Extra bonus damage to Elephant class is major BS!

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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This specially applies to halberdier with 60+ damage( +32 vs Cavalry, +28 vs Elephants). Starting to play this game competitively and I already find the disbalance on this unit more than others. I believe elephants should be countered with same tier units. Meaning units that cost gold as well(Ex Hand cannoneer could be a counter since historically accurately rifleman drove elephants to near extinction) scorpions camels etc.
WHY you may ask?
Easy. Elephants are slow prone to conversions and easy to see them coming. Also to build Elephants and make them battle-worthy require as much as effort and resources as building a carrier or a battlecruiser(Starcraft reference). Do you see them being countered by marines or low tier units? NO
Whats the point of going the extra mile to make a more “powerful” unit only to be countered by trash? There is NO point. There is a reason why elephants are rarely almost not seen on competitive
Because Its so UNFAIR almost NO Castle unit to my knowledge gets countered that HARD cost effectively by trash units.
Now let me give you an example of a competitive game where you try to go elephants even late game after you are ahead of your opponent after his failed early harass.
-So you are head economy wise (Check)
-You outplayed him(Check)
Now you go elephants because your economy allows it. and he starts spamming habeldiers and takes down your army way TOO cost effectively and you are back on square 1. Well I could have gone arbalests and scouts and would have fared much better while also spending a lot less. BUT my issue is THATS SO COOKIE CUTTER!!!
THATS WHAT EVERYBODY DOES!
THIS IS WHEN THE GAME BECOMES BORING AF. Because it doesn’t allow creativity. Instead of pushing 1 or 2 cookier cutter metas(Most effective tactis) against each other. You should be promoting 10 different new COMBOS 20 metas.
YOU SHOULD MAKE ALL UNITS BALANCED.
My solution would be to reduce the damage taken by such trash unit and possibly increase the damage output from high tier counters.

Thank you thats my rant

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Its why you don’t see elephants used in pro play really ever(outside of Khmer). Elephant archers are even worse because they take bonus damage from basically every unit in the game.

I still think that halb line should counter eles but not as well as they do.

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Exactly they do it TOO well. No other unit is countered that hard besides archers into onagers. But at least that realistically makes sense. The thing with elephants as opposed to cavalry is that they are too slow so if halbs are coming. YOU HAVE to engage them. Whereas knights or scouts. You can run laps around them, kill villagers, take out a TC and head back home before even losing 2 or 3 knight.

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Really? If trash was only counter to elephants, there would be elephants every time over knights.

Monks are the real counter to elephants where as trash is always just addition to your army composition.

But I get that all the new players get mad at trash units countering stuff then they fall into the pattern of playing with trash units only, which is just plain bad.

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I agree. Halbs just melt elephants. Shouldn’t do that much bonus to them. I think that bonus was originally thought for war elephants… But it’s qyite unbalanced for battle elephants. It’s a unit I love to used, but it’s really hard to

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The thing if you get a surprise elephant attack on someone. He wont have time to mass monks and plus they are hard to micro as it is. However spamming halbs on a surprise attack is far easier faster and much more cost effective than monks. Also if faith is researched you will have a hard time. However there is no research that helps elephants against trash. Halbs still do RIDICULOUS amounts of damage no matter the upgrades. Even if the elephants were fully blacksmith upgraded vs halbs with no upgrades.
Olive
Yeah I guess they were originally planned to counter Persian elephants but even then the counter damage is ridiculous given the fact those are the slowest most expensive elephants in game

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The problem is if it wasn’t for Halbs Elephants had absolutely no counterplay in lategame (Monks don’t work that good anymore in lategame situations with high numbers). Even the way it is now an elephant snowball can easily be started since they shred through an equal numbers of halbs.
The concept of elephants (very expensive and very strong -> very population efficient) is just very hard to balance. There has to be some kind of hard counter (that’s widely avaliable) to keep them under control. Otherwise you’d just see elephant civs steamroll every opponent once they get to the lategame - I guess you don’t want to see that ;D

by the way: I think the main reason we don’t see them more is not them being useless but rather the lack of teamgames in the pro scene right now. In 1v1 it’s most of the time too expensive to go for them, just like Paladins. Add to that that only a few civs get them and you know why you rarely see them. But I’m pretty sure they’re excellent lategame units in situation where trade is set up and players can spam units. They’re probably even strong enough to power through Halbs with the proper support units. 1v1 is just the worst setting for elephants to excell in.

