Ranged units combine more naturally with MAAs then cavalry do. MAAs can do an effective job of tearing down buildings (especially once arson is moved to Feudal), and ranged units prevent repairs. Scouts can’t combo with MAAs in that way because they are also blocked by walls, and there’s only so much space available to attack a building (space that both of them are competing for).
I’ve used elephant archers in multiple games as Dravidians. They do best as an imperial age unit, but I have had a game where I successfully used them in castle age (against an opponent who’d used an “AI army” including Armenian infantry before I started making the elephant archers - admittedly I made a few skirms to deal with my opponents skirms before switching to elephant archers)
The issue with elephant archers is that as a ranged unit, they lack firepower until they’re massed. But as an elephant unit, they are difficult to mass. The result is that elephant archers are difficult to transition into. But if you can do so, they are quite difficult to deal with, meaning that they’ll often win a game. They’re a power unit.
Yup! Thats a good change. Maybe reduce the bonus damage by 1 and give that to eleite skirms?
Agree
Without a bonus to match cross-bow range, EAs are not going to become meta units.
Water balace is garbage. An average player does not even play water on ranked. Dravidian dock bonus is what makes them good for team games. For the wood bonus change, I don’t think water should be considered too much. If any nerfs need to happen, it can happen to other bonuses later once hard data comes.
No, just usable in castle age against skirms.
Agree, they need firepower. But I think the range deficit also plays a part. They don’t replace cross-bow armies even in imp. If they need to be massed in 1vs 1, they need to be viable in at least mid caste age.
Don’t forget, with Husbandry, Elephant Archers are now faster than Crossbows. I think that’ll make a big difference, especially combined with the higher dravidian fire rate.
Edit: Yeah, just tested it. You can still win, but it’s way more fair than before, and I think with some skill on either side the Dravidians can now come out on top pretty well, especially if they have Medical Corps.
0.03 tps is not much of a difference and does not make up for 1 less range. Elephant Archers are a cool idea, but in practice they fall to basic units like skirms that most civs can make, and are incredibly overpriced for what you get, so you’re better off just making their super-generic archers which have same counters. It also doesn’t help that the Elephant Archers cost food, so you’re Castle Age boom is going to be much slower because of Elephant Archers.
IMO their real purpose is to combine with crossbows to massively increase your overall HP for a comparatively small price.
You can get 1 EA for the price of 2 crossbows, but 1 ea doubles the HP of 10 crossbows, while making you dramatically more resilient to a wide variety of attackers.
If you have a large mass of elephant archers, they’ll beat skirms. It might not be a cost-effective trade, but skirms need a number advantage to win, which is difficult once both players are at 200 pop. Of course, this is post-imp rather than castle age.
Being able to survive mangonel shots is also a pretty big benefit imo.
There are other units like Knights and light cav which can take on mangonel shot and finish the job.
Blacksmith building and attack upgrades available an age earlier
The bonus will make forging, iron casting, Blast furnace, fletching, bodkin arrow and bracer available an age earlier. Dravidians don’t get any dark age bonuses for land maps. So they need an amazing feudal age to survive their lackluster castle age and try to win imp. The abiity to build blacksmith and research in dark age will be a good option to pace the gameplay in feudal. The bonus can make Dravidians play a longer feudal with extra range archers. They can play tower defense better too. Infantry and cav can get +1 attack over opponent units. In castle age, they can use blast furnace for +2 attack on light cav who can equal light cav of cav civs with bloodlines. Its a costlier upgrade, but it makes the units viable. Light cav with + 2 attack against Siege units can finish them one hit sooner than generic light cav. They can also finsh skirms and eite skirms one hit sooner. This way light cav can help against knight + skirms push which is an Achilles heel of Dravidians. Their power unit the elephant archers can also be made useful mid-castle age if they can match the range of cross-bows. Currently, they can’t outrange skirms or cross-bow making them not useful in lower numbers. I left out the armour upgrades since tropical conditions of south India generally dissuaded the use of heavy armour.
If we combine the 10 wood per vill bonus, I think it’ll be a good combo.
200 wood per age + 33% siege wood discount → “Receive 10 wood for villager trained ( optional limit - till arriving in imperial age)”
Blacksmith building and attack upgrades available an age earlier
Do you think this bonus will improve popularity of Dravidians among casual players?
