it makes the game more interesting, everything that makes it more interesting is a challenge when balancing.
if you start adjusting pop requirement according to price, archers, skirmishers and pike/halb become super powerful, while cav and especially elephants decline even further. atm it isn’t possible to have enough halbs to protect from cav everywhere. but halbs cost less than half compared to knights, so with adjusted pop you can just spread them across your entire eco.
messing with something like this for all units would break basically all lategame interactions. that being said adjusting the pop of just elephants could work
this is just not true. Look at the archer-skirm interaction: for most of the game FU skirms can engage FU archers 1:2 and it’s more or less even. but in imp skirmishers lack a final (impactful) upgrade, because the archer player can no longer realistically maintain this 2:1 ratio due to pop cap
This only is a problem if you think that the same copositions should be played pre and post pop cap - a notion i object. Shifting dynamics based on game state is a good thing, it forces foresight and techswitches which make the game interesting both to watch and also to play.
To make my point clear, a few examples of how pop cap and the difference on pop effectivness leads to interesting dynamics:
-War elephant/balista elephant in teamgames have the interesting quirk of beeing hard to mass, but strong once massed. Both sides have to play around this fact: how does the khmer/persian player get to his composition? One way is to open hussar as khmer to force halbs - which you can fight with even a small number of bal ele, sidestepping the problem they need mass to be effectice. On the other side, you should play for an aggresive early imp va khmer to force their gold into scorps and be, so they cant switch to bal ele later on.
-Taking fights with population efficient compositons needs to be done pretty carefully. If you play pala vs halb plumes, you wont win by taking drawn out fights. This means the pala player needs to think of ways to force game ending fights - taking control of neutral ressources, droping forward castles, bringing lots of siege with his push. The maya player on the other hand needs to counter by drawing out fights - evacuating vills, preparing positions to retreat to, placing excess production buildings.
-playing archers, you can fight 20 kts with 40 archers. But you cant fight 50 kts with 100 archers, because you dont have the pop space. Therefor, the pop inneficiency of archers forces the archer player to add other units.
Idk…
I think it’s better to don’t fix it.
Maybe we want to add new units that intentionally have a very low or very high pop efficiency for their cost.
When we fix that to the cost we restrict ourselves to that stale “only on cost depending” pop space requirement.
Agree. But ofc the differences need to be well chosen. Atm even Battle eles have more than 3 x the pop efficiency than their counter. This leads to pikes already needing 25 bonus damage against Eles, as some civs don’t even get halb. And even with that, pikes civs often have huge problems stopping an Ele push in the very lategame. It just rarely comes to this situation on most frequently played maps.
So this pop efficiency discrepancy is one of the main reasons why pikes in castle age counter the eles so hard.
And that’s why I chose to reduce the pop space consumption of (all the) foot units. So the lategame pop efficiency factor doesn’t need to be reflected in the midgame anymore. I chose a value that imo should be enough for that.
The DPS of the skirms is still not very high. It’s actually more a supportive bonus damage. Ofc you can try use Skirms behind walls in castle age. But it will take you a while to widdle down the chunky boys with your skirms. It’s 8 damage per shot every 3 seconds. You’d need a mass of about 20 (due to inaccuracy) skirms to 2-shot an ele). It’s not a hard-counter. Also you’d need elite skirm which is quite an expensive upgrade at that stage.
On open fields the Eles would actually stomp the skirms cause of the speed charge, aoe damage and minimal range of the skirms.
So it’s a bonus damage, it’s until the very lategame where gold becomes a factor not really a “counter”.
I want Eles to be clearly differntiable from Knights. they are a different unit type and this should be reflected in unit interactions. But also in the general way you use them.
When the eles can just outrun the pikes they basically just become a new version of knights. And I don’t see why we would need a new Knight tbh. I see absolutely no reason to add a new unit type that’s basically really just a bit more pop efficient than one other that’s already in the game.
I see that Scorps can be a unit of choice.
But first, scorpions cost Gold. And when we tune down one trash counter like I proposed, it’s really weird to try to compensate that with a Gold unit. Skirms are trash aswell.
And with scorpions in general we have the issue that they can be extremely snowbally if you have a “critical mass” with them. In the current game design it’s solved in the way that’s often just not possible to get to that amount of scorpions. But I fear if we largely increase the bonus damage vs Eles they might become really oppressive against the Eles at some point.
And lastly I don’t like the scorpions in their current state as they are too easily killed by other siege. I think they need a rework because of that. It’s too volatile.
