Usac’s Civ Crafting Brainstorms Part 5 - Tai

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Anyway let’s start. The power of Tai, or Thai, or those people in the Siam area of the map.

They were migratory, settled in this Siamese area and had many empires. The Thai start with the Lavo kingdom. And follows with the Sukothai and the Haripinchi and the Ayutthaya which lasted until after the end. I’d explain more had I the time.

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Tai (450 on) - A defensive and Elephant Civ

  • Builds the Storehouse instead of 3 dropsites. Storehouses act like an all-purpose drop site and has all said research techs provided it’s available to the Tai tech tree. It costs 100w and is otherwise unremarkable but building two counts as two separate buildings for Feudal Age unlocking. Or I could make it so you need only 1 to unlock Feudal Age button.

Historically speaking, the Tai people were migratory. Fleeing supposedly from somewhere in China, all the way to Thailand! Nomadic peoples settle hard! As an eco bonus, this may seem a bit situational, but that time your gold and berries are next to each other or your wood is right next to gold, etc. You can potentially save more than a Japanese player if you play shrewdly.

  • Buildings +1/1 and +1 building armor per age. +3/3/3 In Imp or 4 if starting Dark.

Just a way to keep out your elephant neighbors. The Thai cities were hard to breach. Just ask Burmese attempts.

  • +70food/stone/food when hitting Feudal, +125 hitting Castle and +200 hitting Imperial.

The wood isn’t the most historical bonus, but there’s enough jungle about. Also lots of rice, but not nearly as much food as Ethiopia. Had to fit a rice bonus in somewhere! It’s not the most original bonus but it’s very functional. And extra wood and resources? That’s very functional.

  • Elephants +2 damage vs Standard buildings per age (+4)

The ability to have King Naersuam march through and end the Toungoo empire in 1599 (this is where the Burmese timeline ends in game)

Team Bonus: Elephants and Scout Cav line +3 armor vs. cavalry attacks.

When you have the rare elephant teammate. Keep in mind this effects all elephants including Ballista, Archer, Siege and War and any others I’m forgetting. +3 vs elephant damage is nice but most anti-cav still have massive bonuses!

Missing Techs

  • Barracks: Eagle Scout, Arson
  • Archery Range: Elite Elephant Archer, Cavalry Archer
  • Stable: Hussar, Paladin, Elite Steppe Lancer, Camel
  • Siege Workshop: Battering Ram, Bombard Cannon, Siege Elephant
  • Blacksmith: Blast Furnace
  • University: Heated Shot, Keep, Siege Engineers
  • Dock: Heavy Demo Ship, Fast Fire Ship
  • Monastery: Faith, Heresy, Theocracy
  • Economy: Stone Shaft Mining, Town Patrol

*What an interesting tech tree it has. Elephant Archers without Elites? That hurts. Same for not having the Siege Elephant upgrade. But there’s a tech to help both units get around this lack of upgrade.

Hand Cannons will defend your Battle elephants quite well. You also can see both Faith AND Heresy missing. That matters, especially without Hussars and even more especially when those non-Hussars are 2 damage behind other Hussars. I might give them back but being hyper monk weak is a design choice.

You can probably squish monks and archers with Siege Onagers, this is the only Battle Elephant civ that gets them after all. This can get expensive.

UU: Royal Elephant - A uniquely statted, defensive elephant whose Ngao (hooked longspear) skewers Unique Units and topples Elephants. Hits hard but has melee accuracy issues. If it misses, then the trample also misses. Expensive and lacks Monastery tech support. Bring Light Cav.

Royal Elephant Stats Elite
Hit Points 420 510
Armor (Elephant, Cavalry, UU) 2/2 (+6 cav, +5 ele) 3/2 (+7 cav, +6 ele)
Attack 18 (+6 vs UU, +17 vs Elephant, +7 vs cavalry) 23 (+10 vs UU, +24 Elephant, +10 vs cavalry)
Range Melee
Line of Sight 5 5
Accuracy 95% 95%
Rate of Fire 2.2 2.2
Movement .7 .7
Cost 180f,80g
Train Time 31s 29s
Elite Upgrade 800f,700g 65s

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This unit has… problems. Its stats look amazing. 2/2 on a unit with that much HP is nothing to sneeze at. It’s not weak. Far from it. It’s got the durability to tank, to topple and is just all around not awful. That said, it does move a bit slow. Compounded with a lack of Heresy and Faith? Not the best fate to have. If you focus on this unit, you build your supportive military to dish damage while enemies focus fire upon it.