The siege discount is also not historially and gameplay wise appropriate. Dravidian civ is based on ethno inguistic people who lived in Tamil country. Tamils used lot of elephants in warfare and not much of Siege. Tamils also were renouned for their metallury and the civ bonuses don’t reflect that. Steel from Tamil country was in vouge all around the ancient world even during peak of roman empire. South indian metallurgy was far ahead of western world as well as middle-east and china. They were leagues ahead of the bohemians and other europeons who were still stuck with in the dark ages. Besides, Europe focusecd more on armour than blade quality. Steel made in furnaces of south India were exported all over the world. They were knows for their higher carbon content making wrought iron suitable for weapons with longer shelf life and use. They would not rust or turn brittle with time. Thats why I propose to add a blacksmith based civ bonus to Dravidians to replace Siege wood discount.
Dravidians don’t really get much in imperial age. So getting balcksmith upgrades an age earlier will allow them to play far more agressive wrt other civs.
Melee attack upgrades would be easily balanced. Burmese infantry attack bonuses are pretty comparable (and frankly stronger). Ranged attack upgrades would be a bit trickier (extra range is powerful, and +1 damage is a lot more meaningful with ranged attacks). The fact the bonus needs investment will weaken it, but the civ would probably need rebalancing in a few aspects. That said, the bonus itself would be a fine bonus.
It would make them a lot stronger on any map with dark age fishing (especially nomad style maps) - maps that they’re already strong at due to their team bonus. The extra wood would help with making fishing ships in dark age. So I think they’d become OP on nomad, which would make them more popular there. I’d expect little impact on their Arabia playrate though.
The upcoming infantry buffs will also benefit Dravidians, which might help their competitive play rate some. The Dravidian play rate probably got hurt a fair bit by the debate between the Viper and Hera about how good/bad the civ is. And Dravidian play rate would likely go up if cavalry became less popular (as their poor cavalry options would then matter less and their strong skirms/infantry would matter more). Especially if knight gameplay were to lose popularity
If the goal is to make Dravidians popular among casual players though, I don’t think tweaking their overall balance is the way to go. Making another Dravidian campaign would probably have more impact there. And casual players are more likely to be the sort of players who do what they want with little regard to whether its practical gameplay and more regard to how powerful it feels. Things like making 300 automata in AoM (powerful, but completely impractical)
They have a fairly strong siege workshop - only missing siege engineers and a few upgrades for their armored elephants, but have the wood discount (which is more impactful in early imp than in late imp). They have top-tier infantry (Wootz steel - a blacksmith based UT - is roughly equivalent to +4 atk, making Dravidian infantry comparable to Aztec infantry) and strong ranged units. And a power unit in top-tier elephant archers (which admittedly don’t have much of a role outside of being a power unit). Plus full naval options. Plenty of imperial age options.
Yes, the bonus would be fairly balanced. Ranged units will be more powerful. But the cost will make it a pretty defensive play. It would also make their towers and castles more capable which @Pulikesi25 was refering to. The civ could play to boom with defensive structures as well instead of being too aggressive as they currently do. It gives balanced options to the civ.
I undestand that which is why I had suggested the team bonus of giving +1 pop space for every building except walls and gates.
The bonus in itself is not OP. Its benefits are less than Wu’s “Houses built 2x faster”. But it allows Dravidians and allies to train an unit immediately after making a building then make a house if more production is needed. It is useful on both land and water. Current Dravidian bonuses are too focussed on water play which is ruining the civ design making it unpopular since water maps are not popular. Dravidians should be capable of playing arabia like Malay or Vikings because of their amazing eco bonus despite their bad tech tree.
Maybe it will boost their winrate. But it will be temperory. Remember celts could do this all this time and still opened archers → siege. Romans probably had the most viable militia-line in castle age with +2/+2. yet used cavalry.
Dravidian campaigns are a grind as it draws to the end. A campaign featuring the cholaa-chalukya wars would be good.
Aztecs get eagles which are exponentially better than light cav without armour for finishing the game by taking dowm defensive buildings. Woot steel does not work on buildings. they need siege engineers.
massing elephants in 1vs1 is only possible on closed maps. Dravidians don’t get any bonuses to do that. So Siege is their current best option.
He made a passing comment that Dravidians should be good now along with a bonch of other civs. Dravidians now can play a better, longer feudal age and with arson can punish FC builds. However it remains that they have no combo options in castle age against Knight + skirm. Longswords did not get any stats improvements. So Knights still trade cost effectively against them and run away when they don’t want to engage. Dravidians don’t have cav archer or camels to chase them down. Elephants fall under the same category.
Don’t get me wrong. I like the direction infantry buffs have gone. I think Dravidians can definitely benefit. But its offset by the fact that other infantry civs like Malay, Bulgarians, romans are exponentially better with these changes compared to Dravidians.
There are more steps needed to make infantry viable all through the game and particularly dravidians. I think the next steps wil be a tech similar to supplies in castle age to decrease cost of long swords by 20% and then an imp tech to drop infantry pop space by 25%. When Infantry has more techs, Dravidians benefit more compared tto other civs.
