Idea to improve the Khmer: Extra House bonus

These are the current Khmer bonus

• No buildings required to advance to the next Age or to unlock other buildings
• Battle Elephants are 15% faster
• Villagers can garrison in Houses
• Team Bonus: Scorpions have +1 range

Both military bonus are good (add Tusk Swords and you have the best Battle Elephants in the game) but not good enough by themselves. With no food-related bonus, the elephant production is just average. And the Scorpion bonus is ok but again, no strong eco bonus helps the production and we all know this unit is far from impressive.

One can argue that the first bonus gives the player some extra wood, vill worktime, and helps to age-up faster. However, the wood difference is not big and in general will be paid later in the game anyway. The same can be said with the villager worktime. As a method to age up faster is fine, but other civs achieve this way better (Byzantines, Ethiopians, Italians, Malay, Persians). The only ways I see this as a strong bonus is for a Fast Imperial strat in maps like Arena (although still, the Khmer are not a great booming civ) and Springboards with Khmer serving as the Spring.

Let's add something to the third bonus.

• Villagers can drop resources AND garrison in houses.

With this, the player can save in the whole game a decent amount of wood and villager worktime (houses takes 10 seconds less to build than a Lumber Camp.) The player still has to build the Camps and Mills for tech upgrades, but when you need houses, you can build them next to the wood line or gold mine to help reduce the overcrowding effect and increase the collection rate. The extra wood can be saved for archers/x-bows and siege that would help to deal with the elephant's biggest counters.