With elephants, monks are the real issue. It’s simply too good a trade to convert even a single elephant, making them non-viable in the early game, where they should be very useful in some cases.
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.
Dispensation Allows Elephant Units to be converted.
Cost: 175g
Research Time: 60s
If they make one elephant, you have to decide whether to spend the gold to be able to convert it. If you do and they stop making more elephants, you’re now down 15 gold(relative to the cost to build the elephant) and 60 seconds of monastery time for no benefit. If you don’t and they keep making elephants, you’re forced to make bad trades or go for pikes!
Not enough. No matter how much resistance you give them, they will still be forced to instantly run. After all, bengalis have twice that much and they still can’t effectively survive monks in the early game. It needs to be a complete immunity for it to work.
I don’t see how monks being OP against elephants is good for the game balance neither. They need to come up with a solution, otherwise they may as well remove elephants from the game completely, why bother with elephants when players are discourage to use them? It’s just blatant bad balance.
It’s up to the elephants player to have scouts or light cav ready to snipe monks. If the monks player is turtling behind walls you need to break in with rams or mangos first before sending in the stampede. Good game balance doesn’t mean buffing elephants to the point where that’s the only unit you need to make. Make a balanced army and you can compensate for elephants’ weaknesses.
One other idea I had was that converted eles turn neutral in a first step, giving the elephant player also the opportunity to reconvert them from gaya.
Then it would also make sense most ele civs lack Heresy, cause you want to bring them back to your side and not die.
Forbiting the monks to convert elephants is risky. When the play finally can unlock the ability, lots of damage have been caused by elephants.
The driver, called a mahout, was responsible for controlling the animal, who often also carried weapons himself, like a chisel-blade and a hammer (to kill his own mount in an emergency).
— Wikipedia
Maybe a new tech in stables that able to give elephants more resistance against conversion or even the effect of Heresy, or to make converted elephants receive a damage about 100HP.
That clearly doesn’t work, because early elephants aren’t viable. This is such a strange argument. The whole point of the changes I’m suggesting is because early elephants aren’t viable. If what you say were true, then early elephants would be viable, but they clearly are not, so you are obviously wrong.
You mean no need for redemption? Yeah that will shut down siege quite a lot against civ that doesn’t have Redemption. For redemption civ, you need to convert just 1 mangonel for justifying the tech. Same with your proposal. Redemption is not an universal tech and siege is vulnerable to all melee units. Adding 9 ranged monk will be bigger than BE as BE can hold against all melee units except spearman.
I personally do like one ranged gold unit to counter elephant. But we have 2. Scorpions ability to melt a parade of elephant is quite unknown to the community. I think you can just completely shut down monk against elephant by making Heresy more common to BE civ and some cost reduction instead of going difficult route.
Heresy cost 1000 gold → 600 gold. And now available to Bengalis, Burmese, Dravidians, Vietnamese.
That will just make them more overpowered in the late game, without having much impact on the early game. Elephants are already expensive to get into, they don’t need to be more expensive. Rather, countering them should be slightly more expensive, to create a niche in the early game for them to be used.
I propose breaking heresy into two, one in castle and one in imp. @Skadidesu suggested that the first heresy in castle age would make it so 50% hp is lost on any existing units so if they’re below 50% hp they’d die from it after a successful conversion but if above 50% they’d not be converted while losing half of their maximum HP.
this would allow more heresy usage and also make elephants a tad more viable. the castle age heresy + imp heresy tech total cost would amount to what it is now so 1k gold, while the imp heresy would act as the heresy it is now
Again, making elephants more expensive to get into is not a viable option. The added expense needs to be on the side that is currently more powerful, namely, monks.
it doesnt make them that much more expensive. a pre heresy of 500g is cheap to come especially gold is easy to get in castle, or even pre castle age.
the trade off here is you spend 500 gold, you waste the extreme hard counter of enemy monks which also drops few hundred gold into it, so it isnt really 500g more like 200-300g.