Summary of all these threads started by so many different people is the same. India was not a united entity in medieval period. It is a huge number of culture group classified as one civilization in the game. Even if you do so it makes very little sense to make them so heavily camel oriented while making their elephants of little to no use (which is just unacceptible). Some people are asking to buff/change elephant archer, yet some others are asking to give them war elephants or battle elephants. Yet some other people are suggesting to create new Indian Civs and non of the Civ designs they are proposing is camel heavy. They either use Infantry, Archer or Cavalry along with the Elephants.
There is no question that EAs need buffs, it’s only a matter of how. They’re a very confused unit. Why have an archer UU when they already have more powerful hand cannoneers?
Buff their damage and they overlap too much. Buff their range and they stop being meat shields automatically. Buff their health, I guess? It could work, but they’d still be generally inferior to equal resources in HCs, because they rely so much on critical mass to survive, rather than on large health pools.
That’s why I want them to have a monk on their back that automatically heals units nearby them. Make them offer something other units dont, and then you’d want a few scattered through your army no matter what.
Trouble is, the whole reason they’ve got shorter range is so they automatically take the front position and can tank for the other archers. Give them more range and you’d just end up needing to manually micro them to the front, because high health is pointless if it’s hidden behind all your other units anyway.
They’re in a weird place is the thing. They’re clearly meant to be a tank for other archers, rather than the main body of your force. But archers tank for themselves by reaching critical mass, so that niche isn’t really necessary. As long as they’ve got less dps than other archers, they’ll not get used, but if they have more, they’ll only be used in the endgame in the exact same role as War Elephants, to achieve a massive population efficiency advantage.
As long as they’re in direct competition with archers, they’re gonna be super-niche at best.
That’s why I think they need to be buffed laterally, to give them something else they can do while fulfilling their primary purpose. Like how Mangudai have their siege bonus. They kinda have that with their building damage, but if that’s to be their role, it needs to be quite a bit stronger. But it’s why I think giving them healing for nearby units would be cool, it would make them useful in small numbers combined with just about anything.
But it doesn’t have to be that. Just anything that sets them apart from other archers.
Elephant archers in history were used like tanks to smash the enemy ranks and the archers on top helped soften the enemy for the infantry to proceed in and finish up. How could this be replicated? Could they have some form of melee then?
According to ES devs, it’s actually easy to do. However, they decided not to implement melee/ranged hybrids because it was deemed too complex. They explained it with the example of samurai: they were supposed to be such hybrids units but then you would have situations where you task them to defend ur castle vs trebs, go do something… and then come back and see your castle is ded and your army is just shooting arrows at the treb.
I suppose you could theoretically do some sort of debuff on things they shoot. Reduced damage or armor or speed or something. That might be a bit too complicated and weird though.
Would definitely be hilarious though. Going against a faster enemy only to shoot them, slow them down, and obliterate them? Good times.
Trouble is, that puts the burden of knowledge on the enemy. I think it would be better for them to help their allies, so the effort required is placed more on the indian player.
It’d be great if people with no coding knowledge would stop making bizarre claims about what the engine can and cannot do, though.