Tughlaq Dynasty

[Shneider177]

Tughlaq eco upgrades a bit different, think China’s supervised bonus. The bonus on tc and elephants create 5% resources per drop off at base. This means it’s a true 5% bonus to eco which is NOT to be conflated with a % gathering rate increase, a virtually inferior eco bonus–with the only exception being KT wood gathering.

However…. Created resources isn’t better than all bonus gatherings rates. Let’s do some MAFF

Say we’re gathering from the woodline vs standard civ gathering from the woodline. And both civs get eco upgrade, we get our 5% gathering rate increase + 5% more bonus, and they get 15% gathering rate increase. Assuming, you can queue the worker elephant to follow the vils along the treeline, at which point (if at all) would the eco bonuses of tug beat out the standard vil’ bonus?

BONUS Tug_wood_per_min > BONUS standard_wood_per_min?

I’ll link the maffs (an approximate was made that vils still walk 0.25 tiles even when on top of the depot, which may not be true, however vils do not instantly cache resources the way KT wood cutters do so I didn’t want to approximate the walking to zero).

The alleged distance at which tughlaq villagers on wood with a perfectly following worker elephant gather more eco bonus wood vs a standard villager gathering eco bonus wood is 2.94 tiles ROUND-TRIP ( basically anytime the lumbercamp is 1.5+ tiles from the woodline, which is essentially ALWAYS!!!)

Edit …. The link is too long and won’t work so here is a screenshot of the input so you can do it yourselves. Essentially it’s tug bonus - tug base> standard vil bonus - standard vil base; with the distance traveled from depot to resource only being variable for the standard vil.

Edit:

I re ran the numbers with a few adjustments.Is there a point where the full eco bonus of tughlaq over takes the standard eco upgrades for other civs on farms (both civs move the same in order to gather and drop off) and on gold (where both civs pretty much are on top of the depot and resource, aka minimal walking). AND THE TUGHLAQ MAX ECO BUFFS ARE INFERIOR TO MAX STANDARD ECO BUFFS ON FARMS AND MINING??!!to be clear I’m not comparing total tug yield to standard vil total yield. I’m comparing exclusively bonus yields due to upgrades, tug vs standard.Regardless… in conclusion if we’re gathering from sheep under the TC, mining, or equally moving around to farm, max tughlaq eco buff is emphatically INFERIOR to standard eco buffs……nevermind civ eco buffs??? OUR ECO IS TRASHHH​:sob:

edit 2…

the interpertation of the maff being referenced in the edit above isn’t completely CORRECT. Tug eco buffs beat out on farms on shared round tile distances traveled from depot to resource and back of -1.9 tiles (aka always). I originally saw the negative and thought the solution was NOPE TUG IS NEVER BETTER..however the solution read: tiles >= -1.9 (aka all postive values of tiles). Which means Tug wins on farming and woodlines assuming tug can stick to the tree line while other civs are 2+ tiles ROUND trip away. Tug max IS inferior to standard max eco on MINING though; since the distance is small and fixed. All this was calculated without wheelbarrow. WB reduces the roundtrip tile range at which Tug max eco buff overtakes standard max eco buffs (from ~7 tiles down to ~6 tiles shared roundtrip).

[heimdallsvariant]

Hi! totaly agree with the majority that I ‘ve red, healers elephants(HE) are too strong! With two premades team (expleme english and jap), they can give up to +40 dmg to all of the HE before 10 min. The allies inf should not give the bonus, it s too strong. And I didn’t see if I m the only one getting the idee, but maybe decrease the healing rate 50-60% when they are taking dmg or attacking could be nice. And maybe give a speacial version of medicinal plant in caslte age specialy for HE, that gonna remove the nerf, and add some armor later. (because yes, they are too heavy for feudal). I hope for a nerf soon! Thank’s for the dev if you listen our complain! (really nice new civs btw)

[Croissantini]

Give the Healer Elephant 1 Imam in Feudal, 2 in Castle and 3 in Imperial, also give them a Feudal skin (like Worker Elephant with a Tower, and a brown rope holding it in place).

