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The berry buff was not that significant. It mainly makes the berries more consistent. The gather rate increase is only 4-5%. The biggest thing is when you use up the first row of berries close to the mill, the increased carry capacity means the further berries are less inefficient.
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Delhi are really hard to balance because they are so much stronger on hybrid maps than land maps. This patch is a step in the right direction on that front. Improved berries brings their pure land map performance up a bit. The fishing nerf brings their hybrid map performance down a bit. I still think there is work to be done in that area (imo docks need a week attack, something similar to a single villager in an outpost, to prevent dark age cheese being so much more effective against the other civs than it is against Delhi), but it’s improvement. Until Delhi are performing similarly on hybrid and pure land maps, it will be very difficult to balance them without making them massively overpowered or underpowered on one or the other.
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The Devs said in Monday’s live stream there are lots of buffs for all civs coming in the Spring Update (which I believe will be the next patch, probably in March, maybe in April).
Lastly, I suspect, like most people, you’re buying into the overall win rate statistic and probably overestimating Delhi’s actual power on pure land maps (as described above, their safe fishing makes them quite strong on hybrid). Other than faster berries and +100 wood (which is generally used to get the mosque up), Delhi don’t have any inherent eco advantages in the dark age. They start building a little bit as the free techs come in, but even then it only really amounts to 10-15% improved villager work rate a few minutes AFTER you get to Feudal and all those techs come in. That’s not actually particularly strong compared to the built-in eco bonuses the other civs have.
HRE get +30-40% gather rate basically as soon as the game starts (granted it costs them 100 gold and 1 villager’s production time for a prelate). Abbasid get 10% work rate just by building 10 buildings, have the same berry bonus, don’t have to divert villagers from gathering to build a landmark while advancing, and for a very low cost get 1/2 price villagers when they get to Feudal. French get 10% more villagers by the time they reach feudal, save 75 wood on their 3 drop of buildings, don’t have to build a military building to make their royal knights, and get the blacksmith melee upgrade free (I know Delhi get upgrades free too, I’m just including it because it’s relevant).
The Delhi free upgrades start to become really significant in Castle age, but for the first 8-10 minutes Delhi is objectively weak on pure land maps compared to most of the other civs’ bonuses. It’s really only after 8-10 minutes when most of the Feudal Blacksmith techs start coming in that Delhi starts to level the playing field. They don’t really get strong until they hit Castle age and have access to more powerful military units to go with their free blacksmith techs.
Yes, they have efficient production, but that’s really only worth 150 wood and requires pulling your scholar from the mosque which slows down research (if you’re not using the first scholar you’re basically substituting 75 gold for 150 wood). Most of the other civs get more than that much from their other bonuses anyway.
Yes, they can capture sacred sites for double gold a few minutes after hitting Feudal, but (a) given equal player performance there’s no reason they should have a larger army than the opponent to actually secure those sacred sites, and (b) trying to hold multiple fixed points spread out across the map necessarily stretches them thin. This is where I see most games go astray - the Delhi’s opponent gets obsessive about denying the sacred sites and fails to put meaningful pressure on Delhi’s actual base.
The other major place where people tend to screw up is beating Delhi to Castle age and making knights for some mysterious reason. If you beat Delhi to Castle, you should swarm man-at-arms (especially if you are HRE). Delhi have no counter to MAA in Feudal, and even in Castle Age MAA trade cost effectively with both types of elephants. I repeatedly see players lose to Delhi because they either (a) fail to exploit MAA vs Delhi, or (b) fail to anticipate that Delhi inevitably tech switches from spear/archer (sometimes horsemen) to MAA/Lancer/Elephant when hitting Castle age.
If there’s a real issue with Delhi, it’s the stone wall tower pushes. I do think something needs to be done about that. But Delhi’s eco is not the problem. Honesetly, I think the meta is still adjusting to Dehil, and given enough time Delhi were going to end up needing a Dark Age / early Feudal eco buff to keep them competitive on pure land maps anyway. I’d much prefer to see that combined with a stone wall tower push than the current situation where Delhi is just trying to survive til Castle age.