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I agree that they need some kind of counter, but yet i think they should be a little bit more resistant to halbs. They’re certain civs that are unstoppable when they’re boomed (like mongols, with mangudai, fo example) if you let them arrive at that point, you’re done. Same thing should apply for elephants. Also, elephants are always a late transition, because you can use them in castle age (except if you’re malay), so that’s make them even harder to mass. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be countered, but there’s a huge difference in effectiveness between halbs vs paladins and halbs versus elephants.

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People just say unstoppable to make a point - they’re just pretty good. But they also need micro and support units. Elephants with less weakness against pikes would just be: spam 1 kind of units, attack move, win. That’s much more more unstoppable then current top tier civs^^

There’s also a huge difference in what an army of elephants does to you when you’re not prepared for them. It’s like an extrem version of what happens when you get hit by Paladins before you have a counter ready.
Btw: Look at at how well Camels (anti cav unit without bonus against elephants) do against elephants. That’s for sure no solution^^
I know you don’t want to completely get rid of the bonus, but I still think it’s very important that there is a hard counter for such a powerful unit. There’s just nothing you can do if there is no hard counter. It’s basically the same reason why we can’t give Teutonic Knights more pierce armor: A slow and strong unit needs something that absolutely destroys it. Otherwise that unit can just steamroll through everything you send against it without counterplay.

And again: I think you somewhat overestimate how good halbs are against elephants. Try to stop 20 Elephants with the same numbers of Halbs. Yes, its cost effective, but you still have a problem to deal with after that fight. That can result in huge momentum swings ingame. Add to that that halbs themselves are very easily countered by multiple things. Mix some Champions into your elephants for example and they will soak a lot of halb hits (and deal good damage) and make your army much more effective.

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Thats why I stated they should also have a different counter. Halbs still could be counter but their cost effectiveness is way too disproportionate and that should be balanced. When you are better off building trash than some supposed to be top tier castle unit. Then this game obviously has a problem. And as far being population efficient sure they are that but they are not even the strongest on that regard. I would give that to Onagers. and Onagers only get countered by top tier units.

How can you mix anything with elephants when they are super food and gold dependant? sure you can put some canoneer. its a good combo, however to get there requires so much farming and Imperial age. Most games dont even reach that stage and even 1 onager shot could wipe out your canoneers. 60+ damage is just bad coding IMO

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The thing is, one total counter it’s not balanced neither. Yeah, they’re pop efficient, but how much more than paladins? A frankish paladin have almlst 200 hp. An elite battle elephant have 320 and both do the same damage (viets have more hp but less attack). Yeah, elephants have trample damage, but still, they have a lot of cons: they’re much slower, harder to keep alive and much more expensive. I think they should get a little more resistance agains halbs, and maybe be a little weaker to arrows. At the end, that only one counter prevent them from being used

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That’s the point. Now that he is 100% paranoid about your elephants, he’s wasting pop slots on weak trash units.

Welp, elephants are cost-effective vs all gold unit (besides Scorpion, Genoese crossbow and Monks, and the later is more of a problem with low numbers) Also, the purpose of elephants is being the most pop-effective units (it’s why there isn’t really a unit in the “same tier”), so once that you filled all your pop slots with eles and they did the same with halbs it’s a win for you.

Unlike eles.vs pikes, arbs can’t win a duel vs skirms, and scouts are even worse to use vs halbs. Sure you don’t lose gold, but all your units lose fights, and scouts are bad at pop efficiency.

If elephants had no easy counter then you would just have to spam stables and eles to win. Definitely not creative.

Even if you could implement that, that would be like paladin vs camel, and would make eles less unique.

Malay can also elephant rush. Also, Burmese and Vietnamese will eventually produce elephants in late game. As of the Persian one, it’s hard to mass because it’s a castle unit, but once you get them going they can stop anything, including south eastern elephants (not to mention now you can combo them with trashbows if you really hate halbs that much)

True. Also, did I mention elephants can attack any adjacent halbs (dramatically increasing their DPS)?

I don’t get this one, Castle age is the best time for Malay elephants.

