It does look like their winrate on Baltic may be above average, but overall it doesn’t look they have an oppressive winrate on any standard type of map. Arena is <= 50%. Islands is about 50% (not too great a showing considering that they’re a naval civ). Arabia around 50%. And megarandom is <= 50% as well. It looks to me like an average performance on open maps, closed maps, and water maps. Data on hybrid maps is a bit limited, but their performance on Baltic suggests they’re good there, but it’s not high enough to be called oppressive.
Maybe they perform better at top-level gameplay, but they’re not being OP on every type of map anywhere below that.
While I did advice the need for mobility, I wouldn’t give a direct speed boost to their militia line since its a duplicated Celt bonus. My suggestion would be 2x benefit from squires or speed increase per barrack tech or some building to create aura speed effect (maybe even towers). I’m also ok with no mobility boost for Dravidians if they get an insane economy almost the same as Vikings or if their ranged units become harder to kill like taking -33% damage from skirms, cavalry and siege or if they get very good tower play somehow further strengthened by their infantry.
The maa or militia is a timing attack because it can be trained before any other military unit, not like people get upgrades and continue producing several militia or maa. Eagles and such anti archer infantry uu are specific to 5 civ matchups but otherwise people don’t go for longswords. So in general beyond the first 3 or 4 maa aren’t produced because of the need for several upgrades. This is why I wouldn’t recommend additional upgrades for that unit unless all of their existing upgrades become significantly cheaper and faster.
Fencing school is not the solution either since its an upgrade to make upgrades faster. It has to be a change for free. So if you want to give the extra damage against houses, walls as extra upgrade, all other existing upgrades should become like 30% cheaper and faster. This way despite the new tech, overall investment would approximately be the same as today.
I was thinking along the lines of making them a generically usable unit from early castle age like knights which needs the monk change. It doesn’t matter if they belong to cavalry armor class they don’t have the mobility or affordability of cavalry. They can’t raid or chase down and kill weaker units but are insanely expensive. This is why I wanted an extra upgrade for monks to convert. The pike bonus resistance is good for some team games and a few 1v1 closed maps but will still keep them hard to use in most of the castle age.
All of these units are unusable as they exist today. Monks got buffed last year and convert ridiculously fast. This makes it very hard to use high food units. They’re also slow so its tough to fetch good value from them. If you’re opposed to substantial free buffs to militia and elephant usage, no matter what additional bonus you give on barrack units, its not going to work. Goths, Japanese, Bulgarians so many civs are a proof of that. You’d have to either design a new barrack unit for infantry civs. Or redesign many alternative military units like knights, ca, xbows so that infantry are relatively easier to afford. If its neither of those changes, pairing infantry usage with towers is the only other alternative.
Here’s why that won’t be the case. Unlike Britons or Ethiopians Franks scout will scale better in castle age since they’d get the extra hp and can be useful to snipe monks which will be quite common against their knight aggression. Plus scouts are made even with archer civs to avoid and counter heavy skirm play. Pure fast castle into knights is too niche and a high risk play.
There are a few situations where you might want to play heavy feudal and this will prevent the ability to get significantly better scouts and punish Franks.
I might have said it in a context where Franks lose berry bonus or castle discount or the bloodlines split somehow makes Franks have weaker cavalry in castle age. Otherwise +9 hp for free along with 2 other eco bonuses and other civs getting a maximum of +10 in feudal that too by paying for it, is a huge buff to Franks.
Franks get 2 eco bonuses. Only a few more than a dozen civs get such benefits for free. Unlike Franks, many civs don’t get a substantial economic advantage. These civs need to rely on feudal aggression. Even though such a play is currently off-meta, it could be harmful to those civs to move bloodlines to castle age. And such a change would also push gameplay more towards castle age making feudal almost obsolete.
In my list of changes I’m explicitly introducing weaknesses for civs at some stage of the game to make sure no civ is overpowered throughout the game. So its not like I’m isolating Franks.
Yeah, I have to think about it for a while to be able to put something decent in writing. For now, I am of the opinion that the Armenians’ bonus should be theirs. It would probably be enough to have 2HS at the Castle Age. Then also the elephants’ attack speed bonus is completely random as far as I’m concerned.
