I myself advocated that Dravidians should get ‘Mahouts’ instead of ‘medical corps’. It would have been quite easy to just give a 25% speed boost to elephants without changing original design.
60 HP is even worse than elite Urumi(65) and both have equal armour when fully upgraded. Its better if light cav got the benefit of medical corps at least. Its effectively just +1/+1 armour in 1vs1 fights. A trash battle elephant is a better idea as a raiding unit in imp since pierce armour is more important than speed at that point of the game.
If you don’t have good cavalry or their counter like monks, then you can’t do much in castle age to aggressively expand map control. The only option for Dravidians is an archer or siege deathball with extremely good dps like celts, ethiopions. Only Elephant archers have the DPS for Dravidians, but their eco is not as good as vikings or khmer to go early into farms. So a weird siege discount has been given to make up for their poor wood savings on their original discount. It has lead to a situation where a scorpion which has the same cost as elephant archer under normal circumstances but with better dps has become cheaper. So the elephant archer unit is redundant in castle age and Dravidian economy remains setup for wood and gold units well into imp especially on open maps and water maps. However their Siege is nothing special and struggle at that stage against all non-meso civs.
Elephant archers of dravidians have good enough DPS. But they can’t run from their counters such as skirms and pikes like cav archers can. Husbandry is not enough. May be another speed effect on top of it may be required like
Equestrian Archery - Archery range units move 10% faster
Syed Khazi Tajudeen, a direct descendant from the bloodline of Prophet Mohammed who was sent to south India by the Arabian caliphates to sell pure breeds of racing Arabian horses for Equestrian Archery to the Pandya king Soundrarapandyan took over as the chief instructor of Equestrian Archery for the Pandya king.
Maybe a bonus like ‘equestrian archery’ could make EA more fun to use and give a niche to Dravidian archery units. To balance the design however, ‘Hand cannoneer’ would need to be removed. But its okay since Dravidians have other anti-infantry options.
From a gameplay sense, due to wood bonus, Dravidians are better off playing archers → siege. Dravidians keeping their economy wood and gold units focussed is wise since they lack the food eco to make elephants anyway. However their Siege needs to be qualitatively better than opponent since they lack siege engineers. Or else a defensive bonus is needed which will make it very hard to push Dravidians base. @Pulikesi25 and @filtercoffee488 had suggested a bonus to increase range of towers and TCs. If feudal towers and TCs get a +1 range advantage on arriving in castle age that itself will help Dravidians playstyle a lot in castle age even without cavalry or monks
New bonus - Fortification buildings and TCs +1 range, LOS starting in castle age
Affects Outpost, towers, TCs, Castles, Sea towers and Bombard towers.