The whole idea is just broken.
There’s a reason why we usually work with ranged/melee army comps. And those comps are costly to tech in, which usually leads to a “natural” progression in the game.
Then comes a Ratha which is it’s own unit comp. But in order to be balanced it must have some serious drawbacks.
The biggest is that you need to make castles. And it’s not only the cost of the castles but the timing disadvantage. Castles need ages to be built and can only be placed after actually reaching castle age. Knights and CA can directly be trained from buildings you can already prepare before actually reaching that age.
It’s btw the one thing that makes all these broken cav units balanced that were added since de:
Leitis
Konnik
Keshik
Coustillier
Sicilian Cav
If you look how they perform, they actually shred basically everything except pikes/halbs. But even against them they perform way better than the Knights.
Rathas are even more complicated cause they have the double funcion. Everybody who played against CA + Knight all-ins knows how difficult it is to deal with it. And Rathas are this comp in a single unit. And for balance reasons both forms must kinda underperform if you factor in the castle disadvantage cause it would otherwise basically be impossible to deal with them.
I think devs should now just cut their losses and give up on the ratha design. There is just no place for a unit that has basically no caounter as it is it’s own army comp.
The counter resistant cav UUs of DE where already stretching out quite far, actually too far for my sense into that direction of “counter resisitancy” and the Rathas showed that if you try to go even one step further you have to tune down the units so much they become basically useless as they can’t offer the sheer powerspikes of the units they try replace.
I personally think the Ratha would be a great trash unit additon to the Bengali eles, if redesigned in a fashionable way. Cause I think that’s actually the bast way to buff eles, to add a trash unit that synergizes well with it. Here is my idea for a trash ratha .