An arbalest gives 0.57 HP per resource, while a Ballista Elephant gives 1.72 HP. This isn’t just some HP boost, it’s literally tripling a ranged unit’s comparative HP and making them way better at dealing with both melee and ranged units by a huge margin, thus breaking the counter system. Not every civ gets halbs, and Ballista Elephants even melt some halbs thanks to a combination of pass-through damage and unacceptably high HP.
Not to mention, they also have 3 pierce armor while arbalesters have 0, which widens the gap even more. There shouldn’t be such a massive difference between two gold units that each take up just 1 pop. The classic generic units weren’t designed with these kinds of high-HP ranged units in mind. Bohemian tanks have a similar issue.
They’re supposed to be countered by the mangonel line, but why do Ballista Elephants also get heavy siege armor? Why do they need extra protection when they already have massive HP?
The value of a ranged unit is first in its DPS, and in numbers they enjoy Lanchester’s law. When it comes to DPS per resources, elephants are bad. All it means is they can do without a meat shield, as they are already a decent one.
Elephants also have the disadvantage of taking a lot of room so they are harder to physically mass in tight terrain, fewer will be in position to rain arrows on the enemy.
Also why do you try to counter elephants with xbows (which they are indeed supposed to out-tank) when you can send pikes who have a massive bonus vs them ?
They lost Bombard Cannon and have no real answer to Onagers.
Besides, comparing arbalest and ballista elephants= comparing apples to oranges. They are neither same unit type, nor co-exist in common circumstances.
One Onager shot and all the DPS of Arbalesters is gone, not so true for Ballista Elephants.
Pop efficiency? Ballista Elephants are better.
HP per resource? Ballista Elephants are three times better.
Resistance to Mangonels, skirms, arrows, and melee? Ballista Elephants win again.
info: this comment was written before the prevoius off topic post were removed
pls stay on topic, OP has a valid point. Ranged units with absurd HP and PoP efficency are a blight to teamgames. engange with the topic instead of personal attacks
low hp ranged units like arabalest or hand cannons are WORTHLESS to most causalts in 4v4 late game sitations because power creep gave use Ballista Elefants, Elefant Archers, Korena and Bohemain Wagons and probably more.
Sure, in pro play stuff is different, but for the majroity of casuals players in the 800-1000 elo range, OP has a point and this should be considered and discussed instead of ridiculed. thank you
part of the issue is, that these high hp ranged units are barely counted by skimisher. gold cost efficency is not an issue after trade is set up.
Look, I’ll say it once, there’s nothing wrong with this thread as long as it’s about AOE2 and its balance. If anyone is bothered by Selim complaining about the Janizaries, you know what to do. Just ignore this thread, but don’t think we’re going to close it for spamming.
On the other hand, you’ve already had enough of the trolling. Focus on the thread’s discussion. Any member who starts trolling or makes off-topic comments will get suspended. Take this as a warning.
If anyone has a question, complaint, suggestion, or anything, send me a private message, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.
310 HP is too much even for a slow melee unit, let alone a ranged one. These kinds of units make so many original units obsolete, like generic archers or the militia-line. Why would you want a generic champion with 70 HP when you can get a ranged unit with more than quadruple the HP and survivability?
Remember that in the original game, Paladins with their 180 HP were the reason halbs were even introduced.
Adding the “heavy siege” class was just a band-aid solution to a glaring balance issue, but it didn’t really solve anything.
The first issue is that not every civ gets Onager or BBC. Second, their supposed counters are disproportionately more expensive than these units (whereas a cheap skirm is totally fine to take on arbalesters or hand cannoneers). Third, it’s not that hard to dodge Onager or BBC projectiles. Fourth, Ballista Elephants even have +20 resistance against one of their supposed counters.
At the very least, more than half of their HP needed to be shaved off just to keep other units relevant. Then maybe their cost or other stats could be buffed accordingly to rebalance things.
So yeah, any ranged unit with more than 130–150 HP is completely unacceptable for me.
Elephants are expected to be very tanky. If you nerf it, making it more expensive would be a more logical move, as currently elephants aren’t much more expensive than heavy cav (while we’re talking about beasts that can reach 10x the weight of a medium horse).
