The original design of Dravidians made their stables look like an unnecessary building as if it was a meso civ. However further changes down the line like cost changes to elephant archers and addition of husbandry made it possible to use stable technologies based strategies. But the stable units themselves remain unusable especially the battle elephant. I have a proposal which can give Dravidian elephants a role in castle age. Here is how I would go about it.
I put up this idea of a change to make the wood bonus smooth across the game:
200 wood per age + 33% siege wood discount + docks +5 pop space → “Receive 10 wood per villager trained except starting vills”
Team bonus - Ships and Siege repaired 25% faster
Merged the 3 wood bonuses which practically serve the same purpose. I would pair this with a new bonus.
“Elephants absorb 2 damage to infantry and foot archers in a 5 tile radius”
Elephants will lose 2 HP when its closest infantry or archer takes damage and the foot unit takes 2 less damage. The bonus makes battle elephants and armoured elephants act like meat shield against ranged units making up for Dravidian lack of heavy cavalry. It makes use of already built Dravidian stable to make battle elephants as part of an useful combo. I did the mathematics. It does not change the counters dynamic such as archers vs infantry or skirms vs archers. But it gives the combination 25-33% more tankiness as it is expected by gameplay mechanics.
By default the effect of ‘medical corps’ stacks on this effect to make regeneration a good technology for the elephants, on top of that I would add another 2 damage absorption capability as part of medical corps
Medical Corps: Elephant units regenerate 30 hit points per minute. They absorb additional 2 damage to infantry and foot archers.
Elephants with medical corps will absorb 2 more damage. Regneration will allow absorption of additional damage from opponent upgraded counter units like elite skirms, Eagles and unique units like plumed archers. This change might make medical corps an worthwhile investment in castle age.
Do you think this bonus can make Dravidian elephants useful in open maps, broaden their cavalry options and improve their playrate?
Medical corps and Elephant aura bonus combo is better design
Dravidians are fine now. Wootz Steel Light cav now with husbandry are actually usable now. If the Dravidians were to be buffed, it should either be pierce armor of the Urumi swordsman (dying to skirms is embarrassing) or medical corps (50HP/min?)
Woots steel light cav still don’t have last armour upgrade. They die to any range units and the low 60 HP means that they are no better than urumi. Both urumi & light cav are good at defense against melee units. But you can’t use them as part of a death ball composition.
The assumption that dravidians currently win due to woots steel is flawed. Woots steel is hardly researched in my experience. Its mostly siege push with discounted trebs, bbc and skirm. The comp is not a good death ball comp as teutons or even dravidian elephant archers. Its halbs that fight cav not urumi or light cav. Once you are past early imp age, its hard to transition to farms to make elephants if you are not already in a winning postion. Woots steel due to dravidians mobility problem is not as useful as lets say ‘garland wars’. You get a small window in early imp and thats about it which is assuming you overcome Dravidian castle age weaknesses.
Urumi is indeed an embarrasment. If devs can’t add a pierce armour, they should have buffed the movement speed to match shotel warriors who perform a similar role. At this point, they don/t have the speed to intercept melee unique units either
Some add on benefits should be there for medical corps. if the tech is supposed to benefit elephant archers, the effect should be changed to ‘Archers regnerate 30 hp/min’ or ‘Infantry and cavalry regenerate 30 HP/min’ which will effectively function as a +1/+1 armour in 1vs1 fights. Elephants have a ton of HP. They don’t need medical corps. Even ‘herbal medicine’ is kinda useless for Dravidians.
Aura’s are part of the game now. This one helps Dravidians in a niche castle age situation.
Theare are so many issues whenever new civs like 3K are released, the older issues just get swept aside. This is a game for history buffs. The cholas used a lot of elepahnts in battle going to the extent of transporting them from sri lanka. Elephants never fought alone like horse cavlary could. Hence the infanty and archer units angle. Dravidians as a civ hardly makes elephants due to their cost, slowness and more importantly cheapness of their siege. With a bonus on elephants, they could have an authentic playstyle of ‘elephant + archer’ or ‘elephant + infantry’ combos to overcome their mobility based weaknesses.
I’m fine with the Dravidian stable as it currently stands. I do like to open with a scout rush as Dravidians, and it works perfectly fine. Not every civ needs to be good at everything, and tech tree holes are a part of the game. And medical corps is a strong technology as it stands (pairing well with Dravidian’s superior elephant archers and occasionally benefitting their siege elephants)
I’d say having lots of hp is an attribute that makes hp regen especially useful (other ones being the ability to pick fights and damage being spread out between lots of units). They often survive fights/mangonel shots, and that means lots of time to regenerate hp. And hp regeneration makes a unit very resistant to chip damage, something elephants will inevitably accrue.
Elephant archers are one of the strongest points of the civ (along with naval combat) and is the one thing Dravidians do better than every other civ. It’s my go-to in the Dravidian late-game. Siege without siege engineers doesn’t compare, but BBCs are still good support for elephant archers.
I agree Elephant archers are good for late game. But in 1vs1 open maps, they are cost prohibitive. They cost more than knights and are needed in numbers similar to archers for the same dps. Its better to just open crossbow backed by siege as the economy needed for archer to scale to siege is similar than going elephants. Elephant archers cannot be made right away in castle age like Knights in smaller numbers. They need an economy swittch to produce in numbers. Dravidians food, gold economy is piss poor. If they get to that point where they have so much gold control, they can use any comp of infantry or even urumi to finish the game. So Elephant archer is not a go to unit like mangudai for Dravidians. They are just a convinience just like Urumi.
