Hearted for the Dilbert comic.
It would be interesting if the Chinese gained Battle Elephants, even if the Elite upgrade was missing, as currently no civ has Camel Riders alongside Battle Elephants.
Like kinda but not quite.
regional elephant skin for trade carts, elephant lancer, even elephant scouts aren’t ridiculous.
But after a few reasonable ideas, he skips over some other (perhaps even more) reasonable ideas (elephant monks, elephant cannoneers, bombard elephants, maybe even elephant skrims), and goes to the silly ideas.
If the idea was to create a list of best ideas of some arbitrary length, you think you’d exhaust the good ideas and only THEN stat to go to the silly ideas to get to the number of ideas that was the stated goal. If he’d ended with trebephant, but had exhausted all the good ideas, then I wouldn’t think anything was that unusual about the video.
Conversely, if the idea was to be silly, like the windmill video, IDK why you start out with some reasonable ideas. Just go whole hog. Start with the Mangonelelphant and go downhill from there. Maybe SOTL thinks elephant scouts, lancers, and trade carts are completely unreasonable, but then when substantiate the historicity of elephant trade carts?
So if the video isn’t actually the best ideas, but it also isn’t completely ridiculous either, IDK what the intent of the video actually was.
SOTL is the GOAT of AOE2 YT so he can make whatever kind of aoe2 video he wants and I’ll gladly watch, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what the video wanted to be.
I still don’t think it’s some clue. I know SOTL gets early access, but from what I understand, most aoe2 creators of a certain size have the same early access, so as to help MS promote and hype new releases. It’s not impossible that SOTL knows something we don’t, but I don’t think SOTL singularly knows something we don’t. And if SOTL is making youtube videos about early access content, however obtusely, I’d expect similar-ish from other creators, and I haven’t seen anything to that effect.
So even despite the seemingly awkward exclusion of some possible Tai civ elephant units, until I see some other aoe2 content creators drop peculiar videos of their own, I just can’t see this being some coded clue video.
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Isn’t the elephant lancer already pretty much that?
Would make sense if battle elephants weren’t as slow and had better line of sight.
How about camel monks? Monks that are particularly good at converting enemy monks.
I honestly think starting with reasonable points makes it more comedic overall.
Maybe he’s just the first doing it? We can more securely assert the relevance of this doubt after a few days.
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Just my two cents on this. One of the things one would occasionally want (if not need) as a creator of SoTL’s stature is the option to (slightly) rest on one’s laurels every now and then with the understanding that you can make a video about anything, or slightly below the usual standards, and people will watch it because you’ve earned your audience. Trying to min-max every video all the time (in this case either the seriousness or the sillyness of the proposals), along multiple axes can be exhausting, and in the long term is probably worse than just shipping whatever you’ve come up with as a first instinct.
My decidedly unprofessional opinion is that this is a just coincidence of our mental pattern recognition software and desire for new information and an offbeat video that’s different enough to catch the attention of overactive brains primed to find hidden meaning.
But who knows. I definitely recognize that it was an oddball video for no discernible reason (but to my earlier point, there’s no consistent necessity of such a reason).
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But what would be ðe fun in believiŋ ðat?
They have good LOS. And despite their slow speed they are way better scout unit than Dark Age Scout Cavalry.
Although for the south and southeast Asian civs the buffalo cart pretty makes sense too.
Maybe it’s a UU in Archery range for a civ like Chams that has high HP, high attack, low speed and expensive trash cost. I just don’t know if such a unit can have a good niche. Perhaps it can be a anti-skirmisher skirmisher.
In some extent the Battle Elephant is an elephant lancer because the elephant is so tall that the mahout has to use a long spear to poke enemy.
However, a melee elephant with +1 range is technically possible. The Elephant Lancer can work as long as they don’t turn into a longpikeman upon death. I just don’t know how can such a unit be strategically different from the Battle Elephant. They would just be like a stronger melee elephant.
Another plan could be a Flail Elephant, being the upgrade to the Siege Elephant or even a unique replacement to the Siege Elephant. When there is no Siege Engineers, it can have +1 range and better attack against buildings and melee units but less HP and maybe slower.
I’d like to let the Camel Monk a Missionary-like unique unit for maybe Saracens, and let they just take less damage from melee cavalry.
The Elephant Monk, on the other hand, also a Missionary-like unique unit for maybe Siamese (or Thai/Tai), having slower speed and higher price but higher HP and able to carry a Relic.
Assumed that the Elephant Scout is as slow as the Eagle Scout, besides the good light of sight it should have a pretty low attack in exchange for the high HP that is the characteristic of elephant units.
Guys, I’m pretty sure the video was a joke. Plus the likely reason he didn’t mention hand cannoneer or bombard elephants, is because those are things that actually happened, and wouldn’t be as funny.
Even though technically the scout elephant was a thing.
Don’t forget that he has been utterly out of the loop on new releases before. Like DoI for example.
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Wow, @Tyranno13 really is the star of this video 
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What can I say, I like a good bit of detective work 
Nice to finally have someone on youtube talk about this. Even if the majority of the things we have been talking about are speculative in-nature, the existence of this DLC is not.
Also the video reminded me about the “you’ll never guess” hint that was dropped a while back. Well, with how worried people were about Tibetans not being added…perhaps that was it after all?
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Although we come from different parts of the world
But the feeling of expectation is the same
I enjoy the atmosphere here
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What dropped?
Or…variant civs like AoE4. 11
Around the end of 2023, there was a cryptic “You’ll never guess what we have planned, no really, guess!” comment left after one of the updates for/after the Mountain Royals.
Technically every AoE2 civ is a variant civ. As they all work off the same basic tech tree.
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Maybe just give battle elephants +1 range? It always felt weird to me that they have such a long weapon but their enemies have to be under their trunks for them to attak.
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In my Chams civ proposal I gave them the Elephant Crossbowman as a unique upgrade of the Elephant Archer that has +20 HP and +1 range compared to the normal Elite Ele Archer. But I still think they should be more naval-focused and their Castle UU should be an amphibious raiding unit, cause if you bother to read some medieval Chinese records about them this is what the Chinese gave them the most credit for, being excellent seafarers and raiders.
Whereas we could reserve the Ele Skirm, Ele Monk, or Ele Arquebusier for other potential SE Asian civs like the Siamese and the Mons.
This could serve well as a civ bonus for the Siamese / Tais.
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It’s like a turducken, the way SOTL depicted it lol
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Yes, a Return of Rome 2…the game still needs content from the 6th and 7th centuries (Bukhara and Dos Pilas are not enough and they are The Forgotten content from 11 years ago)…
Yes, and to top it off with the elephants… siege cannon elephants…