They would still be tanky even after shaving off 50%–60% of their HP. No need to give them almost 8 times the HP of an arbalester for that. It’s just an insanely big HP gap between two units in the same game that cost the same pop.
Melee elephants can have more than 130–150 HP, but still not more than 200–220.
The difference with a paladin would be insignificant, especially given how hard halbs punish them (+45 total bonus damage in castle age, +60 in imperial).
Elephants should feel like elephants : mighty but expensive. Another possible nerf would be increasing their collision radius (similar to cavalry being wider than infantry) allowing fewer elephants to mass in the same area and, in open areas, more units to target each at once.
Having 8x more hp than arbs doesn’t feel that much if you remember Lanchester’s law is quadratic. And you already have mighty options vs elephants : halbs & monks (elephant civs have terrible defence vs monks, including no heresy for most, use and abuse it !). But if you’re waiting for your elephant opponent to get to 200 pops then try to match him with arbs so his pop efficiency can come into full effect, you’re doing it wrong.
As it happens, both Aztecs and Spanish have excellent monks.
Having an extra armor class does not make a unit tankier - it makes them more vulnerable. It means units that deal damage against that armor class can deal some extra damage (assuming that their extra damage is higher than the armor class’s armor value, which is often the case).
In the case of ballista elephants, they have 20 heavy siege armor - which means they don’t take any additional damage from villagers (who deal 6 heavy siege armor, but can still deal 3 melee damage assuming no armor upgrades because while 6-20 == -14, it gets zeroed out by a damage floor), but still take extra bonus damage from mangonels and BBCs (who both deal 40-20==20 bonus damage against ballista elephants, in addition to their melee and anti-siege damage). The end result is that BBCs and mangonels deal 20 more damage against ballista elephants than they would against another siege unit (at least before factoring in melee armor, which is low for siege units).
There’s also cost to consider. Ballista elephants (and most elephant units in general) are quite expensive in both food and gold. Arbs and champions are relatively cheap compared to them. Result is that champions and arbs are easy to spam and elephants are not. And Ballista elephants require castles to produce, making them even harder to spam. And ballista elephants also have lower range and attack than scorpions. The lower attack weakens their damage output and makes it so that ballista elephants require a larger mass. Lower range makes it harder for them to attack, and means that they’re outranged by mangonels (who can fire and retreat, making the fight a micro battle favoring the mangonels)
Arbs and hand cannons can deal pretty significant damage, which is why they are used. And they aren’t difficult to mass, which makes it easier to scale their firepower.
A generic champion can be spammed for a long time and are easily massable. If you lose a mass of champions, you can build them again, and again, and again and still have gold to spare. You lose a mass of elephants (melee or ranged), it’s going to be pretty hard to rebuild them (especially in 1v1). A mass of arbs is also easier to replace than a mass of elephant archers, and cheaper to upgrade too (the elite elephant upgrades are really expensive, like paladin upgrade). So long as you’re careful with a critical mass of arbs, you can keep their significant firepower around for a long time and have them much earlier than an opponent would have an elephant archer mass.
The counters to elephant archers and to arbs are pretty much the same. The difference is that you’d want multiple onagers against elephant archers while you only need a single good onager shot against arbs. Scorpions are also similarly effective against both units (remember that scorpions have bonus damage against elephants, which mitigates the hp advantage elephants have). Ballista elephants have different counters, but it only takes a few onagers to ward them off (or outright destroy them), and it only takes a few BBCs to whittle down their numbers.
I don’t pay too much attention to high-level gameplay, but my understanding is that elephants don’t see too much play there. Speed and range are both very strong at high levels, and battle elephants lack both. Elephant archers have some range, but not as much as arbs (and certainly don’t have the mobility of cav archers). And all elephant units are expensive, which makes them hard to mass. Their main advantage is pop efficiency, and pop efficiency doesn’t matter until late-imp (by which point most games have already ended). And elephant units are a difficult tech switch.
Elephants are expensive to use en masse, so that’s supposed to be the balance point. As for the problem with particularly Ballista elephants, while they aren’t countered by Skirms as their archery range counterparts, they additionally require a castle to access, which is further an expense that offsets their strength.
