This Is One of the strange things i’ve noted from the First closed beta (when you were able to zoom in on your units). Unfortunately, due the NDA i can’t share any screenshots.
But someone took a screenshot from the last official video about the Delhi Sultanate.
You can see how elephant driver Is more detailed than other units and i don’t know Why the others units can’t seem detailed in this way. Also his weapon Is more realistic.
No mention about arrows and animations becuase are Horrible.
It’s a massacre …
i made more screenshots from the 4k source
they seem more realistic to me.
Could developers make all units like them?
Do you have a comparison for a “undetailed” unit? For me they look the same.
Look at the Elephant driver on the last image. His details (face, feet, weapons and clothes) are more detailed than other units on the screen.
Somebody mentioned this very same thing like 2 months ago but I don’t see a ton of difference. It’s a low poly fest and muddy textures all around.
I guess it is from initial model buildings…… After a while, devs don’t have time to do this level of building.
I feel like these elephants are too good… in comparisons to other units just blow them out of the park as far as stats. I think I would rather see more and weaker ones. in the preview 2 arrow elephants took out so many units, at least to start will be hard to determine just how much it takes to counter them effectively. since they can shoot while retreating, and have a melee attack with range attack. they look like fun though…
They are super expensive and relatively slow.
Only their siege damage is really strong.
Pikes/spearmen slaughter them pretty easily as they got a large attack bonus against them.
You may feel like the elephants are too strong, but just calculate how many spearmen you could train for one elephant.
The spearmen will win cost effectively.
If you let the enemy train a critical mass of eles, then you must have given him too much time to boom and mass and played too passively.
The melee elephant is anti cav, the ranged one is anti heavy inf, especially with age4 elite upgrade.
Pikes slaughter them both though.
Their hard counters are crossbows, hand cannoneers and anti-siege units though.
Its not that they can not be countered… it just seems like there is such a power gap between that unit and any other unit. how many pike does 1000 resources give you? why not make it weaker at 600 res and be able to field a few more of them… it just seems to throw off the balance in my opinion.
How much does a knight cost?
We will see once a meta manifests.
Nerfing the elephant’s attack will essentially make them useless, as you will automatically prefer the more mobile knights then. In AOE2 elephants are rarely seen in pro games because of that.
Not I have not played in any betas.
I hope they are a viable unit, (not sure what knights cost vs a melee elephant) but it seems like it would be far more efficient to have like 5-6 knights than 1 big unit. unless it its super OP, which then is hard to balance, as it may take 10 pikes to kill it, otherwise can barrel through like 5 pikes and still get through to archers and kill them easily. With that much power to tank, one can bait the pikes into bad positions
But I have limited knowledge, it was just odd to see 2 elephants left after a big battle and they were cleaning up the enemy army which was much bigger forcing them to run to try to raid.
I really like how the unit looks and attacks (well there were some issues with 2 elephants walking in a line where the head was hidden in the others hinder parts, and not sure if they fixed the siege attack swatting in air), being able to melee and fire arrows at the same time… so I also wonder why the melee version would be much better since the archer one can fire in movement too. does it do AOE damage? because 3 attacks vs 1 attack yet more hp is kind of an odd trade off…
Afaik the melee version has more HP and bonus damage against cavalry. Both do trample damage, so it really depends on how you want to use them.
For example:
In the closed beta I paired Knights with Tower Elephants and Mangonels: The Knights kill off units, the elephants raze the buildings and siege destroys any unit gathering around elephants.
If you were to play against cavalry civs like Mongols and French, you could swap the knights with melee elephants for bonus damage.