I’m pretty much sure Mangudai are countered cost-effectively by skirms, and they can struggle vs camels and paladin, especially if you can’t micro, while eles don’t need to be babysitted that much. Also, mongol trash is bad, while no ele civ have bad trash. The only real weakness among all of them is the Burmese skirmisher (I mean, you can forgive the Malay’s bad light cav since they will use all their food for much better swordsmen)

All BEs cost 5 less gold, which can matter in 1v1. Khmer ones have +3 attack, and Burmese have more armor. And Malay ones still confortably win vs heavy cav while costing even less gold.

Ie. the more you try to gang up on them to kill them the better their damage output is. Mass cataphracts can win vs FU Cavalier thx to a measly 5 trample damage, I let you guess what you get on a unit that has better stats than Paladin and does half its attack to anything that is near them.

And that way instead of forcing your opponent to use bad units, they can just go archers, kite your eles to death (technically you can already do that but it’s tediously difficult and the eles can just ignore the archers and level your town first) and then they can go kill your eco. Those eles would be worse than those we get today.

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-Its not the most pop effective. That easily goes to Onagers.
-Its gold effective counter if your opponent is DUMB enough to crash head on to battle with you. Its actually very easy to ignore elephants build obstacles around your base to prevent elephants inside and send your gold tier army to their base to starve their economy while you are spamming halbs to get rid of elephants in your front door
-Arbs can do just fine against skirms and thats an amazing example actually. Skirms are supposed to be the HARD trash counter to them. However it doesn’t even come close to the cost effectiveness of halbs vs elephants. Sure they lose but dont lose as hard and are not a as resource intensive. Compare the upgrades too. If you have arbalasts blacksmith maxed and you run into your opponent and he hasnt blacksmith upgraded his skirmishers. You will still wreck the skirmishers
-NOPE There still would be counters just not stupid unbalanced counter like halbs. Like I said before give camels, scorpions or canoneers a bonus against elephants. Thats more fair
-If you dont babysit your elephants then you obviously dont know how to play the game. Besides halbs You can easily kite a group of elephants with one unit while the others are doing range damage. I found playing Lithunians with 4+relics just send my paladins attack to base. Forget about them and the base is destroyed. With elephants I have to babysit every little movement or they get kited or agro useless bases and get killed by halbs because some stupid in game pathing.
-Trample damage is only useful if you are dumb enough to crash elephants head on.
-Resistance to halbs wouldnt make halbs useless but would actually level the playing field. It wouldnt make them so cost effective +60 damage is broken. Im willing to bet just some random guy who didnt play too much Aoe came up with that number

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Why?
Do you also want to nerf Skirms because they’re trash and most of the time the best solution against ranged units?
What you’re saying is just not how AoE2 works. Pikes and Skirms get their value from being able to counter specific units very hard while being horribly bad against (a lot of) other units. There’s nothing wrong with them being good against a lategame unit. This is not Starcraft!

so what?

Have your ever tried to fight with Onagers against Hussars? They for sure get countered by a trash unit. Yeah they can land some good ground attacks (just like elephant can defeat some pikes), but it’s never cost effective.

You stop elephant production for like 1-2 minutes and use the awesome eco that allows you to spam elephant in order to set up the production of another unit. From there on you get a little less elephants and a little bit more of the other units.

Honestly you seem to just throw random arguments in here to make your point, so I’m not even sure if it’s worth responding to them. Anyway:

Trust me: The stage where you can spam elephants is also the stage where you can easily transition. So what’s your point here? If the game doesn’t reach the stage where people go elephants it doesn’t matter for the discussion here anyway.

Yeah, 1 Onager shot can kill some hand cannoneers, but what does that have to do with the discussion? 1 bombard cannon can whipe out every onager before it even gets to shoot. I don’t think throwing in random counter units gets us any further.
Btw I dont think hand cannoneers are that great of a choice to support elephants. Either go for the Champions I mentioned or some ranged units with arrows. Hand cannoneers are not in a good spot in general right now and they’re also much better if the enemy has to run at them (which they wont if there are elephants in front of them)

I don’t know about you, but I consider +50% HP (it’s even more than that), trample damage (huge in big fights) and bonus against buildings quite a bit stronger…

Honestly that would make them (maybe even a lot) weaker than they are right now…
Being resistant to arrows is much more important for a lategame frontline unit than not having a melee counter (which is horrible against arrows btw.)

