SpiritOfTheLaw said it was historically accurate that the Bulgarians did not use crossbowmen, at least the Wikipedia page seems to confirm that the Bulgarian army was mainly composed of heavy cavalry. And also on the infantry:
The infantry of the newly formed state was composed mainly of Slavs, who were generally lightly armed soldiers, although their chieftains usually had small cavalry retinues. The Slavic footmen were equipped with swords, spears, bows and wooden or leather shields. However, they were less disciplined and less effective than the Bulgar cavalry.
Edit. If, on the other hand, you create the scout archer, then you can also give it to the Huns, taking away their crossbowmen and strengthening their identity as a people always on horseback.
I feel they already need too many techs in the first place. Scouts get an immediate free increase in speed and attack but you have to pay for man-at-arms which is practically just the same +2 attack, no speed increase and a small hp boost for a huge 140 cost. Not just the upgrades, it needs an extra tech for cost reduction, extra p.armor. Adding several upgrades is good from balancing pov for very strong and powerful units but right now its the other way around. The weakest militia line gets most upgrade while good units require lesser upgrades to be useful.
The tower rusher has to walk 5 vills for 1+ min towards opponent base while the opponent sits at base. Once the first tower gets countered with a tower opposite, the tower rusher also has to put a few vills on stone to continue the rush. Its extremely difficult to find damage as such. You cant kill repair or rewalling vills if 2+ of them come together. +1 attack is not going to make early feudal tower rush very strong, it would rather be good at stopping forward castles and dealing more damage against fc builds.
Except they are not. They are slow like siege. Knights and Camels move at 1.49, 1.6 speed. Much higher chances of getting some damage done and running away from monks. Food cost is also lower which is very important for early stages of the game. Its the reason why we never see elephants used with civs other than Malay in 1v1.
Agree with you on most of this except Elephants arenât a good late game move either. They die exactly in the same amount of time as Paladin, have nearly the same dps as Paladin while costing 40 more food and being terribly slow. At that stage of the game mobility becomes very important on many maps. If youâd rather take this route, Iâd recommend 15 or 16 attack for elite battles, +15 elephant class armor so that they donât die cheap to halberdiers.
Towers donât get any bonus damage vs cavalry, just +1 vs camel. And the idea is not to make them powerful against early cav raids but rather good vs late castle age cav raids. Indirectly addressing the problem faced by civs with poor mobility.
well yes. Isnât that why most people were complaining about phosphorus builds?
Thereâs no other way infantry will work which is why Iâve proposed tower buffs to most non-meso infantry civs. Its well known Dravidians die to knight + elite skirm. This could partially address that. Canât be a cav civ, ca civ, monk civ, archer civ then what civ should they be. Only other meaningful change is making urumi swordsman some unique kind of anti-cavalry ranged unit that doesnât take bonus damage from skirms like organ guns.
Canât believe how berry bonus, free mill upgrade and +9 hp on scouts is being seen as normal while an extra mule cart and regen on scouts is considered broken. How many games do you play or watch where bloodlines was upgraded in feudal against Franks and reversed the game in favor of the opponent. Bloodlines is very expensive and canât be afforded until like 17th min. Usually by then your food grows to something like 400 and mostly walling gets completed. Extremely uncommon to invest into bloodlines to kill the left over Frank scouts.
Great. You treat it as a normal civ and build 1 church like how every other civ builds 1 monastery. If you want to build more, fine, youâd get some protection for your vills but no eco benefit.
Might have been good 5 years ago but given they wouldnât swap bonuses from 1 civ to another, Iâd say this is probably the best. Currently fast imp Arbalesters arenât even meta and I donât think it will cause a substantial improvement in fast imp Arbalesters compared to the likes of Portugese, Ethiopians or Malay. Its very hard to buff this civ for open land maps without making them any stronger on closed or water maps.
Thought it was implied but I can see how it can be confusing. Blacksmith attack upgrades give archer line +1 attack vs buildings. Iâll edit my original post.
Its not going to excel vs cavalry. Theyâre currently almost useless, so instead of a cosmetic change like +1, a +3 vs cavalry might make them useful and worth using more often. How many games you tower up to defend against cavalry raids if you donât have a civ with heavy camels. This can also help adjust the balance between high mobility and slow military civs a lot.
Iâve proposed things like that before but people donât want yet another mechanic copied onto that unit, so Iâm out of ideas.
I think saying that they die in exactly the same amount of time as a Paladin is a bit of a stretch. Itâs roughly the case with pikes and halbs (their intended counters). Against other types of units that arenât given bonus damage, elephants are quite a bit tankier. And youâll usually face more than just halbs by that point in the game (and if you are, you should already have a unit available to counter them). Halbs are rather flimsy, so they donât work well by themselves.