True, among other things, the attack bonus of skrims should be reduced.
It could probably be done like this for now:
→ Move ‘Scorpions have +1 range’ from Team bonus to Civilization bonuses.
→ Add ‘Elephants have +2 Line of Sight’ as Team bonus.
Lithuannian spearman and Roman legionaries have already crapped all over celt bonus. If any civs’s militia needs to play a proper role, its Dravidians because of their lack of options.
You don’t start with militia line in castle age. So the incentive to go milia as part of army comp comes down to utility in early, mid-game game as well. Dravidians should have the option to not go stable in feudal age against skirms being massed by opponent. If Man-at-arms have the speed to counter skirms at all stages of game, then Dravidian strategy can be based on them. Otherwise the unit will have no use for Dravidians too and useless overall. Its not like the unit will suddenly become unbeatable, knights do exist for other civs and mangonels do trade fairly well against them.
“Receive 10 wood for every villager trained” is a great bonus. If this is implemented, a civ bonus slot will be available to make militia line a better unit for Dravidians. The -33% damage gimmick belong to scicilians along with defensive buildings stuff. But the civ is still a one-trick pony. Dravidians can do better if they are able to use just barrack and range units agressively.
If devs feel the bonus will be broken on water and nomad, the dock bonus can be exchanged for something else like
If the civ has more problems with Siege in late castle and imp. There is always medical corps which can be reworked.
This kind of rework and new mechanism will probably not be looked upon favorably. It is simply too much work for a civ which is basically free now.
EAs are billed as repacement of Knights and CAs especially for Dravidians. Both units are very different and generic elephant archers don’t have the dps of knights or speed of cav archers. Thankfully Dravidian EAs have higher DPS with 25% faster firing. But a speed boost is needed to do cav archer job in castle age. Dravidian problem is the civ comes to a stand still against monk + siege pushes. The problem is unique and is not shared by Bengalis or Gujjaras. The speed boost will help Dravidian stategy to engange siege proactively by deploying elephant archers from existing ranges instead putting down a panic siege workshop. The downside of elephant archers is that your imp timing will be hit hard and the unit still dies to skirms. Hence the longswords.
If the bonus damage is reduced by even 1, the unit will still be functional. But I doubt it will fix Dravidians or change the gameplay considerably.
Which reminds me, in the last summary I proposed moving the bonus attack of the Burmese to the Celts, because the role of fast infantry is already covered by the UU.
One could then give the speed bonus to the Dravidians eventually.
I mean their bonus ‘Skirmishers attack 25% faster’. As it stands, it makes the Dravidians extremely effective against other archers civilisations.
@KHANATTILA There is a new bonus floating
“Melee blacksmith upgrades do double the damage”
Can this bonus be applied to celts instead? Is there any benefit? I don’t see any benefit for celts from the speed bonus except for woads.
This bonus doesn’t fit. But I don’t have any opinion on them
Clearly you know the Militia, Man-at-arm and Longsword do be used on some occasions. They are indeed less common — compared to cavalry and archers, but still enough that they’re much better off than the Two-handed Sword and Champion. The Two-handed Sword and Champion are the ones who really need more for being more common.
You ignore the additional +1 attack from Fencing School, which is its permanent effect and the another part of its effects I stated from the beginning. I don’t want to give the units just an extra damage against buildings but a solid +1 attack improvement. The cost may probably be around 150 food and 100 gold, so even if you don’t need the instant upgrades as you’ve already done the Champion upgrade, it would be still worth researching for that +1 attack.
Furthermore, it is to make upgrades instant, like the Goth researching Loom, not just faster. I do not so agree that the instant upgrading has to be a free change, since It is intended to help the transition to Two-handed Sword and Champion in later games, rather than giving players instant access to Man-at-arm and Longsword when hitting the Feudal and Castle. Before the Imperial Age this unit line doesn’t really need very much other than better speed (through the change of the Squires-line). As I mentioned above, while the Militia, Man-at-arm and Longsword at least have their niche uses, Two-handed Sword and Champion are the ones that really need help.
You can, of cource, try to help them be more used in the Castle Age, but again, making the elephants unconvertible by default is fundamentally weird. Ultimately, the plausibiliy in theme is what you have to consider, not just making the math look good on paper.