Castle UT: Irregulars - Can train swordsmen and Skirmishers (Maybe also Hand Cannons??) at the Storehouse. Swordsmen +2 damage.

Also not uniquely Thai, but the area was known for not the most regular of combat. This will be vital as your elephant army will likely need these units to cut down their most common threats. The swordsmen +2 damage is because no Blast Furnace. If too soon for infantry damage I could add it to the imperial UT.

Cost: 500f/800w 65s

Imperial UT: Ngao – Elephant units +1 range. Also increases trample/splash radius. Cost: 1400f/700g 40sec

Not uniquely Tai. On the other hand, Tusk Swords, Howdahs, Mahouts, and Chatras aren’t unique to those civs who have them ‘uniquely’ either! Still, +1 range to your elephant spears is a good thing. It might enable you to consider Ele Archers even without the Elite Upgrade. Now you see why they lack Blast Furnace and the Imp upgrade to the regional elephant techs, well that and their UU’s 22 Elite base damage. The Elephant Rams have serious trample and building splash thats bigger than the .5 of capped rams (as this is 1 instead of .5)

The Thai army is illusory vast. It has decent Halbs and champs, full Skirm and Hand Cannon and access to Siege Onagers and BBC and BBT. These units can all probably find use. The trick is making sure you can get to a point where you can trample everything with +1 range elephants! This bonus is no joke as it even effects your Armored and Elephant Archers despite not getting their imperial upgrades.

The ability to rock early game Thai is the ability to know how to get as much value out of a single Storehouse. Do you build 1 tile further from gold or wood so you can save 100w to get both? This might be a noob trap, but getting all your resources right up against the wood line never hurts or just 2 nodes nearby is fantastic time saver.

Then when you age up you should have enough stone to go on a tower based offensive. Late game it’s a very gold and food heavy civ, but all the wood saved on drop site diversity goes a long way towards farming. Sadly no farming bonus but age up food hopefully helps! Being able to train armies at 100w buildings is not a bad thing especially saving up to 75w/15seconds per building. Arbs are completely out of the question! Best of luck in Thai encounters!

In truth not sure if all the bonuses are of balance. In the late 4v4 mass trade, infinite resource era, this civ could be terrifying, but getting there? It wishes it had faster units, although it works fine with full crossbow or knights and extra wood/food to use them well. The stone focus might promote early tower.

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This is a good bonus, IMO a must have for some new civ given that the OG devs chose not to make one for all civs.

This seems to overlap a little with the Goth bonus as well as any future infantry focused aggressive (e.g. Vandals) type civ. What about just giving their elephants more damage vs. buildings?

I like this, but wonder if +2 is too much when stacked with something like the Bengali resistance. (Halbs would still perform well, but this might make Skirms unable to properly counter EAs). I think +1 would still be a worthwhile bonus where applicable.

I don’t know that any kind of RNG dependence is a great plan for non-monk units. I get that it’s a clever way of trying to balance with a new mechanic, but the result is a unit whose performance is always going to be worse than it appears to be (just made a thread about this with BBTs missing shots). Also don’t love stealing the Samurai’s thunder, although being tanky + weak to halbs may be a different enough role.

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It’s about as random as an Arambai or any other unit that may have similar mechanic. It’s also not super rare. For comparison, Archers have 80 accuracy. To be fair, I could up the accuracy to 80 (85) if this is too low.

I also don’t see this civ stepping on Goth toes unless you see this civ as an infantry civ? I could maybe just take out the free aspect. But certainly wouldn’t give this bonus to Vandals.

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Right, but in both those cases there is an upside. Arambai’s low accuracy is actually good because it makes them more effective vs. massed units, and archer’s accuracy gets upgraded with thumb ring/ballistics, which are must-haves for long-term archer play. Melee units missing at crucial moments (e.g. the beginning of a fight) could swing a fight against them, and I can see players becoming frustrated with this unit/mechanic because in order to be balanced, it needs inflated stats to make up for how it misses 1/5 times, but its performance on the large scale will be worse than it appears.

Free Arson makes it as good/better than Goths when it comes to destroying buildings in early game, regardless of other bonuses (e.g. man at arms rush, which is viable for plenty of non-infantry civs). Also, if it’s not an infantry civ, why does it need free Arson (as opposed to just giving elephant units an arson equivalent)?