Besides, as I mentioned, Celts with their wood bonus and faster infantry makes them a Dravidian proxy. When celts gameplay prefered to go archers, compared to infantry after Hoang nerf. I don’t see Dravidians being successful with just a feudal play with M@A.
Agree with you that the overall civ balance needs to be improved. You can’t expect knight or cavalry unit’s popularity to go down significantly. Mid game in majority of the maps involve expansion of player base and the mobility and pop effectiveness of cavalry will make them a great choice. Or to simply put it in other words, its never going to happen.
Siege engineers give both an extra range and 20% higher damage. Without siege engineers, the only way you can consider it as a strong siege is if it has any extra bonus on it like some of the upcoming DLC civs or Ethiopian/Celt/Mongol/Korean UT. Otherwise siege engineers is a must for generic siege civs. Being stronger, faster or having higher dps is significantly better for siege than a cost discount. Even in that case, a gold discount is somewhat decent in imperial age, while wood usually isn’t a limiting factor since its abundant for 2 hours on most standard maps. So Dravidians siege is just average.
Likewise infantry is just above average. Both the +4 attack for Aztecs and Wootz steel offer a very minor advantage when compared to the free Burmese bonus. For Aztecs, the +4 is sort of a compensation for the lack of halberdiers which is justified given their 100 hp monks. Wootz steel is a great tech only for the charge splash attack of a big group of Urumi swordsmen. Problem is urumi swordsmen like OG Jaguars are too squishy for their cost and practically useless. This limits the tech’s current usage to barrack units. For halbs, the effect is about the same as Burmese halbs when fighting all cavalry units other than Savar and Boyar in the net amount of time or hits needed to kill. Most other imperial age melee units have 3 armor. Or in short both Garland wars and Wootz steel are overpriced and inferior to most of the infantry bonuses like Japanese, Slavs, Armenians.
Elephant archers are the only strong imperial age unit and I believe it might just be usable now since this patch because they received husbandry and food cost has been significantly reduced.
Longswords answer both of those units. Historically speaking, the massive weakness of men at Arms in late feudal age has made that approach untenable, but nowadays you can head into Castle age with a dozen longswords, while they are starting their Cavalry production from scratch.
I still think they are probably going to be pretty weak there, but I would suspect they will actually be pretty well balanced overall now. Another notable factor is the fact that they’re unique units is probably most effective against infantry, and with infantry being much more powerful nowadays, they will become better by proxy.
Funny. I’ve done it on evacuation (a hybrid map that is very much not closed) and on Syzygy (a custom map used in alchemy league season 5 - basically nomad X Megarandom). Worked out well both times (though on evacuation, I did bottom out the market prices on food/wood to get the gold for it - after researching guilds to maximize the gold gains). I’ve also massed elephants with Bengalis on the map Brood Wars. I’d say it’s very much possible to mass elephants on hybrid maps, even if you don’t manage to keep a fishing economy.
The militia-line does seem to be in a much better place generally now, with the ability to chase or flee from enemy ranged units (even without squires), the removal of supplies, and the imperial age buffs (small, but enough to mitigate the impact of paying 50f instead of the 45f post-supplies). And the militia-line pairs especially well with skirms (something the Dravidians specialize in).
I think longsword + monk might work (along with walling to restrict mobility). The extra speed means that skirms will have a harder time using hit and run on longswords (and even if they do, monks can heal), even before squires. And converted knights are also a threat to skirms. And with infantry being better in Feudal age, Dravidians could reasonably start teching into it earlier. But this would be more a buy-time option, for while you develop an economy or get a defensive castle up. Defensive mangonels can also be thrown in (might be weak to knights, but the knights would have to dive to get at them), and can also deal with enemy mangonels (at which point unit micro is a very important factor)
I don’t think Dravidians are going to be strong on Arabia, but I think they’ll hold their own. But they do well on hybrid and water maps. Their Feudal play (especially early feudal) is pretty decent. And they have options for post-imp (champion+skirms, elephant archers, siege, etc). Having a weak period is fine if they have other periods where they do well.
Looking at the sneak peak for AoE stats, it looks like Dravidians are a patch winner in 1200+ and 1000-1200. Sicilians meanwhile appear to be a bit of a patch loser (likely due to serjeants being more vulnerable to archers now), though it looks like they’re doing much better in 1900+ (where they’re approaching 50% winrate in 1v1). Results are preliminary, but it does seem like Dravidians are doing a fair bit better, Sicilians are more well-rounded (rather than strong at low ELOs, weak at high ELOs), and that Italians are a major winner of the patch.