole new UU.

In AOE 1 PA is as good as 0 PA. Especially when most micro-intense Archer play already overkill an unit per volley.

I agree, in Imp they should have a useful UU to solve the issue.

You inflate the civ with useless bonuses, do you really think THS/Champion really benefits this bonus damage vs. Siege? When an Unit with this high amount of base damage approaches the Siege, it’s an inevitable death for the siege anyways.

The only way to make Infantry relevant is to Eaglize it, or rather Huskarlize it. Aka, giving it both movement speed and pierce armor. However, since Celts and Malians already have that, I’m not too hyped about giving another civ a speed/PA bonus to their Militia line.

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It is mostly for EA. Ranged anti-siege unit can be deadly.

Will this help against siege though? Siege has very high attack to ignore those regeneration.

I’ll say it is Husbandry that is the must. PT is missing probably for the same reason Mongols don’t have last archer armor, keeping the consistency. And also not giving one civ straight forward the best EA.

I liked someone’s idea of giving small bonus damage vs siege to all EA.

I must say, both Medical Corps and Wootz Steel are also quite weak and seemed useless actually.

I do not know why these two techs can make Dravidian stable sucks. Regeneration of elephants is mostly useless and cannot be matched to Berserkergang or Berbers camel regeneration. Lack of mobility truly sucks for this civilization.

About Wootzsteel, this just gives 4-5 attack to inf and cav by ignoring the armor. Because in most situations, you do not always face units with high melee armor, and there are few units which can have more than 5 melee armor. Ignoring armor is not something overpowered, since Leitis was introduced.

In most of the time, elephant and infantry are always the sucks unit types in the game due to their mobility. How can we expect their performance with these two techs?

Dravidian techs should be remade or modified to make their melee fighting better, now the performance of two techs make Dravidians truly weak in most of the games.

Knowing devs which will highly unlikely to ever happen.

Yes and? I didn’t propose extra PA for Urumi to begin with.

Useless? And your siege moves 10% faster is so useful, right?
Let me get this straight. If I proposed a cav or an archer bonus, wouldn’t your comment be “So we Frankize/Britonize every single civs. That’s what we do in 2022. RIP diversity”? An infantry civ is getting a new infantry bonus as a replacement of not so useful UT (Which you even agreed upon) is killing the civ. Really? You’re a hard man to understand.

Yes I do. How often LS and THS can actually manage to kill siege? They all die bcz of low speed and PA. So I added both of them in one of the proposal.

Well I can if

which I did.

Fair enough. I even combined both of them as we don’t have such combination. Why anyone want to hype with your proposal though? It is so uninspired. And also inflating with so many bonuses for only one civ like Teutons.

1 PA is not much vs. Heavy Scorp with 18 attack and does nothing vs. SO. 10% speed is not enough. Need to be atleast as fast as eagles. It also overlaps with other civ bonuses.

I like this but is too weak to be locked behind a UT, especially considering EA are very expensive and cannot hit and run like Mangudai. It should be atleast 5-10. Maybe even more due to scorp bonus vs. elephants.

Sadly you’re right.
Devs never bail on bad ideas, no matter how awful they are.
Hi Flemish Revolution.

I didnt say my suggestion solves the problem, it doesnt attempt to heal the civ, but to offer an alternative playable feature.

No, cause 1 Archer bonus won’t really turn it into (awfully designed) Britons, where all its bonuses are streamed into Archers.

Eaglizing the Militia-line works, always, but it’s the easiest path to solve the problem, we’re dealing here with an Infantry civ that has no UU. Imagine Goths without Huskarl.
You cant pull this trick and call for a solution. It must be approached in a wholistic way.

In theory it works.

I was suggestion a random bonus, it could be anything else, I’m not suggesting however to solve the problem, just to redirect civ’s identity, since the current one is just painfully bad.

If I turn them into Eagle it overlaps even more. My point is not magically remove their weakness against siege completely. Giving a bit of help against siege.

It can’t be such big due to closed maps, more specifically BF. I’m okay with EA getting +2,+3 vs siege as its unit stats (Not even civ bonus) though.

Easiest path is Frankize or Britonize the civ, not Aztecize.

Thank you.