Imagine you have the critical mass of (eg 30) Scorpions. They would totally stop any Ele push. But then 3-4 ### #### up and clear out half of your scorps. Then the Eles run in and you can’t stop them anymore. That’s an issue as this is a one-sided volatility. The scorps are only there to stop the ele Push which might come at any given moment. But the ele player just can wait for his opportunity when the Scorps numbers are widdled down.
Also scorpions counter Infantry very well. And I actually would like to see the Ele players adding infantry to deal with the halbs + skirms. I think this is an interesting dynamic. And many Ele civs have quite nice Infnatry they could use for that. Would be kinda wasted if these infantry would never come into play cause scorps (or HC) just flatten them, no?
And I think this need to be “fixed” anyways. Bengalis could also easily just get a bonus to their Champs like +1 PA. Problem solved.
And again. I don’t see the Skirms as a real “counter” to eles in the midgame with that bonus. Maybe skirm defence behind walls can be an option, but this would allow the ele player to just pivot to other things like mangonels which aren’t countered by skirms. I chose the amount of bonus damage in a way it shouldn’t count as a real “counter” mechanic until the very lategame where gold becomes important and we have way bigger unit masses fighting each other and the skirms can be considered “safe” behind the mass of halbs in front.
I say it. And it’s actually only 1 of 2 strategic comeback mechanics: Raiding and Castle drops.
I don’t want to miss either.
Well and the opponent tries to kill you. Don’t you want to have a comeback mechanic when you are behind? Or do you just ragequit every time you see the opponent pulling ahead?
Yes. But I prefer active control over that kind of solution.
That’s why I chose the way I did with only the foot units affected. Then I basically only needed to adjust the Halbs against Cavalry and the other foot units cancel themselves out for the most part, as basically any of them has another foot unit counter, that is affected the same way.
Whilst I generally see that it ofc looks like archers would receive a buff there - don’t forget that archers require a lot of Gold. So it’s very unlikely we’ll see higher archer masses cause of this. Most likely the archer masses will actually basically stay the same but instead we will see more addition of other units to accompagnie them.
The unit which would probably benefit the most is the skirmisher. But tbh I think they can receive some love.
Don’r really agree there. It’s usually an all-in play. Especially with the given Example of Paladins.
But it’s a strategical play and option for sure. And it ofc leads to interestic lategame dynamics. I like how Paladins can be used that way.
The issue with Eles is that they are like even 50 % more pop efficient than Paladins. And paladins are already on a very slim edge of being “broken”. This additional pop efficiency is reflecting down til castle age already. With the +25 bonus damage of pikes there already.
Yeah nice note.
Also think, a pure speed boost to eles could make them oppressive. That’s why I chose to give them a speed charge instead. This way they get at least some mobility, but still aren’t capable of completely outrunning everything that can counter them.
This quite literally fits the example im talking about perfectly lol. 2:1 is a specific ratio. And yeah elite skirmishers dont have an upgrade because this 2:1 ratio breaks at pop cap.
Which is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Once you take into account meatshields and other dynamics, the maximum power you can grant to skirmishers is hard capped to prevent archers from being swamped by a bunch of imp skirms every game. Luckily the hard cap + blacksmith upgrades still allow for skirms in castle age and early imp to work fine.
Like for elephants you could do the skirmisher treatment if you wanted and have castle age elephants be very strong with no elite upgrade (maybe give pikes some free bonus damage in imp for civs like berbers and vikings though). In castle age theyd be fine because monks and pikes are strong vs small numbers and in imp where pikes are constrained by pop theyd be fine. Thats totally an option and I should have made that clearer
Pick any two units where one has to outnumber the other significantly to effect a desired counter relation. With a uniform pop cost, at pop cap your unit designs must be such that the one which requires more numbers will be stronger or the one that requires less numbers will be weaker relative to the previous environment. If youve designed your units well then the players dont have to think about this because the pop cap dynamics line up with upgrades/unit dynamics.
But its very easy to design a unit which is too strong at pop cap such that its maximum stats are capped at a point where by the time you design a reasonable elite upgrade and remove the blacksmith/other upgrades the unit will be kind of meh. This is made worse if your real (villager time) cost for this unit drops over time, as it does with all food units in AoE2. Elephants are basically all in this category because the counter unit where you need less (monks) is no longer a viable option for a lot of civs. Since some civs dont have halbs, pikes also need to be strong enough to deal with elephants in imp and their bonus damage is going to be very high.
