BE can still stay. Knight and BE doesn’t compete with each other honestly.
Why you’re comparing EA with foot archer instead of CA? Because of speed?
Not for Dravidians. That will be broken for them in water maps.
It is still 100vs150 with so much more mobility in favor of CA. Plus about 10 civs can only justify going CA where archers is so meta that every civ has to open archer in flank or even in 1v1. And again it is food vs wood in this case too.
It still costs gold and with zero dark age bonus except 1 less house they will be fine. Pretty sure lots of other civs get bigger res bonus directly or indirectly in dark age: lith, persians, cetls, ita to name a few.
That is better comparison.
Only Celts. Other 2 don’t get 200+ free resource within 10 minutes of game. Not to mention neither will be picked in water maps.
Standard build is 2 docks as soon as reaching Feudal. So that’s 250+ resource.
In land maps, sure. Even hybrid maps will be okay except Nomad. And in water maps, completely broken.
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Yes definitely. I think most good ideas for improving BE have been discussed. But people can’t do anything right now because we have to wait for devs, who have shown no interest in battle elephants except to heavily nerf them.
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Battle Elephants have to have some bonus armor against the spearman line (like Armored Elephants) and buff their speed at least to 0.9 to make them decent; otherwise I don’t see how they can be viable
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Bengalis doing way better than my expectation so far.
Only 10 days though. So not the best conclusion can be drawn yet.
I cropped the data somewhat differently and got very different conclusion. Granted, I selected for the settings I play on (Megarandom, 4 lakes, Hideout, Runestones, African Clearing, Scandanavia, Mongolia, Acropolis) but it’s looking bad.
Also worth noting, every single civ with Elite Battle Elephant is represented here.
Side Note: Sicilians dropping into the bottom 6 is just sad. The devs did them dirty.
They struggled to get 40% before. I’ll say 42.4% is still better than my expectations. Not saying they are fine and don’t need anymore buff. But not as big as I initially thought.
Edit: Can you remove Megarandom and African Clearing. Also what is the elo range here?
800-1500. AKA mid ELO. If 200 is a standard deviation this should encapsulate >75% of the player base. Is there a problem with African Clearing besides inflating Spanish?
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There are only a handful civ that are good in nomad settings. And African Clearing add 2-3 more due to shore fish. Bengalis is not among them. So I think any nomad map should be removed when a civ is clearly not good in that map.
Edit: Couldn’t find Scandinavia as an option. You’re right. Not looking good in this case. But only on runestone they have exact 50% win rate, 48.42% in Arabia+Runestones.
I think it is too early to be looking at statistics for the new patch.
I think Bengalis have a lot of units that are good when you get a lot of them but die too easily before that because they don’t have any units that are good in early castle age.
I propose changing the BE to fit this role by changing the following:
100 food 85 gold (currently 120 food 70 gold)
60s training time (currently 24s)
1.2 speed (currently 0.85)
Trample damage increased to 33% (currently 25%)
+0 bonus vs buildings (currently +4)
EBE +0 bonus vs buildings (currently +7)
EBE 48s training time (currently 24s)
I think these changes make BE better against units at the cost of performance against buildings. Siege elephants are much better for that. I think the previously suggested 0.9 speed is insufficient when pathing and attack-move micro is taken into account, also BE would need Husbandry (on top of being expensive) just to be functional. At 1.2 speed, it can chase archers and villagers, outrun spears, but cannot destroy buildings. I think this justifies the increased gold cost while the food cost reduction makes it easier to use in castle age 1v1. 1.2 speed allows BE to be used defensively against knights and archers. These units will not be able to just raid while ignoring the BE (as they currently do). BE would still be hard to use offensively in 1v1 since it is still so hard countered by spears and monks. I think monks will still complete conversion every time against BE.
I envision civs making mainly xbow + 1-2 BE (similar to how eagle civs use mainly archers + 1-2 eagles in Feudal). Xbow are easy to mass and snipe spears and monks, BE kill mangonels and provide a meatshield. This would be really useful for Bengalis, as well as other BE civs.
The training time and building damage nerf keeps BEs from getting out of control in team games. 60s training time is also used to keep eagles balanced in Feudal Age. Training time also makes it hard to mass in team games while building damage allows players to wall against them and mass spears in response. BE would still be really powerful in large numbers, but enemies should be able to replace knights much faster than BE can be massed.
I am not sure about the trample damage buff I suggested, but it could be necessary to balance the long training time.
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they need a speed buff but this is way too much. this makes generic BE with husbandry almost as fast as teuton knights . khmer BE?
it wont matter that they arent as good vs buildings, when they can jet around the map, and kite pikes
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I did not consider those. Maybe it should be 1.1 speed instead of 1.2.
1.1-1.2 speed is nothing close to what Shrivamsha riders can do. This is closer to castle age eagle speed. BE will be able to run away from pikes but will still have to take damage from pikes chasing them if they stop to attack something like siege because the speed difference is not as much as pike vs. knight or Shrivamsha. BE still cannot kill monks before they get converted. With such high cost and slow training time (as I proposed), you will not have many BE on the field unless your enemy does nothing for a long time. My intention is for BE to be useful in low numbers. The ability to run away from pikes is important to justify their investment and also realistic since elephants can outrun humans in real life.
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You can always look. Just not enough to use it as evidence. I’m just expressing my 1st impression.
I’ve suggested something very similar. But your training time is very huge honestly. Something in between 35-40 seconds will be enough.
This will change their stats a lot. I don’t think this will ever happen. Can be reduced a bit though.
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The difference is that I seem to have a different role for the BE in mind than you, which is why I gave it more speed and training time and less building damage. I want BE to be good in low numbers so that they can be justified in 1v1 castle age, not some late game scenario where gold has almost run out (most 1v1 games end before this). At that point, players will prefer to spend gold on ranged units because they don’t have to take damage to attack (or on siege to destroy buildings), unlike melee units like BE.
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Yeah, I understand that.
But with that big training time, you won’t get that number anyway. If I consider 1.1 (+10% from husbandry) speed, you still can’t force cavalry to fight. You can only kill archers. But they can do it now anyway. And they don’t need a whole minute to train. The only good thing is now can they dodge pikes but the penalty of training time increase is just too huge.
Currently, BE cannot kill archers and archers can attack-move micro to kill villagers while running from BE.
True, but I think BE at 1.1 base speed should be able to fight knights in a defensive scenario, such as within your base. Knights would have to stop to attack villagers and that is when I expect BE to catch up and get a hit in.
I think this is very important for a melee cav unit that costs so much gold to be useful. It is the only way BE will ever get to reach their intended targets (siege, archers, villagers) and justify their investment.
The devs nerfed Khmer speed bonus because they thought it was OP in TG situations. So, I gave BE a very long training time to compensate. I am not sure exactly how high it should be, but I think 50-60s should be enough to prevent whatever scenario devs are worried about. 35-40s may not be enough, but it will be hard to say for sure until it is tried out.
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Can they? Archers are faster.
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The only case I’ve seen this happen (excluding Khmer) is either very low micro, or if the BE are in the archer’s base so they have no where to run.
Even IF BE catch microd xbow, you aren’t doing much damage, due to body blocking and the “pause between hits”. Like camels chasing knights. Except with more body blocking and even worse speed difference.
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thats way to high. no way that would be allowed