Agree to disagree, pretty sure every civ design I’ve ever seen for Vandals gives them free Arson.

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I could up the power, but this is a matter of the player deciding to take the risk. In competitive pokemon, low accuracy moves aren’t banned but moves that raise evasion are banned for a reason. It takes the control away from the player. Even if this unit does miss, it is incredibly durable as a frontline beef while Ele Archers do splash damage behind it. Still I gave it slightly more accuracy, more damage and reduced gold cost a little.

I’ll look into this.

Not here.

Not here either

Nor here

And you know mine doesn’t even focus infantry.

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That’s nice. A great versatile eco bonus.

Solid.

100 wood is too little, Dravidians have 200. However you attach another res, 50 food is too little to be worth the gimmick, I’d just make it +50 stone, +100 stone, +200 stone, per each Age accordingly.
Or else it’ll end about like a poor weaker hybrid of Ethiopians and Dravidians.
You want it to be unique and meaningful.

Cant be used, Goths already have it, just as Celts have free Squires, Franks have free Bloodlines, Cumans have free Husbandry. It doesnt have to be literate to be the same thing.
I’d just give Elephants directly bonus damage against buildings if you really want it. Though considering the new Siege Elephant - It’s kinda an over-used feature.

Way too situational to be a Team Bonus.
Gurjaras bonus is even less situational.
Too niche to be elegant at this point.

Imposible to be implemented nicely. The Storehouse already has a ridiculous amount of buttons in it, 1 tech for wood, 2 for farms, 2 for mining, It’s already 5 which is too much and you want to add on top of it 2 to 3 units/buttons?
Not AOE.

Nice, though just like EVERY Elephant tech, its conceptually a flaw, it always ends up being an over-luxurious tech for some fantasy post-boom situations. Why? Because Elephants are expensive to begin with, yet so counterable, the investment into them barely has a place in the game. (again, unless it’s a TG BF style for the most part, which is not quite vanilla AOE)
So you basically do the same mistakes our Developers did and still do with the new civs. No wonder why we just dont see Battle Elephants in normal games.

That’s practically a whole War Elephant level kind of an unit to a civ that already has a kinda fully upgraded Battle Elephant, this does not make any sense, this unit serves no strategic role. Plus serves no diversity.
The miss chance feature is the only element that brings uniqueness to the table, however has no degree of playability, 85%/90% really? What does it really mean? basically 10% less damage than written?

Overall you had two nice civ bonus ideas, besides that the civ is unwrothy of being implemented, sorry, it’s far from being a well rounded design, low on playabilitiness

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I’m pretty sure it’s only 1 for mills.

So the buttons would look like this.

OOOO
XXX

Top row is the techs, second row is the units. Or reverse it. Either way, the grid is, unless I’m mistaken, 5 by 3 tiles worth of spaces for icons. Remember, you don’t upgrade these units here, you simply make

It’s very much a tank. While the Battle Elephant and Elephant Archer, both with Ngao are more frail, this thing has some elephant resistances, which helps it have some identity. It’s a very risk vs reward unit, much like the Arambai who hits hard but can miss 1v1. That said vs non spears, non-anti-elephants and monks, this unit should be a solid frontline. Even with a little accuracy issue, you can still force enemies to consider not training their UU or their

You’re underestimating its value. It’s not just Battle Elephants. It’s for the UU, rams and Ele archers too, and you start a scenario with them, Ballista and war elephants. The reason EA and AE don’t get their Imperial upgrades is because +1 range and splash can be pretty scary. So even if all you do is infantry meat Shield flood with Ele Archers behind, you can actually do some real splash damage and the rams can obliterate rows of turtle wall outs.

I also like a progressing bonus resource per age. But saving pure bigger Stone only per age for a different civ. There’s a big world with tons of civs left.

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My bad, I thought I had seen this more apart from my own previous suggestions of such a bonus (also thought there were more specific threads here on Vandals). Even so I maintain that this is more of a Goth overlap and/or would be better suited to a civ like the Vandals/Alans (if anyone) than the Thai. Kind of like how no civ has been given free Squires since that substantially overlaps with the Celt bonus (despite their bonus being better).

There are a lot of characteristics and mechanics of other types of games that I don’t think lend themselves well to AoE2 for various reasons. It just seems like the lack of 100% accuracy on a melee unit would be seen more as a liability. Yes, people take risks in AoE2, but they’re almost exclusively strategic risks rather than RNG risks (even monks have min/max conversion rates to moderate the randomness). Anyway, it’s your party of course, but my gut feeling is that a lot of people would find this odd; whereas most UU defining mechanics serve as a buff, the unique gimmick of this unit is a nerf towards its otherwise impressive damage output.

