Hypothetically, if SEA Civs were to be given Elephant Archers & Siege Elephants, what changes would be needed to keep them both fun, viable and balanced?

What would be the purpose of this unit?

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I don’t think cavalry archers and elephant archers can be available both, so the Hindustanis may still have to keep cavalry archers.

Getting the Southeast Asians to use elephant archers is indeed more accurate than using cavalry archers. Perhaps for balance, the Vietnamese and Malays should not have elite elephant archers upgrade because of HP bonus (and Chatras) or cost bonus, and the Burmese and Khmers should lose Parthian tactics so that the elephant archers with armor or speed bonuses remain weaker. This keeps things as balanced as possible without changing other civilization bonuses and tech trees. (Assuming that all current bonuses and UTs that benefit Battle Elephants also benefit all elephant units.)

I’m not so sure about armored and siege elephants. When the Elephant Archers are also shared with Southeast Asians, perhaps it would be nice to keep them as regional units specific to the 4 Indian civs. If the Ram line of Southeast Asians are also replaced with Armored Elephant line, the Malays must lose the Siege Elephant upgrade due to their cost advantage.

Elephant Skirmisher is a redundant design as a common unit, but maybe it’s worth being an Castle UU for some new Southeast Asian civilization, such as the Chams or the Siamese?

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Why can’t we have civs with both horses and elephants? Why remove the horse archers or even the rams when you could have both. There’s ways to alter the code to add space at the buildings…. Isn’t there?

It doesn’t make sense to have both Cavalry Archers and Elephant Archers at the same time, just like having Rams and Armored Elephants at the same time. The meaning of the latters is to replace the formers and provide gameplay that never existed in the past, otherwise the devs would not have placed the latters in the formers’ place.

Doesn’t make it a good idea. I fail to see them filling the same role and I fail to see how the simultaneousness of both breaks a civ!

Sometimes a unit exists for tech tree flavor or are people calling for turks to lose the trash that they cant upgrade or railing against Celt Paladins wasting tech tree space?

Turk Spearmen and Skirmishers are still important in Feudal, and I remember the Celt Paladins have historical significance, so they have nothing to do with flavor in my opinion.

I’d like to ask, why do you have to have both? Moreover, Southeast Asians and South Asians living in the jungle probably do not have the military tradition of shooting arrows on horseback.

If the developers thought Cavalry Archers and Elephant Archers could coexist, the Gurjaras might probably have both. And now the Gurjaras tell you they probably don’t think so. What’s more, the space in Archery Range is really not enough.

Probably no more knights would be enough to balance most of it, as the new civs are.

a skirm elephant, sounds useless to me tbh.

tbh, The only unit I would add to SEA civs is the elephant archer. Other than that, No.

all indian civs should have access to camels. elephant archer is debatable but must have camels

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Why? Its not historical to give camels to bengal or dravidians.

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Khmer should get light cavalry but not horse archers.

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really is that true? bengal and dravidians got no camels at all?

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Yes the climate does not support camels much.

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The Chams should get a pirate unit in their Castle to emphasize their history as a maritime raiding power in SE Asia, whereas the Siamese should get a gunpowder elephant unit in their Castle to reflect the fact that they arose relatively late in history (13th century onward).

As for the Ele Skirm, I think it’s better as a regional unit for SE Asian civs.

While I really like, or let me say, love the idea of Elephants for SEA civs:

  1. Why remove Husbandry and make their bonus 12%/24%? Just leave it as it is. Husbandry + 10% for Ele units.

  2. We all know that if a civ has EA, it loses CA. Same for AE and Rams.

  3. Elephants do not fit Hindustanis too much since Hindustanis are basically Afghans/Mughals and I am happy with the current implementation.

  4. For Gurjaras, getting Battle Elephants is debatable though.

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its ok for Bengalis to have a strong unit for Black forest 4v4. There’s houfnice, War elephants, celt s.o, Mangudais with drill SO and so on in such maps anyway…
Outside BF 4v4, EA are useless and nobody is going to make them. I’m also against Burmese getting useless EA instead of CA because it literally does NOTHING. The civ is still going to struggle against archers, their raiding potential is gone and these EA aren’t going to save Burmese. Its such a bad idea and waste of resources in early or mid castle age to make units that cost 160 resources to defend against xbows, get converted almost instantly and die so easily to skirms.

exactly. No idea why devs overnerfed BE instead of just reducing Khmer BE speed bonus to 10%. They need like +10 elephant armor for non elites and +20 for elites and elites should get their 16 attack back from pre-DE or 50% blast damage (just for the elites) or they keep these stats but cost 95 food 70 gold. EA should definitely have -3 ca armor and elites -1 and cost 80 food 60 gold or have 7 attack for the base and 9 attack for elites with more conversion resistance.

Historically speaking Dravidians should have knights and good cavalry -

While its true that Bengalis, the Palas didn’t have horses, Cholas (represented by Dravidians in the game) fielded vast amounts of cavalry. It makes no sense to give the worst cavalry to them if everything was supposed to be based on “history”

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Historically hindustani should get the knight line too as they are a mamluke civi.

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I have seen in multiple places arguments for it not being true (this is prob something similar to the Chola Navy article in which a part of it is made up). Also, later Bengali states had better cav than what Tamils should have

For a unit that is strong only when massed, what exactly is your thought process behind making them lack elite?

Realistically all of the aforementioned civs can get access to siege and archer elephants without changing anything about them.

The only special cases will be Khmer and Vietnamese where it’s debatable whether the UTs should affect both archers and battles, but considering how hard they are to mass and use, and that we have never seen ele archers work, I think one has grounds to experiment, and readjust later, based on data.

Yes, 460HP elephant archers, yes, elephant archers that move 10% faster and have 14 damage (but miss thumb ring).

Yes, 40% cheaper siege elephants. Because currently Malay are very bad at dealing with archer masses and consolidating a push.

And the Burmese one will be whatever.
10PA.

In practical terms, all of those solve issues that the civ have. Khmer lack a proper backline unit. Vietnamese lack high HP units to play aggressive with. Malay lack anti archer and anti building capabilities. Burmese lack strong backline options, and they also lack good siege.

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