Taking things out of context as usual. That was a response specifically to giving knights to dravidians. Most people don’t want to do that.
Urumis take 6.8 seconds to produce after conscription. If you have 3 castles and enough resources, you need less than 2 minutes to create 30 of them.
The reason you are going so hard on Medical Corps is because you love that tech. Just be honest and clear about that. There’s nothing more to it.
If you think that I’m totally changing dravidians, that’s something I guess. That’s not true, but you do you. I don’t care enough to convince you otherwise.
You know what else can do the blocking you accomplished with 600 on elephants and 175 on the stable? A 25 wood house. Or a 5 stone wall.
Make 4 more monks. Making elephants is harder anyway.
Okay, this is the dumbest argument line that nobody serious is going to give even a second of credibility. I’m not even going to argue about it any longer
I think I’m following the same chain of thought. Why take away from what makes them unique and distinctive, only to make them more bland and uninteresting?
I mean, it’s not what I think, it’s the fact you’ve tried to change almost everything about the civ. You’ve tried taking away the fishing bonuses, the docks bonuses, medical corps, their weak stables, pretty much everything that makes them interesting.
How can you claim to actually like them, but want to completely change what they are? It feels somewhat masochistic to play a civ you want to so completely change.
Again, we both know how this game works. The fact there are multiple ways to deal with a given situation is just how this game works, and doesn’t really mean anything.
They all have strengths and weaknesses, and the ability to rapidly produce disproportionate amounts of HP via battle elephants is one of their great strengths, which was what surprised me. The ability to produce 280% the effective army per stable is a surprisingly potent way to rebuild your army quickly if you need to do so.
By contrast, by the time you’ve built that monastery and built even a single monk, a minute and a half has passed, and you’ve already lost much of your economy.
In the situation you describe, the monks would not die if you kept them within your walls that the BE were defending. If you have time for micro, you can also try to convert the knights to chase them off.
Monks don’t need micro to heal, they do that automatically. Just set the gather point near the BEs before making them. Even 1 monk would heal faster in that situation. Monks don’t restrict your unit transitions; you can make whatever you want after it. Meanwhile, the UT does encourage you to make more elephant units to make use of it. So, it is relatively more restrictive compared to monks.
So in your situation, the player had time to make a castle and a stable and 3 BE and get the UT, but cannot make a Monastery? This is such a contrived situation, it is incredibly unlikely. You can even collect the wood for the Monastery and build it in the time it takes to build a castle and collect resources for the UT. Food collects slower than wood and gold.
Except you described a situation where it is more cost efficient to make monks. You could invest the resources you save in other units and upgrades. If you are getting the UT in that situation, you are helping your enemy by wasting resources. The player also has to leave a hole in the wall for 5 min. to get value from the UT. Your entire situation could have been resolved with a little attentiveness from the player, a vill and a wall segment.
Sure they would; limited production capacity limits the number of monks you can produce in a timely manner, which means they get in, which means your monks die.
Only if your units are near them, and that means they’re NOT chasing your enemies around. That takes constant micro to make sure they’re all in the right spot at the right time.
They already had a stable from feudal age scout rush, and already had a castle, because they needed it for defense. That’s not a particularly unreasonable situation.
To be clear, you wouldn’t get the UT until AFTER; no point getting it while your units are at full HP.
Nah, not really. Trying to build a monastery and make monks might be ideal if you had the time, but you dont often have time to do everything in the most efficient way possible.
Needing power fast is the perfect niche of the battle elephant, allowing you to use existing buildings to utilize resources asap to save the day.
How is production capacity related to the position of monks on the map? If you are housed and are lazy, delete a vill and make a monk. You will still be better off than getting the UT.
BE are too slow to ‘chase’ anything. To make BE defend a hole in the wall, they have to be on stand ground stance (can also use defensive stance, but that would allow BE to move around and that might result in knights getting in). If they were not on stand ground, the knights can get in; the speed difference is just that big. Monks can definitely keep up with a BE on stand ground.
If you have the eco to make a castle, 3 BE and afford a UT, you should easily afford a monastery and a monk.
So, the player had enough time to move 3 BE to a hole in the wall on stand ground, check their HP and get the UT, but not enough select a vill to close the hole? Try it yourself and see which is easier.
Maybe Dravidians should have a civ bonus like, “Start with a Stable and Castle for free”. Since the stable and castle units of Dravidians are very weak, the game will be balanced.
