As far as I understand they are costly for a reason and meant to be used in heavy booming team games with tight choke point maps. Do you disagree with this? Or should elephants become more viable in 1v1
They are not meant to be used in typical meta 1v1 games. With that said, civilizations that have access to elephants should have options outside of their elephants to compensate.
Elephants would be perfectly fine if it wasn’t for monks.
Design-wise there would otherwise be nothing wrong with a very strong but more expensive unit.
Also absolutely no unit should be “designed for team-games”. I won’t touch team games with a barge pole due to all the hoops and generally higher chance of toxicity/feels bad moments. So am I supposed to be denied some of the units?!
What about the opposite? Should any unit be “designed for 1v1”?
I think yes… Especially if you have civs focused in elephants but you rarely see them in 1v1 (which is where the game is most balanced for).
No. Units should be designed to work with the civ(s), not for a specific gameplay mode.
Yes, I think they should be viable in 1v1, ideally.
I think it’s a mistake to look at how elephants work and conclude “they were meant that way”. I think War Elephants were poorly designed, by devs who didn’t think about multiplayer balance, and the devs haven’t thrown out some of the old (bad) legacy decisions. And instead have build on those decisions when designing other elephant units. Which never really worked properly, because the base they were build on is bad.
I see a necessity for having 1v1 only units, because in multiplayer many civs will only do what they’re best at, whereas in 1v1 all civs need to be able to do (almost) all things.
If a civ was very poorly suited for multiplayer, it might be reasonable to give them a team-game-only unit. But even then just giving them a very strong team bonus like “+25% trade income” is a better solution, which is likely to result in more varied gameplay.
Yeah, monks are the real issue here. It’s simply too good a trade to convert even a single elephant.
IMO it should take a special tech to convert elephants, similar to Redemption. Maybe make it not so expensive, but still take a bit and a while to get, maybe ~150 gold?
Dispensation
Allows Elephant Units to be converted.
Cost: 175g
Research Time: 60s
Boom, problem solved. If they make one elephant, if you research Dispensation you’re now 15g and a monk of build time behind.
Start with small. Give them ship like resistance to conversion. +2 min, +2 max time.
Sad trade cart noise
*Sorry, Military unit
Call me crazy, but I’d love it if there were more Technologies to make trade carts more viable in 1v1 scenarios.
Maybe something like, smuggling: trade with hostile markets pays twice as much.
Perfect, love this solution.
What does hostile market means? Enemy just can’t delete the market?
They could, if they knew it was coming!
Sounds weird… If just all 1v1 maps would have a neutral market would be enough. It would make trade a 1v1 option and would enrich maps.
The monk conversion time system is nonsense and should be scrapped. Conversion time should be in direct correlation with the cost of the unit the monk is trying to convert. So spearmen, skirms and villager conversions should be lightning fast, knights should be average (stay the same) and elephants should take a lot longer. The monk player would then be able to use multiple monks to speed up the conversion time of one elephant, but then if successful, all monks involved in the conversion would then lose their faith and have to recharge. I think that’s the main issue right now. Defending player can just make 4 monks and easily convert 4 elephants which swings those early castle age fights and then snowball it into GG without much effort or skill.
Maybe recharging faith should also correlate with the cost of the unit they converted. Monks who converted skirms or spears didn’t need as much faith to convert so they should recharge faster. But a monk who converted an elephant used a lot more faith to convert an elephant so it should take longer for him to recharge. This would at least give the elephant player a chance at a fair fight.
Doesn’t account for relative value of different resources. Also, villagers can be a lot more useful than more expensive units, making them a high-value conversion (sometimes even more so than an elephant). Also doesn’t for varying unit costs. Should militia-line convert faster after researching supplies? What about civ bonuses that make units cheaper (like Italian Bombard Cannons, or Goth infantry, or Polish Knights).
Also, the stacking would allow for near-instant conversions in late-game and would make Theocracy (as it currently stands) somewhat broken. Imagine 10 monks trying to convert a Siege Onager (That can take out a small army in just one shot)
There are already ways to deal with monks. Scout-line can do a fine job and ranged units (archer masses and some long-ranged siege units) can also be rather effective. And in some cases, players have even deleted a unit that was about to be converted (thus preventing a conversion). Removing the variability would open up the possibility of consistently waiting until the last second to hit the delete button.
Yeah, monks are mostly fine, they only really break down against specific outliers, namely elephants.
I’d suggest just making battle elephants into Siege units, except that would cause some really weird interactions with units with anti Siege damage. Far better just to make elephants have a specific technology required to convert.