My Proposed Changes for the upcoming balance patch

its not cheaper siege though. just cheaper siege workshop.

and pavise affecting condo.

it can always be easily adjusted if its too much. i just put random numbers down for now.

he also admitted they are very late game units, because of the huge cost associated with them. but the fact is that they trade too cost effectively to make big buffs too.
Elephant Unique Units aren’t bad, they just cost a lot, which is prohibitive in 1v1 games with limited resources.
if you want to actually see them in 1v1 as a main stay you’re going to have to accept rebalancing them around a lower cost.

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Yet he demolished whole Archer armies with them.

Seems like a unit you would love, it breaks the Arbalest Meta.

I would love it if it did.
But it does not break any meta.
It doesnt even belond to any meta.

It is that vulnerable and costly. FU ESkirm are far better at their job. Unless you are popcapped with michi resources, and ridiculous gold in Post imp.

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It does, so learn how to use it, and stop complaining.

EAs just murder Archers and Pikes, and take almost no damage from Knights.

Vulnerable to what? 8 times its population of units? You don’t see the advantage there?

Here’s the game you and @MatCauthon3 love to refer to so much

That group of 20+ EAs(costing atleast 2000F, 1400G) didn’t scratch the TC before this and proceeded to die within seconds to a trash army. Achieveing nothing.

They couldn’t counter a single crossbow standing there.

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and a group of 39 of them chewed through malian pikes, 2h swords, Cavaliers and arbs.

They get better exponentially in larger numbers. Which is why buffing them is a huge problem that you refuse to acknowledge

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The same Lanchester’s laws apply to every unit out there.

And no even if there’s 45 of them, a much cheaper Halb army or a much more numerous Skirm army still destroys them.

While EA stand in a place and achieve nothing. No timely raiding, no pursuing, no micro nothing.

Except you aren’t being honest. That video shows 15 elephant archers. Not 20+.
And elephant archers scale harder due to their insane bulk. It takes a lot less firepower to kill 1 arb then it does to kill 1 elephant archer.
Lower hp units lose overall power much faster then higher hp units do.

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21 pikes(700F 500W) instantly destroyed 15 EAs (1500F 1050G)
So one-sided that not a single corssbow was shot with a single EA arrow.

And people say they counter crossbows

it literally takes 8 damage from an elite skirm and has 350 health. That means 44 shots to kill.

As for your comments about pikes. They do bonus damage to pikes and we already seen fully upgraded malian pikes get chewn up

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lets ignore the 8 cavalry and hordes of archers in the background like they contributed nothing. and instantly is about 30 seconds of full on combat.

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Exactly, the archers didnt fire a single shot if you notice
and the knights didnt do much damage.

and minutes later 39 of them chewed through over 20 2H swordsman, over 40 pikeman, 10 Cavaliers, all while having 30+ arbs raining arrows down on them.
and only lost 19 Elephant Archers.

that means an army of 39 took on over 90 units and WON.
that is insane population efficiency.

this is why i say you twist stuff. i didn’t say what you said i said. first of all the knights don’t have to contribute much damage, because instead of those EA firing at Pikes, they were firing at Knights, soaking damage, that the pikes would have taken.
and its also false. you can see that at 22 minutes. the archers were shooting at the start of the fight, and they were also getting shot by the town center. also notice viper learned from his lesson. he tried to micro them, which took away from the units just standing and attacking. which is what he did later.

If you want Elephant Archer buffs (and other elephant UU buffs too) you’re going to have to accept re balancing it around a lower cost. at the current cost you don’t see Elephants in 1v1 Games as is. even the War Elephant isn’t seen even though it has insane population efficiency.

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The general Probleme of EA is that they do not fight in that way a typical Archer unit usually work.
Archer unit snipes the enemy and then run away from their follower and snipe again. Best against infantry because they are too slow to follow them. Best for this kind of hit and run tactics are cav Archer thanks to their speed bonus.
Unfortunately EA are cva Archer but quite slow unit and it is not possible to go for hit and run tactic and the second disadvantage is, they suffer against pikeman or other counter unit to cavalry. They can easily follow them and hit with bonus damage.
The third Probleme is to mass this unit to be effective. Archer are weak alone but incredible strong in mass. So you see its quite hard to mass an expensive unit where u can only train in castle.
Usually Archer units are not tanky, EA does and it sounds good but not necessary because Archer should not fight in the front, they are backup unit usually protected by tanky unit in the front like elephants do.

The best thing to buff EA would be to make them cheaper and more speed and lower the HP as I mentioned above. But it is really hard to balance to not make them OP.

The last point is, Indian has a great combination with strong camel you can go for and most player does. Camel need a (cheap) backup for their elite unit like somebody they protect them for Halbedier. Best would be hand canonier or skirms. So there is no space for Elephant Archer in that combination.

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Thank you for this, i have been saying this for a while. re balance the units around lower stats (primarily health), and lower cost as well. they wouldn’t be as tanky as they are now, but with more speed and their current damage they would be more then fine.

i’d say 0.9 speed would be a good starting place.

also FYI i scrapped the Goths nerf for now. I’ll continue to monitor them though, as i still feel they could be problematic, and that will only get worse as pathing improves.
and i gave both Portuguese and Koreans better eco bonuses (Portuguese save 20% gold on all tech (not age up), and Koreans eco techs half off. thoughts?

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yeah i know, but its still something like 125 wood per shop, plus the 5% plus all that res from eco discount

for a civ that is sitting at something like 40% winrate on Arabia.

if this was Byzantines or Lithuanians i’d be right there with you. but Portuguese and Koreans need MAJOR help.

would you feel better about it if i scrapped the siege bonus?

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It means that already in feudal you have armor before the opponent, and you can either deley the armor techs, or simply have more armor in feudal, and even more after pavise.
It is a more versatile bonus, it could affect both archer (not GC) and skirms, so to have something similar to old pavise skirms.

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yeah defo… its just that i dont know how it would all fit into the greater scheme of things…

like being able to do a fast mangonel or ram rush to support the tower rush, since discounted sworks directly translates into discounted early siege(first ram /mangonel effectively costs 35 W), and along witht the 50% food saved from eco, it means faster/stronger eco to get that siege out… i know its not a lot of savings, and might translate into balanced play…