I don’t really think they are literally “unusable”. They are just one step short to be popular.
Just like the Scorpion, after one or two changes it becomes a very popular and powerful unit.
That’s how a game work. What you call “substantial free buffs” seems to me to be just likely to tip the balance to the other side, so I don’t really like it and would like to balance it out with more improvements via techs (since those will have manageable cost and access).
With observation for a while after they actually have more bonuses and fill in the lacks in the tech tree for infantry and elephants, if they are still severely lacking in power, I would consider more further changes. But even so I hate the practice of forcibly transforming a civ into a tower civ once it is considered weak, which is more like doing math on paper than making adjustments actually for a game.
But my focus has been on the Feudal Age rather than the Castle Age. The performance of their scouts in the Castle Age is not the point. They could have their Feudal Age scouts be weaker, but I don’t want them to be completely abandoned and skipped, that’s it. Experience has taught us that Feudal Age scouts that have no chance of gaining HP will probably therefore be skipped, and people will attempt to age up to Castle as soon as possible whenever the opportunity presents itself. The Franks immediately have 120-HP Knights as soon as they hit the Castle Age, which is much more advantageous than wasting time in the Feudal Age with 45-HP Scouts that don’t have any more HP.
If this is really a problem, just make the another +10 HP upgrade accessible in Feudal Age as well, and the problem will be over. You can start by getting half the effect of Bloodlines for half the price, which is already very helpful. And when the other half is also available in the Feudal Age, then it will all be a completely huge buff — to civs other than the Franks.
Furthermore, your argument is very confusing to me. You were going to nerf the Franks in the beginning by crudely delaying the HP bonus for the reason that you thought the Bloodlines were too expensive to be practically accessible in the Feudal Age, but then you thought that other civs had easier access to up to +10 HP is a buff to Franks for the reason that they currently have been able to access totally +20 HP in the Feudal Age. Your reasons are inconsistent, arguing that it’s not practically obtainable and arguing that it can be obtained. If it’s the former, then the cheap +10 HP is enough to make it easier to have enough power to compete with Franks when playing heavy Feudal, without having to spend even more that you have stronger scouts but fall further behind economically; if it’s the latter, then that means you think it’s actually practicable to afford the price of Bloodlines to punish the Franks in the Feudal, and then we may not need to make such a drastic change to the Franks.
Very historically accurate description of the history of Bengalis in AoE II. However giving them “Free Cava Armor” would be very very historically inaccurate.
A similar proposal that I made was “Cavalry benefits from Archer armor” while cav armors are removed from tech tree.
I don’t think the free cavalry armor was a consensus at the time, at least I had expressed my opposition to it at the time, I remember.
I remember I had supported this one as well, before the introduction of the monk armor bonus. It could help them transition from Archery Ranges to Stables or vice versa, and it is also particularly meaningful for a civ with Ratha.
Now that we have the monk armor, what I want most is to make Mahayana affect trade carts, trade cogs and fishing ships as well. Once trade begins, the villagers will be deleted, causing the extra population space it provides to actually be not much more (and sometimes even less) than the Goth one. They are also nominally a naval civ, and going fish boom reduce the amount of villager training, so it makes sense to allow fishing ships to benefit as well. Even so I still think it costs too much for an effect that requires the player to hold at least 200 units to be effective, maybe the elephant resistance to conversion (or the monk armor) could be moved to Mahayana to make its cost worthy.
Other than that, maybe make Paiks not affect Elephant Archer and ranged Ratha in exchange for Thumb Ring. The firing rate of Elephant Archer and Ranged Ratha will be compensated by Thumb Ring, and Crossbow and Skirmisher can perform better. The Arbalest upgrade can be removed for this purpose if we don’t hope they have a fully upgraded Archer line.
However, they are already a good civ on closed maps.
I’m saying the entire line needs improvements for free. If you start with maa, there’s a chance players will make maa and longswords and continue with it which will also make imperial age versions usable. Right now the games where players go for longswords, is like a gamble where you go all-in and finish off before opponent manages to mass other units and works in very niche situations like you mentioned. So even if you want to see two handed swords or champion more often, adding more upgrades is definitely the wrong move.