Making stable is the most in-efficient way to play Dravidians. Elephant are useful most against Buildings not units. They are for all practical purposes pseudo-siege. But they don’t have range like mangonels. They move shit slow and don’t have the damage output to turn around a game wither. Get converted almost instantly due to no-resistance like Bengalis. Their tech-tree is also not designed to make use of Battle elephants. Dravidians don’t have any good unique tech or bonus to do any surprise strategies either.
Dravidian battle elephants have the worst stats in terms of HP, attack, speed and bonuses. The poll shows that nobody makes battle elephants as Dravidians. If Siege and Elephants had a 20% speed boost and charge attack as Dravidians civ bonus, then it makes sense to make Elephants not otherwise.
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.
It isn’t? Not sure what you mean, the point is it takes a long time to build a monastery, and twice as long to make a monk after that.
Knights don’t attack in only one place, you need the ability to pursue them now, and then afterwards, when they’ve been repelled, you need the capacity to leave the base.
The point isn’t cost, it’s production speed. A single stable can produce 500 hp worth of battle elephants in the time it takes to make a single monk.
Quickwalling isn’t a magic pill. Knights get in plenty even at the highest levels of play. You need the ability to fight at some point.
A scout rush is just fine for dravidians, you just can’t go very long with it. Going for a single stable is completely reasonable.
And while their battle elephants aren’t great, they’re also still battle elephants. For context, their battle elephants are still more cost efficient in melee than champions against paladins, according to the combat calculator, so they never devalue entirely.
What surprised me specifically is how fast you can produce power with a single stable using battle elephants. You can keep up with 2 stable knights with a single stable’s worth of production.
It’s a niche strategy, to be sure, but one people shouldn’t dismiss entirely!
Compared to > 5 min. to get value from UT, monks give value faster.
What ‘pursuit’ do you think BEs can do? It’s 0.85 speed vs 1.485. Even vills are faster at that point in the game. By the time BE leisurely stroll over, knights will have killed all your vills and be ready to run away. You have to keep them on stand ground blocking the hole in the wall for your situation to make sense. Also, if you have time to move BE away from the base, then you have time to garrison them in a castle instead of getting the UT. You are contradicting your own arguments at this point.
We are talking about the usefulness of Medical Corps. BE are only being discussed in the context of how to heal them faster. There are multiple other threads for discussing the usefulness (or lack thereof) of BE.
You don’t need to quick wall, you can slowly make the 4 clicks required to close the hole in the wall (while the knights try to fight the BE that are blocking the way). Once the hole is closed, the BE can go somewhere else and don’t need healing, thus saving resources on the UT.
I mean, the utility of battle elephants and the value of medical corps are pretty intrinsically linked. The question here is between battle elephants and monks, not monks and medical corps.
And internal mobility can be much slower than a unit moving around the outside of your base and still keep up.
Sooner or later, the elephants will reach a point where the monks die. Medical Corps is a long term tech, that scales with the size and mobility of your army. Not going for it is akin to skipping bloodlines because you can get out more scouts; it works in the short term, but you lose in the long term.
It’s just even more obfuscated, because healing’s power only becomes evident in the aggregate.
Not at all. 4 civs have BE but not MC and are better off for it. The question is whether it is more efficient to heal 3 BE with monks or MC. Monks are more generic and cost efficient in your situation, so there is no reason to even remember that MC exists.
‘Can’ not ‘is’ - you admit that your situation is getting more contrived as we go on. Now you are adding a condition that the player’s base is so cramped that BE can somehow keep up with knights but simultaneously open enough that the BE cannot save monks in time. After all, if you think BE can save vills from knights, why don’t you think that BE can save monks from knights? Especially since the monks have to be closer to the BE than most vills.
Monks don’t have to die if you keep them defended. You can just leave them in within your walls for the whole game. SOTL showed the value of adding even just a handful of monks (less micro required) to whatever army you are going for. Conversion + healing is really powerful. So, monks have long term value as well.
Disagree. Bloodlines helps you win fights while MC helps 5 min. after you win. MC does nothing if you lose while BL gives you immediate survivability and can help snowball fights in your favor thanks to Lanchester’s square law. Also, MC only works if you are willing to leave BE idle for >5 min. which itself is a big opportunity cost. If you win the fight, you can pressure your opponent immediately and potentially win the game (so there is a chance of no long-term if you get BL). If you get MC and wait 5 min., you are giving your opponent a chance to come back and win. He could use the time to boom or go to imp and get a tech advantage or mass counter units (so there is a chance of losing in the long-term if you get MC). You’ve come up with big numbers before to show off the value of MC, but you never compared it to the value of having knights running around the map causing chaos. Nor have you compared it to the value of monks.
