I think it will be a cool idea to have feudal age recruitable elephant scouts. Even more cooler if it is in the form of Feudal Elephant Archers. So we have a scout that is ranged but slow.
It will be impossible to balance this unit.
2 Likes
Even for elehant civs, an elephant scout (an animal that is slow and eats a semitruck of food) doesn’t make a lot of sense.
3 Likes
Elephants are too slow for scouting
3 Likes
Elephants are really not suited for scouting as a horse would do the same job for much cheaper.
Elephant is also too big for scouting.
4 Likes
To be honest we have seen crazier things, so I don’t think it’s completely unthinkable that a future Elephant-focused civ might get an Elephant Scout. I don’t like the idea of it being an Elephant Archer since it having a ranged attack has no ranged counters in Dark Age. I also think it might be tricky to balance an Elephant Scout but let’s give it a try.
Like for the Gurjara’s Camel Scout - and like all other unit upgrades - it should have the same cost as the base unit, which would be 100 food and 70 gold.
Like the Eagle Scout it could have the same speed in Dark Age and in Feudal Age and like for the Scout to Light Cav upgrade it could decrease the speed of the unit. So it could be like 1.0 speed in Dark Age and Feudal Age, so that you’re able to scout the map quite well and then drop down to the usual base speed of Battle Elephants (0.9) in Castle Age.
Battle Elephants have 7 line of sight which even considering the low speed would be too much but I think 6 line of sight (one more than an Eagle Scout) might be the right amount for Dark Age.
The Elephant Scout would have to have the most HP out of all the Scouts, and since it would be slower than all other Scouts it’s fine if it’s able to win a battle against them. It still has to be balanced against villagers of course, so its attack has to be extremely low.
I think you could make it work somehow and given the fact the game seems to be going for kingdoms instead of actual civs, we might get hundres of potential new kingdoms, so one day there will surely be one with an Elephant Scout 11
Yes, we have horse scout, camel scout and infantry scout. So an elephant scout should not be a far fetched idea.
For scouting purposes, even if speed is slow, larger line of sight can compensate.
Let’s give a ram scoot to Celts.
4 Likes
By ram you mean sheep?
This is a terrible idea. The point of a scout is that its supposed to be a fast unit. Why would anyone use an Elephant as a scout? Elephants were historically used as shock units used to strike terror into the hearts of enemy formations.
Irl elephants can run faster than humans ironically
But not faster than bird people.
Are you arguing they should be faster than any human unit then?. The units are not suppose to be running all the time, the game doesn’t represent rough terrain debuff to mobility and realistically nobody would have use a huge and loud animal for scouting (in real life the scout would have to be sneaky to explore efficiently).
They are really intelligent animals.