Cavalier has a pierce armor of 2. Paladins have 3.
The sad thing is players make all kinds of excuses to avoid using Malay elephants.
Some will say “oh theyre bad against archers because they miss the armor” without doing any calculations on cost-effectiveness of tanking arrow fire. Or without asking themselves the counter-factual “what would a 40% reduced cost elephant be like with full upgrades?”.
Others will still say things like xbow + malay elephant is “too expensive” which makes little sense. It has a setup cost which is analogous to pure knight because half your army is xbow (which reduces farm costs) and elephants dont need upgrades in early castle age.
Theres a laundry list of excuses like this. And it works on both sides where people try to counter malay elephants wrong. Ive seen 2k players try to kill malay elephant spam with xbow 11. It did not go well for the xbow player. The xbow lived but their base did not.
Realistically the devs have to say “screw it players didnt figure it out” and implement the nerf anyway.
Non-Malay Battle elephants are good, but they also are sensitive to pop cap and monk micro. If this sensitivity can be reduced (even in the form of an indirect nerf) you have a lot more freedom in terms of 1v1 design because the “critical mass” problem gets mitigated. Especially w.r.t. making non-elite elephants strong (but not broken) in imp for 1v1s. The UTs were a good design choice in this respect its just the Malay cost discount has caused it to take years to get to here.
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It’s not sad, it’s expected. When you have a strategy that’s unorthodox and not part of the understood meta, people revert to conformity to the norm, and do the normal thing. They may make excuses, but the excuses boil down to “since nobody else does it, I’m not doing it.” It’s an especially hard pressure when within the wrappings of AOE2, where your strategy has to be considered in your economic buildup to perform it optimally. If you weren’t planning them, the transition is slow and it compounds the self-imposed restriction of conforming to the norm.
It does however, make it even more painful when the Malay player sometimes opts for Karambit or 2h, both requiring a castle and an expensive upgrade in and of itself instead of utilizing stables and upgrading fewer techs for a better unit. The castle will go up anyway, trebs are just way too important to the Malay since their siege is lackluster at best, but it’s still impressive, and a very clear showing of this subconscious aspect, that players will often jump through unnecessary hoops to avoid doing something uncommon.
Of course, plenty of people exist that do not follow these pre-built inroads and innovate instead of playing meta, but due to the general average strength of the meta (due to it being the understood best avenue among the players) those players generally don’t succeed even when playing a strategy that is strong on paper, simply because a player that naturally strays from the meta will be far more prone to inconsistent results.
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Same for the Elephant and its Elite version.
Again, for no reason but aesthetics.
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I see what you’re getting at now.
flat out, however, I disagree with the implication you’re making. Taking a pierce off the elephants isn’t going to make them weak against archers. Archers do, at most, ~6.5 dps, and that’s for the top of the line, high dps archers and CA, before counting armor. An elephant has too much HP for that amount of damage to be relevant in most cases, unless the pierce armor is brought to exceedingly low numbers. A malay elephant still takes 50 shots for a fully upgraded arbalest to down, and it’s missing three pierce armor and Bloodlines.
Archers simply aren’t the answer, much like you don’t expect to use archers with any great success against most things with high HP.
Conversely, adding a pierce armor to them does nothing to the unit. Archers do not kill Elephants. Not one variant. Period. If your name doesn’t say Genoese in it, you need to get behind a catapult and rain rocks on them, or find five friends to pick up big sharp sticks with you. Preferrably both.
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I’m not saying this change would turn Elephants all of a sudden into a viable unit, same as the Longsword syndrome, there is simply no change that will make them viable, as viable as knights and xbows, combining the high food cost with the lack of mobility make this unit a complete impotent, especially in micro wars.
With that being said, it’s the least we can do. There must be a buff that won’t Knightisize them and kill their identity.
Reduce pike/camel damage to non war elephants a little bit and increase their blast damage.
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I agree with the food cost reduction, but the gold cost should be more to compensate, like 90 .
I think this would make them OP and also lose their identity. Spears are meant to counter cav and nothing else and I think the bonus damage should stay. BE in large numbers do lost of trample damage, so spears need a large bonus damage to be effective.
A 10% speed buff would make them a lot more useful. If all BE speed is increased by 10%, then Khmer should just lose their speed bonus. I think the devs gave too many BE bonuses to Khmer from the beginning. Giving Khmer BE more attack and speed and FU made the unit harder to balance and they ended up making them unplayable for other civs.
My personal idea for balancing BEs involved changing the cost of the elite upgrade to 1200 wood and 800 food. Making it a trash upgrade will make it a lot more feasible for 1v1 while the total resource cost will keep it balanced for team games.
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Battle Elephants have 2 main windows where they can be strong: early Castle Age and early Imperial Age.
In the first case, the high food cost and vulnerability to Monks in small numbers makes all bar Malay elephants unviable.
As for the second case, in Imperial Age their main problem is speed. On Arabia-like maps, speed matters a lot and here units like Cavaliers, Hussar or Ranged units that can “stack” their dps are better.
In theory you could full wall your economy and do a slow Battle elephant push, which is reminiscent of how Teutons would grind down post Imp on Arabia, but I guess most people don’t like playing like that, also because you need a lot of time to get to Elite Battle Elephant and you need some alternative unit in the meantime to hold ground (which let’s take the example of Malay, let’s say this unit is Arbalest, why not simply win with Arbalest + BBC then?).