Firstly, MC actually does have roughly equivalent value to bloodlines in a single fight. With such high HP pools, they are the only unit that can heal meaningful amounts in a single engagement. It also absolutely works constantly; leaving your elephants idle is the wrong way to use it! It’s not at all like berserks, where you want them to sit still and heal to full, because battle elephants are still highly potent units even at 33% hp. It’s a long term benefit that instead shows its benefit over multiple engagements with little downtime between.
Attempting to heal with monks mid-fight is also a very bad way to use them, because the monks typically just die. Only teutons can really get away with that.
They serve very different roles, really. Monks are great for topping up lower-hp units between fights, while medical corps is much better suited for more prolonged constant fighting.
Anyway, as far as defense is concerned, I’d absolutely say that battle elephants have significant zoning power, far more than monks. Monks are great at repelling small forces, but beyond a point, they just die, due to the difficulties in microing multiple monks and the butterfly effect even small delays in starting conversions can have on a fight.
Along vaguely similar lines, it’s not a very accurate statement to say that monks can be protected. Even at the highest skill levels, monks die with great regularity; in fact, if you’re being so careful with your monks, you are likely not playing right, since taking risks is necessary in this game.
Here’s the deal when it comes to battle elephants; Fundamentally, battle elephants are a unit that enemy cavalry simply cannot engage with. When they arrive, the cavalry has to either take a bad fight or leave. Monks, by contrast, can be(and are) killed by cavalry, and especially with multiple monks being queued for conversion, even the slight delay in starting the conversion can rapidly diminish their effectiveness. The first monk might get a conversion off, but the chances of any subsequent monks successfully converting are nearly zero.
Having both played with and watched monks be played for a while now, my conclusion about a monk defense is that it can be very potent, but it’s something of a last resort. It reduces your survival to keeping a handful of very flimsy units alive, and I have experienced many occasions of those monks dying to a simple mistake and then the game being over, even at the highest levels of play.
So I can absolutely see using battle elephants for internal defense as viable.
And once you have those elephants, you can either get some monks and get a set value out of them(the damaged hp on the battle elephants and a certain amount of value before they die), or you can get a PERMANENT boost in value by getting Medical Corps. Yes, the monks might give you more short term value, but practically speaking, at that stage of the game, you’re no longer playing for short term victory. Looking at their aoestats win rates, by the time you’re in the midgame of castle age+, you’re no longer playing for immediate victory, you’re playing for getting to your long term composition.
I don’t know which Fantasy game you are playing. But it is not AOE2. Battle elephants of any civ is currently useless to win you a game. Cavalry is never used to engage Elephants because there are so many easier ways to deal with them. All civ battle elephants can be Kited and killed by archers except Khmer. Khmer get the fastest battle elephants in the game and have a great food economy to support elephants. But nobody makes Battle elephants as Khmer. Because Knights are a far better alternative. As I said before, Battle elephants are pseudo-ram units. But unlike Rams, Elephants can be converted from a distance. You can’t even run away once a conversion has started which is not true for knights. If Elephant civs or Dravidians get a tech or bonus in castle age to avoid conversion by monks, then Battle elephants are useful. Otherwise all this praise of battle elepgants is just hot air.
If they’d been making archers, that might be a concern?
But they weren’t. I think the biggest mistake people make with elephants is trying to make huge armies of them when you have nowhere near the economy to afford that.
They are very powerful units, even in small numbers. They take minimal upgrades to be fully functional. They can force a disproportionate response from your enemy. You just have to make sure not to overcommit, but that’s no different from any unit.
Or Arena, Or any other map where land army is needed.
That’s fine. But something else. Fast eco or a raiding alternative.
Vikings, Portugese, Italians, Malay are naval civs too. All of these are quite good either on Arabia or Arena.
Yes they are not absolute worst. But they are not a top-20 civ either. They’re definitely more civs better than Dravidians on closed than the ones that are worse than them.
