India

[Garja]

Define game breaking, because right now it makes FI a very legit way of playing, seemingly superior to more traditional way of playing the civ and certainly easier.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Define game breaking, because right now it makes FI a very legit way of playing, seemingly superior to more traditional way of playing the civ and certainly easier.

1) In what MU is the FI viable?
2) I wouldn't say that FI is easier, you need to defend vs early agressions instead of rushing like a dumbass.

[Garja]

It's pretty much viable in every MU atm. Even when it doesn't work it's very close to work andstill it's an easier way to play the civ.

[princeofkabul]

For my understanding India has become a civ that mediocre player is able to become "top" player with it suddenly.
Cease fire needs to be tweaked in my opinion, the ability itself has no place in rts game.
India is a good choice for people with not as good mechanics, it's easier to move forward and z move opponents army with high dps unit rather than smoothly hit and running and split fire sepoys with skirms. Most of the cases india has units in front to snare, (urumi/mahout). Normally this wouldn't be such an issue but urumi has no real counter in scenario like this. you block with cav, they get melted very fast, practically everything gets swept to a oblivion by sepoy mass volleys. The army composition is just too brutal in my opinion, and it's backed by economy which skyrockets very fast.
Diarouga might be sceptical about how strong it has become and it's understandable, however I assume you if you put the time to play the civ you would notice quickly how blatantly OP they are now compared to other civs. I don't think India has lost a single game in elimination brackets so far, except mirrors : D

Credit to Somppu how he has been able to show how game breaking this civ and it's abilities can be. Just like @Diarouga showed us how gamebreaking aztec FI can be with hero abuse.

[Kaiserklein]

Imo india seems more op than it is because of people microing suboptimally. It's indeed easy to smash a bunch of sepoys and melee units in the opponent's army, and it's indeed harder to hit and run properly; but if you do hit and run properly, you find out that urumis are not that scary, mahouts get sniped down quickly, and then sepoys get kited by skirms.
Overall I agree that india is too strong and that the sepoy/urumi/mahout/cease fire stuff is dumb though.

[princeofkabul]

That's age 3, age 4 is totally different thing, and India can get to age 4 very quickly.

[Kaiserklein]

Well it's not like they should be allowed to reach industrial without taking any damage

[tabben]

lol India FI is absolutely not viable in every matchup.. It also loses to other FI:s than azzies.

And it's not even realistic unless your opponent is being overly passive for the first 10-15 minutes of the game. Obviously if you let india ship trickles + otto vills and straight FI unharmed, while you're staying fortress, you're likely gonna have a bad time.
Problem is that many people expect bot rush from india so they sit back and do nothing until it's too late. But there's still a large window where you can punish this. For example look at Soldier shutting down Lukas FI in this tourney, despite aging late to fortress as france (clicking up at 8:00).

I don't think India has lost a single game in elimination brackets so far, except mirrors

false

[[Armag] diarouga]

It's pretty much viable in every MU atm. Even when it doesn't work it's very close to work andstill it's an easier way to play the civ.

Lol, I'm not even sure there's one MU where it's viable.

[princeofkabul]

lol India FI is absolutely not viable in every matchup.. It also loses to other FI:s than azzies.

And it's not even realistic unless your opponent is being overly passive for the first 10-15 minutes of the game. Obviously if you let india ship trickles + otto vills and straight FI unharmed, while you're staying fortress, you're likely gonna have a bad time.
Problem is that many people expect bot rush from india so they sit back and do nothing until it's too late. But there's still a large window where you can punish this. For example look at Soldier shutting down Lukas FI in this tourney, despite aging late to fortress as france (clicking up at 8:00).

I don't think India has lost a single game in elimination brackets so far, except mirrors

false

I'm not talking about FI but the civ in general...?

[princeofkabul]

Well it's not like they should be allowed to reach industrial without taking any damage

And nor should you go for it blindly, you can reach it very fast however after playing abit of colonial and fort that's what im saying.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Anyway, I haven't really played for 2 years so I might be wrong about India.
Still, I'd be very surprised to see India going from averagish to top civ without any major change. The 300e build wasn't scary at all for most civs.

[princeofkabul]

maybe you should take a look of the patch notes then.

[[Armag] diarouga]

Well it's not like they should be allowed to reach industrial without taking any damage

And nor should you go for it blindly, you can reach it very fast however after playing abit of colonial and fort that's what im saying.

So what's the strat?
Semi ff civs like France/Germany used to rape the sepoy rush into semi ff stuffs like 5sepoys/trickle/300e

[deleted_user0]

isn't it just -20w for houses? the sowar buff has been reverted, right? and sepoys have been nerfed.

[[Armag] diarouga]

maybe you should take a look of the patch notes then.

What? 60w houses and sepoys get killed in 2 hits by the TC, I'd call that a nerf bro.

[princeofkabul]

sepoy urumi cease fire and india being india. that's about it. the strat is that anyone succeed with that civ. and beat mechanically superior players with no mechanics.

[[Armag] diarouga]

isn't it just -20w for houses? the sowar buff has been reverted, right? and sepoys have been nerfed.

The sowar buff wasn't relevant anyway, it was still better to make either gurkhas or age instead.

[Garja]

India was never average.
It's the civ with the most potential just like Jap. As soon as people figured out some actual build to use their old known strenghts they became top again.
It's not just about bot FI. You can do usual rushes just to force a certain wanted reaction from the opponent and then age up. After that you have plenty of options. Can go sepoy mahout aging with charminar gate (600w in transition to add stable and res for mansbdar mahout), or age with taj mahal and have res to queue howdah while sending 2 howdahs and making gurka. Alternatively can use the gold to go IV. It's hard to straight up punish this sort of stuff when you're on the backfoot at the start and then there is the unit pop threat when you're supposed to do something.
And of course there are the other strategies too.

Sowar was relevant in MUs where you do the cav switch after the rush or when you're age3 doing skirms wars.

[deleted_user0]

maybe you should take a look of the patch notes then.

What? 60w houses and sepoys get killed in 2 hits by the TC, I'd call that a nerf bro.

depends on the situation tbh, but ye it doesn't seem like a huge buff if it is one. that said, india wasn't really that weak to begin with, and whenever i was experimenting with greedy india builds and semi ff's or ff's, i always felt like i was just 20 sec too slow from stabilizing and then winning comfortably. so something like 20w off houses can definitely give you that 15-20 sec that was needed for india to become very strong.

yet, i also feel like ppl aren't really playing the right civs/strats vs india and are just recycling the same stale approach to beating india.

[Hazza54321]

all the active players asking for an india nerf, all the inactive are blissfully clueless. I think thats a telltale sign. They were already pretty good on RE, after a buff overall to the civ in general (cheaper houses), theyre over the edge even with the sepoy nerf. People just didnt know how to play them before and like tabben said always went for the bot rush which was just so bad, now people have abused indias buying time capabilities, and brokeness of urumis rather than staying age 2 and getting outskirmed. Not every civ can make 50 expensive musk units ship urumis and reach imperial in under 20 minutes.

[WickedCossack]

Now that people have stopped shipping 600w as the second card everygame India's full potential has been unlocked!

[princeofkabul]

take tp
trickle-gfa-300exp-trickle, have 1500 worth of resources from crates and insanely good market techs behind your gathering and at this moment you feel bad about how good your economy can become in this short period of time.

[Hazza54321]

our india dutch game i was outecoing at 10min lol

[princeofkabul]

that might've been due to the butchered dutch build though XD