If you can afford the elephants, they are more pop efficient than paladins. They might not be as good at raiding, but they are stronger in head-on fights (due to larger hp pool and trample damage). Battle elephants also get bonus damage against buildings, allowing them to double as a weaker battering ram, something that comes into play after you win a big fight.
Of course, there arenât any civs with both paladins and battle elephants (let alone elite battle elephants), so the comparison is somewhat of a moot point.
A speed buff to 1.15 will still be less than shotels and shotels donât fare any better against skirms. Given the weakness of Dravidians to skirms and ballistic scorpions now, it makes sense to have them adopt the shrivamsha shield. It gives them a niche role. If devs can take the effort to rework unnecessary chages like hussite wagons to make them usable. The only gimmick of Urumi is charge attack that recharges quickly compared to coustiier in exchange for speed. But these guys drop like flies to do the first one let alone a second. A petard with a speed bonus like âMongolâs Drillâ can be a better unit for cover dravidian tech tree handicaps. You donât need another castle unique unit for that. I donât see any reason why they should not fix urumi with a useful gimmick which works on top of the existing charge attack bar.
Vikings are not a cavalry civ like Bengalis. When Bengalis were introduced, they were absolute crap with no military powerspike in any stage of the game except post-imp when they could field elephants. But a few played on till imp on arabia or even arena for that matter in ladder games. The consensus was to give them âcavalry armour upgrades for freeâ which will guarentee powerspikes militarily as soon as they a new age and enable scout-line to carry them on open maps against skirms as well as other mobility related weaknesses till Ratha picks up the slack. However a monk armour tweak, a wierd +2 skirm attack bonus, and a more fetish like focus on monks + Ratha has now made the civ a phosphorous strat basket case. To the extent that the civ is getting nerfed and people calling for more nerfs while another bunch calling for buffs to make it an archer civ. A clear bonus in line with community wishes could have avoided all this mess.
Any suggested bonus is dismissed with doom and gloom. But there are enough similar bonuses like Burmese relic bonus, Vietnamese TC bonus which is specifically far more poweful on paper. But end up far less effective in practice.
'Fishing ship and Trade cog move 10% faster' is also an acceptable bonus imho.
Elephant units are just expensive infantry units which can tank arrows, mangonels better than standard militia line. Its only saving grace is the trample damage which is not useful against archers, Knights or siege which are meta units for the most of the game. They donât slam into archers or siege like knights do with their miniscule speed advantage. They are not practical cavalry.
I agree they need to be more aggressive and towers are not definitely the way to go. The Armenian bonus idea itself was copied from a suggestion for Dravidians buff.
I agree. But for the average player, civs with such design are not fun to play with or against. Eventually you will get more and more âEthipion vs xâ and âDravidians vs xâ on random which will worsen quality of gameplay.
I agree elephants without âhusbandryâ shoud have been illegal design. The design rule should be Elephant civs don't get "heresy", But will always have "Husbandry" in their tech tree. However the only unique tech that is left for elepahants is âmahoutsâ which will be useful for Dravidians.
Well the forum unanimously called for âRedemptionâ to be added for Dravidians who had a rich spiritual history to boot. But devs made a decision to upgrade âBengalisâ as the monk civ and Dravidians as âinfantry + archer + discount siegeâ civ. If the 200 wood bonus was insufficient for Siege, devs should have replaced it with â10x wood bonusâ which you had suggested a year before Devs gave the siege wood discount. Since they donât want so much resource floating, its ideal if they gave this bonus instead. 200 wood per age, 33% sige wood discount â âReceive 10 wood for every villager trainedâ
Elephants cost -50% gold could be a civ bonus to replace the wood discount or unique tech which reduces all siege and elephant cost by -40% gold. But elephants donât need regeneration either way.
Another unique tech idea is to buf their EAs more using unique tech on top of husbandry, special forces called âThrindha Vizhigalâ based on a historical novel based on cholas called âPonniyin selvanâ. They were chosen archers who were trained to carry out swift deployment. "Archery range units move 15% faster" like bohemians wagenburg tactcs. To avoid overlap âhand cannonsâ can be removed from tech tree. One of the main reasons for fall of south Indian kingdoms is that they did not develop light and portable cannons. Despite having heavier cannons than the invading armies, eventually lighter cannons were more mobile. The muslim armies innovated with versatile cannon tactics and defated the besiged fortresses.
