Siege Elephants OP?

As we say in Argentina… Hera is a smoke seller 11

no they are not OP, leave them be. They have a huge weakness against pike while Rams don’t, not to mention they cost more gold to field.

Rams still kind of do have a weakness to pikes as well, but at least it isn’t a heap of bonus damage, just regular negative melee armor.

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Well i had my curiosity satistied :slight_smile: seems that they have their niche and diversity over ram, which Is obviously cool to see

Gets converted by monk in a few seconds without needing redemption or any tech. Dies to pikes/halbs 4x faster, camels 2x faster. Costs a lot of food, collection rate of which is 20-25% slower compared to wood in castle age and is much more harder to stockpile until late imp. Has lower blast radius compared to siege rams. Overall its better in some situations but more difficult to get to or replace.

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I think the main advantage that makes the unit so good is that they move faster and feel way less clunky to rams. Usually three armored elephants take down castles very quickly.

And since most of the new civs don’t especially excel in siege it’s fine to have them. Although tbh I’m not sure about the gujaras bonus dmg as it’s insane how fast your buildings die vs their elephants.

Btw them costing food might indeed be a drawback early castle but at this point you rarely make rams. In late castle age or at some point in imp however in my experience so far it’s a bit easier to mass them compared to regular rams as you usually get a large farming eco with the new civs.

It kills monks though usually, if the elephant hasn’t been targetted to something else.

Villagers hadnt loom in that video

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Don’t they have to be directly beside the elephant to convert, so walls don’t help? I could be wrong, I haven’t tested it.

That’s why I deleted it, I actually have also no clue how far that conversion distance is. I misclicked to post why i wanted to like the previous :smiley:
Thing is imo monk defence only makes sense with no walls in between but as I basically never play arena this situation isn’t common for me.

I’d give it more time before we decide the unit needs a tweak. IMO its biggest weakness from a practicality perspective is the food cost (of armored eles in castle). When playing as a AE civ, I usually find I don’t want to spend food in castle on a siege unit, when that food is so essential for support units or going up to Imp. Overall I like the idea of a unit that’s similar to rams, but with tradeoffs. And more regional units is always good in my book.

I think it’s stronger than Ram line, but also none of the new civs other than Hindustanis strike me as particularly capable or good. In fact some civs like Dravidians seem awful in general, while Bengalis have an extremely bad time defending in the mid game on open maps.

They can use the help imo.

Food cost generally speaking is an advantage imo as you can branch to the needed techs more easily (techs such as Siege Shop first or University first or 2nd/3rd TC require wood) and the support units for these civs aren’t something like full Knights so you almost always have the extra Food in early Castle age.

Is Hera trolling? Those vills didn’t even have loom. If you’re going to show something is OP at least put it in a situation where it can show it’s OP. Not post imp vs Dark Age.

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Nevertheless a Armored Ele needs 8 Hits to take out a vill whilst a vill takes 74 hits to take out ome.
But vills attack 50 % faster (rof 2 instead of rof 3)
So 12 * (x+1) * x / 2 >= 74 gives the number of vills needed to kill one armored ele.
Which is 4 Vills and one of them will be lost.

And siege eles with their 1 more melee armor +2 atk and blast damage perform much better.
But the question ofc is why you don’t have anything better in imp than vills to fight rams… ?

Tbf in imp I don’t see why that unit should be op. The time when it’s really strong is castle age because armored elephants are just so much better than battering rams. But also I find it refreshing to see because that makes it pretty dangerous to go to imp fast vs the new civs.

It’s severely countered by pikemen, whereas pikemen aren’t a massive threat for regular rams (low base attack, slow attack, and infantry speed, you usually can bring some heavy infantry or archers to save the ram). Siege elephants also can not garrison infantry, neither increasing their speed and damage nor protecting the infantry.

More situational, they also can be converted by monks without needing to research redemption, for civs that have access to this tech.

Even in castle age the unit is so food intensive I kinda doubt it will be that crazy since you need the food to boom.

Although maybe Im understimating how good their better castle age stats are. Siege Eles will probably need a buff either way

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Well at the point where you usually make these things you should have had 3 tcs for quite some time. So you don’t delay your boom. What you will delay is your imp time but imo that doesn’t matter too much as maybe except for dravidians you wanna play prolonged castle age with new civs and get really large farming number before going imp.

They usually kill monks though, so it’s a risky option.

Agreed. Hera didn’t have Loom btw and still he almost killed the Elephant with Non-Loomed villagers!!!