The poll demonstrates a few observations on the most popular changes people want to bring to Dravidians. The preference is to have strong monks to balance lack of cavalry.
As a cavalry boost, people want to reduce wootz steel cost and bring it to castle age. That is what I would do:
Castle age unique tech : Wootz steel cost 400 food and 300 gold.
Add Husbandry to tech tree
Add Redemption and fervor to tech tree while removing block printing
This idea of a slow civ needs to be junked. Even with all speed upgrades added to tech tree, Dravidians due to lacking Knights and cav archers will still have slowest army in AOE2. The Devs don’t need to force that.
I would go against the poll and suggest changes to the civ bonus identity. For civ bonus, I’d just leave the +15 carry capacity alone and modify the main wood bonus theme to an all-around economy bonus:
The first bonus will give a smooth start on any map. The second bonus will fix most resource and tech tree deficit problems.
This idea comes from Viper’s opinion that Dravidians can make use of fast firing elephant archers. But from my experience Dravidian castle age economy does not allow for teching food on EAs. The attack speed is also not good enough to intercept cavalry or even pikeman with squires in small numbers. A pet idea of mine to make Elephant archers more useful is to make them even more powerful glass cannons.
Skirmishers and Elephant archers fire 33% faster
This increases the base ROF of Skirmishers to 2.25 and Elephant archers to 1.5. This addresses the tendency to go skirmishers against Dravidians. If Dravidian Skirms have very high DPS, then scouts become their counters instead of skirmishers who can easily defend Dravidian aggression in feudal age. This makes Elephant archers 25% more effective against cavalry instead of 20%, which means you can do the same job with 4 elephant archers instead of 5. It calculates as 25% more pop-efficient units like Byzantines for both skirmishers and elephant archers. If the above eco bonus is implemented and EAs are given a attack boost, then it’ll give more incentives to go as a main unit for Dravidians. Elephant archers also miss out on +3 bonus attack against spearmen line though they have almost the same speed as foot archers.