Elephants husbandry is impractical due to their long-life span meaning that the most effective strategy is to capture wild elephants. The reason why elephants fell out of favor is not because they are ineffective but because they are a logistical nightmare. So a long training time makes sense
Well I think this unit along with Steppe Lancers, need a rework, it’s more than a tweak, since they serve zero viability.
Battle Elephants are already stronger than Knights, I would go for more of a radical change and have Elephants have 3p armor flat, regardless if it’s Elite or not. However change their melee armor to 0 when not Elite, and 1 when Elite.
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Give them the Khmer speed buff to all the Else civs
If you want to give something more to Khmer ok
I dont get the point of your change. Imo if we need to buff them somehow we have to work around making them harder to counter in 1v1s since they are a balanced team game unit already.
Maybe we can also make them slightly cheaper on food or give them cheaper upgrades
I just wanted to point out that the biggest issue with battle elephant is that they have the same armour class as war elephants meaning than the spearman line is unreasonably effective against them. This completely neuters them in a 1v1 setting (and open map team games) where it’s hard to support them and makes building knights the superior option in most settings (main exception being post imp team games in super closed maps like BF)
Numbers:
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Ig the point is to make them better arrow sponges than say 2 kts. I don’t know whether it works but it doesn’t sound too hard to test at least.
Elite war eles BEFORE the buff actually were almost evenly matched with halbs. On a cost effective basis, so if you manage to make a mass push they just overrun the lower numbers of halbs.
Yes, a halb spam can stop eles, especially battle eles, but it’s not that effective as you showcase it here. Also don’t forget that khmer, vietnames and malay eles have insane bonusses.
Most of the Eles in the game are actually less hard countered by the spear line than paladins (in terms of sheer fighting ofc).
I also thing that aoe-combatsim.com potentially miscalculates here. The numbers from age arena show downright better results for battle eles than the number of that reddit post suggest (don’t forget age arena makes equal ressources, not even outcome. Even outcome always gives numbers closer to “even” than equal ressources cause of the lanchester laws.
This concludes to me that in aoe-combatsim eles somehow underperform. Maybe the trample damage isn’t implemented properly.
Just to say that I wrote that Reddit post 
at the time I did spot checks on several of the simulations (I.e. ran them myself in the scenario editor) and all of my spot checks were identical to the simulator results. If you want to test it out and find they are wrong I’d be happy to retract / correct the Reddit post.
First I would take out castle age Eles atm cause they just don’t work for different reasons. But it would be too complicated to go deeper into this for now.
Second it’s important to state that every unit needs to have a counter. As in mass battles (for which eles are designed) Monks are basically useless, the halb is the only remaining counter.
And then we come to the second thing, that is the extremely high pop efficiency of eles. Way higher than Paladins. That means even if halbs would counter eles more efficient than palas on a cost efficient basis, this doesn’t include the pop space difference needed to eg stop 60 eles instead of 60 palas. You need way more halbs for that, so it comes to a point you can’t have as much eco behind to support that halb spam.
Third, we are only looking on burmese eles here and compare them with FU paladin. But Burmese eles are the worst eles in the game when it comes to fights against melee units. Malay, Khmer, Vietnamese (and Persian) eles perform way better there.
Sorry, but for me it looks like one of this repeated desperate “nerf the spear line” approaches from all the cav lovers out there. Only because the spear line is the only military counter available to all civs to counter cav doesn’t make that line OP.
It actually showcases the lack of cav counters in the base game. It’s only one unit. Yeah we now have camels, eagles, eles, supplies. But still only 1 base unit that is available to all civs.
And still a lot of games cav (palas and eles!) is just used to overwhealm the spear units of the opponent by the sheer pop efficiency of the cav, still people complaining about halbs being allegedly “too strong” against cav units.
With various crude comparisons that with a bit of look into actually don’t really hold.
