Well, here are the issues with Dravidians.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.