@SMUM15236 I want to bring to ur notice that you suggested replacing medical corps with ‘mahouts‘ in the other thread. I also wanted to remove husbandry and give 25% speed boost to elephants. Below is just for reference.
I shall explain why a further 10% speed boost on elephat archers will not be OP. Elephant archers are hard countered by skirmishers and pikeman. The speed boost only allows you to outrun one of the units not both. The tech only helps elephant archers from being overwhelmed by a small number of skirms. It allows EAs to retreat and regroup. If you try to go forward again, you are likely to run into that wall of skirms and pikes. The differnce in mobility is not high enough to run around and attack a completely undefended part of the base. So its not offensively oppressive. You can elaborate which actual use cases are OP. But I doubt you will find any.
Speed is most definitely not the identity of Dravidians, at least not for archer.
You gave the example of the Italians. None of their buff was out of Italians design. Discount on uni techs, +1/+1 armor for archer line is for their archer identity. And new UT strengthen their gunpowder.
First, Dravidians civ does not have any identity. Its just a meme civ based on a hotchpotch of bad ideas and futher fixes. People don’t even play them on pure water maps. Vikings, Japanese, italians and Koreans are far more tuned for those maps. They are prefered to be played on water nomad type maps which is a niche within a niche called nomad start. But the best civ for such maps is persians and their identity is a cavalry civ with a versatile economy bonus and even lacking bracer. Yet they are playable on Arabia and Arena with a decent chance of success on both. Dravidians need such an economy bonus to be playable.
Dravidians have had an archer identity from the start with their faster firing skirms and elepahant archers. Their best unit upon release was the fully upgradeabe arbeslast not the elephant archer which didn’t have husbandry and parthian tactics. It is the siege discount that skewed the design. So a tech further boosting their archery range units viability is not a design violation once the siege wood discount is removed.
But I fail to see how its useful or better for Dravidians over Medical Corps, at least Medical Corps is useful for Elephant archers.
The problem seems to be that everyone has predetermined that medical corps is useless, so they don’t use(or try it) it, so they ignore most of the strongest parts of the civilization, and end up playing it like a really bad Mesoamerican civ.
I will admit, a big part of the problem is the wood discount on Siege. That really directs people down the wrong path as far as I can tell.
Medical corps is useful only after you get a death ball of elephants. Its better as a civ bonus or an imperial age unique tech where elephants are viable resouce wise. In castle age, Dravidians have zero high dps mobile units like knights. Instead they get battle elephants and elephant archers both of which cannot be played in a similar way as knights. So the civ was played as a meso civ without eagles.The siege discout made siege which is a tier above elephants easily affordable for them. However that is a far serious design violation since you get siege cheaper than elephants now.