In the event of a match which can go either way, despite reaching imp, Dravidians slowly lose space due to no cavalry option. Due to lacking map control, Dravidians will be forced to use trash units and 2 of their trash units are pristine. But light cav is so bad they can’t be used effectvely. They need last armour upgrade for Dravidians to claim that they are a viable late game civ. IMVHO, Dravidians have too many of their bonuses front loaded. But lack the units or bonuses at the start of castle age to capitalise on that. The Siege discount may feel like it adresses the weakness. But in reality all their units in castle age die to mobile units. So their best option is a second TC and doing military simultaneously which is not always possible.
I understand and I myself struggle against these new civs and units. But its better to adapt than complain. The existing civs probably need a boost to keep up with this power creep.
200 wood per age + 33% siege wood discount + docks +5 pop space → “Receive 10 wood per villager trained except starting vills”
Team bonus - Ships and Siege repaired 25% faster
With this combination, any defensive bonus for Dravidians in castle age will do a world of good.
You are aware that games can be won without cavalry, right?
Other imp options dravidians have access to: halb/SO (no siege engineers is not ideal, but still a common deathball), arb/halb, arb/champ, champ/skirm (both top-tier), etc. And BBCs supplements many of these comps fairly well.
Dravidians are relatively vulnerable to raids since they have a hard time counter-raiding, but getting raided doesn’t mean much if the enemy base is collapsing to your push. And Dravidians can use static defenses (generally walls/castles) to limit cavalry raids.
Also, looking on AoEStats, Dravidians do have a winrate dip in 30-45 minute games (a clear weak point), but it rises again for 45+ minute games.
Castle age options: Xbows (a critical mass can deal with enemy cavalry, but would be vulnerable to enemy mangonels), longswords/skirm (castle age is a weak point for the militia line, but is a natural follow-up to the Feudal age equivalent), monks (not great, but is capable of warding off knights), mangonels, pikes (another counter to knights). There are plenty of valid strategies that don’t use cavalry, and Dravidians have access to most of them.
Dravidians do have their weak points, but a civ having weak points is fine. Most civs have weak points, and knowing how to compensate for that (or how to make it irrelevant) is part of the game.
You could argue that. But in aoe2, all that glitters is gold. Unless you have counters to all gold unit combos as well as some defensive bonus like byzantines, You are never going to get to ur ideal death ball comp on open maps. It does not even need to be scouts even battle elephants or elephant archers with a bonus will do. Woots steel comes in too late for light cav to matter.
But Dravidians don’t have any bonuses for building (eg fortified church) or any durable death ball except elephant archers which can be almost as resource intensive as persian war elephants.
Medical Corps is a pathetic excuse for a tech which Georgians get for free on more units than Dravidians.
This was the suggestion given roughly a month after release of DOI and it ties up neatly with Dravidian woots steel. But devs still kept medical corps within elephants while full well knowing its irrelevence when it was buffed to 30 hp/min, medical corps could have included light cav as well. The effect would been equal to +1/+1 in 1v1 fights. A pretty defensive upgrade for light cav compared to plate barding armour and cannot defeat any light cav with bloodlines in imp let alone hussar provided they have blast furnace. So if they are going to keep the civ as they are, the civ should atleast get elephants which are useful in every stage of the game since all their other units are too offten too squishy for longer engagements.
Your elephant aura idea is cool and unique. But unfortunately this means its going to be stolen for the next civ DLC’s infantry and naval civ. Infantry regen, Jian swordsmen like barrack anti archer unit, double benefit from blacksmith for infantry, reflecting damage, passively generating food, unit line upgrades available an age earlier were all community suggestions to buff Dravidians.
The pro players and the ranked meta players are mostly happy with newer civs being mediocre than strong. At the moment Dravidians are like a bottom 20 but not bottom 10 civ on most land maps. Hence devs are not going to directly buff Dravidians anytime in the near future.
Don’t need bonuses for a fortified stone wall to be effective. Also don’t need any defensive bonuses for a castle on a mine to hold the gold/stone mine against anything that isn’t a serious push.
Elephant archers cost 60f/80g: literally just 5 gold more than a knight (one of the most viable units in the game). Nowhere near as resource intensive as Persian War elephants (which cost 170f/85g). Elite upgrade is pretty expensive though (but cheaper than paladin upgrade)
Looking at aoestats, in 1v1s Dravidians are ranked:
All ELO: 29 (38 on Arabia)
1200+: 24 (29 on Arabia)
And they do well early game but fall off late game. And early game is more important than late game in 1v1s. In team games, they do better in the late game though (probably due to their top-tier elephant archers)
Personally, I think the only change I’d give Dravidians is a general +1 damage to every civ’s longswords (gives longswords the same attack as a knight and allows them to beat knights in equal resources).
Other than cost a knight and Elephant archer are not comparable.
Dravidian economy is geared towards archers and siege in castle age which required economy centered on wood. Persians can do knights transition to a food economy and but can only make war elephants once fully boomed. The transition from wood based units to food based units is a hard ask for Dravidians. They hardly even make second towncenter despite getting 200 wood for this. They go for a siege workshop to make use of their bonus and just get a military lead. Dravidians are incentived to go for Siege units. So if they try to transition to elephant archers, its a lot of time and economy changes. Thats is why I mentioned its as resouce intensive unit.