I think microsoft made a mistake by making 'Dynasties of India' and not following it up with 'Dynasties of India 2'. It would have given them a chance to fix the extremely divergent winrates of the civs they had introduced as well as make more money compared to what the made wiith 'Return of Rome' or 'Mountain royals'. Its not like India only has 4 ethnicities. Seriously, what market were they targetting with the last DLC targetting Armenians and Georgions. Were they going to use AOE2 simulations to win their war against Azerbaizan. Their half ass fixes to DOI civs especailly Bengalis and Dravidians only alienated players like @filtercoffee488 , @vigunsta and @GentleEvening5 who played the civs in different maps as main and seem to have quit now. They suggested several fixes to Bengalis like âcavalry armour upgrades are freeâ and Dravidians like âknights with no upgradesâ. But devs gave bland changes and called it a day. As a result, AOE2 donât have a new market nor did AOE2 expand the last market which was successful.
Is it foot or mounted? Giving a scout unit range would probably be unacceptable in the Dark Age, and it would be even worse if it has speed too.
It takes 4 upgrades to go from Militia to Champion, which is 2 more than other units (such as Archers and Knights), looking like their original sin to some extent. Besides, the Supplies-line is essentially more of a base-level statement from the devs on whether or not a civ (except the Goths) should have a Militia line viable. If a civs doesnât have Supplies, then maybe the devs want you to use them only in passive situations, such as against large groups of Eagles or Huskarls, where youâre forced to use the Militia-line units.
Anyway, the number of upgrades is not the point but the total cost and time required to upgrades is. The purpose of my proposed âFencing Schoolâ is exactly to remove the time required for those upgrades while giving +1 attack as bonus. As long as upgrades on this line no longer take a lot of time, people can transit to them and gather them more quickly when they are needed.
Are direct buffs to the units helpful? yes. But not every civ needs a useful Militia line, and some civs already have a situationally useful Militia line due to bonuses. Providing new techs which have short required time and cheap costs is the easiest way to improve them with the least burden on the balance. For those civs that already have enough bonuses, they may not have access to the new techs. I even think that with âFencing Schoolâ and âMilitary Drumsâ (or maybe named to Tracking and reuses the icon of Tracking, providing infantry +10% speed in Feudal while the Squires only provides the Militia line +10% speed), a civ could access fully upgraded Champions faster and cheaper than fully upgraded Paladins.
Btw I also have suggested upgrade splits for cavalry, especially Paladins, so they could have more number of upgrades too.
The tower rush should be a surprise strategy, or something more efficient for certain civs. Why encourage it in early games âon a general levelâ? It had been strong a long time ago, and it took us several updates to get rid of it. Those changes may not actually make it obviously stronger, but are still an encouragement for people to go with it. Also, having the tower do more damage to villagers is thematically weird.
But the slowness is not the reason why siege weapons require an extra upgrade for monks to convert them, so being as slow as siege weapons does not support elephants requiring Monks to do the same to them.
While I can understand Knights being less easily to be converted due to their better speed, itâs still thematically weird that the elephants, which are also mounted military units, can not be converted by default. This obviously shouldnât be the solution, just like making towers do more damage to villagers instead of soldiers.
Iâd indeed rather have the elephants be a late game option comparable to Paladins, rather than pursuing subverting the natural effectiveness of monks against them. In late games the economy can more afford to have a sufficient number of them to scale, and the scale makes their trample damage a really powerful weapon.
I think it would rather be a good idea to have spearmen have no attack bonus against elephants or less than they have now, and then have a new tech in Barracks in the Imperial Age that gives them additional attack bonus against elephants (while the total attack bonus could be the same or less than it is currently). This can reduce the relative economic loss of elephants when facing Pikemens in the Castle Age, and allow elephants to gather earlier to a certain scale in late games.
That new tech might be named âLong Pikesâ or something else, and gives +2 attack vs cavalry and additional +5/+10/+15 attack vs elephants to Spear/Pike/Halberd.
Then we can directly give the Guard Tower and the Keep their own bonuses against cavalry, rather than making Heated Shot work against cavalry (that is thematically weird too).
Or directly make the elite upgradeof gunpowder UUs requires Chemistry, if itâs so important to encourage those civs to research Chemistry.
But being a tower civ or defensive civ doesnât fit their identity.
If there is a problem with infantry, then we should improve infantry. If there is a problem with elephants, then we should improve elephants.
The mere fact that a civ can access Bloodlines in the Feudal Age or not is enough to determine whether or not the scouts are likely to be actively used in the Feudal Age, even though access is difficult.
The Bloodlines are indeed rare in the Feudal at this point, but if the Franks only have the HP bonus from the Castle Age, it will be tantamount to encouraging opponents to obtain Bloodlines in the Feudal as early as possible. Since the Franks have no Bloodlines, their horses will only have 45 HP at that point without any means of increasing it. As long as the opponent is willing to invest Bloodlines early, the 20 HP difference will make it impossible for the Franks to really compete even with the berry bonus. Eventually, the Franks will be encouraged to go with the fast Castle Age, to spend the Feudal Age as conservatively as possible, or to skip the Feudal Age as soon as possible.
