Vote - Dravidians civ design analysis

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Hi Everybody!

This poll is a culmination of all points we had discussed in Dravidians are terrible thread. Though people in general agree the civ has glaring weaknesses, they disagree on how to manage it. Let us see the experiences of everyone on playing as Dravidians and its overall civ design.

Do you make stables as Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Not recently
0 voters

Do you make scout or light cav as Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Not recently
0 voters

Do you make Battle elephants as Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Not recently
0 voters

Is ‘Bloodlines’ necessary for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Is ‘Husbandry’ necessary for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Is ‘Redemption’ necessary for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Is ‘Urumi’ re-work necessary for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

What new trait does Urumi need to become a viable unit in caste age to serve as cavalry replacement?

  • More HP
  • More attack
  • More Speed
  • +1 Pierce armour
  • +1 range on charge attack
  • Aura effect
  • Less training time like Shotels
  • Train at barracks
  • Need cavalry unique unit like Rajendra
  • No change
0 voters

Is ‘Siege discount’ necessary for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Do you want to replace ‘Siege discount’ for Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Do you want to replace Siege discount with a bonus which gives 50% more effect for economy upgrades ( e.g 30% faster for double-bit axe and bow-saw instead of 20%, +15% faster after wheelborrow instead of 10%?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Do you research medical corps?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Can medical corps be replaced?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

What kind of technology do you want to replace medical corps?

  • Infantry
  • Cavalry
  • Archer
  • Monk
  • Siege
  • Elephants
  • Economy
  • Defensive tech
  • Anything is better
0 voters

Do you manage to research wootz steel in your games?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

Do yo want to replace 200 wood on age-up bonus?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Do you want to replace +15 fish carry capacity bonus?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Do you want Dravidians to have more naval bonus or tech?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Do you manage to win 50% of your matches as Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

How to make Dravidian elephants useful?

  • More HP
  • More attack
  • More Speed
  • Less cost
  • Double current LOS
  • Conversion resistance
  • Aura effect
  • No change
0 voters

This is a follow-up poll based on feedback of the original:

Do you make Elephant archers?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Not recently
0 voters

How to make Elephant archers more useful in castle age?

  • Less cost like 50% less food for all elephants
  • More HP like 40% more HP for all elephants
  • More attack like 10% more on top of 25% or straight 33% using unique tech
  • More Speed like 10% for range units or 20% units for all elephants
  • 25% More Speed and attack
  • No change
0 voters

Do you like playing as Dravidians?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Doesn’t matter
0 voters

Which map types do You like playing Dravidians on?

  • Open maps
  • Closed maps
  • water maps
  • Any map
  • Only Team games
0 voters

Which map types do you think Dravidians struggle?

  • Open maps
  • Closed maps
  • Water maps
  • All map types
0 voters

Which combination do you want to add to tech tree for Dravidians?

  • Bloodlines and husbandry
  • Bloodlines and Redemption
  • Husbandry and redemption
  • Redemption and fervor
  • Bloodlines and fervor
  • Husbandry and fervor
  • No change
0 voters

Which civ bonus combination is better (Not just Dravidians in general for a civ)?

  • Start with +25 of all resource and Economy upgrades except market gives 50% more benefit
  • Start with 150 more wood and 33% siege wood discount
  • 200 wood on age up and ballistics is free
  • 200 wood on age up ; TCs and Castles 20% cheaper
  • After aging up, receive 200 wood on feudal, 250 stone on castle and 300 gold for imp
  • Military, Research buildings cost -50% wood and 33% siege wood discount
  • All food sources drop off 5% extra
0 voters

Which civ bonus combination is better for Dravidians to play both land and water?

  • +15 fish carry capacity for both Villagers and fishing ships
  • Fishing ships +15 carry capacity and +5 LOS
  • Fish and berries last 30% longer
  • Vill and fishing ships don’t need to drop off fish
  • All food sources drop off 5% extra
  • Make shore fish available in all map types as small ponds like berries
0 voters

Which Team bonus is better for Dravidians?

  • Docks provide 5 pop space
  • Fishing ships and Trade cog +5 LOS
  • Fishing ships +5 carry capacity
  • Fishing ships generate 10% gold in addition to food
  • Fishing ships and Trade cog made 20% faster
  • Dravidian Docks can garrison up to 10 fishing ships including teammates
0 voters

Which elephant technology do you want to replace medical corps?

