What are your thoughts?
Personally I find they’ve got too many animation locked features. Charging into a unit will lock them in place, like a War Elephant, but this isn’t the norm for Horsemen nor Knights. Their larger hitbox and longer range also means they will unintentionally get hit by Spearman Brace much easier.
The enemy they are suppoused to counter, Archers, can very easily out maneuver them. Not only because Raider Elephants are slower than Regular Horsemen, but because getting animation locked during a charge gives Archers plenty of space to keep running. The Trample animation lock on it often has players lose most of the ability duration before doing any damage. The damage also does not stack, meaning you want to stagger the activation of it on different Elephants if you’re diving villagers or archers (so they don’t overlap and deal the equivalent of 1 Elephant’s worth).
They also get chased down by Knights in Feudal and beyond if you don’t get the House of Wisdom tech. This is especially bad because regular Horsemen can at least run away. All in all, there are… a lot of negatives to this unit with few if any upsides. The only upside I’ve found is the ability to dive Siege units, but I’ve found them to die very rapidly (faster than Cataphracts) and getting stuck in Spearman Brace before getting on top of Siege. There’s also the fact that Spearmen, Bombards and Culverins will annihilate Raider Elephants due to their bonus damage against Elephants, making that extra health almost redundant (even if it is less proportionally compared to a default horseman).
I’m scratching my head over this unit. Have you found any interesting uses for it?