Splitting the Bloodlines so that the +10 HP can be obtained at a lower price in the Feudal Age for other civs would be the most elegant solution.
It would be annoying if always only the church that existed the longest had the boost area and there are not many villagers near the second church after the first church was destroyed, because Iâd probably not remember which church was the second one.
I donât like the current design that makes it have both a radius of fire range and a radius of boost area. Having a circle and a square at the same time looks redundant and ugly. What I donât like even more is that this design is kept and moreover I have to remember the order. Just replace it with a less gimmicky bonus, like every Relics +3% villager efficiency (up to +9%).
Itâs not impossible to have bonuses swapped if the devs want. I do hope that devs can see the benefit of this swap and try to do it.
After you turn it into a normal civ bonus without affecting allies, itâd be a bit much if you also ask it to get the Fletching-line upgrades first. Maybe just letting the foot archers have +1/+2/+3 attack vs building in the Feudal/Castle/Imperial is fine.
Once they are cheaper and the Castle Age economy can afford them at a scale, even if they are also weaker than they are now, their trample damage and still relatively high HP will still make them powerful. Of course they do not have the speed of horses, but any unit that dares approach them will be melted more quickly.
I would honestly hope to have the Mahouts to be a generial tech for every elephant civ and be the next upgrade of the Husbandry in Stables. Maybe +10% or +15% instead of +30% however.
The regeneration is what makes up for the lack of Bloodlines, and is better for elephants. It should be a civ bonus.
When the civ can recieve more extra wood for creating like siege weapons, the wood discount for siege weapons can be removed. Then, the gold discount for elephants and siege weapons should be a UT instead of another civ bonus, because the extra wood bonus is already enough as a free bonus, especially for their siege.
That is an interesting take on mahuts. Should mahouts wor on top of husbandry or replace it. All elephant civs should not get husbandry and get mahuts as replacment. Is that the proposal?
Regarding bloodlines, any Elephant unit in general donât need bloodlines as much as light cav, cav archers or to a lesser degree Knights. To make a unique tech to replace effect of âBloodlinesâ is quite silly. For Dravidians, it does make sense to replace âMedical Corpsâ with âTherindha vizhigalâ which means âchosen eyesâ. The chola army had a special sytem to draw the best archers from tribals and their feudal satraps. So it makes sense to give archery units a movement speed boost to make up for lack of raiding units as well as use the wood bonus effectively. It makes sense to remove âHand cannoneerâ from tech tree to enable this change. "Archery range units move 15% faster"
Making elephants make sense only when you are on the way to imp. Otherwise they will suck up your rescources and keep you in castle age. The meta is also designed for knight production in castle age. So elephant cost has to match knight and cav archers to be fielded in numbers by any civ. Elepants are so skow and easy to convert even with 2 sec conversion resistance.Hence they are not playable as meta strategy.
Absolutely 100%, the 2 wood bonuses should be subsumed into 1 bonus. 200 wood per age, 33% sige wood discount â âReceive 10 wood for every villager trainedâ
then a gold discount on elephants can be introduced or regneration can be introduced as a new bonus.
While India is very much underrepresented and deserving more, as well as a huge market, its a bit obvious that AoE2 isnt appealing enough to the people of South Asia to justify another DLC for them just after the last one
Mountain Royals wasnt meant to reach new markets but to apoeal to people familiar with the history of the Byzantine Empire and the Crusades. If Georgians and Armenians were a long lost nation ala Cumans or Huns it wouldnt have changed much
Also 10 wood for every villager is too muvh honestly You can basically go full on food until clicking up to feudal. Hindustanis get way less than that and their dark age is still good (although Hindustanis do scale better)
When you screw up, music themes like playing Punjabi songs for Dravidians and a wedding theme for Bengalis, People are going to ask for changes. If you canât make them, you have lost their trust and now have bad word of mouth. You care not going to expand that market.
That did not seem to have work, Did it?
It is a good early bonus and is no better than Huns, Goths, Persians and slightly better than hindustanis, Mongols early game. But Dravidians do need better Dark and Feudal game than all the above civs. This bonus just repaces 2 bonuses into 1. So its efficient too.
It will help with those planning to go for militia line in imp. But otherwise adding 2 more upgrades means its still not going to be useful in earlier ages.
My changes donât make them generally very useful they just make them practically usable to atleast break walls and houses and get better fight vs scout line. And second for civs that dont need very useful militia line it will be like Franks or Teutons having crossbowmen, not a scalable main army but still useful to break house walls. Maybe you could cut more of the existing upgrades like denying champion or even 2-handed swordsmen and maybe even have a few civs that donât get longswords. You still shouldnât add more upgrades to a unit line thatâs barely usable if you intend to make it more mainstream.