There are ways around this that dont involve pop cost (like the example with elephants getting the skirmisher treatment) but they involve changing the dynamics in imp relative to castle age. It can be done but its more of a pain. Other things like higher scorpion bonus damage vs elephants in imp, pikes getting free bonus damage vs elephants in imp + reducing their base bonus damage in castle age, gunpowder bonus damage vs elephants, making monks more usable in imp (e.g. faster or 50% food), etc.
Like I said one can hold this point of view but if one does one should take the trade-offs seriously. If nothing else it prevents one from looking for a solution that doesnt exist or exists elsewhere which saves time.
Im just pointing out that if you design units with specific ratios in mind and those ratios break you need to be able to nerf/buff one unit in a relative sense. If a nerf is not really desired or possible then youll have to look elsewhere by doing something like:
adjusting pop cap to bring the ratios back into line (which for elephants allows the unit to be buffed closer to its release state)
making another unit a viable counter so you can ignore the fact one counter relation breaks.
nerfing the other unit in the previous environment and buffing it later
other things.
One of the least productive things is to get stuck in the mindset that two mutually exclusive things are simultaneously achievable. I just want to prevent people from falling into that trap.
This stuff you talk is really, really ambigouus.
I don’t know how to respond to this, cause it’s neither clear what you are actually talking about nor what’s the takeout.
On one hand you say basically “there’s no easy solution”.
On the other you already prepare for any specific idea that isn’t “easy” to be stepped on as it’s then too complicated for you.
Not to mention that your proposal ignores basically everything you say about other ideas…
At least you imply that you see the pop efficiency discrepancy as an issue for the balance of the eles. And I have to agree there. This is the probably the biggest issue with the current ele design.
There are easy solutions. The set of easy solutions are the ones that don’t try to fight the constraints that the game systems place on a designer. Take the path of least resistance so to speak.
Right now the imp battle elephant stats are capped about where they are because of it’s power near pop cap. Which means when you work backwards by subtracting the elite upgrade, the blacksmith techs, UTs, etc. to get the strongest possible castle age elephant that unit is still weak. You can’t get away from this relationship between the regular and elite elephants unless you want to do something like ditch the elite upgrade or make blacksmith techs weaker for elephants or something weird like that.
Which means one option for fixing it is raising the “cap” on elephant stats by making it weaker near pop cap. You can do this by making elephants cost more population space, halbs cost less pop space, making scorpions do more damage to elephants, making monks more usable in imp, have gunpowder do bonus damage, etc. Pick your poison. Some have far fewer side effects than others. I like the elephant pop cost because it’s got basically no side effects while everything else has more. It’s also not at risk of creating some kind of local optima where if you maintain this change going forward it creates problems. Something around pop cost = 1.4 is probably enough of a penalty but I haven’t tested that rigorously.
This newly introduced weakness allows buffing both regular and elite battle elephant without breaking the unit. Maybe you make bloodlines give 40 hp to elephants, buff their attack, increase their speed slightly, idk there’s tons of options. Malay discount would probably need a nerf but that’s an acceptable trade-off. At the end of this process you have a unit which is more or less the same relative strength at pop cap vs every unit but is also stronger when not at pop cap.
Another different (and probably mutually exclusive with the above but not necessarily) option is making the castle age version less weak by tweaking other units. Reduce pike bonus damage in castle age is really all that’s necessary here, but you’d almost certainly have to return it in imp because of the civs that lack halb. This doesn’t solve the monk problem but it’s something. Plus while basically all civs have good pikes in castle age, not all civs have good monks.
These solutions are “easy” in the sense the are A) highly targeted (few side effects/compose well), B) don’t require new mechanics, C) are not highly dependent on player skill. A) is important because it means you can implement the changes independently of other changes for the most part.
And this would put the Eles in the same region as the other heavy cav.
That’s why I instead opted for increasing the pop efficiency of the foot units. With this the Eles still maintain there pop efficiency advantage (which they were designed around btw) over the other cavalry. Only in the interaction with foot units they would have the same pop efficiency difference as the current heavy cavalry units.
Heavy Cav would still have a 1.5 higher pop efficiency over the foot units. Ofc not as much as they use to, but in compensation I reduced the Gold cost and gave the halbs less bonus damage.
With your proposla you basically make Eles just a reskin of the Knight. Slower and more cost on the individual units, but with a lower Gold ratio.
I see no differentiation from the heavy cav, it’s basically just a reskin. And I see no real reason for that tbh.