+1 attack is fine but nothing extraordinary. If extra dps suddenly makes them phenomenal Japanese and Burmese will be common picks and players would opt for militia line play with them most of the times like Ethiopian xbow or Georgian knights. Its decent and I’d take it if it were free. Like maa get 7 base attack and longswords get 10, champion get 14. But I wouldn’t add yet another upgrade even though it makes the other upgrades cheaper.
Again there’s a civ in the game which literally has instant upgrades and is not broken. While I don’t want to make it instantaneous with all civs. If its a free balance change to something like 12-15 seconds for maa, 16-20 for longswords, 20-25 for 2h swords and 25-30 for champion, all of their food costs dropped by 25-30%. Suppose you make fencing school dirt cheap like 30 food, 50 wood and tech fast to get these benefits its fine. Otherwise its a massive overhead on top of what’s already ridiculously expensive.
Scorpions have received 4 changes over the years. First scorpions got an extra p.armor, heavy scorps got an extra p.armor, heavy upgrade cost was reduced, base HP of heavy scorps got increased and then they got ballistics. And even now they’re a powerful unit with only a few civs like Khmer, Romans that get many bonuses on them or complement the main army. Its not like with several generic scorp civs you can make a plan that you’re going to do crossbows or knights, boom and switch into heavy scorps. Such plans might be too niche. Sure they’re more useful than militia line or elephants now but still not mainstream like cavalry, ca, gunpowder or archer line. They’re actually the unit 1-step away from becoming mainstream.
Elephants and Elephant archers are just far from being usable. They’re 100% not 1 step away unless its a very wide step. Food being a derived resource from wood, slowest resource, most utilized resource for building economy makes units with high food cost, very poor speed unusable. Bad pathing and monks being very powerful in mid stages of the game adds to this issue.
As far as Dravidians goes, I’ve mentioned that its ok for them to not get tower related benefits if they get an extremely strong Viking level eco benefit. (Say lumberjacks drop-off some food or farmers trickle some wood). Its also fine to leave the rest of the civ as it is, if they get 1 solid unit with mobility like how OG Indians got ghulam when they were reworked. This unit has to have a minimum 1.25 speed if its an infantry and a good trade off between food cost, p.armor and hp implying higher the food cost, higher hp and p.armor. In the event they neither get an eco benefit nor a raiding unit, the civ can neither raid nor get ahead in a position to begin pushing with its slow units and that’s a design flaw. If you consider their existing bonuses until mid castle age, they save around 300-400 resources on infantry techs, so do Bulgarians which get cavalry and are still considered weak. Slavs get free supplies and gambesons which is like 350 resources and cheaper siege but still have knights, terrific farming which is a long term bonus, castles are cheaper on stone after UT, a reasonably good uu, even higher dps on infantry after their UT, faster by default monks that can get redemption. You can see how other average or below average civs match the Dravidian bonuses but have better tech tree. Compared to these civs, Dravidians trade off knights, ca, bloodlines, husbandry, redemption, siege engineers for 25% faster shooting skirms and elephant archers, arbalester which is way worse.
Since many people mentioned that they’re supposed to be a civ without mobility, I felt the tower bonus would fit. So while there are alternatives, giving Dravidians a tower related bonuses isn’t far-fetched. Its no worse than introducing Yasama in 2014 for the Japanese and we don’t see people spamming Yasama towers in every game in ladder, so there’s no issue with balance either.
But the design of the civ is meant to be strong in castle age and early imp and be suitable on such maps where Feudal is minimal, ~20 min or earlier castle age is targeted. Feudal age military is supposed to be weaker which is why the berry bonus, higher hp knight, cheaper castle, free mill techs etc exist to compensate for it. Even if there’s no bloodlines people do go for scouts with archer civs to counter skirm spam from certain skirm friendly civs. And lastly if a unit is only going to get its benefit in castle age, its still totally worth going for a few in feudal and holding on to it. The purpose of feudal scouts in passive feudal maps like Arabia is to prevent forward villager movement, have some map control and cause some disturbance in executing builds before walling is complete. 45 hp scouts can still do that. Obviously if the map demands heavy feudal play, Franks would become a relatively weaker civ to play in such maps, which is the intended outcome.
