I also didn’t want to speak about the elefant in the room too much, but I think we have too…
Eles can’t really raid. But that’s essential for main unit in a composition that they can.
That’s why I in my thread purely hypothetical ideas for new trash units created a chariot that is designed to synergize with eles and is an excellent raiding unit.
But if we talk about making battle eles more viable we probably need to talk about raiding and the impact it has why certain units are considered so strong and others don’t. And how good a unit has to be in fighting to compensate for not being able to raid. And if it’s a good idea to design such a unit, if we want to have to deal with “sheer power” units. And that the impact of good raiding potential in actual evalueation “how good” a unit is varies with skill level…
It’s a whole bunch of things that are associated with raiding.
Just have a look at the shrivamsha. It’s actually not that strong of a unit. (Besides it counters some units very heavily) But it is probably the best raiding unit in the game which makes it decide a lot of games at high level of play. A few shrivamshas in your base is all a good player needs to kill you.
Eles on the other hand are useless in low numbers cause they can’t raid and they don’t even threaten any thing cause in low numbers they get still killed by all kind of defences. In high numbers the opponent can just move his eco cause the eles are too slow to kill the running away vills.