Once again, Wootz steel is just practically the same as the Burmese bonus on barrack units. Your barrack units fight oppponent barrack units, light cav or hussar, some unguarded canons, trebs, skirms and maybe some gunpowder. Special cases like Teutons apart, all these units have 2, 3 or 4 melee armor. Numerically the net time needed to kill any of these units is not any different between a Burmese infantry and its equivalent Wootz steel counterpart. Against cavalry units, Burmese halbs do 40 damage and Wootz steel ones do 42, that’s 5% more and not a single cavalry unit gets killed a hit sooner as an outcome of this 5% difference.
Teutonic military, Serjeants, Obuchs are probably the only exceptions. And that’s 3 out of 42 potential matchups for Dravidians. Agains the remaining its 1300+ resources spent for what Burmese get for FREE. So NO, Wootz Steel is NOT an amazing tech. Its strong for elite urumi swordsmen’s charge attack on stacked units. But since urumis themselves are fragile and food intense units and massing 60+ of them is almost impossible, wootz steel tech ends up being mediocre.
If you survive till imp with wootz steel but have 0 relics, 0 map control, 0 everything. Then what’s “fine” about it? Its just a slow death
Yes because elephants are the 1v1 and tg meta and everyone is just making elephant units every single game. And Dravidians have fully upgraded elephant units with a stack of extra bonuses on them. Oh wait that must be in some campaign or CBA unlimited resources.
You could buff medical corps more and more and more, it won’t impact the usability of Dravidians by much. If you’re able to fortify and protect your entire base with walls and castles and mass 40+ Elite elephant archers + wootz steel infantry with all upgrades, you’ve won already. In an otherwise even game, its impossible to get there.
Its definitely NOT a top civ on anything other than maps with a lot of water gameplay.
Neither of those are “broken” on water. They’re on par or probably still weaker than Italians and Vikings. And water has less than 10 usable civs. So there’s no real “balance” on water. You can nerf any civ on water in any way and it won’t matter for 99.5% of the players. Plenty of civs which were considered broken and were the most played at some point have had abysmal water tech tree. Water has a single building for all units, 3 types of units and a 1-dimensional play. Almost no one plays water. Less than 0.5% of the games played in the past 2 years have been on water maps. Either ways having strong water is no excuse for abysmal land.
Viper for example, never thought there was anything wrong with OG Khmer, OG Vietnamese, OG Portugese either. Never picked those civs in a single tournament even though there were a lot fewer civs back then. All of them got strong economic bonuses and now he picks them in every single tournament. With the Indian naval civs, he picked them and lost almost ALL of his games with them and has now stopped picking them unless its a water map. Sometimes what they say differs from what they do. Viper has usually been the player who has never recommended a buff and only nerfs to extreme broken aspects of the game. OG lancers, OG flemish, Obsidian arrows, monks etc.
You don’t need every strategy but you do need viable alternatives. Meso don’t have cavalry but get good monks, better eco and eagles. Civs with limited siege options get good monks and better mid game. Civs with weaker cavalry get better early game. That’s the diversity. Not having multiple unit lines and neither having anything viable to compensate is not a good diversity. That’s just having a piece of junk along with food items. Its different but unhealthy to consume it.
All these are totally fine. You could give them some combination of 50% more benefits from eco upgrades, rework urumi to have super high speed and take lesser damage from either defensive buildings or ranged units, redemption and fervor.
That’s hilarious, Comparing one of the best uu to one of the worst.
Conquistadors never fall behind. You might get that impression sometimes from Nomad players because they usually try to comeback from losing the water and go all-in. Another reason being Spanish are not a very strong open map civilization. If you play them like coustillier by adding eco behind, you can use conqs the whole game. They’re quite solid.
Its not a ranged unit, nor a 1.4 speed unit. Opponent can see the urumis and move the villagers away. If some nearby opponent ranged unit moves to the defense, you’ll lose them as well. Risk of losing vs benefit of doing damage balance is heavily in favor of the latter for Conquistadors and quite the opposite for urumis.
Yes. They definitely need to be faster and less prone to dying from ranged units or tc/castle arrows. Depending on which their usability improve a lot in a bunch of situations.
Depending on the numbers and what they’re up against they’re a hybrid of halbs, miltia line and onagers. But individually worse than all 3 in most situations.
Conqs are not fragile glass canons. They have range, reasonable armor, high speed and consistent high damage output. Any mid elo player can use conqs and do a lot of damage to an opponent of his level in one of his games. Not even the best of the best are able to do that with urumi. Maybe if Dravidians get a very very strong food economy, they could be. But they’ll still be comparable to shotels and not conqs.