Long time ago Arabia map script favored that strategy a lot. Compared to back then, towers just have -150 hp and thatâs not the reason why they are uncommon. Resources used to generate extremely far away from each other and from the starting town center. If the tower rusher blocked access to one of the forests, you had to take wood around a pond which would become very inefficient very fast. Or move vills 30-40 tiles away which is huge idle time. None of this is relevant today.
Again my change gives a +1 attack vs vills, houses and palisades which is a minimal change meant to help towers achieve their purpose. If someone is doing fc forward castle drop or fast feudal into wall and greedy castle age builds, the feudal rusher can build a tower, kill vills or help break palisades sooner. This just makes towers more useful in the earlier stages of the game. Thatâs very important from a balance pov since there are about a dozen plus civs with feudal bonuses that need to gain lead in feudal age to compete later. The wallling into castle age meta has kept these civs much weaker. Given the compact resource generation, tower rush still wouldnât become the meta but help these feudal civs fare better and give towers a purpose.
Slowness, cost, high damage output vs buildings, thereâs a lot of similarities between siege and battle elephants. It has to be either that change or by default monks should have a secondary range like 3 or 4 for converting elephant units. Otherwise those elephants will be useless in 1v1 forever.
The bonus vs elephants was given in the OG game against 600 hp persian elephants. FE devs didnât balance it out well vs these stable ones.
This is a good idea as well. Can help a lot with balancing some broken civs like Bohemians.
If its a free bonus that will work early castle age itself and that might actually make archer civs too powerful as theyâll go for ballistics and follow it up with guard tower offense. Maybe if its uncomfortable clubbing it with ships it can be introduced as an additional separate tech but cheaper.
Thatâs not the objective. Its to reduce the base damage output of high dps gunpowder uu to make them less overpowered in castle age but help them scale longer into the imperial age for balance. Gunpowder civs always get chemistry for bombard canons, but now the tech will also make their army stronger. Non-gunpowder civs will just remain unaffected.
You canât. Generic infantry by design is like that. Cavalry counters archers with speed, archer counters infantry with range and infantry is supposed to counter cavalry through cost and productivity except it canât force fights. So youâd need a way to make fights happen. Towers is one such way to make it happen. Also tower bonuses perfectly align with both infantry as well as naval civilizations and it wouldnât be against their identity.
As far as elephant goes, even if it becomes usable as main army, it might help Khmer, Burmese and Bengalis but Dravidians lack a ton of upgrades including elite and thatâs not going to workout as a main army.
There are over a dozen civs without bloodlines, it doesnât make them incompetent. You are just talking as if Franks are a weak civ like DOI civs but theyâre damn strong and being a civ with 2 early game eco bonuses, theyâd need some chance of vulnerability. Bloodlines are rarely researched in Feudal before clicking upto castle age because its a very heavy commitment and youâre not guaranteed to benefit from it given the walling meta. Since I had balanced out other crazy bonuses like Georgian hp regen, I think its fair to extend the same to Frank scout hp which also doesnât fit their design. They were designed to be weak in feudal, strong in castle age and early imp. Alternate to it is to remove berry bonus from that civ.
This is just a secret buff to Franks given that you want them to retain Scout hp bonus in feudal age. This will prevent the rare 5% possibility of fast bloodlines snowballing their military because all other civs will have to pay a bunch of resources to merely match Frank scout hp. Thatâs just insane.
You are still thinking from the current perspective where you build a dozen churches. If only 1 church gave you the work rate boost, you wouldnât be building that many churches. Mostly at max 2. And if you still want to make the work rate boost jump around, the complication is a fine balance. I donât think its any more complicated than placing folwarks. Conditioning on relic would just make them a zero eco bonus civ and theyâd turn complete garbage. Only other alternate I see is keeping their workrate range at 5 and then letting it increase with blacksmith archer attack & range upgrades to 8.
Given that they get their camel hp for free, its fine to not get the bonus on archer for free and have additional delay.
I dont think those guys quit or if they did, it was due to DOI civs. And DOI 2 is such a terrible idea. People who paid money for that DLC got their moneyâs worth by having fun with OG Gurjaras for about 5 months. Its been obvious how theme of those civs is having no CA or knights which introduces asymmetry and addressing that through units like Shrivamshas hasnât been well received by the community. With this in mind, its best to never ever make another Indian based DLC.
much stronger than Goths eco (you stay at +150w above Goths until you add TCs)
stronger than Huns eco (200w +50w/5vils vs. -100w +33w/5units starting Feudal),
argubly better than current Dravidians 200w/ageup+siege discount (worse on closed maps, better on open maps, much better on hybrid and water maps),
similar to the Hindustanis eco (worse on closed maps and on mid/late game open maps, better on early game open maps and on hybrid and water maps).
worse than Persians eco
Having the bonus 10w/vil bonus also come with some notable strengths:
we dont need to collect wood to age up, like Georgians and Khmer
we can early dock on hybrid and water maps, like Lituanians, Persians and Georgians
we can have infinite resources on water maps (100w => fish trap of 700f => delete and train 14 villagers => 140w), like Portuguese
I agree that Dravidians should overall have a great early game on open maps to compete against the skirm+knight combo in castle age.
