Anyway, agree to disagree.
Elephants if given key protection from their counters are awesome units.
Pro games everyone just picks the Mayans… most of the time. Boring as hell. Since the Mayans are overal the best civ for rushing.
Data suggests otherwise, Data suggests every team going for Halbs forming half their army
And also that elephants are not seen even in the presence of Champions, HCs or Scorpions
And this is a BF 4v4 tournament we’re talking about
1 Like
Anyways, Boa is truly going to anwser another question: Do Elephants belong to TeamGames or are they too weak even for that?
2 Likes
Maybe in high rated pro games. But overall, in most chilly games, elephants are good units.
This basically disqualifies them as competitive units.
They’re noob units for team noob games in the end.
Meh, I don’t think they’re supposed to be like that.
1 Like
My best guess is that these elephants in particular have the elephant armor class but not the cavalry armor class, as they’re not cavalry, they’re siege. They’ll still be weaker to halberds, but they’ll be a bit stronger against knights and such. Halberds are a bit easier to counter with supplementary units and depending on what the rest of your unit composition is like the opponent might even not be prepared to bring out halbs to counter your siege.
And even if that turns out to be a super wrong prediction I try not to cry before getting beaten. As a discussion about halbs vs elephant units in general (an important topic for this new DLC), maybe even cavalry in general, I think this is very interesting. But maybe we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about this new unit yet.
Do you remember pre nerf Khmer?
The civ has insane eco, and the pre nerf Khmer eles they were just close to invincible on 4v4 (People literally picked double Khmer pocket to abuse Khmer eles beyond levels, in fact the whole battle elephant unit was nerfed because Khmer).
I am talking about the curent state of all the elephant units, which didnt see much play in RageForest tournaments this year.
I hear people say Elephants are supposed to be a teamgame boomy unit only, but they aren’t even being used there as seen in RageForest and BoA 2.
So much for their supposed high pop-efficiency, and specialization as a “TG unit”.
In stark contrast, Halberdiers on the other hand form 40% of ALL the armies of the entire RageForest tournament on AVERAGE (so it may go even higher)
So much for their supposed low pop-efficiency, and so much for halbs sukking in teamgames.
All of the above observations point to one thing - That we need to correct our assumptions about both, the Halberdier unit on the one side, and the Elephant units on the other.
Regarding this, let’s go back in time and see the pro Team Game tourneys to check the balancing situation.
As far as the previous RageForest tourneys and the previous BoA events are concerned, I didn’t see pros use Khmer BEs that often at all, if ever really.
Malay BEs were seen but only on a couple occaisions and unsuccessfully, because their Ele Rush gave pressure only for a few minutes then was easily countered by monks/pikes.
And forget about Indian EAs, Persian WEs, Burmese BEs, Viet BEs, Khmer BallistaEles these were just never used ever…
Elephant units were never really used much at all honestly, and weren’t realy even close to being OP ever… for any civ
Every single one of the pros has repeatedly ignored/distanced themselves from every single one of the Elephant units. This should tell us something.
I remember a game between Jordan and Tatoh in which Jordan was clearly winning also way ahead in economy, and the battle was between a mix of normal units like Pikes, Arbs, Light Cav and Skirms.
But the moment he started making Ballista Elephants, he started falling behind and the casters were screaming that this unit isn’t useful here at all, it is a waste of resources, it will do nothing etc etc.
Think about it, they said “Ballista Elephant wil do nothing, is a waste of resources” even though his opponent was going for a majority Arbalest army.
They were literally laughing at the mere sight of Ballista Elephants rightly predicting that Jordan might lose the game because of making that particular group of Ballista Elephants. Which indeed happened.
Elephant units are so underpowered that they made a pro player in a ridiculously dominant position (20 more vills, faster Imp AND more upgrades etc.) lose his game completely despite top tier micro, and despite being against a cheap Arb-Pike (not even Halbs, not even Plate Mail) combination.
People already intuitively know that Elephant units are a massive drain of resources, and extremely unreliable, now its just the time to articulate what’s really happening to the Elephant units.
