I’ve been playing some AI stomps recently with my IRL gamer friends. We usually play from a custom map pool of land and mixed maps and that removes nomad starts (why need the pain?). We came across Michi, and I had never played it before. It’s a great map style. We like to 2v1v1v1v1v1v1 on locked teams, and slowly slogging through each enemy is awesome.
That being said, some civs give us a harder time than others. I thought Byzantines were tough, but then we came across the Dravidians. Siege onagers, elephants of all sorts (archer, siege, and battle), and urumi swordsmen and pikemen make for a very fierce battle. All of this has been noted before by others on the forum.
Let me tell you that Britons have very light-weight units and I ended up just switching to cavalier because I needed HP density for population space.
Also, Koreans are tanky as well, and use siege onagers. I think the Dravidians were tougher though.
I was about to say that Dravidians don’t get battle elephants, then I caught myself. Dravidian stable is so bad I usually forget it exists. Their battle eles are the least of your worries given that they miss armor, hp, speed, and the elite upgrade. Elephant Archers are a bad unit overall, but in this context they are actually kind of decent, given their DPS, tankiness, and mitigation of one of their great weaknesses (being slow) in a defensive, turtled situation.
Even on closed maps, Dravidians are extremely weak to almost any good siege civ. Something like Celt, Slav, Korean, Saracen, or Ethiopian Siege Onager + Halb will absolutely flatten anything Dravidians can make. With a critical mass of onagers, a continuously replenished front line, and even a little bit of micro to target their weaker, lower range SOs, they have no answer to this kind of composition.
You can also brute force them with high pop-efficiency units. Any good elephant civ (read: not Dravidians) will do. Khmer or Persian elephants vs. Halbs isn’t ideal of course, but you’re probably not worried about cost-effectiveness, and they can still push through halbs and destroy a town (and are decent against everything else Dravidians have), especially with Scorp/Trashbow support. There are plenty of other ways to beat them, including high production (with any civ) and decent micro, but these 2 are probably the most obvious and simple. The only thing I would not recommend is trying to go full infantry against them (which is almost always a bad strategy anyway, but especially vs. Post-Imp boomed Dravidians).
-Celts for the strong siege and they have paladins (Not the best, but still Paladin)
-Burgundians strong gunpowder, also Paladin (also not the best) and good Eco
-Persians good Paladins, Elite war Elephant, Trash bows and bbc as support
-Spanish good TB they have Paladins, Conqs and bbc
-Teutons good Paladins, BBC, SO and Teutonic Knights
-Koreans. War Wagons, So and bbc Just Kills everything
-Japanese their Trebs are Fun to use
-Khmer Strong Battle Elephants, Ballistas and Scorpions
If you want the Ai to be stronger without selecting a Higher difficulty add one Team of two AIs as Team so they can trade and get more gold Units.
They can be the final Boss for you after defeating the other ones
Edit: all of the civs i mentioned also have Halberdiers available
I could see bengalis as being very good. Since in michi you tend to spam lots of trade carts, that extra food boom from trade I could see as being useful. Especially if you have an ally like Persians, who then can spam more War Elephants more easy. But also good for franks to spam knights with food coming in from trade. Note, you may need to wall and guard your trade in michi.
Turks are great. Since they can spam annoying bombard towers with very long range and long ranged bombard cannons. Good at irritating the enemy. Portuguese never ending bombard tower spam really good in high pop games of 300 or more. A few feitorias means no matter how costly stone is in the market, you can still make bombard towers. Mix in some trade carts, and then you can make a steady flow of bombards towers. Koreans, long ranged onagers. Khmer massed battle elephant and ballista elephant.
