Extra wood can also be used for farms, wood cost of archers is their least concern. Training time and high gold cost (for a fragile unit) is their real bottleneck
If it used for farms in feudal age, then Dravidians can FC. But to what end? To build Siege units, which will die to feudal age scouts and if you do a pike + siege push, then of course there are feudal skirms which are equally effective against pikes till opponent themselves reach castle age. Dravidians using the extra wood to build archery range to support their MAA push is the most logical play. However this timing window is too small. Just some stone walls can render this entire strategy mute.
Yes, lower numbers of Elephant archers are not as effective as knights. But this bonus can make them effective with this secondary effect.
MAA is the only trick Dravidians can do. The militia speed boost temporarily lifted their winrate. However players have adopted and it happed fast at high skill levels. Dravidian winrate has dropped 18 places at the top level. Their Arabia rate has dropped 20 places and their playrate is again worse than Bengalis. I mentioned the same when the patch dropped and its happeneing.
Koreans are a defensive civ. But they use their faster stone miners for tower rush. Becasue they canât compete against castle age cavalry civs. The same case with Dravidians. If you stone wall and play safe, its your grave. If you put a fortified church down which boosts work-rate then thats a different strategy which makes it viable to defend and then push later.
Btw, the church spam currently happening at high level is also not defensive in nature. I metioned this strat as well in an another post.
The militai line speed boost did not make Dravidians good in castle age. the +1 attack will not either. In fact, I proposed something similar in another thread.
This bonus could have come in castle age. But still wonât do much. Its better if a stronger bonus centered on infantry or archers takes its place
Most of the stolen bonus civs are not well designed either. They too seem to be hotspotch civs with more gimmicks thrown into the mix.
Well designed early game civs are generally centered on a couple of ages where a couple of bonuses stack on top of one another. Then their tech tree weaknesses catch up. For example, Japanese with good dark age, feudal with faster attacking infantry and cheaper buildings. Vikings with feudal and castle age economy to pump out tanky infantry with +5 attack against cavalry. Dravidians get a very small window of oppurthunity staarting feudal age and ending early castle age. The merging of bonuses will make their dark age better. Even the team bonus can be tweaked to âFishing ships and Trade cog +4 LOSâ which will give identiy of early game water civ.
Dravidians - Infantry and water economy civ
- 200 wood per age + 33% siege wood discount + docks +5 pop space â âReceive 10 wood per villager trained except starting villsâ
- Team bonus - Fishing ships and Trade cog +4 LOS
Cholas however did use large elephant arcmies and even made the effort to ship elephants from Sri Lanka to be introduced into frontline battles. In line with this, Make Elephants cheap support units which can tank damage to infantry & archers push
New bonus - Elephants absorb 2 damage to infantry and foot archers in a 5 tile radius excluding bonus damage
Change Medical Corps â Lankan elephants - Elephants cost 50% less food
The bonus is ideal since it benfits battle elephants and armoured elpehants more than elephant archers.
The only other bonus I can think of is what I had come across many times from fan boys of woots steel.
New bonus - Infantry and cavalry attacks ignore armour in imperial age
Then make melee elephants trash units similar to malay an imperial age tech. This makes elephants a hussar alternate to finish games.
Viable if youâre playing black forest TG but otherwise not. Ranged units are cheap and good in early stages when base is compact. Cavalry units are useful in early game in unwalled situations or for sniping siege and great for the mid stages where players expand their base when mobility is crucial. Elephant units donât fit either scenario. They cost a ton of resources and you canât get that much value out of them. Maybe if elephant archers had 5 or 6 base range or 8 base attack or bonus damage vs mangonels they could have some purpose and become a useful unit but as of now they are not. Nobody still makes them in competitive 1v1 games.
While theyâre much cheaper compared to Persian elephants, the whole comparison is flawed because Persian and except Malay all non-siege elephants arenât viable units in competitive 1v1 games. So yes they are much better than war elephants in 1v1 but war elephants are absolutely useless and all that implies is elephant archers are not as useless as war elephants.
Early game is more important when both civs being played are symmetric and have all the necessary important units. But Dravidians donât have knights or CA nor a proper replacement unit like the 3k civs. The tech tree for other important units are weak as well, cavalry lack bloodlines and monks lack redemption and fervor. Given such a huge handicap, their economy has to be better than Viking, Shu level to be competent but thatâs not the case either. They get a mediocre one-time bonus.
Early game winrate is high because Dravidian players are forced to do too much damage and somehow end the game before their lack of good units becomes a problem.
As far as stats goes, Before October of last year Dravidians used to die to cavalry raids around 35-45th min of game time. With slightly better melee pathing this will happen more often again and theyâre likely to drop from approx 30th rank by atleast 5-6 spots.