If you’re playing vs a lot of ranged elephants, abuse the longer range of skirms and pick them off one by one by kiting. It’s basically 200 resources down the drain per volley if you’ve got a good number of skirms, and they will be unable to replace them for long. Skirm + Siege beats ranged elephant compositions, except in the case of Ballista elephant, Siege + Halb tends to be your best bet unless you’ve got a very top-tier cav option or a Magyar. But the real counter to ballista elephant is just not allowing Khmer to drop a bunch of castles comfortably, because they really aren’t spectacular in low numbers.
Halbs’ bonus damage could be decreased accordingly.
And that Lanchester’s Law doesn’t take into account that one Onager shot instantly eliminates a group of archers but not elephant archers, Ballista elephants, or Bohemian tanks. Bengali elephants also have extra resistance to conversion, and when combined with Devotion, they can even kill monks.
My own experiences with ranged elephants is that a few onagers works well. Ballista elephants will run away (too badly outranged and take a lot of bonus damage). Elephant archers can tank a siege onager blast, but if you have 4 (or more) of them, then they will also need to hold back, since they can’t take that many. Of course, BBCs snipe your own siege, but Khmer have to rely on cavalry to fulfill that role.
Lanchester’s laws do have assumptions that don’t fully apply in aoe2. And I think onagers do generally get around lanchester’s square law. However, a small number of onagers (as opposed to just 1 onager) will still get the one-shot effect. If you’re willing to invest into improving your mangonels for combat purposes, you better be willing to get more than 1 of them (otherwise the tech is mainly a waste of resources). You have to invest more to counter an elephant archer mass (or a mass of any of those other units), but nowhere near as much as an elephant archer mass costs compared to an archer mass. Scorpions should also sidestep Lancasters square law, but they definitely need a critical mass for greatest effectiveness.
I know, I was refferring to their +20 heavy siege armor. But still it’s deal breaker for me having 310 HP ranged unit because the original units were not created accordingly with this kind of units.
But it’s a lot harder to lose a mass of Ballista Elephants than a mass of Champions or Arbalesters. And Ballista Elephants are still keeping their range advantage and overwhelming pop efficiency over Champions.
The problem is they are too pop efficient on top of also not being cost-inefficient enough. You pay less than twice the gold cost of an Arbalester for Ballista Elephants but get 8x the HP. So you tank everything way better than Arbs, thus preserving your DPS and gold. That’s why 310 HP is absurdly high for a ranged unit, and I called the introduction of the heavy siege armor class just a “band-aid solution.”
Arbalester dies to 4 heavy scorpion shot. Meanwhile Ballista elephant can tank 16 shot.
Very bad balance.
I watched Survivalist lose against mass Elephant Archers despite picking Romans.
It’s a lot harder to make a mass of Ballista elephants than… basically anything.
And making a mass of them makes it pretty easy to justify making a lot of siege cost-wise, which is a direct counter and a much more threatening unit to a base. And if you don’t make a lot of them, I’d like my chances with sanctity monks, especially with block printing.
Ballista Elephants and Arbs are quite hard to compare, since they are completely different unit types and serve different roles. It’s like saying “nerf Walls” because they get too much HP per resource spent .
Here’s one more thing to consider in this discussion:
Ballista Elephants are among the most micro-intensive units. You need to constantly watch them and shoot manually, while Arbs perform quite well simply patrolling in.
For those wondering why: Ballista Elephants deal damage up to, but not beyond, the targeted unit. If left alone, they will usually target the closest unit but would be most effective if targeting the furthest unit that is still within range, which you need to control manually.
I’m out. I’m actually on team buff Ballista Elephant. They feel quite squishy compared to other elephants, and a few Siege Onager shots are enough to take them down. Also, they can be surrounded effectively: a tanky unit in front with Halbs behind, coming in from multiple angles. If the Halbs reach the Elephants this way, the Elephants get eaten.
The issue is the same with basic melee elephants. They are super OP, especially in team game where a pocket can boom and spam elephants. I hate that they resist so much to monks now.
Not every civ gets Sanctity + Block Printing monks or Onagers. And I don’t think it’s hard for Khmers to get at least 8–10 of them, considering their farming bonus.
Im pretty sure the only civ without Onager (or rocket car) Block Printing or Bombard Cannons is Huns and boy will a Hun player be way too aggressive to let you go for elephants siege
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