A big problem with War Elephants is that, due to their large weakness to monks, you basically have to go PURE war elephants(or the war elephants will get converted exclusively and wreck all your other troops), which is frustrating and nerfs them unnecessarily.
With the recent change to Berserks in mind(where they removed the bonus regen tech and rolled it into the Elite upgrade), what if Mahouts current effect were rolled into the Elite upgrade?
Mahouts would be changed to this: Whenever a non-siege unit is converted, a random unit nearby is converted instead.
For example, if you send a force with 1 war elephant and 10 xbows, and they try to convert the war elephant, there is a 91% chance that one of the Xbows will be converted, instead. If multiple monks are converting the same unit, all conversions complete when the random unit is converted, as normal.
This way, you can risk sending in solitary war elephants as long as they’re mixed in with other units!
I’d also move Mahouts to Castle Age, so they have two castle age techs, just because this would be a pretty specific bonus for which there’s no real reason to need to wait until Imperial to acquire. But maybe that’s a step too far.
Kinda like the idea, altough your assumptions are a bit wacky.
The elite upgrade of war ele costs an amazing 3.4k if we include mahouts (which you obviously need too), so sending in a few war ele without fully commiting is just not possible. You cant invest the res to go to imp twice and then just make a few units.
Since a few units counter war eles so hard (monks and halbs), you actually cant go pure war ele right now; you need something to kill the other units.
That beeing said, the buff you propose is still something interesting; altough possible an overbuff in teamgames.
That’s why I’m not proposing actual conversion resistance. Elephants would still be convertable, just not preferentially. If they go mostly elephants, then the tech would offer basically no benefit. And of course, their weakness to pikes and halbs would still be unaffected.
Elephants are just too big and easy a target to allow them to be preferentially converted; it discourages interesting army comps.
With this tech, you could start working in the elephants from even castle age if you wanted, since they’d no longer be so completely vulnerable to monks anymore. That’d be the biggest benefit tbh, since mass elephants would mean this tech wouldn’t have much benefit, since it would just randomly select another elephant anyway and the difference would be moot.
Monks would still work, they’d just need to work a bit harder at it. The more elephants they mix in, the less effective the tech becomes, so it’s self-balancing.
Alternatively, pikes are still effective, if not quite as much, and siege also works.
I doubt you can ever make War ele work in castle. The investment in the castle, the extreme food investment, and the fact that they are way to slow to gain mapcontrol at all just make them so useless, no matter now hard monks do or dont counter them.
They’d be more like siege than a normal unit. You’ll often see people work in a few mangonels or battering rams; if you could get a war elephant as a sort of siege unit, that could be useful in certain cases!
I don’t want it to be something you’d do EVERY time, but it could make them worth using in at least a few cases, which would be nice.
Don’t think we need any more RNG in the game. This mechanic is very anti-fun as well. The “solution” to enemy monks already exists in the form of light cav/ranged units, but the bigger issue is that War Eles are just not a viable unit (economically and otherwise) outside of a few slow closed map TGs.
The war elephant is no siege, not even close. It has abysmal DPS against buildings even compared to some other units (e.g. longsword does 12 damage but is waaaay cheaper) and does not come close to a battering ram. Non elite WE deal 22 damage to buildings, rams deal 125. Even if we factor in the differences in attack speed, its not close at all.
Some more restistance to monk conversion wont change this.
I don’t think it’s anti-fun; having mixed compositions, adding a few war elephants to a larger composition of other units, is a lot of fun! By contrast, I think instantly losing your elephants to a single enemy monk is the anti-fun bit. Oh you wanted to work in a cool unit? Too bad, it’s mine now.
It’s more siege in the way a Heavy Scorpion is siege; not all siege needs to be specialized against buildings.
Mixing in a few war elephants to a melee could easily work similarly to mixing in a few rams to an archer battle, if doing so didn’t mean you’d just lose them instantly. Imagine if Redemption and Block Printing were active by default? Siege would become almost unusable, especially early on. That’s basically where Elephants are sitting right now.
Mixing in rams only happens in imp in archer battles, because it only works when there are too many units to focus fire and you have to let the units auto target. But in castle age, that point is not yet reached.
War Eles are a fun unit but you would have to absurdly rework them for them to be viable in castle age. All their stats scream “imperial age”.
Which is exactly why this would work just fine for melee, even in the castle age. You can’t micro your melee units the same way you do with archers, so having a big tank in the middle will work just fine. Especially one that does splash damage!
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say nerfing one of their single biggest weaknesses in castle age would make them more viable.
I dont think you come even close to understanding how far from viable castle age WE are. They are quite possibly the single worst unit in castle age and i couldnt name a single situation where i wanna put my ressources into the chonkers in castle. If you want to make them viable in castle age, then you would need to rework them into something completly different.
I mean, sure; they’re certifiably terrible right now. That’s why I’m making the suggestion!
A large part of why they’re weak is is their massive weakness to monks. You make 5 war elephants, they make 2 monks, now they have 2 war elephants to your 3 and you’re screwed.
It’s much more difficult to counter them with monks countered; it forces your enemy into uncomfortable directions, directions which can then be countered in turn. I don’t think it would happen EVERY time, but I think it would at least open up the possibility.
Yup. Some of these buff/rework proposals seem to come from a desire from players to have their cake and eat it too. Like, they want WEs to maintain their identity as the chonkiest unit by a mile, but they also want to trivialize their counters and somehow make them a good unit in 1v1s. Not likely.
The nice thing about this suggestion is that, because it becomes less powerful the more elephants you have, it’s auto-balancing. It allows for early elephants without significantly changing their lategame or team game.
Honestly, I’m a bit confused as to why people are so against this idea. Elephants are terrible in the early game and in 1v1s; why is it a bad thing to make them moderately viable in those circumstances? Especially since Persians are hardly a top civ right now.