Can War Elephants ever be viable In 1v1? Some map scenarios. You are playing as Persians on 1v1 Arabia. You are playing black forest 1v1. You are playing 1v1 on a map with very rich resources and the map is like black forest.
It seems Persian War Elephants can only be made in team games, in the very late game when you have a large influx of farms and trade carts often on closed maps like black forest. Otherwise, they are next to useless. In other words, you would have to make War Elephant cost something like 100 food instead of 200 to make them more viable 1v1. But in making 100 food cheaper, they would be near totally broken in team games.
black forest/michi would be the only maps i could see it.
War elephants are really strong to be viable in 1v1
In fact if you play Persians you should go for Cavalier+ Trashbows for 1v1.
Their big weakness is their cost. I can’t see them being useful. 99% of the time in 1v1.
There is a reason for that cost though. Imagine if they costed what a knight costs
at 100 food they would be totally broken in 1v1 too, not just team games
but yeah, War Elephant is pretty much a team game only unit. Not to worry, Persians are a nice civ even without the Elephants
It isn’t the cost alone. You get a lot for the cost. In fact it’s by far the strongest unit in the game.
But three probs:
A) utility: They have no good synergy except with siege. But they can’t protect siege well until you get a big mass of the,
B) mobility: They just can’t run away from their counters
C) Monastery: persians don’t get heresy, so monks are absolutely broken against them
D) Too slow push. Besides they have a quite high attack, their push is comparable slow for the investment you did, giving the enemy time to find an answer
The prob is, that all these weaknesses scale with the players capabilities to make us of hem. So to make them “viable” the only way is to buff them in a specific utility only the best players can really make use of. Any other form of buff is doomed because it would overbuff them in low elos.
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The only strategy I can think of that might possibly work for 1v1 war elephants is archers into early Kamandaran. If you get Kamadaran fast you only are spending wood on archers, leaving food and gold entirely for war elephants, and trashbows counter pikes, camels and monks. Still you are much better off starting with knights and adding trashbows later as a support unit.
Yes. They’re absolutely busted in 1v1. You just need to be the player against Persia so you can convert them for yourself.
War Elephants that belong to persia are useless.
Well you could probably list every civ where it’s even debatable to use war elephants against them. I mean the barest of bare minimum criteria is missing either block printing or sanctity. There’s just no way you’re killing 45hp 12 range monks with Persians given how few monks are required. After all small no. elephants → small no. of monks → lots more stuff in between your units and the monks.
- Berbers: No sanctity or block printing
- Bulgarians: No sanctity or block printing. No ring archer armor.
- Celts: No block printing, illum, or theocracy, plus weak skirms and weak cavalry.
- Cumans: Similar monks to celts. No bracer.
- Ethiopians: No block printing, weak cavalry.
- Goths: No block printing. No plate barding, no plate mail.
- Huns: No block printing, theocracy. No ring archer armor. Very weak seige.
- Khmer: No block printing. No plate barding
- Mongols: Worst monks in the game. No ring archer armor or Plate barding.
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Persians (11): No sanctity, illum. No bracer.
- Sicilians: No block printing, theocracy. No ring archer armor.
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Tatars: No sanctity, theocracy.
- Turks: No block printing, illum. No pikes, no elite skirms, no onager.
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Vikings: No sanctity, illum, theocracy. Weak cavalry.
That’s about as long a list as you can make. The only real strategy that could even plausibly work before gold runs out is being willing to lose trashbows/CA/light cav in exchange for sniping monks and growing a critical mass of elephants. But I imagine the practice it would take to get good at this strategy isn’t worth it.
After gold runs out you might be able to use elephants and trashbows against certain civs without block printing (the ones not in bold).
At my admittedly very low elo I like them for two purposes:
1 Castle drop into immediate pressure, rather than needing a siege workshop as well to realistically threaten their buildings. Force a few monks and spearmen out of the opponent in defense. Maybe even a monk upgrade or two if they think you’re serious. If you follow this up with say trebs and trashbows this leaves the enemy out of position to counter that push. A very big drawback of this is that you always want to be making heavy cavalry in late castle/early imperial as well, and the counters to elephants work against those guys too. On the plus side, that means your elephants have blacksmith upgrades.
2 Mix them in in a trash war. Trashbows, hussars and war elephants. You’ve got one for the same amount of gold as a cavalier. It gives your pushes some staying power. Puts the enemy into an awkward position because of how well trashbows work against the spearman line. Both the bows and the hussars are pretty cost effective at killing monks too.
Yeah, sure, mangonels, rams and scorpions are all viable alternatives for both of those roles, and probably better options overall in most cases. But war elephants are an option. And that way you’re killing things with elephants. It’s its own reward.
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Just curious, what’s your ELO?
Me? It wobbles around a bit based on how much and how serious I’ve been playing recently, but even the high end is only 900 or so.
It’s high enough that people are aware of basic builds and such, use counters, blacksmiths and markets and are always managing something in a way that you could analyse an API number out of it, but not much more than that on the “I’m like a pro player”-scale. (It certainly felt a bit weird getting the final word in on this conversation for a while like that.) Hence “my admittedly very low elo” (compared to the average person with a well developed idea of game balance). (And the only reason I have such a specific opinion on war elephants in the first place is that Persians are one of my favorite civs. It’s fun to have ideas about things you like.)
(EDIT: Just in case I insulted anyone else’s elo there because it’s lower then mine: that wasn’t the point I was trying to make. Less “oh I’m so bad at football, you must be the absolute worst” and more “don’t hire me to write the rules for the world cup”.)
I see. i’m 1250 and i love battle elephants. In team games i used to play persians and go for them, specially on arena and BF, but when you go up in TG rank they are less viable unfortunately (I’m currently 2450 TG rank).
I’d love a way to introduce them on 1v1 games but not sure how that would be possible.
Well, you could always try some of options out…
(Worst case scenario you’ve got to win a bunch of matches to get your score back.)
Not as a core unit but if you have say a mass of archers throwing in a single ele or 2 max can be nice to soak damage and draw attention if they go into siege since in a archer vs siege scenario you generally lose momentum but the eyes can keep the pressure moving forward. The unit is so potentially strong once engaged that people see 2 and immediately adapt their game plan and tech into something else which would be a larger investment then you just making those few. Especially since as Persians you probably want a castle for UT at some point and if you opened knights then you have the blacksmith upgrades. Basically as a ram but with more of a bonus vs units rather then buildings
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