I agree.

I think it’s a fine TB; there’s no standard for how strong a TB should be, and many TBs are not terribly strong or just don’t get used in any meaningful way (e.g. dock TBs on a land map, Genitours for American/no bloodline allies, Burmese or Porto on Explored/Shared Exploration settings) or are just weak or too situational (e.g. extra Los on units, faster monasteries). A few TBs are decent, and only maybe 2-3 are quite strong.

Yeah it would be trivially easy to have all the mill/camp techs in one building, you can do this easily in the scenario editor.

Not sure how apt the Arambai comparison is given that nobody makes Arambai (or anything) for duels, and as mentioned earlier, their low accuracy is a net buff when in large groups/fighting large groups, whereas it is a weakness with this unit to mitigate their otherwise overwhelming stats.

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You must have an auto-reseeding button.

That’s right but still counter-intuitive for the average gamer, it has to be QWER. Very complicated, I’d rather just design a new unique tech.

There is no such role in AOE, it doesnt serve an aggressive purpose and therefore can’t be utilized into a win condition, there is no Tank in AOE. The most similar thing there is- is a “Meat Shield” type of units, which is mostly Hussars and Halbs due to their low cost.
This unit is expensive so I dont see the reason to even make it, just like War Elephant, it barely has any strategic role.

I said it’s nice, It’s strong, I didn’t doubt it’s value, all Battle Elephants tech are legitimately strong, the issue with them is the whole concept, techs for luxurious units are a far niche for BF games, nothing that can really be fully played in normal games. Do not do the same mistakes that the Devs did. The only reason Malay and Khmer Elephants are kinda viable is the fact they have passive bonuses.
Expensive units need passive bonuses, cheap units would rather have those luxurious techs.

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The fact we have overly situational TB doesnt mean we need more of them, besides that, this TB is the most situational in the game. They first have to have Elephants in their tech tree, which limits it heavily, and then have to actually create them, which is a niche unit to begin with, this doesnt really increase their viability, and lastly they need to actually face either Pike or Camels, which is also not the optimal way to deal with these units any ways, Monks/Skirm are just better.
That’s by far the 1st niche TB in the game.

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American civs can actually all benefit from Genitours, because they have UTs that benefit skirms. Just saying, even if you wouldn’t actually ever use them.

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Now it’s elephants and scout cav. For Scout cav its only +1, this will be meaningful in Feudal for sure as some situations it will mean one more spear strike is needed.

Most notably, Scout cav with Bloodlines and Horse Armor vs a Spear without Forging will now survive 4 hits with 1 hp left.

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It’s much nicer now! I’d make it +3 flat for both of them, or rather +4, which would make them a little bit more meaningful. +3 would make it noticable while having just bloodlines, and +4 similarly to Sicilians just worse.

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Good lord this is a nitpicky as it gets

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But he has a point.stupid word limit.

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If the point is “it looks dumb” then its a pretty dumb point

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Sorry for not being positively overhyped as you’d expect from the average American in a social dynamic.
I wouldn’t bother to give him a detailed honest critic if it was a horrible design, I believe he could adjust and rework some of ideas in order to achieve a better result.

(American here)

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I don’t know how accurate those Thai epic movies are, but I’d love to see the elephant cannons and Portuguese mercenaries.

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Once again, I don’t think overlapping is a big deal. If the effect is obtained in a different way or if it’s unused, then it should be fine.
Bengalis, dravidians, vikings, berbers already overlap with regen; it just affects different units and is obtained as a civ bonus or unique tech.
While teutons, malians, burmese already have the same kind of bonus. It just affects different stat categories.

If it’s fun, just let your imagination go wild.

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Upon reflection, I still like the versatility of thr Storehouse as both a general drop-site and a late game military training facility.

However I can see why people dont like the melee accuracy miss mechanic… but I want it to stay… with a caveat. When you “miss” you do full damage as trample and ignore all armor and damage resistances to your attacks. If thats not sufficient compensation. A missed attack also heals for some % of your total health which can be a significant number when you have hundreds of HP.

I’m happy with the rest of the design and this might be a civ to miss on Gambesons. Doesnt matter much i dont think.

Okay updated thought maybe they should get Gambesons so you get more encouragement to train irregulars

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