No, that’s literally the opposite of my point, lol.
If you want a real summary, here it is: Elephants are designed to have a huge amount of HP, and be difficult to stop once massed. This is their intended purpose. This means that, when massed, you cannot counter them like other units - and this is by design.
And this is, essentially, what you are complaining about. Except complaining doesn’t matter, because again, this is precisely what they’re designed to do.
The devs aren’t going to change this core design, that’s the simple, unvarnished truth. So you can either find other ways to beat them - like monks, onagers, bombard cannons, or bombard towers…
That’s the kind of argument a frustrated 4-year-old would make when they’ve run out of things to say and just want to run away from the debate. I’m not going to quit a game I love. This isn’t a complaint; I’m just sharing my opinions. If my opinions annoy you, move on and don’t even bother replying. Or is this topic keeping you up at night?
It even seems obvious to me that a change will be made to elephants to make them better in Castle Age and less strong in Imperial Age. And the day that happens, you’ll be the first to kiss the devs’ boots and say it’s a great change.
I mean, I’ve actively MADE suggestions to improve Elephants in castle age but not in Imperial, lol.
I think you should be able to garrison a rider on elephants, and if the elephant gets converted, the rider gets sacrificially converted instead, protecting the elephant at the cost of the rider.
This makes elephants better but also less population efficient, so using them as a combined force is enhanced but without making them stronger on their own.
What I don’t do, though, is presume that just because they’re hard to stop in their position of ideal strength, that they need to be weakened there. They’re meant to be strong in large numbers; that’s WHY they were made so population efficient in the first place. But there are effective counters to them, even then. They’re playing against their greatest strength so it’ll never be a HARD counter, but it’s still a counter.
You can use those counters or not, but to not use them and then complain that they don’t have any counters because you don’t like the methods that are available is just self-defeating behavior.
I’m generally in the camp that they are a bit strong for their cost, but I dont think its THAT dire.
Pikemen are enough vs battle elephants
Camels/Cavalry - as you say
Monks - too many counters for these (archers, siege, enemy monks…)
For elephant archers, yea all that applies
Halbs just die
Camel are bad with pierce damage
Cavaliers are too weak and paladins barely come even
Monks get sniped
Onagers are good, but you need a decent number of them - not to mention the cost of the upgrade.
They’re too cheap for that logic to be valid.
Cost reduction, speed increase, base conversion resistance, devotion. They’ve adding small things to make eles usable - now its a bit too much. For the same reason they scaled them up, there’s no reason to thing they wont tune them back. Or at least touch up the civs that were excessively hard hit by the elephant buffs.
Now the counters you listed:
Monks - You make them in age 3 and convert a single elephant. Then the monk dies to the other eles or archers. Then the enemy monk converts the unit back since heresy is 1000 gold. You could make alot of monks - then protect them with a frontline and a siege train too. Doable but unreasonably hard for a unit-counter exchange.
Onagers - Yep they work. Provided you have the critical mass needed, age 4, and the upgrade since mangos really dont cut it. Overall the best counter tho, for sure.
Bombard cannons - age 4, chemistry, 450 res a piece. More than twice the cost of Battle eles, more than thrice the cost of ele archers to have a much weaker onager alternative. Long range, much les aoe and low projectile speed leave alot of room for counter play.
Then you say bombard towers - Look, the number is really big, but the think has a projectile speed of 3, is useless vs even rams and costs a third of a castle. Bombard towers just suck outside of specific maps.
They’re not particularly cheap. Substantially more expensive than knights, and knights are already quite expensive. So yeah, I’d say the logic holds up.
You convert an elephant and it starts attacking the other elephants around it. Thanks to the splash damage it does 2x or 3x its value, and by the time the enemy converts it back they’ve not only lost a huge amount of HP, they’ve also lost crucial time.
Lanchester’s laws. Even one conversion can make an exponential difference. The idea that monks don’t counter elephants is honestly pretty hilarious, really. If they don’t counter elephants, monks literally counter nothing. Which obviously isn’t the case; monks are the most powerful unit in the game.
Elephants are slow, and a better way to phrase that is, “Bombard Towers do THREE TIMES the damage per resources of a castle.”
Castles are already pretty dang decent defensive buildings. The only real weaknesses of bombard towers - their slow projectiles and overkill - are irrelevant against elephants. Not to mention, at the skill level where elephants are useful, players don’t have the skill to effectively counter bombard towers.