The halb line is the only reason why the lategame ele rush isn’t totally OP, cause almost all civs without camels have nothing else to somehow stop that. And still even if you make that halb spam, you need to be prepared to lose a lot of them cause of the low pop efficiency, you basically can’t “evenly” match the eles as you would be left with basically no workers if you do so.
Edit: Don’t get me wrong. There would be a way to adjust eles as a lot of the “problems” with them origin form their insane pop efficiency: Make techs that reduce infantry and foot archer pop consumption. Then Halbs / the spear line could possibly get less bonus damage against eles. But only then.
For reference switching to khmer eles increases halb efficiency from 49% → 55%. Still woefully behind the 68.6% efficiency of paladins. Whilst I agree and respect the argument of pop efficiency my personal opinion is you are weighting it too highly; it is undoubtfully a benefit of elephants but it is nowhere near enough to offset how impractical/sub-standard they are to use in the vast majority of game settings.
Honestly, I have no idea what a good solution to this is as I fully appreciate just blanket nerfing halbs against them will likely break several other components of the game. I’m merely pointing out that the unreasonable efficiency of spears (and the lack of versatility compared to knights) is a huge component as to why they are rarely seen outside of late post-imp team games on BF.
One proposed idea I had (only theory crafted never checked or tested) is to reduce spear bonus damage vs BE but also to give them bonus armour. The goal being to preserve the efficiency but to slow the fight down so that its more viable to mix in support units i.e., to make ele + skirmisher combinations more viable in 1v1s.
I probably wont reply anymore as I don’t want to be drawn into an extended back and forth argument. I do respect your opinions even if I don’t fully agree with them
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OK, I also don’t want to be caught in such an endless discussion, as I try to see the bigger picture. The game just is in a state where some elements aren’t working as intended anymore, also some elements are just off or not available that would make for a more healthy “balance” so that elephants as they are intended can be implemented witout breaking the game somewhere.
My concept:
Mangos become more specialised in countering archery.
Scorpions get bonus damage vs cavalry, reduced base damage and less pierce armor
Skirms get more dps vs halbs (also in terms of rof)
There are techs added that reduce foot archer and infantry pop requirement (not all civs get all of them)
Eles get a speed charge and a little bit of conversion resistance
Imo that would solve a lot of the balance issues we currently have and would allow for way more unit diverity without breaking the game.
From the design perspective, I actually think the causation is in the opposite direction.
It’s because the spear-line gets such massive bonus damage vs elephants (which is a problem that originates all the way back from Age of Kings’ War Elephants) that Battle Elephants received the high stats and low gold costs that make them so hard to counter in certain situations.
I mean, why do EBEs need 3 pierce armour?
It would have been far easier to design a generally-useful, never-OP elephant unit if its ability to tank arrow fire was only slightly greater than than a Paladin’s, rather than 1.8 times better (as is currently the case).
My interpretation is that the devs thought “welp, this unit sucks” (because of halbs, monks)
“let’s make them insane arrow sponges so they at least have some utility”
I might be wrong, but I’d still love to see a rework of all elephant units.
I do agree with
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If we want to leverage a bit the halberdier bonus against elephants, Inwould somit the elephant armor class in 2: “elephant” and “elephant unic unit”
War elephants, archer elephants and ballista elephants should receive the same damage from halbs as before. But after this tweak, battle elephants would receive a bit less damage (it should be enough for holding one extra hit by a tiny margin)
Battle elephants DON’T need to be less vulnerable vs halbs, Battle eles are soo population efficent and they need a good counter, idk why people ever bother to change that 
What you are saying doesnt make any sense when Battle Eles arent even that great on TGs in which infantry practically doesnt exist. Sure, they may be a bit too good on DM but that can be fixed by nerfing their production speed.
And Halbs should still counter them, just not as hard as they do. In 1v1s getting to Eles would still be expensive enough and they would still die badly to monks.
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Not a fan of this because the production speed is one of their appeals compared to knights.