As observed from the past, longswords doesnât matter given the current style of resource generation in standard open maps. The militia line will remain a timing advantage unit thatâs meant for an attack in under 10 mins. If you want to make longswords viable the maps should have more free sources of food and this food source along with wood and gold shouldnât spawn too close to town center, feudal towers should get better against vills.
Yes, yes and yes. But the idea is definitely going to go to some other new civ, probably in a future African civ DLC. Years later when everyone has forgotten Dravidians exist, theyâll get a sudden buff at random and become decent. Happened with Koreans and VIetnamese.
Iâm waiting to play that new DLC civ which has knights, camels, CA and this bonus 11
Iâve played Dravidian elephant archers in 1v1 (including a few tournament games). But they are more of a late game unit. In castle age, my own experience with them is that my opponents would go skirms against them, and that neither really pushes well into the other (but this is trading a gold unit for a trash unit - not a great long-term plan - still was able to win, but probably not the best option). Though if an opponent is teching into many different unit types (a mistake), then focusing on elephant archers does work quite well. Elephant archers can be used to close out a game, by making a ranged unit blob that is particularly difficult to destroy. And that I think is their main niche.
But early game, Dravidians have solid MAA-skirm play, and 200 wood upon hitting Feudal age supports most feudal strategies well. And of course, Dravidians are a naval civ (with a good niche on nomad and naval maps). I think itâs fine for Dravidians to remain in their current niche: not every civ needs to be great on Arabia (and other open maps), and below-average civs will always exist.
Its quite self-explanatory - not the best option, niche. Thatâs not a mainstream unit for 1v1, more like a flex when youâre so ahead.
This bonus itself is ok but thereâs no possibility of a good follow-up. Like if you have good cavalry, you can switch from ranged units to knights or scouts to xbows/CA. For Dravidians, neither is possible. So you are forced to almost do game ending damage.
Italians, Portugese, Vikings these are naval civs too. Apart from being very good on water these civs are either good for open land maps or closed. Being a good naval civ doesnât imply a civ should be too weak on land maps. Every civ doesnât need to be great on Arabia but should be good on some other category of land maps.
I have closed the poll.
Dude, even on water maps if opponent does not resign itâll take Dravidians hell of a lot of time to kill them off on land. Its not just arabia even on maps like arena where you need to be able to contest outside the base area. Dravidians have a hard time cathching upto mobility options afforded to other civs. I think husbandry addition was supposed to fix this. However the timing window they get to contest outside the base is just too small. They donât have second mining upgrades either to just boom like vikings. So their wood economy bonus needs to be more frontloaded to give that timing window in castle age. The 200 wood bonus is a bit hard to capitalize on to boom since it makes sense to build a siege workshop right way and do a push before opponent mobile cavalry are out in force. Its better to get the wood smoothly across the game which affords gameplay flexibility.
Then how about keeping the Siege bonus theme
Siege weapons have 20% more HP
This bonus will make their siege a better more tanky slow death ball just like their elephants. It affords a little more protection against cavalry as well. Helps their armoured elephants cope up without bloodlines as well.
In order to accomodate this bonus, we can do the initial step without changing the team bonus.
Thereâs this unit called the trebuchet. Itâs pretty good at taking out key structures (like castles and TCs). Dravidians even have a bonus for it (a wood discount). They do miss siege engineers, but trebuchets are still pretty good at their role without that tech. Trebuchets are pretty important to how archer civs (such as Britons) close out the game without relying on cavalry. Dravidian arbs and elephant archers can likewise close out a game by guarding siege units that take out an enemy base. After all, it doesnât matter how mobile your cavalry army is if an enemy army inside your base just took out the last of your castles/TCs.
Itâs even easier if enemy buildings are close to the shoreline as then the Dravidians can use cannon galleons.
And champ/skirm is also able to close out the game. Champions deal good damage to buildings (more than cavalry do) and can take out large portions of a base with little micro required. The skirms are microd to take care of ranged gold units that would threaten the champions They do appreciate siege support for certain benefits (siege elephants to take out buildings even faster, trebs to take out castles/BBTs, BBCs to take out enemy siege units, etc). But champs/skirms can sometimes close out a game without any siege units supporting them.
You donât need to catch up to enemy cavalry units if you have an army threatening their base. And even if you did, Dravidians with husbandry are still less mobile than Teutons without it. I think husbandry was really intended to buff their elephant archers so that they arenât outsped by enemy ranged units (like skirms). It also should help them move between battlefields, but thatâs a small improvement.
Donât really need the mining upgrades for a boom: booms take wood/food. Some stone as well for TCs, but you donât need the stone mining upgrade for that (and definitely not the second one). Missing the second gold mining upgrade isnât ideal, but putting a few extra villagers on gold will make up for that. And Vikings are probably the worst civ for booming (weak late-game comps, and their economy bonus is timing-based, not a permanent boost).