[Shneider177]

Governor of Ajmer!!

This one might be too strong? For 425 stone and a 2min 15s build time; u get 6 elite MAA that cost no population? While the units do not all pop out at once, they do spawn indefinitely as long as the cap isn’t reach. So 6 by 180 IMP resource MAAs for a cost of 425 stone and 2min 15s build?? Mind you these units do not get tagged with select all army ( for losers like me!); and they can build walls and siege! Even out of defending a spot they are extremely functional!

[Shneider177]

That would be an extreme nerf; you’d cut their healing in half? IMO a more meaningful nerf that doesnt completely neuter the unit is a health reduction from 450 to 340; brings their spearman kill point down from 16 strikes to 12! and with +1 melee armor it goes up to 13. Likewise brings down their archer kill point from 113 volleys down to 85!! and +1 range damage brings it all the way the way down to 68….

That too much a nerf….. okay lets do 340HP and +1 more range armor; so from 450 3/1 armor to 340 3/2 armor. Now it dies the same to archer essentially but dies much much faster to melee, especially spears.

This goes beyond this post, but NOTHING SHOULD BE DONE TO BENEFIT ARCHER BLOBS, PERIOD…. if anything we need more earlier solutions to archer blobs.

[Croissantini]

What you’re suggesting is just not the solution. They’re hardly a problem from Castle and beyond, so your suggestions would nerf them when they are the least useful. The problem everyone is having is that you can age up into cheap Healer Elephants, who are difficult to counter in Feudal due to lack of both Crossbows and Knight units for most civilizations. By reducing their Imam count in Feudal to one, you can ensure that the unit functions mostly as a defensive one in this stage of the game, rather than a unit you spam without any thought at all.

And so, when they enter Castle, they will act as they do now. It’s very clear that this unit is overtuned for a Feudal unit. My secondary suggestion would be to simply remove them from Feudal altogether, they don’t even have a skin for that age, demonstrating that they were clearly only added to Feudal age as a filler for the useless imam landmark. They aren’t Delhi and can’t capture Sacred Sites, so this was the developers trying to compensate for it.

Personally I think Healer Elephants were not meant to be the primary strategy in Feudal. They’re a support unit, so why would a strategy where you spam them work? At least in Castle and beyond, they get outscaled and actually focus on supporting rather than doing everything. Feudal Tughlaq should focus on Raider Elephants or building forts, not this bizarre immortal army build.

One buff I would give them is making their Zeal buff an AoE effect instead of a buff with a 10 second timer on healed units.

[Shneider177]

@Croissantini

cheap Healer Elephants

305 resource for a feudal unit that takes 40s to train is NOT cheap? The unit has dps it’s not meant to merely sit on the backline; its a heavy melee unit. Reducing its health in feudal then returning its health in castle will allow it to be functional beyond feudal.

The unit doesnt need a massive nerf as to cut its healing in half??

[Croissantini]

Cheap and expensive is relative. The whole sentence is “The problem everyone is having is that you can age up into cheap Healer Elephants”, differentiating regular Healer Elephants with Dome of the Faith Elephants, who are 65 gold cheaper.

And even if you want to be semantic, Healer Elephants are quite literally the second cheapest Elephant in the game, that is of course if we don’t count the Worker Elephant. So even then, yes, for an Elephant, it is cheap.

The strong healing is exactly the problem. If I had it my way, the Imams would never heal the same target. The problem emerges already with only 2 Healer Elephants, who have sufficient healing to outlast quite a few of their direct counter in Feudal. They can move and heal, which makes it even tougher for someone to realistically take down a Healer Elephant with spears only, hence the need for Crossbows to ensure victory.

There is also the problem of scaling. Early on in any game, a small count of units can make all the difference, whereas later on, it is easier to justify losing tens of units in a bad engagement. The very design of the Healer Elephant is difficult for beginners at this early stage in the game for a few reasons. For one, forced bad engagements still tend to leave the opponent wounded to some degree, so there is progress even if you lost a battle.

