This holiday season my friends and I we were playing AOE2 after a gap of few months. All of us who owned the base game got new civs as well. We play arabia mostly and the ones who got new civs wanted to play DOI civs and unanimously everyone agreed elephant archers are a useless unit for castle or imperial age since crossbow and arbs are exponentially better. They are neither an anti-archer archer like the rattan, skirms nor they were anti-cav like the genoese or composite bowman. I agreed.
Elephant archers have not had any changes that could make them a usable unit in the time period it comes available especially as a replacement of cavalry archer. Neither pros nor noobs transition to elephant archers when a more powerful archer is needed or a powerful archer push needs to be stopped. The unit since its inception has been tinkered with in unmaginative ways. The unit was problematic even when it was unique unit of Indians. See this post below which describes it accurately. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/64moy3/why_i_think_elephant_archers_suck/
When the unit was reworked for DOI, the unit should have been made with some specific purposes and use cases in mind. But It was shoehorned into a cavalry archer replacement without changing the design which will make the unit viable without the speed of cav archers. EA stats were tinked with several times like its cavalry archer armour and elite upgrade cost. But meaningful changes like the conversion resistance battle elephants got were never applied to them. The Elephant archer as a unit hardly ever sees use in castle age due to cost and less range. But becomes a menace in closed maps due to high HP post-imp pointing to its flawed design. Even Viper could not make them in castle age, he was ahead and lost the match due to making EAs. https://youtu.be/Ma_srd24N4c?si=DoNXi4K2udt6ENnW
These are the minimal changes I propose to make the unit viable in castle age and neft the snowballing effect in imp. I’d redesign the elephant archer to be a better version of E skirm without needing to upgrade. I would nerf the attack to 4 instead of 6 and increase the range to 6 instead of 4. I’d completely remove the negative bonus armour and make skirms a near equal unit not a counter. The last change is the cost which should be more gold and less food.
Trained at
Food
60
Gold
90
Training time
32 seconds
Statistics
Hit points
230
Pierce attack
4
Reload time
2
Attack delay
0.4
Range
6
Accuracy
70%
Projectile speed
7
Melee armor
0
Pierce armor
2
Armor class
Cavalry archer
Archer
Cavalry
War elephant
Speed
0.9
Line of Sight
7
EAs will become better than archers due to its range and HP despite its equal speed. It can raid like Knights using its range in a limited capacity. Due to damage to siege getting reduced to 1 damage per hit, mangonel line will become an effective counter in post-imp situation. If needed, mangonel can get a +50 bonus damage and scorpion line can get +20 against war elephants.