Vikings have the best eco bonus in the game. If you canât boom and mass archers/beserkers as vikings, then you should not be playing this game.
I donât like the condesending tone.
Britons have warwolf trebs. If trebs were good enough, then devs would have never given Dravidians BBC. The discount on trebs is a by-product of a band-aid fix made for their castle age weakness to mangonel pushes. Instead of these band-aids, its better to design proper bonuses and tech-trees.
You can make 2 arbs for the price of 1 elephant archer. Without the second gold mining upgrade, there is no point trying to outmass your opponent behind walls without a clear resource advantage.
Such a gross design negligence and it took 3 years to fix it. There are still issues like the fact that Armoured elephants are balanced by taking their stats wrt Gujjaras and Bengalis. Dravidians have the worst of them since they get the most squishy units with the worst DPS. With the wood discount, they donât use them either.
If you have a bonus like this for more survivable siege, then you can have siege in front backed up by squishy units like skirms or archers to push like a death ball comp. It would be a buff to their armoured elephants and trebs too.
One thing Iâve always wanted in Age of Empires 2 was hybrid elephant archers.
I donât like the fact that these elephant archers remain stationary when enemies attack them. I understand that due to engine limitations, itâs impossible to implement the same system seen in AoEIV.
But you could make elephant archers a hybrid unit like this:
â You could have an icon with a function to activate and deactivate the use of the bow and arrow. This way, when you deactivate the bow, the elephant would become a war elephant, but due to its stats, it would be like a light/nerfed war elephant, as it would have less melee armor and less health.
It would be really cool; you could even make it so that when the bow is deactivated, it would move faster than a normal war elephant. It would be a lot of fun for elephant fans. It would give the light elephant the ability to defend itself against certain types of units.
In the case of the Dravidians, this light elephant would also have an increased melee attack speed, since archers also have it, thus making the Dravidian light elephant different from other civilizations.
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Initially I was also flummoxed why elephant archers did not do any trample damage.
Yes, using the existing bonus on top of new gimmick is a nice idea.
This implementation is already in the Ratha. It can be done for Elephant archers as well.
The problem with Dravidians is that they have fewer tanky meta options. Elephants are not meta. Even worse the civ needs to rely on trash and ply defensive for a major part of the game. If the civ needs to rely on extrmely squishy units like infantry and archers to make offensive, their elephants need to do some kind of damage mitigation role âAbsorb 2 damage from nearby infantry and cavalry or Units in 5 tiles take 25% less bonus damageâ.
If elephants cannot play a role, then Siege has to take that role. Hence my latest suggestion,
I understand it for realistic reasons but I think the Elephant archers are now in their best state theyâve ever been in and the devs shouldnât touch them further
Exactly and British trebs take out other trebs 100% with their UT which is a great bonus, while 66 wood savings is a shit bonus at 40th minute when you have 120 working vills. You need a bonus like Britons, Japanese or Tatars - Range, packing/unpacking, accuracy vs other trebs, extra damage vs buildings, extra damage vs siege units, lower reload time etc. Even if it were a 33% discount on gold cost, it would be solid because at that stage of a game gold becomes scarce while wood is abundant.
This is good on maps where u push from one region. But after 40 mins, its more likely that players have expanded and theyâd push from a different direction while repairing their castle or using siege engineer trebs to buy time. If you make an army with only ranged units and you split them they become ineffective.
what he means is if you win the water but thereâs enough map left farther from the shorelines, the ineffective Dravidian land army will take a long time to close the game because you canât use champions and skirms to raid as effectively as cavalry units. While many other water civs can do that.
This is again true if you have a bonus like Malay for faster up time or an eco like Shu or Vikings. With civs like that, atleast 70% of the time youâll hit imp sooner and get bracer, defensive castle much sooner. Then the mobility disadvantage gets neutralized to some extent. However, 400 wood + maybe another 200 from mangonels is a mediocre bonus compared to what Vikings, Shu or Malay get. Its a decent bonus for a civ that has nearly a full tech tree and misses just 1 or 2 important techs but not for a civ that lacks bloodlines, knight line with no replacement, CA line with no replacement, terrible monks.
I agree that its a minor requirement but for an archer civ that attempts to go imperial age with 70-80 pop to have the timing lead and get bracer fast, the second gold mining upgrade is quite useful. Again if you have an insane top tier economy, its fine to not have 2nd mining upgrade but this is mediocre eco bonus, huge military weakness AND no 2nd mining upgrade. Malay 5 extra vills from the age up bonus until castle age, Vikings 5 vills from time saved on wheelbarrow+handcart, Shu 40 on wood with bow saw is equivalent to 5 vills on farms with wheelbarrow. For Dravidians, you canât get those 5 vills from anywhere.