With the Healer Elephant in Feudal, it is very easy to have an overwhelming victory over a small unit count, and that snowballing is extremely difficult to come back from when you can send in a Healer Elephant already at the 6 minute mark. It isn’t like a Keshik who will eventually die from being tickled by Spears, but rather, a unit that has to be definitively killed, which is extremely hard to counter in Feudal.

Not only this, but the Healer Elephant is an amazing unit for sustaining an attack. If someone wants to all-in in Feudal, there is the possibility for them to lose their army and be behind their enemy. The Healer Elephant turns this dynamic on its head, ensuring that they can stay in place until even the turtling player finally succumbs to the Siege. In other words, it forces defensive players to be aggressive, or they perish in an impossible hold.

Remember, these are all primarily problems in Feudal Age. By Castle, your unit mass and unit counters should sufficiently be able to react to Healer Elephants.

[Shneider177]

@Croissantini

Cheap and expensive is relative. The whole sentence is “The problem everyone is having is that you can age up into cheap Healer Elephants”, differentiating regular Healer Elephants with Dome of the Faith Elephants, who are 65 gold cheaper.

And even if you want to be semantic, Healer Elephants are quite literally the second cheapest Elephant in the game, that is of course if we don’t count the Worker Elephant. So even then, yes, for an Elephant, it is cheap.

Semantics is shifting the use of the word “cheap” to reference elephants, when the original context was cheap relative to feudal unit costs??

Ppl kill Healer elephants with mass spears all the time, look up most high level recording or tournament games. Also waiting until there are 6+ healer elephants to force an engagement is likely a mistake, bc the issue of having the lower HP healer kite becomes cancerous to counter. assuming healer elephants are subject to income healing rates, 6 healer elephants can generate 42 HPS on a single target, meanwhile just 5 spears can total 85.33 DPS vs an elephant. So the issue IMO isn’t merely the healing, it’s the large HP pool plus kiting WHILE still healing. If you lower the HP pool and flank/body block them, they will die.

[Croissantini]

Your proposal encourages lame gameplay where you keep the Healer Elephant dancing back and forth.

Mine encourages that you use the Healer Elephant in the front like a mini War Elephant with a supportive aura.

I like mine better. I don’t want Tower Elephant 2.0. Simple as.

[Shneider177]

I figured it out!!

So reduce the health pool and… give all light cav a double damage bonus vs all healer units!!

Healers in general are a bit of a meh situation, especially the fast ones, the self healing ones and these hella tanky ones. If we give the fastest unit in the game a bonus vs healers that would nerf all healers, hurt fast castle relics grabs (a good nerf), be an answer to slow moving healer elephants, dervish, warrior monks, and the shalon monks!!

Horseman need more flanking functionality.

Alsoooo consider the popular comp right now with healer elephants: mega mass archers and healer elephants. The current “counter” is omegalul spears and horseman, then try to pinch healer elephants before all your spears get deleted. If you give horseman this bonus then full horseman comp counters both the elephants and archers. So now TugD needs to add spears, at which point you add your own archers.

[BeALy69]

Loving playing Tughlaq!

2 issues:

Select all eco production buildings is a hot key I use to research tech but when it selects all worker elephants - it doesn’t show any technologies?

Select all cavalry selects worker elephants as well?

[Shneider177]

They gave ballista elephants +1 base dmg more over springalds which creates a new kill break point for ballista elephants vs Castle maa, compared to standard springalds vs Castle maa. Cool

However the unit doesn’t kite well? by design? Okay sure…

The unit sometimes gets stuck and doesn’t shoot (meant to write a bug report on this)

The units animation is not as pronounced as a standard springald so you can MISS the fact the attack was executed and mess up your pseudo kiting. It doesn’t have the displacement dust particles that standard springalds have.

The unit is too expensive to also be weak to crossbows and spears

(Note: spear crossbow composite kills everything unique about Tughlaq elephants maa ballista………. Basically you can blindly go into spearman crossbow and the civ has to focus on fielding the extra vanilla units..oh, TugD spears are fast producing and kill cav faster, so I guess you keep one uniqueness that isn’t directly countered by the comp above.)

