It seems they rolled back the patch.
If you are going to nerf these elephant units so heavily, at least make them like 30 food cheaper or something. But still 100 food and 95 gold is still pretty costly.
What’s with the random nerf to Houfnice? Seems out of nowhere. Again, if you are going to nerf the stats that unit so much, just make the tech cheaper.
they move faster and are affected by BS upgrades.
Many civs also have bonuses or UTs to help those Elephants out.
I think that’s the main rationale behind the nerf. They want it to be a Ram that costs food, not a stronger version of the Ram that costs food.
I don’t think they needed a nerf either but let’s see how it plays out.
Also technically they got some buffs here and there, they do more bonus dmg and they take a bit less from Halbs now. In practice this might mean the nerf isn’t as bad as it looks on paper.
Houfnice nerf is uncalled for I agree.
Sicilians say hi.
Oh, wait. That’s because Gurjaras were doing too well, never mind then. Sicilian nerfs were obviously the solution.
Therefore… Houfnice was nerfed because Hindustanis were doing too well, and their nerf wasn’t enough.
Only Gurjaras. And this is correcting the mistake of rounding fraction numbers, not really a buff.
Need to calculate but I think they survive the same amount of hits as HP also nerfed.
they gave them more bonus dmg vs buildings and siege, though again this might be the “rounding” you talk about.
yes, so the goal was maybe to nerf them vs archers and vills. Admittedly vs vills Armored Elephants are a bit too strong now when you combine the splash damage (which I think castle age version has too, correct me if I’m wrong), the possibility of armor and them starting from -2 (iirc) instead of the classic -3 of rams.
Again that’s only Gurjaras. They made a mistake by writing those changes on “General Balance Change”. I was also confused when did Heavy Camel had +25 vs cavalry until I watched Ornlu’s review video.
Basically everything but spearman line as LC, knight, Castles all will kill them faster. They are more similar to rams now.
The Sicilian nerf made sense because of the Sicilian cavalier spam, they just didnt compensate for their early game nerf and now the civ sucks
The Houfnice nerf makes a lot of sense regarding the insane power of Bohemians on Arena, especially because of Houfnice. Increasing the tech price is perfect, decreasing the blast radius may be a bit much, but it is not a huge change.
The armoured and siege elephants were changed in two ways: anti-ram units will be performing better against them, while pikemen will be slightly worse. Honestly, this is perfect, as these elephants were ridiculously too tanky versus a lot of units supposed to be soft counters, and pikemen already are so good against elephant civilisations across the board. The second change is the HP nerf, which I think should have been a -1 melee armour for at least the armoured elephant, but it’s fine. Armoured elephants were really difficult to deal with when consistently supported by range units.
Armored/siege Elephant were massively stronger than basic rams. One can argue that non siege rams are a bit UP, but noneteless if every civ had access to both siege rams and siege Elephant, you would only see 100% of the time siege elephants cause they are simply superior
That’s why they nerfed them i guess, and is a good Nerf. They still are better than RAM anyway
I would have targeted their halbs which made houfnice very hard to snipe or maybe removed siege engineer and maybe buff houfnice if that is too harsh
That’s all part of the package though. Costing food (and more gold) than rams hurts both their early viability and their lategame longevity, so they need to be stronger. This was pretty clearly driven as a (minor) Gurjaras nerf, without having to further nerf the civ’s bonus attack. Bengali and Dravidian AE/SE were fine as is, but maybe somebody saw a Youtube video of a Wootz SE killing villagers or something and thought that was OP.
Mixed thoughts on the houfnice nerf. On the one hand, I have enough annoying memories of microing vs. Houfnice on closed maps as civs with much worse BBC (e.g. Dravidians) and/or cav (e.g. Japanese) that I’m not entirely sorry to see it get weaker. Hitting it in two places seems a little excessive, but it won’t make the civ useless, and may be a prelude to a Hussite Wagon buff or something.
Even with food cost they are still much stronger than rams, mainly due to them being not so easily countered by villagers, against which they are almost immune. They also benefit from BS upgrades , and all civs that can male them have some bonus for them.
They are also faster than rams, and capable of dealing damage to not only building with their splash, unlike rams, and also have only 1 imp upgrade instead of 2, making them cheaper effectively than siege rams despite being almost equally good against building
They could use a tone down
Exactly. Hopefully they get better buff for Armored Ele line in the future. Especially Dravidians with their 2 UTs just have meme Siege ele. No last armor, BL, Husbandry or SE, but regeneration + ridiculous amount of attack against units. They are literally exact opposite of what they are supposed to do.
All but one. Hindustanis.
And faster speed in Castle Age.
Dravidian SE are the same speed as Siege Rams, with -50 Hp, lower blast radius, lower DPS vs buildings, halb weakness, and (obviously) no garrison ability. When you ignore the weaknesses or tradeoffs, of course they’ll look better than rams, but the “OP-ness” is more tied to one civ than to the unit. You don’t see players getting crushed by Dravidian or Bengali AE/SE pushes (but the Gurjaras have been able to do that from day 1). As stated before though, I get why they did this - as a roundabout nerf to Gurjaras without nerfing their camels. And I think the nerf is okay, but I expect that it will be followed up with some kind of buff to Dravidians and possibly Bengalis. Although to be fair, Bengali SE are still very strong in Imp and may not need a buff solely as a countermeasure to the AE/SE nerf.
This is also a tradeoff though. It takes more res to get to Siege Ram, but the low cost of the Capped Ram upgrade allows ram civs to improve their rams much sooner than Ele civs can afford the Siege Ele upgrade.
All those weaknesses are overshadowed by their strenghts. Infact, they were nerfed for this reason, they are too strong compared to rams.
They might be weaker against building, but the differences is not that significant and they can still demolish buildings real fast. Also not many faction have siege ram, while every indiana faction AFAIR get siege elephant. Having a split upgrade is a weakness of ram, don’t know how can you see it as a strenght honestly
Weakness to pikes is less peoblematic than weakness to villagers. Rams dies to anithing melee, while elephants can bypass that and can take Better against anithing but halbs but even against halbs they can still retaliate a bit of damage, while rams just die, just not as fast as a armored Elephant does
Also if you are making pikes against something like ########### or gurjara you are already not in a good spot…asking to be countered by chakrams and HC
Exactly. They should just nerf Gurjaras bonus.
There is other way - limiting the bonus to only stable units.