  • Strike Corps - Elephants move 20% faster
  • Strike Corps - All elephants including EAs get a charged melee trample damage of 20 HP per minute
  • Strike Corps - Elephants move 20% faster and deliver a charge attack of 30 HP every minute
  • Medical corps needs to be buffed again from current 30 hp/min
  • Medical corps should include all cavalry (light cav too)
  • Medical corps should give a flat 40% increase in HP for all cavalry
  • Medical corps should give a flat 40% increase in HP for only elephants
0 voters

Which other technology do you want to replace medical corps?

  • Strike Corps - Archery range units (Archers, Skirms, hand cannons and EAs) move 10% faster
  • Strike Corps - Skirms and EAs fire 33% faster; 25% faster bonus removed, medical corps becomes civ bonus
  • Strike Corps - Skirms and EAs move and attack 10% faster
  • Strike Corps - Infantry move 10% faster and do +5 building damage
  • Spice Trade - TCs and Docks work 33% faster(Vill, ship production and tech research including age up) remove shipwright
  • Bhakthi movement - Enemy monks can’t convert any Dravidian units (Enemy monks become useless except healing opponent units)
  • Some other technology
0 voters

How to make wootz steel more effective for Dravidians?

  • Reduce cost by half
  • Reduce cost by half and make wootz steel a castle age tech
  • Include bloodlines while removing 2nd Armour upgrade and make wootz a castle age tech
  • Include bloodlines without removing 2nd Armour upgrade and keep wootz in imperial age
  • Make it ignore building armor too
  • Make infantry move 15% faster a castle age tech
  • Make elephants move 20% faster and deliver 30 charge attack
  • Make wootz steel a team bonus available in blacksmith
0 voters

What is the main weakness of Dravidian civ design?

  • Lack of recurring eco bonuses
  • Lack of stable
  • Lack of Eagle like infantry
  • Lack of options against cavalry
  • Lack of good monks against cavalry and Siege
  • Lot of gaps in tech tree
  • Unviability of medical corps to turn around a game
  • Unviability of wootz steel to turn back the game
  • No gaps
0 voters
3 Likes
2

For the last question you could add the option to give them Elite Battle Elephants. Apart from that I enjoyed voting very much :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

The initial sketch for Dravidians was for a civ with a stable which lacked all imperial age upgrades. So Elite upgrade goes against design. Besides, the question was to address the fact that despite having the fastest archers in the game. Dravidian elephant archers see little gameplay in castle age. They are also the only elephant archers who can’t run away from skirms. Siege elephants are damn slow too.

Already I see some interesting patters, only 4 people voted that they ever made stables as Dravidians last year since their introduction. But 7 people voted that they made light cav as Dravidians. How is that possible?

1 Like
4

My rationale was that you can do Light Cav as supporting army, but you’re not going to make Stables as your main strategy.

F.e. against Monks I’ll do some Stables to make Light Cav, but I don’t really want to consider that as I’m going to make Stables as my core army building.

If you didn’t intend it like that, you could’ve just said ‘Do you make Battle Elephants as Dravidians’ to have that result instead. 11

2 Likes
5

Yes, you can make light cav against monks. But as Dravidians its not worth the effort. You are better off using your archers or skirms. So making stables is just waste of wood for Dravidians. The poll also #### #### interesting obervations. The Dravidians were based on cholas who had the most battle elephants in their armies of the sub-continent. But none of the players make them.

I did not intend it ike that, the questions are fairly open-ended.

7

You also should’ve included a question about how much someone plays dravs. If someone doesn’t play the civ, their opinion is basically worthless. Unfortunately, you can’t edit it now, because it will reset the poll.

8

It depends on the situation, it’s mostly why I voted no on making Stables but yes on making Light Cav. They help with sniping Monks, and your other army can fight the rest. My opinion is also skewed as I tend to play more BF (and is where you see smushes pretty often). On open maps those situations are rarer so you might not need Light Cavalry whatsoever.

What if you play on random? I hate civpicking usually. 11

1 Like
9

Just give the civ husbandry and call it a day.