The unit is pricy so it is worth the enemy focus firing on this unit.

For almost 3 times the cost and more than double the training time then it standard springalds it still ended up with the same DPS**???

IMO

Keep the high price and train time, double the DPS (base and bonus). The standard civ would have queued 2 springs in the time you made this one unit, and paid less for the 2 springs than you did for this one unit? Lose the heavy tag or give this unit some serious armor, 2/2 armor in castle on a slow moving cav unit that gets malice bonus damage vs everything?? What exactly does this unit do better than standard springs?? Imagine you get TOV, collateral damage, get the healer elephants zeal like buff maxed, the imp upgrade and ….2 STANDARD springalds still produce more DPS, cost less, and trains faster???

[Shneider177]

I took pen to paper and wrote down the unique rosters of each faction and Tughlaq Dynasty is the only unique roster that is completely countered or soft countered by JUST crossbow and spears??

Not Mali, Eng, Frenches, Delhi, China’s, Rus, Byz’s, Otto, Japan’s, Mongol’s, HoL, HRE’s, nor Abbasid’s…

Just TugD special roster can be completely negated with that simple castle comp, then you can use knights and horseman to just raid Tughlaq to death bc they can’t catch raids….

[Shneider177]

Raider Elephants have too many negatives

1. Trample animation lock and duration
2. movement speed until you get specifically House of Learning age 3 landmark and upgrade
3. takes extra damage from spears with no compensate
4. cannot catch raids
5. late game it’s the only light cav that gets counterd by cannons
6. Range units have zero civ bonuses so they struggle mass vs mass to support cav, esp raider elephants
7. b/c they take 2population per, late game you’re thrusted into an OTD connundrum (with all your elephants mind you).

[Croissantini]

I’m split on Raider Elephants. They’re genuinely good Knight alternatives, and can function as a Feudal Knight somewhat. Their trample effectively gives them an additional whole 8 DPS for 6 seconds if used smartly. I’ve found some scenarios where they work amazing.

For example. If you are diving their wood, gold, you can position two elephants on top of them and stagger the Trample activation. Because the Trample doesn’t stack, you can guarantee at least 50 damage in a very short amount of time. While Knights are great at diving, I’ve found Raider Elephants to be infinitely more destructive if the opponent is not paying attention. The key here though is that they’re different ways to “raid”. A Knight’s damage is frontloaded, and they’re more likely to guarantee picks. But, Raider Elephants? You can kill 10 villagers silently.

Combine that with the fact that they have +1 ranged armour with high health compared to a Knight and they become very durable units that can drive your opponent nuts. If you can go fast Castle, they even have +1 melee armour so you can quickly upgrade your Elephants in Castle to have 3 melee 6 ranged and that will be incredibly oppressive against a Feudal player.

While their attack rate sucks, it is compensated by really high base damage, and they are well beyond a significant armour threshold. The low attack rate doesn’t matter as much if you’re moving a lot anyways, so I much prefer high damage than high attack speed.

Combine these two facts and you can have a frontline with a decent amount of DPS for 6 seconds, in a scenario where you are forced to fight with the Raider Elephants. What’s key to remember here is that they are only effectively weak to Spears, unlike Knights who struggle against Crossbows. That means these units are quite annoying in Castle Age when people’s compositions aren’t geared towards Light Cavalry, and are instead trying to counter Heavy.

And hey, their healing tech also heals way more than what it says. I’m pretty sure it does percentage based healing. I’ve started selecting the Fort damage bonus to units healed by Healer Elephants, allowing me to further enhance their damage and make them true frontline units when I HAVE to fight.

But, I think your points are all valid. In fact, I struggle with a few things. Their Trample takes too long to activate, and I’m pretty sure it starts from the second it is activate (even as you are stunlocked). Their turn rate is abysmal and makes them very difficult units to maneuver, especially around Spears, who they dwarf. They also get hit by Brace much easier due to their extended size, and as you said, take more damage from Spears, making it maddening against for example Limitanei or Yuan Spears. The Raider Elephants also get run down by Knights without House of Wisdom, which makes it very easy for you to lose Elephants against Knight civilizations.

