You convinced me. This is hoy I use elephant archere.
Arbalesters could be a good option, better than the so requested battle elephants
I 100% agree with you with these statements, however the general sentiment of the forums is otherwise.
In that case the elite upgrade should be dirt cheap. Like cheaper than the arbalest upgrade. But how would you make sure massed EA isn’t too strong, in eg diplomacy games?
by not balancing around people who wait to the super late game to attack, very simple. kill them before they get to massed EA.
you shouldn’t balance the game around sub-optimal play. let me ask you this - what do you do in diplomacy games if you let a persian player get 100 war elephants on the field?
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Indians don’t need Arbalesters. The main issue with indians is their lack of response to eagles. And arbs won’t do jack about that. They need a viable 1v1 option, and their CA are now nerfed indirectly with the hussars nerf
The rework buffs them only against less piece Armor units. They are not cost effective against units with 2 or more piece Armor. Also their range and speed is not changing. So still easy to counter.
The elite upgrade cost reduction makes sense.
Champs + better hand cannons at the cost of one upgrade sounds OK enough to me to beat eagles.
The real problem of Indians is that they do not have a meta strategy. Missing arbalests and knights is huge in 1v1. If the opponent is going archers or eagles you are forced to switch to counter units…
The trivial solution is giving Indians one of the two units.
Otherwise, to make them more original, it may be meaningful to buff CAs with one of this bonuses:
- CA frame delay equal to the mangudai one
- CAs +2 attack vs infantry
- CAs affected by the PA bonus (they would became unbeatable for standard archers)
No, I dont want to make them anything. That’s what they already are, and considering that Indians used to have Arbalesters until patch 5.5 I suspect that’s the role that was initially intended for them.
So? Archers need almost no wood at all. For each archery range you only need 3 villagers on wood.
You can easily gather enough food to produce them, and you never even need the elite upgrade. As long as you dont intend to mass them it gives you absolutely zero value. So they are actually a cheaper variant than rams, being faster and still able to deal some damage.
Indian CA attack delay - 20%.
At least the Dev can give the bonus to attack delay special for Indians. That helps a lot.
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Btw. lets see about Mccauthons claim that Elephant archers are a good unit on its own.
37 crossbows with decent micro can beat 20 unmicroed knights on a flat surface.
I picked 37 crossbows for this because this is approximately the threshold where I manage to win against knights. Other players might do it with less, with more favourable terrain it definitely is possible with less, too, but lets stick with 37 for now.
So lets think about how Can we compare that to Elephant archers:
Could be done three ways: Population efficiency. Only stat we look at here is 37 units. Sure Elephant archers massacre knights, im not losing a single one.
But thats not a fair comparison.
Resources: 37 Crossbows equal 15 Elephant archers, if you consider alls resources to be of equal value.
This actually works out quite well. I manage to keep 11-9 elephant archers alive in this engagement. Whereas this is around the same number of crossbows I manage to keep alive against knights.
But well, you can only produce them from castles so training time is also important.
Lets consider 1 castle vs 3 archery ranges. That would give me 13 elephant archers. Only now the knights actually win, with around 3 of them surviving. I cant keep them from surrounding me.
Actually I have to admit, Im kind of suprised. Elephant archers in castle age do much better than I expected. They not just population efficient, but even against knights actually cost efficient.
And they ALMOST are training time efficient as well. Remember 13 elephant archers do bad but just 2 more are actually as good as 37 crossbows against knights, if not better.
The downsight of course is, that you cant mass them in feudal or early castle, and they take longer to kill the knights (didnt measure the time), but they are not that terrible. Getting them massed to a significant number should actually not be as hard as most people think.
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I think you should pick 40 so that you can kill knights with all castle age upgrades in one shot.
Can you test another scenario where you mix EA with your xbow as AoE wiki page suggests? From wiki “a group of 40 Hand Cannoneers is easily defeated by a group of 40 Elite Skirmishers, but a group of 34 Hand Cannoneers and 3 Elite Elephant Archers will instead win the same fight for the same cost.” Add 1 EA for every 10 xbow and see the result. For example a 13 v 13 xbow fight will go to whoever micros better. Can you please test a 10 xbow + 1 EA vs 13 xbow and share the result?
Does that applicable for xbow vs knights as well? Instead of 20 knights vs 37 xbow or 13 EA, try 20 knights vs 30 xbow + 3/4 EA and share the result.
In that case, since indians cavalry have been buffed in castle age, one buff would be yo reduce the cost of the elephant archer upgrade, so it is easier to transition to EA in imperial.
I dont think you can test that scenario versus the ai. Against knights elephant archers will be pretty useless, because you can much easier position them in a way that they will focus the archers instead of the elephants.
I’m not a scenario editor expert but I think you can do this with trigger. All the knights will attack xbows first which a human player will do and attack the EA later. EA has a huge size and always stay at front since it has 1 less range. This may block knights path to surround the xbows. It may be worthy to force the knights to focus down your xbow while you can micro with them and the EAs are also shooting. I did this battle -
and xbow+EA wins pretty easily with 5-6 xbows alive and almost 2/3rd of EA HP left. In fact EA team can also win with only 6 xbows as long as opponent is shooting the EA. 1 less range of EA is really helping here acting as a ram that can also fire arrows as someone else mentioned before.
I think we can buff EA in an interesting way. Just like rams and mangonels can block tower, TC and castle fires and protect units (mostly the repair vils) behind them, EA will block all types of projectiles , not only arrows from defensive structures. In that case they will be a better version of ram in archer vs archer fight and opponent can no longer focus on your archers.
- Remove the ’ Cavalry have +1 pierce armor in the Castle Age and +1 pierce armor in the Imperial Age (+2 total)’ bonus
- But give them back the ‘Plate Barding Armor’
- Give them the ‘Battle Elephant’
- Make Shatagni a civ bonus
- And replace it with something that gives elephants more + 15% speed.
Tanky longbowman is guaranteed to be op no matter how slow they move.
Why not make them 2 factions?
One of them can have elephants and gundpowder bonus and the current UU
The other one can have camels and arbalesters and a new UU
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Because Khmer haven’t been nerfed repeatedly because how strong there elephants are
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