But I dont know if this is the way to adress it, it feels like it buffs them more where they are already competitively good compared to where they struggle.
Yeah, I donât like that Organ Gun and Hussite Wagon projectiles now work as same.
Only a quarter level of faith. Faith is +4 min, +4 max. Bengalis bonus gives only +1 min, +1 max.
Mahyana effect is free for villagers? You will save some wood from not building house frequently.
Yeah. They are just too good in melee imo.
I think it is too low of an eco bonus. Could be a good team bonus for camps though.
The extra armored camel and elephants should have come at a price just like Teutons Cavalry. Also S.Rider is ridiculously fast which canât really be nerfed because in that case, players will just spam Hussar.
I think their elephant bonus should be removed from the bonus. Their armored ele is actually an OP unit.
At least this will give them a reason to train those tech tree decorative units.
They are designed as a scout rush civ.
Fair.
I would say the otherwise. They are very very weak against skirmishers while pretty strong against melee units.
In my opinion, the Militia line does need to be improved in later games rather than early. The current situation is that the Militia and Man-at-arm are used much more than the Champion. People occasionally go drush and upgrade the units to Men-at-arm once in a while, and may even use Longswords when encountering Eagles, Huskarls or Gulams, but in imp people almost never use two-handed swords or champions. Even the Hand Cannon is far more commonly used than the Two-handed Sword as they just need to wait Chemistry.
Increasing the number of upgrades is not a problem at all! Again, it can help as long as the upgrades took less time totally (that is what the âFencing Schoolâ aims to), and providing improvements via upgrades means their power increases can be managed and controlled with reasonable cost and accessibility.
Yet elephants are fundamentally cavalry. After all they belong to the same family as horses and camels, not siege weapons. I said from the beginning that I understood why you wanted to treat them like siege weapons, but I also said that it would be thematically counterintuitive and seriously weird.
Rather than limiting the monkâs ability to counter elephants, I am more in favor of limiting the spearmen lineâs ability to counter elephants.
I believe people will prefer Dravidians to get better barracks units and elephants rather than get better towers.
Giving one more Barracks bonus, Husbandry, Elite BE upgrade, and an Elephant discount UT is a much simpler and more direct approach.
They are indeed not a weak civ, but if their scouts donât have extra HP in Feudal and donât have the opportunity to invest in Bloodlines, then their scouts are likely to be skipped, just like Britons or Ethiopians. I feel People would be more likely to take advantage of the berry bonuses and free Mill techs and try to go fast castle and spam Knights directly, and thatâs it.
Wrong. Itâs more of a choice than a compulsion, so this is a benefit to civs other than the Franks in any case. After the Bloodlines gets splt, people in Feudal will be able to choose to spend less (perhaps just 75 food and 25 gold) to get a +10 HP improvement first thatâs enough to compete with the Franks, rather than spending the full cost to get +20 HP. The Franks donât have this whole Bloodlines-line upgrades, so if the opponent is willing to invest it, their scouts will be able to keep up with the Franks (with 1 more HP). For civs that donât currently have Bloodlines, they can also be able to access the first +10 HP upgrade. And still, people can choose not to invest it, just like they usually do now.
In my thread, people, incuding you, had praised it as a good idea to balance the Franks.
[edite]
If you donât consider splitting up Bloodlines, then I suggest officially moving Bloodlines to Castle Age when delaying the HP bonus for Franks until Castle Age.
Since you think other civs canât invest in Bloodlines in the Feudal Age anyway, why not make it fair for all civs to not get more HP for scouts in the Feudal Age, and the Franks would be just like getting Bloodlines for free when hitting the Castle Age.
Forgive me, but what are you talking about? They are archers with 135HP and have 7P armour, like Tatars heavy cav archer with all the upgrades. So they should destroy any archer.
But I see they take 1 extra damage from the âCavalry archerâ class. Rather Iâd say, they should lose 1P armour and go back to zero extra damage.
2 out of 3 of them have an underpowered UT. So my idea is to just replace them with better UTs - 1) Knight line +3 attack and 2) +30 HP. Magyars will get a civ bonus only for that unit for example +1/+1 armor.
We have discussed this before as I remember. I couldnât come up with anything. Iâll welcome any historically accurate term for Euroasian Heavy Cavalry.
