I agree, this is the most useless buff I’ve ever read
I think that is meant to micro the other units of your army. An EA with huge vision is like a personal outpost, you build a couple of them to go with your other units, like the archers. When you see onagers approaching, you retire the archers. It is very useful.
You won’t mass EA with this buff, but this buff makes the EA useful, not OP
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Yeah, the purpose of this buff is clearly to improve them in their best use case in a standard game: Blending them in to your normal composition with excess resources you’ve pooled to make your composition sturdier and more population efficient.
LOS doesn’t make them any sturdier, but being able to posture or react to an enemy a bit quicker can reduce your losses, which in a way does help the durability of your army.
Elephant archers are seriously expensive to get into, so I’d be surprised if this came up often, but it’d still be a nice QOL.
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I don’t know… why I would train an EA instead of 2 or 3 scouts?.. sounds like a consolation buff…
Your scouts aren’t doing their job being in the middle of an archer mass. An Elephant archer can do it’s damage at range.
Often enough, flanks happen, and having good vision of your surroundings in general, and not just of the front of the engagement can be meaningful.
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Also, Elephant Archers give you about 1.95 hp/resource, while hussars give just 1.18. Paladins, by contrast, give 1.37 hp/resource. Also, Hussars cap at 6 pierce armor, while EAs cap at 9 pierce armor; against arbs, a hussar will take 3 damage while EAs take 1.
Perhaps most importantly, EAs automatically take position 1 tile in front of archer units, automatically tanking enemy fire, while hussars need to be microed to prevent them from running into enemies and potentially getting wrecked by halbs.
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How many times you see Tatars, Franks, Magyars picked in team games just for the LOS TB?
And what makes the Elephant Archer so bad to use is their very high cost, long training time and requiering Castles.
I proposed long time ago, that Sultans could allow the Elephant Archer at the Archery Range, which helps to use them, especially in team games.
Besides Indians struggle a lot vs archer civs, and the Elephant Archer is like the only tool that they have to use effectively against them.
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I still think they would be too oppressive if they were easily massable. And the LOS buff improves their utility without making them more oppressive in the wrong situations.
You don’t pick tatars specifically for their LOS but it sure does help.
Indians might be one of the underrated civs. Considering their perceived weakness but actually decent win rates in the ladder…
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Instead: Elite Upgrade reduces their training time as well. Easier to mass, but only through castles.
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Maybe replace the Indian Unique Tech of +1 range to hand cannons (one of the most useless techs, given how inaccurate these units are at long range) with some buff to EA? E.g. if EA got a unique tech upgrade that gave them bonus damage against some specific unit type?
Decreasing elite upgrade helps but not that much
You’re exactly right that Indians struggle against archer civs, but EAs alone cannot fix that, since they have slightly lower range. The only way to effectively use them is by combining them with other more traditional forces, especially the powerful Indian Hand Cannons.
Giving them additional LOS is giving you much more benefit than JUST the LOS, the LOS is just something that helps it fill its role.
The cost, difficulty of production, etc, also aren’t really relevant because you’re not supposed to have huge numbers of EAs in the first place. The ratio I’d suggest is 1 EA to 10 normal archers or hand cannons. So being able to make them at archery ranges or more quickly really wouldn’t matter at all, since massing large numbers of them isn’t ever the primary objective.
they could leave it at +1, and add extra hp. there’s a ton of UT / civ bonuses that overlap, and as it stands it would increase the utility of the HC
or +1 range and +10% accuracy, to offset the range
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If the HC UT is to be kept, I would consider removing the range bonus, and just give it +2 archer armor and maybe +1 pierce armor. In most games HC’s tend to just get shredded by skirms and there’s not a lot you can do about it due to their meager HP
but overall, I’d prefer to replace the UT with a buff to Elephant Archers and make the EA a more viable UU 
Always sad when a UU sees no real use
Indians have FU ESkirms and Heavy Cav Archers. They do not struggle against Archers, at all.
They lack FU hussars in imp, meaning they have a weaker counter to Skirm. Archer+Skirm lacks an efficient trash counter besides your own Skirms, which is fine assuming you have better siege options than your opponent. The Indians siege options aren’t terrible but they’re far from being a high point of the civ.
With gold, I agree with you, but without gold or with limited gold to spend, cleaning up archer compositions is rough.
No, they get the same Pierce Armou as if they had FU, so for the intent of fighting Archers, their Hussar is as good as FU.
" * All Stable units have +1 pierce armor in the Castle Age and +1 in the Imperial Age."
It is the same effect as Plate Barding Armour, for free, against Archers.
Indians have FU ESkirms, FU HCA and FU Hussars, against Archers.
Consider myself corrected. I thought they had the same Melee armor, not pierce, in imp.
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Indians atually have trouble against Goths.
Without that +1 Melee Armour, Hussars do not trade so well against Huskarls anymore, and they lack Knights, Platemail Armour and Supplies, so they are constantly outmatched by the Goths Infantry.
They do have extra range on their hand cannons, which can make a pretty big difference.
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