Honestly, I kinda doubt anyone here has even tried them in this context.
There are good reasons for elephants spam not bothering most players. Games usually end before that point. Otherwise, you should find Italians and Saracens should have assymetric pick rate and win rate. Elephants just melt in front of genoese crossbow/ mameluke.
Battle eles cost about 25% more than knights and give +150 hp and splash damage. Elephant archers cost 11% more than knights and have a ranged attack. No one has trouble massing knights. Getting a potentially game ending number of elephants is nowhere near as hard as you’re implying.
So no, there’s no logic in that whole ‘strong because hard to mass’.
Thats a far reach, well beyond theorycrafting.
Dont go into PhD math. Just dont. You saw it mentioned in a SOTL video, cool, but just dont go there unless you can actually start modeling the exchange of units and damage down to the resource.
Here’s a game that shows the reality of elephants vs monks. Daut got devotion at abt 16:20 then just sent elephant waves into the enemy base. Against Georgians. Off 1 TC. No archer, onager or monks of his own to counter the monks - just battle eles. Notice how easily the monks were drowned in the number of elephants despite what should be the ideal situation against a unit they should hard counter.
Currently monks are still a very good counter to knights, camels and many unique units - though devotion makes knights and similar units a bit iffy.
You forgot to account for fire rate in your calculation.
Elephants move at 0.9 so ‘slow’ is a bit much these days. Even with ballistics BBTs are simple to mirco against - not that anyone would bother since they only deal 1 damage to rams and come out well after trebs. At the level elephants are useful at, people use their scouts to dance around TC fire in the feudal age.
BBT’s dont counter sqaut. In fact, NO static defense counters any unit because beacuse its that easy to snipe towers with siege.
There are number of reasons why no one consider the use of an easy countered , expensive static defense thats only available after ag4, and two techs. At this point I wonder if you even play the game - the flaws in your proposals are common sense in the game and you cant find them on your own.
Yeah, massing a large number of knights is pretty difficult, lol. Monks effectively counter knights, and knights are waaaay easier to mass AND way faster and better at evading monks.
What ELO are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Because even at my elo(not terribly impressive), I can manage the fairly basic degree of micro needed to counter small numbers of elephants with monks. The only place where elephants are particularly potent is like 800 on down.
It’s not exactly complex; this is the sort of thing everyone should know. Small numbers advantages balloon to large differences.
Malay have a significant advantage here. But if there’s a problem, it’s with Malay, not elephants.
But bear in mind, that’s against just 1 pierce armor, and in general we’ll expect more like 4-7 in most cases. In practice, more like 1,335 damage per minute from a castle is more reasonable, compared to 1230 from a bombard tower.
And, of course, in the case of the Turks(who are the most vulnerable against elephants), they can more than defend their BBTs from trebs with BBCs.
Absolutely there are. Just like there are a number of reasons why Battle Elephants are considered to be underpowered in the majority of circumstances.
But both of those things are largely limited to high level play. At the level of play where battle elephants are viable, so are bombard towers. The answer, therefore, should be obvious.
Your responses are strange, you focus on the form and forget the substance. One moment you suggest I should quit the game, then you say I’m complaining, then you call me defeatist. But at no point do you actually respond to my arguments. All of this is completely off-topic. it’s just hot air.
What do you think about improving the monks’ gameplay? What do you think about giving a bonus to Heavy Camels and Imperial Camels? And what do you think about all the suggestions that have been made in this thread by the people who actually respond constructively?
Read the thread again and respond to what’s actually been proposed instead of making up unnecessary tension with your “complain” things, “quit the game”, “self-defaet” blablabla.
What ELO are you, if you don’t mind me asking? Because even at my elo(not terribly impressive), I can manage the fairly basic degree of micro needed to counter small numbers of elephants with monks. The only place where elephants are particularly potent is like 800 on down.
It was around 1230 ish a year ago, when I last played. Not high, not low I guess imho. Its the elo where microing around slow moving projectiles and having a support for your main units is common.
If you’re this confident that elephants are only threating at ranks LOWER than your own, by all means, upload videos of yourself proving your point.
Also, massing knights is trivial - elephants are barely harder. Just so were on the same page tho; you know I mean what happens in actual games right? Where about 15 - 20 is a big number for your main premium unit??
I REALLY hope you’re not this confident while assuming 80-90 pop of fully teched post imp units. That is DEEP in the realm of wishful theorycraft.