Speaking of bland name, now we have âImperial Cavalryâ as a reskinned Paladin in Chronicles.
I excluded Khmer as well as Georgians because I believe they will be hit hard by nerf hammer soon once new DLC comes out. But Khmer buff is the treatment Dravidians need currently to stay competitive across different elos. Without Khmer mobility, Dravidian can never be as oppresive in different settings.
The reason I picked these civs is because they have early bonus in dark age before reaching feudal which avoids a prerequisite and ends up with more vills on food. The prerequisite is either a building, resource constraint or just the meta. The civs have very good early game and do so by skipping loom time for goths + kill animals faster, huns just are the OG skip civ with house bonus, persians just get the resources early and end up with a vill more or 2 fishing ships on water. Skiping on some prerequisite is important to be quicker to the next age and the resuting villager lead can carry the civ despite a weak tech tree. We also have mayans who just get the vill lead right away and chinese with same capability albeit with some TC idle time. So I decided Dravidians need the equivalent of 1 vill resource collection lead.
The idea was to give Dravidians the equivalent of a 1 lumberjack lead from the start in line with the theme of the civ. If the wood collection rate was 5 wood per villager, it was the equivalent of additional 0.513 lumber jack. If it was 10 wood, it would be 1.025 lumberjack. The bonus could have been 5 wood in dark age and 10 in feudal. The decision not to stagger the discount came down to the fact that lumber camp upgrades will not affect the TC work rate. So 10 wood per villager is the optimal value to cover dark and feudal specifically due to FC build orders in vogue. Please note that I have not taken walking time into account. But it is negligible for lumber jacks. So the calculation still holds good.
Infantry civs can manage their late game with lackluster units if they get time for early aggression. The civs I am looking at are Goths, Aztecs, Japanese, Malay. However the 200 wood on reaching feudal is too late to take the initiate for Dravidians. So they need to be able to click up to feudal before the opponent non-infantry civ. Goths have their discount in Dark age and use it to produce army on the way up. Aztecs do the same due to collecting extra resources. Japanese donât have it as good. But perform decently with 33% faster attack bonus. Malay just get 2 more vills and then click up. If Dravidians have more vills on food and nothing on wood, it will lead to fast uptime. Once they put down a barrack after mill, they can click feudal first, pump out militia and upgrade them with their barrack discount while opponent is still on the way to feudal. The window they get to do damage is sufficient before scout rush civs can turn the tables.
The 33% siege wood discount would be redundant because you get to make new TCs in cstle age. You make more vills and use the extra wood for Siege units. Currently Dravidians are forced to make mangonels to confront siege push since they have no cavalry. The same strategy can be followed with this wood bonus from multiple TCs producing villagers which will increase the wood collected in a scaleable manner. Otherwise since the â10 wood per villâ bonus subsumes the siege bonus, a new bonus can be selected from among the many suggested by @Pulikesi25 , @UpmostRook9474 , @SMUM15236 , @FurtherLime7936 , @filtercoffee488 etc. There is no shortage of them to address the cavlary + skirm weakness in castle age. This bonus however might just be enough to make the civ playable in all levels.
Having read through @Pulikesi25 proposal for a tower buff, I feel like defensive buildings are one option Dravdian player can use to hold against skirm + Kight â Mangonel push in castle age and beyond. Successive Tamil kings built monumental structures like dams, temples and forts using granite stone and tamil architecture is known for stone buildings which have stood the test of time especially compared to their counterparts in northern India. The 33% siege bonus can be replaced with "Buildings with stone have 33% more HP and +2 LOS starting in feudal age"
The above bonus can help Dravidian TCs, towers and castles stand for longer than other civs against Siege pushes and pumping out villagers in the mean time. Dravidian tech tree does not get treadmill crane or siege engineers. So more durable buildings especially defensive ones are not OP and are in fact vital to sustain the game while doing slow push with zero mobility against opponent civs with strong raiding units.
If there is a need to nerf the fish boom potential, then the carry capacity or the Team bonus can be nerfed. Team bonus nerfing can be like this "Docks provide +5 pop space" -> "Docks have 20% more HP"
The above bonus gives more value for docks without helping acclerate their production.
"Docks provide +5 pop space" -> "Ships 20% more building bonus damage"
The above bonus directly helps their military to be better siege on water maps. It will also help in âSlaying the Virataâ campaign.
Well, there are portugese, malay, sarcens anyway and Dravidians hardly save wood on water maps after reaching imp. So it might not break anything.
I did not like the reworks either.
Now battle lephants have +2/+2 min/max conversion intervals by default and with the bonus its +3/+3 which is almost faith. It would not hurt to buff the conversion resistance to +2/+2 as bengali bonus.
