devils advocate, he didn’t bring them up, they were brought up and he responded.
That said, I still don’t see a lot of evidense that elephant archers are a problem. Maybe Balista elephants, but i dont think that was an issue with their hp and more about their damage output.
If you’ve allowed your opponent to mass elephants against you and you didn’t actually invest into the counter for those units, either because they utterly denied you scouting by outplaying you or simply because you didn’t think to do so, you deserved to lose 100% of the time in a 1v1, and that doesn’t indicate a unit being unbalanced. It indicates you weren’t playing good.
There are only two civs in AOE that lack both Onager and Block Printing. One is the Khitans, because they have Rocket Carts instead. The other is the Turks.
That being said, even a base Mangonel outranges a Ballista Elephant with Siege Engineers.
Mangonel does 45+12+40 damage per shot to Ballista Elephants, but it’s reduced to 74 after counting their +20 heavy siege armor and 3 melee armor. So they still require more than 4 shots.
Also Turks don’t have Siege Engineers.
Correct. I was stating that even a mangonel without siege engineers outranges a ballista elephant with. Ergo, a “base mangonel.”
I think the ballista elephant needs a lot of help. Please buff. The unit is way too dependent on manually targeting units deep in the ranks to do acceptable damage because of it’s natural firing path putting it’s projectile into the dirt on it’s target. Would be a far more entertaining and useful unit in an actual composition when it doesn’t need to be the sole focus of micro to do damage when there are so many other things that should probably take your focus instead (like maximizing your cav’s mobility)
Let’s remove pikes, onagers, block printing, illumination and siege engineers from all the civs then, and we’ll see what’s gonna happen. If Ballista Elephants (and other elephants and high HP ranged units) are balanced, then they should have no problem with that.
Nah, that won’t solve the problem with the unit having a really annoying bit of micro to constantly keep on top of. Better to leave the counters and just improve the unit a bit.
For the record, I think the Elephant Archer is actually an insanely good unit that you should almost always lose to if it’s in mass, but the high cost makes it reasonably balanced, except maybe in team games. I think the Ballista Elephant is the opposite. As opposed to the Elephant archer, it’s relatively difficult to use, not all that high in damage as far as ranged units are concerned (until double crossbow makes it viable) and because it comes out of a castle you need a lot of upfront investment just to use it. You will never get me to agree with the premise the Ballista Elephant is unfair in any way, because I think that unit is straight-up a mistake to build in 98% of situations.
Also Huns. 20 characters
I just realized that the Melanesians civ I designed is the same way. I suppose there’s a balance reason why there are few civs like that, so perhaps I should reconsider.
I think Khmer elephant+ scorpions > ballista elephants. Ballista elephant is harder to defend due to shorter range.
If elephant archer HP get a nerf, I would recommend a higher base movement speed then. War Wagons would seem too good then.
I suppose it is not another Turk post.
I’m not convinced in any way that the Ballista Elephant actually needs a buff, I am truly annoyed with the mechanics of the unit requiring active and precise micro to make it perform acceptably, but there’s plenty of units where active micro is a necessity to maximize it’s return (see: Monks)
I’m just making the post to argue the opposite of Selim. If it were to receive any change at all I would be far more pleased with a buff to it’s functionality to mitigate the problems of not continuously micromanaging it than I would be with any nerf to the unit. Because I do not see the tankiness of the unit to be a serious problem at all.
I don’t think I’d want to see the Elephant archer get a nerf. I think it’s strong, but at a fair cost. If we started seeing civs picked on the back of the Ele archer in 1v1’s, maybe, but I don’t see that happening now, and further, I don’t think we really will get there. The pros still know that proper siege is a cost-efficient answer.
You can even create a counterable 1000 HP unit by simply giving massive attack bonuses to whatever they are supposed to be weak against.
But just because they can be countered doesn’t make the unit balanced. Because this kind of unit would massively outclass the rest of the units outside of their counters by its massive HP. It’s as much a compatibility issue as a balance issue. Massive HP differences are just bad when you consider a Halberdier has only 60 HP or an Arbalester only 40 HP.
So we have elephants that, when converted, give exceptional benefit so we naturally prioritize converting them. And then they give conversion resistance to elephants to help them. But then you end up with a unit that resists arrows, swords, and siege, on top of also resisting monks much better than the others. It’s just a self-inflicted problem. Had they had reasonable HP and power, a conversion would already have less benefit, so we would neither need to give elephants extra monk resistance nor introduce heavy siege armor.
I wouldn’t expect an elephant to have less HP than a Cavalier which would be ridiculous. But there’s a difference between high HP and too much HP.