And tbh 1.4 pop space consumption is a weird value. If anything would make sense for a reasonable design you would go to 2 pop space per ele. And then you have the reverse effect of Eles actually having lower pop efficiency than Knights… Unless you make a complete overhaul of the unit with new cost and so on.
On the other hand lowering pop space consumption via a tech for specific units is way more comprehensible especially if it’s done in a fashion giving easy to understand numbers. 3 unit taking up 2 pop space is quite easily apllyable in the heat of a game. We see it already for Mahayana. Nobody complains about being too hard to use. You just pick it up when you’re pop capped, even if you don’t get the math.
Maybe in your mind. But the solutions you proposed aren’t easy to comprehend.
Neither would they work as there would be so much stuff to be fixed arount that in order to make that work:
You literally just took away 50 % of the pop efficiency advantage of the heavy cav over halberdiers. For absolutely no compenstion.
This is a super weird and random 15 % pop efficiency nerf to ranged units. Like literally all of them. And it’s applying at all stages of the game including feudal and early castle age. Why?
Would just put Eles at the same pop efficiency as the current heavy cav. But you’d still need Elephant Eco to get there. Which means you would probably have to delete Vills quite shortly after i order to get to the needed mass of Eles.
And then you make vague descriptions without goin into details…
I mean, you say it’s easy ### ### ##### #### off with a real design. Cause I can tell you whatever you do there it will have indirect effects on certain unit matchups you have to compensate…
So it will become complicated. You just try to wish over the complications by not getting explicit, implying there wouldn’t be any indirect effects you need to compensate.
AOE2 is a very complicated game. And yes, I made the hard work and tried to figure out a way that would actually work out, as I looked chose an approach that reduces the side effects to a minimum. And tackled each of them which could become an issue.
You on the other hand just claim your stuff would be easy. But you don’t go into details, you just post ambigouus, generalist and unspecific phrases.
And you’re not even try to make it a differentiable unit, that has some interesting features to it:
I mean you just listed the most shallow stats that can be changed. As if Eles wouldn already be blunt “Stat monsters”. Seemingly just having super stats doesn’t make a unit nice to use.
But yeah, increasing these shallow blunt stats even more will work, for sure.
If anything the current Ele design is the best example for “just buff random stats” isn’t working, like at all.
Youre welcome to dismiss what Ive said or otherwise not look into it beyond what I’ve stated. This isnt a competition where Im trying to prove myself to the community regarding my balance knowledge. Im just pointing out relations and implications that matter and ways to potentially make elephant work with the bare minimum changes. Because stuff that abides by KISS actually has a chance to be implemented.
Youre welcome to put all sorts of constraints on yourself like integer pop costs, having elephants be something special relative to knights, making foot archers stronger vs cavalry, or whatever else you want until the solution you have is the only one that meets your design criteria. Dont be surprised if people who arent as wedded to those design decisions choose to look at the problem a different way though.
I think you’re massively overestimating players’ mathematical abilities. You evidently have a mathematical background, and it’s very easy to forget that most people don’t have the level of numeracy you do. The majority of players will not know what to make of a pop cost with a square root in it, let alone a square root of a fraction.
(In fact, I can think of plenty of situations where I personally would find your proposal difficult to use, and I’m a professional mathematician.)
It also sounds like you want a very different game, since AoE2 is deliberately designed around the idea that the balance changes at different stages of the game – hence advancing through the ages, and the fact that different civs have bonuses that are beneficial at different times.
That said, I am warming to the idea of changing population costs, especially having read what @TungstenBoar said:
I didn’t know this, and it does actually surprise me. According to the wiki, Khmer elephants used to have +15% speed (+10% extra from Bloodlines), which I think would make their Battle Elephants still slightly slower than a Pikeman with Squires. So boosting elephants’ speed beyond the current Khmer elephant speed is evidently not the way to go.
As far as pop costs go, I like the following suggestion a lot more than your one with square roots:
Although for simplicity, I’d prefer 1.5 or 2 rather than 1.4. I’m definitely in favour of a solution that doesn’t involve changing non-elephant units (except possibly their bonus-damage-related interactions with elephants).
I don’t know that this matters very much given that all the calculations are behind the scenes - pop space will still be displayed in game and all proposed pop costs are within a relatively narrow range. Which could be annoying if you overshoot and get housed by making a 1.6 pop unit (which is my biggest issue with this concept), but that’s less a matter of needing to be a human calculator, and more a matter of having to pay extra attention to your pop/headroom.