Those are problems for blackforest and other closed map TGs. In open or hybrid map 1v1s you need timing lead to push their base fast to not chase after cavalry like youâve previously mentioned and Viking eco is terrific for that. Sparing a few civs like Shu, Chinese, the resource advantage is unmatchable. You save 650 resources + 5 vills worth of tc time and until the opponent gets those upgrades 14% faster farming in feudal age and an additional 10-11% faster farming in castle age. All of this combined easily translates to 1000+ resource advantage in under 30 mins almost every game. Thatâs massive. If you check aoepulse for civ winrates in 1900+ 1v1, Vikings are top-10 while Dravidians are bottom-15
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I totally hate them getting husbandry though. Should get the old Persian UT Mahout instead.
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I would think that by disabling the use of the bow and the elephant acting as a light war elephant, it would have trampling damage, because that would be the only way a light elephant would be useful on the battlefield, since its stats are lower than a standard war elephant.
But if the ability to disable the bow wasnât implemented⊠A different suggestion could be added: a new upgrade for the archer elephant to deal trample damage when attacked, even when standing still? Since the elephant doesnât attack, at least it could defend itself when attacked. That could also be a possibility.
I liked the suggestion. Letting the elephant survive a little longer. It would be fair, as it is an elephant civilization, to also encourage the use of elephants.
I really donât think itâs a good idea to improve siege units. Historically, southern India used a lot of elephants. It had a much larger elephant army than other civilizations here in AoE2.
I also think the Dravidian elephantâs bonuses are terrible. I think they need to add a better bonus to rekindle its use in the game. If they had so many elephants in real life and used them, in-game they kind of threw a bucket of cold water on it. If there were a more interesting bonus, which would increase the interest in using it, I would like it better.
I have no idea if this archer elephant is powerful in tournaments or not. I just wish it was more fun to use.
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Dravidian EAs surely are
They are still 1000x better than Urumi due to speed and no gold cost. But you should accept their actual trash tier horse unit and maybe ask for better melee elephant unit bonuses. Like a trash or almost trash Battle Elephant or even Siege Elephant will be quite good for both balance and design.
Viking eco bonus is pretty powerful, which does support a boom well. However, Vikings late game isnât that great (no power units, no deathball comps, no BBCs to take out enemy siege, etc), so the payoff isnât. Viking eco bonus is better at supporting aggressive strategies because of that. Vikings also get the full benefit of their eco bonus in castle age, making that a better time to push.
Apologies. I did cross a line there. BBCs hold a different role than trebuchets do, being specialized against enemy siege units while trebs specialize against buildings.
I do maintain that there are several ways to close out a game. The only ones Dravidians seem locked out of to me are raiding an enemy to death and massed monks (missing redemption hurts this micro-intensive method).
In a practical test⊠the Dravidians have the best elephant archers on the offensive, âbut they have a huge Achillesâ heel hereâ, rsrsrsrsrs, because their elephants have less health, so they are killed more quickly.
This reminds me of some old championships I watched, where the Dravidian elephant archers, when fought with certain units, died quickly.
The difference with other archer elephants isnât that great when compared in a practical combat, where there are units that defend themselves and retaliate. The Dravidians have a slight advantage⊠but if these elephants had that upgrade to increase the cavalryâs health, then it would be a more pleasant difference.
I think itâs a bit unfairâŠ
The Dravidians were the only Indian civilization that expanded the Indian dominions beyond the continent. They defeated the Bengalis, the Malay kingdoms, and other smaller regions, as well as liberating Southern India from the rule and influence of the Kingdom of Northern India. They utilized many war elephants and archer elephants compared to other civilizations in the game. However, their bonuses are mediocre for war elephants, actually the worst. The archer elephant has a slight advantage, it could be better if it werenât for its extremely low health.
In my opinion, some bonus should be changed, or some health upgrade should be activated, or something else should be enabled.
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Dravidian elephant archers get hp regen, which more than makes up for missing bloodlines. They can still die quickly to focus fire and multiple onager shots, but bloodlines doesnât have that much impact on elephant units, as +20 hp when you already have over 200 is less than a 10% increase. Their main competition would be Bengali elephant archers, who receive less bonus damage (which is also a significant buff to survivability). Gurjara elephant archers the worst, as they are missing the last armor upgrade (elephant units tend to take more hits than other units, so they use armor more than most other units in the game). Gurjara elephant archers do get better melee armor, but that doesnât help against skirmishers, castles, or scorpions, and spear units mainly rely on bonus damage anyways (which is still pretty high).
Iâd bet you mixed up Gurjara and Dravidian elephant archers, as Dravidian elephant archers have much better survivability than Gurjara elephant archers.