Aight bet, model every single one of your statements numerically, with the damage achieved by each unit, its time spent active, and the conversion of hp to resources.
Malay battle elephants with rams as a side ran headfirst into Georgian monks and won. Civ diff, is it? Stop the cap.
2.49 - DPM per resource of the castle as 2.88. DPM per resource of the bombard tower as 5.47. You said:
and the reality is 5.47/2.88 = 1.89. Not even close - and less important than the simple fact that projectiles from a bombard tower are easily dodged or soaked by rams.
Just get to age 4, tech into BBT’s, also BBC’s, make both to fend off elephants and siege. AFTER surviving age 3 - where the unit to counter appears and spending whatever resources need to hold it off till then.
I’d have taken the suggestion of mass scorpions more seriously. With this, it seems you really have no idea what the game is beyond toot tip decriptions.
None of the reasons you’ve provided that elephants are NOT stronger than they should be have stood up to scrutiny, beyond your own subjective insistence.
Claiming your points to be a skill gap is a very flimsy cover - any videos of an ACTUAL high level game to support your position? Because from the videos I watch, your view is FAR from what happens.
It depends on which age. In castle age, it is extremely difficult to maintain queueing villager production and elephants production. But knight+villagers can be continuously produced. Only in mid imperial age, food eco has set up, battle elephants cost is more forgiving. That’s why mostly Malay elephants is seen.
Plus, knight actually have more advantages in small number due to mobility. Only in large number, battle elephants will be scary. But this requires time and eco.
Elephants just have way too much HP, and if you don’t have a strong anti-elephant unit, monks become your only option. But monks not only get harder to use as the game progresses—elephants also aren’t as vulnerable to them as War Elephants used to be.
Faster movement, cheaper cost, innate resistances, Devotion, and civilization bonuses are just too much. They even make monks without Block Printing a questionable counter.
I’d remove at least 200 HP from War Elephants, 60 HP from the other elephants, and rebalance the rest of their stats. Only then would their monk resistance feel justified.
“You must perfectly utilize your window of opportunity in a particular moment with Block Printing monks or else you deserve to lose,” is just acknowledging the problem. Why should elephants be the only unit that imposes such a strict condition on opponents?
War Wagons and Hussite Wagons have high HP too, but they don’t demand such conditions to counter them. And unlike elephants, they can actually be countered by more than a handful of units.
Malay elephants are cheap, rest are not. Once again there’s monks to convert the early elephants in castle age and halberdiers for late game. Halberdiers deal 66 damage to elephants, more than enough to kill them very cost effectively. If you lost against Elephants, you got severely raided or were severely behind in economy already or chilled too much and gave your opponent time unnecessarily. Otherwise its nearly impossible to lose to Elephants. Just check your own recorded game where you lost against Elite Battle elephants, look for villager difference, k/d, eco k/d, resources collected, eco upgrades and so on. That must be the reason for losing against Elephants. At higher elos almost nobody makes them as main army, probably less than 1% of games.
If they are bad against knights and cavaliers, why would anyone spend 35 more resources on doing such slow units. Resisting monks is a nice suggestion for earlier stages but could become problematic for TGs. With rest of the stats fixed, just giving them some conversion resistance or an additional tech to convert them can make elephants more playable in castle age.
Nope. Monks should never auto-convert, that would be broken. They have 9 range, more than any other unit in the game. This will kill all possibilities of military aggression. Its a terrible idea.
This is a good suggestion, will let the opponents make better decisions against monks.
Also a great suggestion. They could extend the stats to show the time left for faith to fully recharge, something to indicate redemption, atonement, faith, conversion charge so far.
It’s fine for elephants to be strong against melee units or to have innate resistance to monks—but having both is too much. Just look at Bengali elephants:
Extra resistance to conversion.
Extra resistance to bonus damage.
Faster attack speed.
That’s three strong, stacked bonuses on top of already fully upgraded Battle Elephants. You’d never see such a combination of bonuses applied to the same unit in older civilizations.
No fully upgraded unit should receive such stacked bonuses. It’s like giving Britons both Thumb Ring and the Vietnamese archer HP bonus on top of their extra range, or giving Franks both Bloodlines and Stirrups.
These elephants are already powerful, and monks and halberdiers were among the few counters available. Minimizing their effectiveness makes these elephants nearly uncounterable.