But, I think the factors that make them truly difficult to justify, is that doubled Horseman cost. I’m fine with 240 resources, but 200 food is hard to justify early on and makes some compositions not really possible. The second thing are traits they’ve seemingly inherited from War Elephants, they will get somewhat stunned when they actually hit someone with their Charge, locking them in place and making them easy pickings against Spears, or anyone, really.

Overall, I like this unit. I’m not a fan of them taking up 2 pop space, I think that is a lazy solution (why isn’t the Camel Archer 2 pop?) and I think they’ve designed them to be too closely linked to Horsemen, and would’ve maybe liked to see them simply replace both Knights and Horsemen as a Light Cav that is somewhat more robust.

[Shneider177]

I agree with making elephants cost more than one pop space BUT they should also go back and make all cav units, ALL, 2 pops too; that change is so overdue!! Otherwise make the cost/power whatever is making them decide what stuff should cost in population space CONSISTENT!

@Croissantini

But, I think the factors that make them truly difficult to justify, is that doubled Horseman cost. I’m fine with 240 resources, but 200 food is hard to justify early on and makes some compositions not really possible.

if they keep its 240 total resources you absolutely want it to be mostly food. You dont want a light cav to cost gold, I know HoL have gold cost but those cav are dirt cheap and its a way to (IMO) to keep that unit balanced making it cost an exposed resource. Food is the one thing you gather the fastest and get excessively. Also its exactly 2 horseman in cost (100f 20w x 2 ).

They should up the speed to 1.7 speed…. this way House of Learning isn’t mandatory yet getting the speed upgrade now makes you as fast as every other light cav*; and this allows you to run away from knights?

[Shneider177]

TOV

SO I’ve played a million TOV games so far and I think the 15% might be strong enough, but we need TOV to be a stable plz .

The timing on a fast feudal with tughlaq is huge, if we had an instant stable we’d essentially be French school of cavalry.

AS is I can get a sub 4min feudal and que 2 raiders back to back after slamming down a stable with 4 vils; that about a 4:15 raider que, 4:40 trained then traverse 65+ tiles @1.60 tiles per second puts me in the enemies base by 5:20??? The enemy will need TC fire or 2 spears to have their vils NOT go idle or worse! So imagine TOV is a stable?? It would grant you 15s saved and 150 on production building , that’s huge momentum!

I’m changing my opinion on elephant raiders…. if they remove the animation lock of the TRAMPLE; raiders will be as broken as feudal knights?! I WELCOME IT!

[Shneider177]

ALRIGHT…

time to share the secrets

Tughlaq can play like delhi (in a way). Delhi’s power actually comes from ultra aggression into free upgrades. Although the upgrades take a while to research the idea is to keep sufficient pressure where the enemy needs to field army and therefore has less resources to put into upgrades themselves OR they have’ll to play on the back foot until their early upgrades digs them out of a hole!

Well Tughlaq can be played the same exact way! B/c of the 5% bonus rate, you can age faster than all factions except China’s and KT; if you forgo your fast upgrades but instead pull a Vlad or MSN, and go full army (starring raiders) you’ll force the enemy to constrict! TOV raiders can beat any standard feudal unit 1 v 1 with french knight as the only exception* (u can actually kill these units too if you avoid the charge dmg/bonus; or you can outright kill feudal knights if you get the 20HP fort buff). The idea is like massing Ghazi Raiders, it’s a tempo/numbers game!

[Shneider177]

This 2 population thing on Raider Elephants is frying me…

But of course military units should cost more population, it’s the AOE4 way of ultra power control?! But… 2 pop on Raider Elephants? I mean Raider Elephants are in some way almost as strong as an early Knight?! But … knights are only 1 population?

I’m agree to Raider elephants costing 2 population. But I also think more units need to cost 2 pop (all heavy cav and range cav…) Riddari and Cataphtacts are each single population units?? Manguadi, Horse Archers, Camel Archers are also 1 population units???