That’s wrong. High cost prevents them from being used in 1v1. Lack of teamgames prevents them from being used in teamgames.
There’s nothing wrong with elephants. Remember, they even got nerfed (-2 damage) when DE came out. I’m not sure if that was necessary, but it shows that IF there was a problem with elephants it was them being too strong in lategame situation, not them being too weak.

Dude, you you start assuming that both players are playing well for your arguments. Of course I can make up situations where unit X sucks if their owner uses a braindead approach while the opponent is playing clever. Even then I think it#s not as easy to ignore elephants in front of your base as you make it look like.

No, they don’t. If they do it comes down to a lack of upgrades. You can never fight with Arbs against FU skirms unless you heavily outnumber them and even then it doesnt feel good.

If you elephants and the opponent hasn’t upgraded his pikes you will still wreck him…
Heck, even if he has fully upgraded Halbs you will wreck him if he’s not able to outnumber and outproduce you.

Camels makes absolutely no sense from a realistic point of view
scorpions already have a bonus and if it get’s more you will probably cry about elephants being useless because evil scorpion shoot them down way too fast.
Hand cannoneers might be a decent option, but why fix something that isnt broke?

???

Noone has time to kite single units in lategame situations - also if the opponent has time to micro single units to lure away elephants, please assume that the elephant player has time to give new orders to elephants and prevent that from happening.

Also Paladings are just the same as elephants in the scenario you mentioned. They will kill a single Halberdier, but they will die easily against a group of Halberdiers.

What else are Halbs supposed to do???
Trample damage is actually huge here and it is why Halbs need to do that much damage. They would get totally slaughtered in mass battles by elephants if they didnt.

Yeah, the devs went “no idea why, but let’s just give Halbs a big bonus against elephants”. That’s probably what happened…
It rather seems that your understanding of the game isn’t good enough to understand why such numbers are necessary.

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@Tohobuwaha gets it. Furthermore, did you take into account not everyone gets halb (or have them FU!) in the first place?

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People already complain about the power of elephants in BF matches or diplo games because of their extremely high pop efficiency.
And you want them to be buffed ? Way to go to unbalance the game even more.

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Can’t. The word I wanted is can’t ahahha.

The thing is, for me, the nerf the got was unnecessary. Now they take one more hit to kill halbs. FU halbs take 5 hits to kill a FU BE and vice versa. From the economic point of view that’s senseless.

It’s okey, it’s a hard counter, but I still see them as highly situational, or a late game unit. Yeah, maybe I’m wrong wanting them to fill the same roll of the knight line, but I think thank yhe transition knight to elephants is always a must, and that’s why players tend to go for other units.
Maybe, just maybe, they should get a little buff. If not for resistance to halbs, maybe they should move a little bit faster (I’m assuming they won’t regain their attack). That way they wil be able to run from halbs a little more, and give the player time to kill halbs, because, elephants are definitely not expendable

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They nerfed elephants with the nov 14 game release. That must mean something.

Elite Battle Elephant attack reduced from 16 to 14

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They also gave us broken Cumans and Broken persians, so… That’s not a good justification 11111

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OP has good point

This is like saying roses are red because roses are red :smile:

  1. While BEs cost -5 gold, they cost +60 food. This food difference matter a lot even in 1v1.
  2. They lack speed. While Paladins can just avoid losing to the bad trade, Elephants almost always have to engage.
  3. They have large collison box (rougly twice Paladin’s). This means even for a fairly average size army (which is how BE is supposed to be used), the units in the back will have to spend more time to move in the front to engage a fight. Their slow speed combined with current state of bad path finding massively reduce their damage output (Here’s an example, increasing collision box weaken Steppe Lancer damage output as a group)
  4. BE costs 40% more resources than Paladins. Balancing out resources, Battle elephants can’t be compared to Paladins in every aspect. If paying the same price you’ll get more total HPs, total dmg output and higher mobility for Paladins. So BEs are not more cost effective than Paladins.

The way Halb counter elephants is just too cost effective. Paladins take the same amount of hits from Halbs while kill them in less hits than BE does. Paladins also have the option to refuse engagement.

To sum this up, from a balancing point of view, it is reasonable for a unit that is too slow and too expensive like BE to be able to take more hit from its hard counter Halberdier.

If pop efficiency is a bigger concern than cost efficiency in late games, then just keep their stat and reduce their food cost.