120 hp knights will get insta converted and become opponent’s knights. If you make a few 45 hp scouts and hold on to it, they’ll become 72 hp light cav, you can kill those monks or force pike upgrade very early in castle age.
If you see from Arabia only perspective it could feel that way. My perspective is that Bloodlines is a heavy investment and getting all feudal upgrades is not worth it in most of the common Arabia generations. However there are maps like Land Madness, Atacama where getting bloodlines, all blacksmith cavalry and ranged upgrades is the meta. My intention is to make Franks weak in such maps and situations where Feudal gameplay is heavier. This way they become a good civ on maps with passive feudal but not on aggressive maps. If you keep the Frank hp bonus and limit extra hp to +10 in feudal for other civs, Frank scouts will never be weak even in those late feudal situations. Even if it gets cheaper, other civs still have to pay for it to get even. Plus they’d have to then pay for a 2nd upgrade to get the other +10 in castle age which will limit the production time available for knights. So I’d want to postpone the hp bonus to castle age to introduce substantial weakness in late feudal.
I like the 2nd idea and whether historically accurate or not giving free cav armor upgrades to a civ with no knights, lancers, camels, cavalry armor based uu is such a terrible idea.
I hope for that too but not sure if the balance discord feels that way, so no harm pitching an alternate path of buffs to weak civs.
I was talking about Ratha vs skirmisher anf Ratha vs Knight, not Ratha vs Archer. Yes, Ratha destroy most of the archers that cost gold. Rattan, G. Xbow, Camel archer and EA are the exception.
My point was mostly against Knight. They win against knight in 1v1 even before UT. That’s too much melee power for a unit that cost wood. After UT, they even beat Camel Rider in 1v1. With now trample damage, situation goes to in favour of them in mass battle. I wish they would become stronger against skirms but gave up some melee power.
Malay did get free infantry armour upgrades despite their tropical enviroment as well as their shirtless midget unique unit
This could work i suppose. Surprisingly Bengalis are in the nerf spectrum now. I’m kinda happy they are doing better than meta civs. They have better play rates now in open maps as well. Their melee version is a battle elephant lite. I would not remove their trample damage. More importantly they have broken the mould like malay that they are a water civ and arena civ. Given enough time, the civ should have options evolved for arabia meta as well. So Dravidians can be made functional too with tweaks.
Agree with the +2 LOS
I would rather move the + range to double crossbow upgrade or remove siege engineers.
I would also remove husbandry and give elephants a 20% faster movement speed out off the box.
Interesting. A big part of my consideration of a weaker Paladin came from the fact that Huns and Cumans have some almost useless Imperial Age UT.
How is this a buff?
IDK. Everyone is saying Cataphract is not just a Romans (In game Byzantines) thing. Any heavy cavalry from Romans or Sassanids or closer region can be called Cataphract. So maybe. What really bothers me is that they are the only one that have “Imperial Cavalry” but have the stat of “Paladin” instead of “Savar”.
Which civ bonus though? Even house hoping will be pretty good TB and almost borderline OP. Maybe instead consider an useless TB like Elephant units +2 LOS.
I think it would usually be a buff in 1v1s. Both the heavy cavalier upgrade and the new UT would be more affordable than the paladin upgrade, plus you don’t need to pay for both at once – so your knight line would be more powerful earlier, although with a weaker fully-upgraded form.
I think Huns are actually a counterexample to the power creep people like Ornlu talk about – they’ve been heavily nerfed over the years (particularly the cavalry archer discount), but they’re still one of the top performing civs in multiplayer.
That’s my understanding too. Cataphract is quite a generic term, and the Imperial Cavalry graphic depicts a cataphract. (Although I don’t think the Achaemenids would have had cataphracts.)
Fair enough, although I don’t think they’ll remain unique to Achaemenids. It will be weird if they introduce a Sassanid civ for Chronicles that doesn’t have savaran, while the Safavids in the Ismail campaign do have them.
The Militia line requires too many upgrades compared to its worth.
Remove Squires, make its bonus default for all civilizations, and balance the Celts accordingly. Also, make the Man-at-Arms upgrade free and instant upon reaching the Feudal Age.
I’d also have Supplies grant +5% speed to all infantry but increase its cost to 125 food and 75 gold.
The Conscription tech could also grant the Militia line a -25% population space reduction.