Khmer likewise can transition into Cavalier + Hussar out of Castle Age Crossbow play so while Khmer could in theory do mass EBE, it seems overkill on Arabia when you can more easily grind opponent down with Hussars.
I think in early Castle age, Elephants are in a good spot, don’t see how you would make them viable here without breaking them in Imp, as for Imperial Age, like I said the main hurdle imo is the difficulty of the tech transition (it’s basically Paladin price AND you likely start massing in Imp unlike Knights who you mass in Castle age). So the easiest solution to make th3m viable in 1v1s seems to SLIGHTLY lower the EBE upgrade price.
People who say Pikes are unfair vs Elephants are dreaming btw, you realize that vs a unit that has more than 2x the HP of a Knight, Pikemen NEED more damage to preserve the status of counter unit and allow comebacks and prevent steamrolls.
Eh no. This is archers. It’s the opposite, actually what you write is where BE are weakest. Battle elephant need huge farming eco so it’s in late imp where they’re good. You can also try go elephant in late castle age (shouldn’t really work though).
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yeah my bad, I meant to write late Imp.
Early Castle they are viable in theory, you could buy like 100-200 food and make 5-7 but that amount is too weak to Monks.
Late Castle, the problem is that you will face a lot of fortifications (Castles) and Battle Elephants aren’t exactly great vs Castles, while they take them out faster than Knights, it’s a costly engagement.
Does anyone know why they had their trample damage and anti building damage nerfed? My speculation is because of Khmer elephants + eco being OP but that always seemed like a strange way of balancing them to me.
I made a mod that gives BE base speed of 0.9(which is equal that of champion line) and they performed very well. I think all they need is a base speed buff and that’s it really. However tho, I do think Pike line in general needs to do a little bit less damage to elephant because at the moment, the total bonus damage is too ridiculous toward a units that’s are too slow and too expensive to field in castle age.
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It was to address the issue in team game mostly. Khmer BE back in the old day was really nasty in team game.
I really like this as well. Some civs lack the H scorp. So could already give some bonus to standard scorps
It was because low elo player TGs were dominated by ele spams at some point.
IDK exactly which, maybe it was just arena or BF, but there were several complains at that time.
I spoke against the change at that time, but probably the only way to somewhat “balance” the eles is to try to target-buff them for higher elos, give them some kind of micro utility that scales heavily with the players skills.
Also I think we also need to start talking about timings here aswell. Ofc a lot of people already mentioned that eles have problems getting started with the high food cost, but I don’t even think that’s all of it. Eles also - even on smaller sized maps - take longer to get to the target destination, that’s where knights shine. They can be produced immediately and move fast to the raiding grounds.
BUT I would step away from the kind of “easy” solutions like just increasing the movement speed generally cause that’s actually the one big difference between knights and eles. If we start reducing power of eles for higher movement speed we at some point will just end with a knight again.
I think The question is what advantage can Eles have over knights in the midgame? Maybe some kind of brainstorming would help there. Is there one single think that annoys you when plaing knights and you would like to have a unit that solvest that issue?
One example could be against walls + quickwalls - What would be if Eles would be specifically designed to overrun palisades + houses? What would be if they had some kind of ranged atk (or maybe extended trample damage radius or whatever) to damage the repairmen?
So, what is your heaviest “upset” when playing knights were you wish they would perform better?
Edit: I made my own topic for this now so it doesn’t convolute this thread, please answer here
Pikes are meant to be a counter unit, if they mass Pikes you are meant to transition out of Elephants, not overpower the pikes with trample damage and full upgrades. A total bonus of ~40 coming from +22 vs Cavalry and whatever residual you have for bonus vs Elephant seems reasonable when FU Castle Age Elephant has 270 HP vs 120 HP of the Knight. If HP is double, it makes sense that bonus damage should also be double if the status of “counter unit” is to be maintained in small/medium numbers.
this is nowhere near the same though, and if anything is being obtuse. a 0.99 speed elephant (if speed was upped to 0.9) with 300 hp and a 1.49 speed cavalier with 140hp are two vastly different things with different uses and “weaknesses”, monks and halbs vs massed arbs respectively
knights will still have the vastly better mobility for flanking, siege sniping, base raiding, out manoeuvring, more rewarding micro, BE will still be the slow tanky, building killers super weak to monks.
and by arguing against these buffs simply muddies the water and we end up with nobody getting anywhere because someone wants to be obtuse to the level of walking over houses or damaging repairmen?
like i mean that stuff would be great (walking over palisades) but is so radical, i dont see it being implemented and doesnt address the unit itself, it just creates niche cases where the ele is better
a number of civs now lack the knight, meaning the BE has to, to some extent, fulfil the roles of a knight. which it cant do with its exorbitant food:gold ratio, and ridiculous speed
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Agree but currently I feel pikes are over tuned. The spearman line is significantly better against eles than they are knights (exception being Malay) which just feels fundamentally wrong given how many other advantages knights have over eles.
Some numbers for Bermese (admittedly the worst against spears, but I think the conclusion still holds regardless):
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/ps4uku/the_unreasonable_efficiency_of_spears_against/
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Wasnt just low elo and closed maps. There was an open msp team game tournament where they ran amuk too