10

That’s fair. It’s just that you need to spend some time playing them and understand the civ. My guess is that most people haven’t played enough games with them. Lots of high elo players who always go random hate the civ. Heartt and MBL have huge rants about them, for example.
The only pro players who like playing dravidians on arabia are Viper and Lord Daut. But we can’t play like the Viper. There is only one Viper, and we can’t balance the game just for him. (Actually, I wouldn’t care, because I love theviper, but that’s different).

11

I think Dravidians are not as bad as everyone thinks
They are just different to play and very difficult to master
I’m not saying they don’t need anything, a little help from the devs to make them more appealing will be enough for now

2 Likes
12

Well, here are the issues with Dravidians.

  1. Making Stable is pointless. Imagine a meso-civ without any good economy bonuses and Eagles. They have Elephants instead of Eagles. But Elephants as units are not designed for meta play. They play like the forgotten meso-civ. Despite having a stable, Dravidians can’t make any cavalry against meso civs. This is a huge design flaw.

  2. Their units get none of the speed upgrades on any of their units except squires. Monks and light cav are both slow. You can’t even fight for Relics on Arena. Dravidians are not a booming civ either. So they can’t take fight early due to lack of eco bonuses. They can’t last long wihtout relices. They are shut-off from both win conditions. This is a pretty big hole in the design which needs a fix either with an eco bonus or with tech-tree support like bloodlines & fervour combo or Bloodlines & husbandry combo.

  3. Dravidians lack all the last eco upgrades except 2-man saw. It was okay when costs were high and those techs were not getting researched. But now, both Gold shaft mining and stone shaft-mining are cheaper which is a nerf to Dravidians any way you look at it. It was not compensated by civ bonuses either. A re-work is needed to fix this power creep.

  4. The civ has had a glaring weakness in its design since inception which Hera pointed out.:

Hera gave a solution to that as well. He said Devs should give Dravidians both Knights and Bombard cannon. But they did a half-measure with just BBC added in the next patch. These kind of half baked fixes mean that they kept on underperforming.

Finally they got a Siege discount which does not even fit the civ identity. Now the civ looks like a hotchpotch of band-aid fixes. Dravidians need some serious re-work.

1 Like
13

Its a great poll. Couple of things I wanted to point out. Some people might not want any one particular thing in the poll but some combination of these things. And some things might be unnecessary if others are given. Like if they get good stable, redemption is less important. If siege discount is replaced with eco bonus, urumi rework might be less necessary and so on.
And players who like playing water maps or TG Nomad might want to keep the fishing bonus, so there’s the map based bias as well.

15

Thanks @Pulikesi25
New questinare added to original poll in 1st post of thread. please update your feedback there.
I’ve added more questions on Elephant archers and Medical corps as well.

16

I would like an option for just “add Husbandry”. As honestly that’s the furthest I think they need changes.

17

For the wootz steel question there is no ‘no changes’ or just ‘bring it to castle age’ option.

Wootz Steel at half cost and same effect in Castle Age is bonkers, in my opinion.

2 Likes
18

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In his response video to Hera, Viper accidentally probably had a realization that Dravidians were underpowered from his own stats. His win rate as Dravidians is 60.9% which is better than Hera at 53.3%. But we have to look at what the percentages mean here mathematically and not Viper’s opinion of it:

  1. 60.9% as Dravidians is less than his win percentages across all time spans from 5mins to more than 45 mins. What it means is that he is likely is win with a different civ across different time-spans rather than Dravidians even if by a small margin. Dravidians are pulling down his stats. Not boosting them.
  2. 80% winrate against Dravidians and 60% as Dravidians means. He is 33% more likely to win if he is not Dravidians when playing Random. This proves Viper himself is trying to carry Dravidians hard. But stomping on them given a chance.

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Please go through the voting again. Some edits and poll name change might have invalidated your votes. The poll will stay as is from now on. Let us put out our opionion while the Pro players exchange theirs about Dravidians.

1 Like
22

May I know the website please?

Also wins against which players matters a lot. With all respect, top 10-12 players are really ahead of rest of the top 20 players.

2 Likes
23

That one is aoe2insights. It’s really cool as it lets you analyze your games and see the effective APM in those matches, along with those civ stats.

2 Likes
24

Btw, viper reacted to this thread yesterday

25

Thanks. Can I see tournaments matches specifically?

Where? Can you share the link?