What about buffing the persian elephant ? actually its the most expensive unit in the game by far 200 food /75 gold and if you want upgrad them in elite version with the +30% boost speed its cost you 1900 Food and 1500 Gold !
For a unit who is almost the slowest in the game and who get countered by almost every unit easily(monk,pikemen,mass crossbow,camel,onager,cavalry archer…) So you have to pay one billion gold and food for a unit who gonna get killed in 5sec by 90% of the unit of this game or get converted in two second and helping your ennemy for free.
Something sould be done about this unit,its kinda sad than the most expensive unit in the game is also the most useless.
Maybe reduce the overall cost,give them more movement speed at least equal to the battle elephant, or reduce the number of unit who counter them so easily,(more resistent to conversion,or almost immune to ranged damage)
Nothing is more sad to invest all your economy into an unit who get killed by 3 trash unit who cost nothing. Any idea about buffing them and make them more usefull ?
They just mass skirmisher and pikes they hard counter your elephant/crossbow mix spending 1/5 of ressource your spending and in competitive play we never see pro player using war elephant. When we never see an particular unit i think the unit have some problem
War elephants are not a bad unit, per se, but they are very situational. They’re the hardest hitting, tankiest unit, so they’re pretty good on Death Match. As has been pointed out, the Trashbow tech helps them be more viable because it gives Persians a great castle age/early imp counter to pikes. Also, nobody has mentioned this yet, but the -2 attack nerf to elite battle elephants can be seen as a comparative buff to war elephants, as they are now that much stronger than all elephant units. So at the end of the day, I don’t think they’re bad, although I tend to be in favor of small changes that make UUs more viable. Hopefully they’ll fix the superfast DE conversion rate, as that is something that’s particularly dangerous to war elephants.
Yep, there’s definitely a role for hard hitting late-game power units, and they’re viable enough on DM, Michi, Black Forest, etc to justify their existence, even if they’re rarely seen on Arabia. If 60 war elephants are coming at you, even with how hard halbs counter them, you often can’t stop those eles from bulldozing your town. Being “cost effective” against them doesn’t matter much if you don’t have buildings anymore.
There are times where it’s helpful to focus on what happens in Pro Age2, and times where it’s not very helpful. Pro play is all about the early game, and pros rarely play late game resource-heavy slog fests in which War Elephants are at their best (e.g. DM, Michi, BF). That doesn’t mean that war elephants aren’t good in those situations. Frankly, more units/strats are viable at lower levels than in pro games because of how hyper-optimized everything has to be, and also because mid to low level players often favor “turtle and boom” type maps over early aggression maps.
I can argue in favor of elephants. In the old days AOE 2 days, units moved in one axis more than the animation had. Also, most people played offline. In this circumstances, elaphants were an absolute win. There wasnt any serious counter. However, AOE 2 HD (now 2013) removed one axis, and also increased unit stalling time with collisions, to allow more population without overrunning network and CPU. However, elephants loss significant power, especially with the stalling times. This, added to the walking speed of elephants, rendered them useless when them hit to a mass. Units stall logn time pathfinding.
So, it’s not elephants, it’s pathfinding. Eliminating one axis made pathfinding harder, because there’s less escape directions. If a less stalling (and more demanding) unit AI/autorun was implemented, this would never happen. Cpu’s now are lot more powerful, and there’s lot of memory, and still wonder why unit pathfinding is so slow and local search based. Also never understood why devs limited movement directions.
That is untrue fyt. There was never any kind of movement axis removal on either HD or DE compared to 1.0c. Yes there are pathing issues, but this is not the cause.
Yes and ? Yes, in AoE2 the sprites only had 8 directions, and they have 32 in DE. But the number of directions in the graphics has absolutely no influence on unit movement. I can make a unit with graphically one direction and it will move just as well as a unit with 128.
A fun buff would be to give them area damge, with the tusks.
I don’t know if the WE needs a buff though.
But why should the game be balanced for Death Match?
Hmm, because Deathmatch is a core game mode of the Age of Empires series? Even if it was much more popular in AoE that in AoE2 many people still like it. And there is an official ranked DM ladder as well.