The problem of elephants is that they’re too damn slow and too easily countered by halberdiers.
They cost 40% more resources than knights, and they die roughly in the same hits from halbs.
I’ve seen plenty of games where a ball of Paladins is stopped by a ball of halberdiers, but half of the Paladins manage to escape, outrunning the halbs, and then they go directly for the economy of the defending player, usually destroying TCs and killing loads of villagers in the process, then obviously the defending player can afford way less halbs and in the end it’s game over.
Elephants can’t do this, you can literally road block them for hours while you replenish your halbs. Also, unless the attacking players has stables right in your face, elephants take much more time to get to the fighting, again because they’re slow. This also mean that if suddenly the opposite side of your team is getting beaten, you can’t easily divert some elephants and come to help, but I’ve seen that done multiple times with Paladins, because they’re fast.
If Khmer had gotten Paladins (just FU, no extra bonus) instead of Elite elephants, they’d probably been picked as pocket just a bit less than Franks.
Basically elephants are win-more units. You can make them when you have economic and military advantage, as they’re too slow to be moved easily through the battlefield.
You could say “but archers are slow too”, yes but archers are ranged units, and usually picked by flanks, which by position, are closer to the enemy. They are also way, way cheaper than elephants and cavalry.
And imho in their current state, it’s a bit of an hazard to make elephant themed civs (without knights), I’m really looking forward to see Bengalis and Dravidians performance in open maps.
I’d bet they’d be played as archer civs only.
1 Like
That actually doesn’t means that the most ressource flow into halbs. Halbs are extremely cheap also a lot of civ have basically only halbs to contribute in 4v4 BF torunaments.
Eles cost 3.5 * as much as Halbs, so you just need less eles to still have the same amount of value on the field.
It also showed that cause of the dominance of Siege most archery units seem to underperform which ofc also allows for more usage of the halb line.
Bengalis have the Ratha at least. If it is as strong as I expect it, it can certainly be one of the best mobile UUs.
I also think we have to expect an overall Change in the Ele design. The current Ele design actually doesn’t looks like being suited for such an expansion. Why would they make an Expansion like this if the eles then still suck? That would mak no sense.
3 Likes
If you really watched Rage forest that closely, you might have noticed people still go for elephant units once they have enough res and that they can win with them even though the enemy is going halbs.
3 Likes
This is simply not true, in final game between Barles Team and Miguels Team Barles went for EA, and rekt enemy trade, and even Persian Paladins cant stop them. Barles Team won. Weve seen also Viets Elephants in this game as well.
No later than yesterday Team Tatoh went full war ele and ele archer, at some point they had a 50k res army value or something absurdly high like that and they won.
so very first series i watched, Liereyy vs Vodka - had war elephants in game 3.
only reason the Viet player didn’t go Elephants in game 2 was becaUSe he was stuck in Castle age most the game and behind.
series two - slam vs villese - oh very first game viet player went for elephants… game 2 again had elephants…game 3 and 4 also had elephants. including elephant archers…
series three - game 2 and game 4. elephants…
so yeah. and already elephants are used numerous times. so when someone makes a claim that elephants aren’t being used, and referencing this tournament? yeah…
So, what are these stats? Any info?
Affected by stable and BS tech.
I’m guessing also affected by drav UT, meaning these badbois can also slap units pretty hard for a ram
Also hoping they don’t have the cavalry armour class or possibly have a positive value on either cav or ele armour class, so they don’t burst like balloons when poked with a spear
They’re mother food expensive for a castle age ram, so they’ll need some advantages
1 Like
Really underwhelming stats, and most people on the streams seems to have this opionion
Also Halbs seem to do 40 damage per hit to them, something to consider here
while these food-heavy elephants only do 5 damage back even with full upgrades…
2 Likes
IDk… What I feared has happened, they receive anti-cavalry bonus damage.
I really thing this is a bad design concept. Even if it is only 50 % as much as normal
They also cost more gold and have only just so slightly more HP (siege rams actually have even more)
They look kinda bad to me.
1 Like