Overall I have pretty mixed thoughts on @Dagorad62’s proposal here, although I generally appreciate the type of analysis he gives, and agree that something akin to what he’s suggested does give more design freedom, especially to solve the problem of excessive variance in ele viability across different game settings. That said, I do personally find changing pop costs of units kind of bothersome and disruptive, and I’ve noticed a lot of pushback against the idea when its has been brought up in the past. It fits into a fairly large category of things that I think could be good (and would have been good if it was included from the beginning of the game), but is questionable as a global change ~24 years into the game’s history. (Another example of this is a “Celts” rework, which IMO should have been done better from the start, but is very questionable and unlikely as a change at this point.)
Speed isn’t the only thing. EBEs used to have +2 attack (16 base), 50% trample damage (now 25%) larger blast radius, and larger bonus vs buildings. On top of the Khmer speed, they were easier to spam with Khmer due to the higher food collection rate with their pre-nerf farms. Basically the higher base and blast damage meant that they could brute force their way through even hard counters and destroy bases too quickly.
Honestly, reinstating the 15% speed would be fine (but ideally as a 5% global boost while the Khmer bonus would remain as an additional 10%). Something like that and reducing bonus damage from pikes/halbs (and maybe moving some of it to scorpions) would be a good start without messing with pop costs. Although I’m also warming up to something like BEs taking 1.5 pop space.
Maybe I should give an example of the kind of thing I’m expecting to be a problem. Suppose I’m almost housed, currently training military units, I want to train a Mangonel asap, and I discover I don’t have the pop space. Can I make pop space for the Mangonel by cancelling other units from production queues? With the current system, the answer is always yes. With @Dagorad62’s system the answer depends on how close I am to my current pop space and the pop costs of the units currently in queues, and I don’t see how to find that answer without doing a very difficult calculation.
Yeah, I think about this sort of thing too – there are lots of things I think should be done differently if the game was new, but shouldn’t be changed now. Celts are an especially weird one, because I don’t even like the civ, and it’s historically nonsensical, but I don’t think they should be changed.
But pop costs generally aren’t something I’d be that keen on varying, even in a new game. Maybe it’s because I’ve been playing StarCraft recently, and the variable pop costs in that feel like part of the way in which its tech trees are arranged into hierarchies of progressively stronger units, which is a feature I don’t really like much. I really appreciate that the AoE2 tech tree is broad rather than long like the StarCraft ones.
As long as we don’t have any number above 1 we still can set the occupied pop space for all units that don’t have inherently lower consumtion (karambi) as 1. That way independing of what you queue you’d always get enough pop space to add the same amount of any other unit type.
I think it’s maybe not bad to “solve” it like that. Cause otherwise there might situation happen where you queue essential units like bombard cannons but they never get trained as other queues always immediately will be started to train if there is less pop space free than the one needed for a bbc. And it’s very rare outside hits with stuff like mangonels that multile units die in the same frame.
So I think for the sake of queues at pop cap it’s very important that (almost) all units in queues will be considered as 1 pop space consuming.
I just want to make clear Im not proposing anything be implemented, I’m offering suggestions on how one might tackle the problem. Its why i’m not going into a ton of detail to defend any specific implementation but am going into detail regarding the relationships. I’m not proposing an alternative here, I’m simply bringing up the relevant relations for discussion. I may have used the word “proposing” inacurately which may have given the implication this is an alternative.
Like I said about the whole sqrt(x/100) w/ exceptions from the beginning:
“Impossibility” has a bunch of things baked into it but it was a quick and dirty way to imply its an important relationship.
If someone is curious why I “like” that kind of function as something that should have been implemented from the beginning:
The minimum ratio of halbs to paladin that can win is 1.5:1. Conveniently sqrt(x/100) allows for this but not more. Total coincidence that this 1.5:1 ratio coincides with a clean parameterization.
It has a natural ######## (i.e. continuous transformation) as you adjust n in the function (x/k)^(1/n) and if you want to include a ranged unit penalty you can have a linear penalty in the form of (x/k)^(1/n)*penalty. Large n (n > 20) is basically a constant 1 (the current function) and n=1 is the pure resource constraint that plays out below pop cap. You can choose any N you want to get good results and you can choose K to adjust the average army size.
It is non-decreasing which is necessary for carrying forward the resource constrained version.
The ratios for units are invariant w.r.t. k. You can see from the math the k cancels out in a ratio. The only thing that affects the ratios is N.
