So at this point, once you go Imperial, elephants are just useless - they can be killed by siege, by hand cannoneers, by strelets, elite crossbow. Yet they cost so much and take up 3 pop space.
I feel like elephants are only useful early castle age. If that is an intended design decision, okay. But Delhi having this cool unit that always gets run over in the Imperial age, even in mass, is pretty sad. They are a huge investment - where’s the value for money?
I feel like the elephants should give Delhi the identity of an “elephant civ” just like Abbasids are the “camel civ”. Right now, they are completely useless after a point.
Maybe they should get Elite upgrades? Or speed upgrades? Or Tower elephants should be able to garrison archers in its carriage like outposts? They need some sort of identity in the game apart from being “fun to look at”.
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don’t Dehli get elephants for free? Also springald nerfs are basically elephant buffs so yeah. They soak up a lot of damage in fights and that should be their primary role. And yes, they should die to a mass of crossbows/handcannons because why wouldn’t they. Also abbasid build camels ones in a blue moon so it’s not like they have some kind of camel identity going. Both camels and elephants act as support units and it should be just that.
There is a landmark that makes an elephant every 90 seconds or so in Imperial age. But that isn’t sufficient to actually help out this situation - if you want an elephant army you still have to pay for most of them.
I don’t think “elephant army” should ever be a thing unless you’re playing some low elo game on black forest and you’re just spamming elephants for fun. Getting a 600 gold unit every 90 seconds that acts as a filler for your army is already pretty good
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The tradeoff isn’t very fair against crossbows or handcannons - checkout the video viper made. Equal resources, the elephants do really poorly, by a huge margin.
But low elo games are what I’m always playing.
Because I’m not interested in high elo.
Handcannons counter everything in range
Crossbows counter elephants, among other things.
Maybe elephants need a buff in imp, but if you’re putting them against counters, they’re going to lose badly.
I think they are a big priority target and also have many counters.
Spearmen, crossbows, handcannons , bombards…
I heard that horsemen do bonus damage to the tower elephant as well, because they are ranged?
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Elephants lose vs everything on equal resources except when war elephants fights cavalry, but when would you ever fight war elephants with your cavalry, just run past them. The only thing towers really do well against is MAA while walking away from them, but if you just had 25 crossbowmen instead of 3 tower war elephants you wouldn’t even need to walk away.
Cuz that is equal resources, either 3 tower elephants or 25 crossbowmen. Which would you prefer?
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They should be given some kind of aura to either buff your army, or rebuff the enemies. Probably the debuff, as camels do the buff aura. Fits well thematically - they strike fear into the enemy.
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Also just wanted to say here that cannon cost almost the same as elephants and spamming a ‘cannon army’ is somehow viable… makes sense to you?
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it’s not tho, and with springalds doing even more siege damage next patch, it never will
Can you explain more.
I’ve seen games where someone just builds bombards and they kill everything in front… what you say would be right if melee units were strong against siege like in AoE2, AoE3… but in this game, the only counter to siege is siege. And bombards are pretty tanky, so torch damage doesn’t help much.
That is only a good advantage if the unit is actually capable of getting to the battle and doing that much worth of damage.
Tower war elephants are especially egregious because crossbows, horseman and pikes all get bonus damage against them, they also get countered by bombards/spingalds, handcannons, they lose too mass maa and knights too. Not to mention they are insanely expensive, so their only use is war elephants vs cav and/or use as kind of siege units if you are already winning or an early castle timing push.
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I love this idea. Someone on the reddit proposed that the melee elephants should give a camel like debuff and the tower elephants should give a buff to friendly units. I find this to be a really elegant solution bc it forces a diverse army composition and shouldn’t make spamming just elephants a viable solution.
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