If you are in a position where you can afford both battle eles and ballista eles then you’re better off making only battle eles and attack moving to win.
Agree because archery on elephant nearly like free hand when shoot indeed
For me the main problem of balista ele is that their proyectile works as an arrow instead of a balista. Its a bit hard to micro them to attack the back rows and pierce trought units. Maybe give the proyectile a minimun distance they always must pass? (3 4 tiles max)
Ballista Elephant sucks, too slow, too expensive, pitiful damage and range, plus it doesn’t benefit from the team bonus.
Why making them when you have the best Battle Elephants and scorpions around?
They’re weak in small numbers, but a large mass of Ballista Elephants can be tough to stop. They’re tougher than Scorpions, and they can be healed by monks. Seems to be mostly a BF/michi deathball unit.
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They are useful to cut trees, that’s it
They’re murdered by Paladins, Eagles, Elephant Archers ( 
), Kamayuks and probably even by Huskarls (only a theory since 10 pierce armor). Not to mention that with proper distraction can be annihilated by onagers/siege onagers and siege rams.
In said maps, elite battle elephants with proper support are imho way better.
Yes, much better for that, expecially in castle age for a knight rush.
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Elite Elephant Archer is too strong to begin with, the whole problem with Elephant Archer is the fact it belongs to fantasy play territories, where it requires both Boom and Imperial. The creation time of these Elephant Archers is quite fast, 25s per one unit, that worth 4 times longbows that have 18s training time. The issue with this wonderful unit is in its design, it’s going to be very hard to make this work.
You went for the easy path of reducing cost + marauders style. The situation is much more complicated for this generic solution. I’d love to know if you thought about another balance suggestion for this unit.
Balista Elephant can’t have more damage, their deathball potential is ridiculous, Khmer is my favorite civ, and I tend to go Balista Elephant every second game (1700 elo), highly underrated unit. However I like the extra movement speed bonus! I’d adjust it a little so it’ll be just +5% movementspeed instead of 10% by lowering Balista’s base movement speed - or else they’ll be able to run down Archers, (0.96 movement speed for both) which is already an absurdly good match up for the Ballista.
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Agree. Sultans is such a useless UT as it is and elephant archers are proper garbage currently.
Maybe give them a melee attack as well?
Units can’t have two types of attack
Do you mean a melee attack like the Chu Ko Nu? Or a different attack animation entirely? The first seems feasible, but the 2nd would get confusing (if you click an enemy do they walk up and melee, or position for a ranged attack).
In cut content this was originally planned for the Samurai, where he could switch between a bow and a sword, but it was scrapped because of the problems it could create when ordering him to accidentally attack with the wrong weapon. If Elephant archers did low level trample damage while moving, and fired arrows while still that could work though.