I think it’s a common misconception that it helps urumi Splash damage particularly well. It helps it exactly as much as it helps the main attack, and since the main attack is so powerful, it really doesn’t help that much at all.
I do think you’re not quite giving it it’s full credit, though. You’re basically ignoring all of its most useful niches, and focusing on where it’s the least useful. But even there, the Burmese bonus is very potent. Even equaling that is quite decent, plus the ability to do substantially more damage to certain Niche cases.
I dunno about that, you can’t forget urumis are much cheaper, especially in terms of gold, and function better in smaller numbers. Two urumis at a tiny cost can snipe villagers instantly, something that would take twice as many conquistadors and six times the investment.
The splash damage hits multiple units. So its like an additional +2 to +5 attack on multiple units simultaneously by mutlple urumis. In a clustered fight with 40+ elite urumis, which is the only way urumis are more useful than barrack units, wootz steel on urumis can easily lead to hundreds of extra hp reduction. This might end up changing outcome of fights against quite a decent number of units. Again its nothing OP or too much, but its a bit more useful than what generic infantry get.
I’m not saying Wootz steel is useless. Burmese infantry bonus, Gardland wars and Wootz steel are all quite good and decent UT. But by no means its OP or amazing or something worthy enough to justify the lack of mobility, monk techs and missing different unit lines.
Burmese have economic bonus comparable to Dravidians but get good cavalry, amazing monk bonus, and a high dps ranged and fast uu. Aztecs don’t have cavalry like Dravidians but get an even stronger monk bonus, eagle warriors as a fast tanky raiding/anti archer/anti monk unit for very low food cost. But people just keep constantly saying “Oh Dravidians have wootz steel, so they’re ok”. No Wootz Steel is NOT sufficient to justify the lack of knight-line, stable upgrades and poor monks.
Lets take 2 stages of the game. One the mid game and the other late game. In the mid game, food is so much more important and harder to accumulate than gold. 65 food per unit is huge. Second thing, urumis can snipe instantly only with the charge attack. Conqs constantly have 16 attack. Most importantly they have RANGE, you can keep chasing down the villagers as they move within the opponent tc range and kill from outside the tc range. That’s the benefit of range. They’re fast, so you can split them into 2 or 3 groups, and regroup as necessary. As numbers grow you can kite and kill knights, run away or close the gap to kill ranged units depending on numbers and upgrades. The 6 times the investment would lead to much larger paybacks. On the other hand, if you end up using multiple urumis charge on villagers, cavalry units will wipe them out, they’re not significantly faster, so you might lose more than a couple of urumis if ranged units are brought in for the defense, you are not even guaranteed to get any value. You have to hope that opponent doesn’t notice your urumis till they’re very close to the villagers. If the opponent notices the urumi even a couple of tiles away and they run vills under the tc, the investment into urumis is down the drain. The only infantry similar to conqs for raids is Gbetos.
And if you’re talking about super late game when gold is very limited, there’s absolutely no value in 1-shotting villagers and why would you want to waste the gold on urumis. You can simply just go for their light cav. Same p.armor, approx same hp but 30% faster. And use the gold for an extra treb or canon.
A unit that neither has great speed nor has good range, nor p.armor/alternate form of tankiness and costs a lot of food is not a good raiding unit.
The thing about the splash damage is, the more enemies you hit, the less useful wootz steel becomes.
The way the splash damage works is, it takes the initial damage, subtracts the armor value, and then multiplies it by 50%. Take the base attack for comparison; if you are hitting a unit with five armor, then you get a 55% damage increase.
But the charge attack does 29 damage. That means that, and most, you are getting a 20% damage increase. And because the splash damage is just a 50% multiplier, it too only gets a 20% damage increase. Wootz benefits it less than anything but halbs. And the more enemies you hit with the splash, the less effective as a whole the technology becomes.
The real challenge is, even with the UT, it is still a bad idea to engage without the charge attack, as they trade inefficiently. That being the case, if you can, it’s going to be better to try to exclusively utilize the charge attack and avoid other combat altogether.
Anyway, as far as the Conquistador comparison goes, none of what you are saying is technically untrue, but I don’t think it gets in the way of my initial comparison. They are both units that have highly potent strengths out of the box, which slowly become more average as the game progresses. I’ve been on vacation for the last few days, but when I get back, I plan to reevaluate how I plan to get them into my strategy, perhaps focusing on getting a few of them up earlier, and utilizing their powerful base stats in combination with other types of units to achieve better results.