Its non-linear which is important because the pure resource cost is not everything. As an example if elephants were able to be outnumbered 3:1 vs halbs that would be ridiculous even with a buff to elephants.
It inherits many but not all of the properties of resource constrained fights in terms of making the expected ratio of units that can fight each other similar across the entire game.
Some exceptions like skirmishers that dont need help with extra pop cap are already designed as weak vs their intended targets.
The number of exceptions which are clearly problematic are limited to a small handful of units.
It removes the need for very strong ad-hoc adjustment of certain units to make them competitive at pop-cap vs some units. These types of upgrades inherently have a trade-off where you balance the unit against pop efficient units at the cost of having it crush pop inefficient units. El dorado is the poster child for this.
It heavily mitigates the optimization present from changing military:villager ratio depending on the pop efficiency of your army. This reduces the search space for optimal strategy which is better for the median player. Also easier to balance since finding the best ratio is non-trivial.
There are drawbacks as well but this is long enough.
Im fully aware that implementing this is unrealistic. But analyzing the general case often makes the special cases which are manageable easier to identify. Like the elephants.
If you were to try to implement a nonlinear function like what Im describing the way it would probably play out is that players would round in conservative ways. Things like infantry is 2/3rds pop and mangonel is 2. So you’d delete/unqueue 3 foot units to get a mangonel or 2 cavalry or 2 scorpions or whatever. Most non-infantry would be 2:1 with infantry, etc. The maximum error that this kind of approximation produces would be pretty small.
Also I’d like to point out again that the current end game has an optimization problem orders of magnitude harder than what youre discussing: “How much pop should I dedicate to military vs villagers?” This is a crazy hard problem to solve because the pop efficiency of units is so heterogeneous and thus the inclusion of which unit youre using heavily affects the outcome. E.g. When fighting 150 vils & paladin (+ siege) what villager:military ratio should you use? Whats the trade-off for changing this ratio? Clearly these depend heavily on which unit youre deciding to use.
By homeogenizing (spelling due to dumb censor) the pop efficiency marginally you reduce the dependency on the relative pop efficiency and it becomes a simpler problem. And since people cant solve the above problem optimally in real time the “interesting factor” is kind of moot.
If youre concerned about the mental arithmetic of houses you must be livid over the current complexity of the villager ratio problem.
If you want players to make approximations like this, then I think you should just use those values, instead of the ones involving square roots.
No, I’m not bothered about it at all. Yes, it’s a difficult optimisation problem – but I don’t think it impacts anyone’s enjoyment of the game when they don’t solve it optimally. In fact, it’s a good thing for a competitive game to have essentially insoluble optimisation problems – games whose problems can be solved optimally (e.g. noughts and crosses, mancala) don’t really work competitively.
(I also disagree that changing population costs does much to simplify the optimisation problem. The relevant variables are the rates you’re spending resources at, and cheaper units tend to die faster, so need to be replaced more frequently. The total resource cost of your army at any given moment is not all that relevant.)
Anyway, I’ve said all I have to say about this. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
The pop efficiency discrepancy between certain units was intentionally implemented.
In case of eles it just was too much in comparison to the counter units in the pikes.
We don’t need an “optimal” solution. But imo there are 2 ways to tackle that:
A) Generally increase the pop efficiency of the foot units, so they can stay competitive against Eles at least. It’s a change I would welcome in general as atm the mounted units have an unnecesary advantage in the lategame due to the pop efficiency difference. In trash wars the Hussars heavily benefit from that efficiency difference over skirms and halbs. Also CA have that advantage over regular Arbs. Only heavy cav falls of in the lategame due to the high Gold cost for a melee unit. But that can be tackled multiple ways.
B) Reduce the Pop efficiency of Eles so they are more “align” with the heavy cavalry. But for that we don’t need to increase the Pop space consumption of eles. Instead we can/should make eles just cheaper and with reduced fighting stats (less HP/Attack)
But imo this is only one small part of what makes eles so bad atm. The bigger one is that it’s just so heavily designed around it’s sheer fighting power. And this means the unit necesarily needs to be terrible in other factors like the very important raiding ability.
Ir would be much easier to make the eles viable in the midgame if there was just one more counter unit but in exchange better raiding capability.
The pop efficiency issue is only responsible for the current super-heavy bonus attack of pikes against eles as some civs don’t have access to Halberdiers. But imo this is only the secondary issue with the current Ele design. The primary one is that eles just don’t fit the requirement for the midgame as they are terrible raiding units.