That’s still a lot of damage, and it applies to multiple units all at once. Dealing roughly a quarter of ballista elephant’s hp to 10 ballista elephants is effectively 180*10/4 == 450 resources worth of damage from a single mangonel shot - almost as much as the siege workshop and mangonel combined. And that’s unupgraded castle age mangonels against upgraded elite ballista elephants. With 5 mangonels (which costs less than 10 ballista elephants), you one-shot elite ballista elephants, and the ballista elephants deal little damage in return even if the mangonels wander within the ballista elephants’ range. Result is that a few mangonels will ward off ballista elephants (assuming opponent is paying enough attention to keep the elephants from being destroyed, which is a heavy enough loss that it is sometimes an instant gg).
One of the weaknesses of ballista elephants is that they take a lot of bonus damage. In small numbers, they can be destroyed by anti-cav units. They can be converted by monks (no need for redemption). As their numbers rise, they can still be sniped by mangonels/BBCs, and battering rams/armored elephants should remain effective (deal anti-siege bonus damage, and only take 1 damage/shot). They don’t take as much heavy siege bonus damage as hussite wagons, but being an elephant unit means they don’t need to take as much heavy siege damage as hussite wagons do because they have more counters even without the heavy siege armor class.
Hussite Wagons are another pain to deal unit, especially in Arena. Too much HP, too much pierce armor, too resistant to both melee and pierce damage, doesn’t take anti-cavalry bonus, easier to mass because of costing wood instead of food, needs Redemption to convert and still not easy to convert. Their elite upgrade is also cheaper than both Conquistador and Janissaries.
Possessing too much advantage as a unique gunpowder unit. Also 85% accuracy? Even the Conquistadors have only 65% accuracy and Janissaries have 50% plus less than 1/4 HP of Hussite Wagons! Oh, also forgot they protect units behind it.
They taking extra damage from Mangonels/BBC doesn’t mean anything to me. They are still faster than their supposed counters and Bohemians already have Houfnice and good monks to deal with them. Because unlike Conquistadors and Janissaries, they can’t be countered by skirms, archers or anti-cavalry units.
How much does the 1000 hp unit cost?
Can it be trained at an archery range or does it require a castle?
How long is its training time?
You are correct in that just having a hard counter doesnt nessisarily make a unit balanced, thats why there are a lot of dials available to balance things.
It’s as much a compatibility issue as it is a balance issue, regardless of other stats.
It’s the same with the Three Kingdoms heroes. Just because these heroes (or any very high HP ranged units) can be countered doesn’t mean they’re acceptable. They are incompatible with the original unit design, because the base units were never meant to coexist with units like these.
There’s no good reason for a ranged unit to have almost eight times the HP of an Arbalester while costing less gold than two Arbalests.
An Arbalest’s DPS drops to zero instantly after a single Mangonel shot, while a Ballista Elephant’s DPS continues as if nothing happened. So you end up with a unit that is gold-efficient, population-efficient, HP-efficient.
But distinctly not trainable at an archery range, meaning it is far easier to produce arbalists on mass whereas building balista elephants takes castle training time (especially valuable once treb wars start)
Saying they are incompatable and “were never meant to coexist” is strictly opinion, they clearly can coexist and clearly are compatable. And even if you’re a die hard “og games weren’t ever designed to deal with this”, one, those factions have been updated since then, and two, Korean war wagons exist. If they weren’t compatable we would see Khemer running rampant in the leaderboards and instead they just maintain a healthy midline.
There are plenty of good reasons for the hp difference. The arbalist has a faster attack rate, better single target damage, is a faster unit, has a smaller hitbox, so on and so forth.
This feels less like an actual complaint, and more of a “I lost a game using arbalists against balista elephants and im mad about it”
@II.Selim @AbuzzJam4677680 @DynasticPlanet5 just keep the discussion as usual.
My desire is to understand the context of where these are OP hence knowing what level and maps a player uses will better frame my reference of response
As someone who enjoys Bohemians: Mangonels help, like a lot.
Also, I mostly play as Turks and sometimes as Spanish and Aztecs, so the first two don’t even have Arbalester, and Aztec arbalester is probably not better than generic crossbowman.
Why does a unit have to be countered only by something that costs almost twice the gold and is also slower? Meanwhile, Arbalesters can be stopped by Skirmishers that cost no gold.
A Castle Age gunpowder unit with 160 HP and 7 pierce armor, LOL. Why did they nerf the Conquistador’s 2 pierce armor to 1 then, if 7 pierce armor is apparently perfectly fine???