That could work. But I still think your suggestion of âFree cavalry armour upgradesâ from 2 years back was ideal for Bengalis and not the slav orthodoxy +3/+3.
Cavalry unique units are always good in melee. Maybe just change the cavalry archer armour to minus 1 to make them weak to Skirms again.
Georgians as a whole are a big mess. The civ is supposed to be defensive. But has OP civ bonus on cavalry and unique unit.
I agree with the extra armour on camels. But on elephant archers, they are quite okay. Their armoured elephants have pretty OP stats. I enjoyed the civ when it was still being tweaked. I hated the speed nerfs on srivamsha. Just a gold cost increase by 30 gold might have fixed the spam. They are also not better than hussar n late game.
Yes, the bonus should have belonged to Dravidians or Bengalis.
No. Unless its a casual game and with the current phosphoru builds, food heavy units are not going ot come into prominence.
âFree cav armour upgradesâ can also give same scout rush potential while the food discount will be better for elephant spam from Bengalis.
Sorry
Fair enough I did have fun with Gujjaras. But I did not enjoy the aesthetics or the design choices with them either. Gujjaras represent âRajputsâ. But why name them Gujjaras. DOI had 4 civs from 4 corners of India. But Dravidian genome is found all over India. They should have just named the civ âTamilsâ. Bengalis are fine. Some cosmetic changes like Bengali and Dravidian musical theme to a more traditional instrument from the region. Sometimes it feels like a parody of the fanbase crafted civs. Fans pointed out all the asthetic flaws. But there has not been any response. They went for pan India appeal and did nothing good. If DOI 2.0 is not feasible, at least rename and fix Dravidians and buff Bengali tech tree.
I am fundamentally skeptical about this. All of their bonuses are very beneficial until they reach the Castle Age. They already have an advantage in opening in the Water map, the discount on infantry upgrades and the extra 200 wood are beneficial for switching to Archery Range after the Militia/Man-at-arm rush, and the faster fire bonus is very useful in Feudal Ages with heavy use of skirmishers.
In my opinion, they just need to get more wood in the Castle Age and Imperial Age. In the Feudal Age, an additional 200 Wood is quite enough (or even slightly less as long as it is enough to afford a military building), and there is not a must to get additional wood earlier in the Dark Age.
So youâre encouraging them to play defensively with their tower bonus, but clearly their additional wood, which is their core identity of civ, is encouraging them to be more aggressive.
South India has a rich history and culture so you can find historical references for any aspect of the buff, just like you can still find a historical reference for their siege weapon discount or even for giving them Knights if you want, so this doesnât particularly help convince me to abandon their aggressive gameplay for some defensive design.
Besides, you have thrown many ideas for this civ, replacing almost every bonus and UT. However itâs ironic that you keep wanting to change the bonuses but rarely talking about first filling the critical lacks in their tech tree, the most common and basic way to balance work. That somehow looks like designing a new Indian civ rather than balance works for Dravidians. Personally, I think a one more bonus for more aggressive Militia-line in mid games, enough useful Elite Battle Elephants in late games, more wood in Castle and Imperial Age, and tweaking Urumiâs role if needed would be enough to make this civ decent in terms of balance and historical accuracy.
In fact, the Cataphract would be a decently good generic name for the heavy cavalry of non-European civs. The Byzantine UU can be renamed to more specific terms such as Katafraktoi or Klibanophoroi. But I think we donât need to make such a change unless we are trying to give many civs the Cataphract.
Having the Huns and Cumans with very heavily armored horsemen is for gameplay, not actually very accurate I guess, especially for the Huns. The historical reference to the Magyars owning Paladins is also more likely to be their Europeanized kingdom of Hungary rather than their early nomadic origins. On the other hand, if we want Paladins to be a regional unit unique to European civs, and these civs can be understood as Europeans, or steppe peoples that were particularly active in Europe, then it is not incomprehensible that they have access to Paladins.
That being said, instead of replacing the Paladin with a Heavy Cavalier thing weaker than the Paladin, I would rather replace the Cavalier with a Heavy Cavalier thing stronger than the Cavalier, so that it only needs to research once but needs higher cost than the Cavalier upgrade⊠if we have to change their cavalry.
I wanted to buff archers in exchange for nerfing archers.
Yeah, but then that is your changelist and not mine anymore.
I understood the 10w/vil bonus wad meant to replace both the 200w/ageup and the 33% wood discount.
I didbt say they would necessarily need a nerf, only that they would stand out.
Given the statevof stable monastery, it is good if they stand out.
Portuguese also have a glitch, and even a worse one Malays and Saracens have no infinite resource glitch. 19w/100g is still a bad trade, Malays need 66w to make 2100f, which get sold for 125g, and allow you to buy back 21.25w in average.