Forces them to boom? 11
Their current exco bonus makes it easier to get their eco tecs, which, you know, is pretty important. It looks like it isn’t much, but in early feudal having 125 extra wood is a really good thing (it means either more walling, faster military buildings or a couple of extra farms early feudal: this things do matter)
And to op: the last thing the rattan archers need is to be more similar to the plumed archers and to be cheaper. They are already one of the strongest archer UU in the game, especially in composition, no need to make them broken
So you want to make Rattan Archer a Plumed Archer, lets just make Teutonic Knight similar to Berserk and the game is easily balanced.
This game needs diversity.
This bonus just sanding them up to become a slightly better meta civ, that’s easy, you can give every weak civ bonus like this, it doesnt contribute to the civ’s identity not strategic possibilities.
Besides that, in order to achieve the most from this bonus one is required to boom, that how this kind of eco bonuses are being utilized to fullest, just like indians vill discount. The more upgrades (vills in case of indians, farms in the case of teutons) the more value, unlike Malay/Vikings/Malians/Huns bonuses. Simple math.
Done some testing in the scenario editor for the new +100hp battle elephants, I’m getting them as having a:
60% (was 49%) efficiency against halberdiers ( 38 or 2280 res vs 20 or 3800 res)
120% (was 105%) efficiency against paladins ( 34 or 4590 res vs 20 or 3800 res)
79% (was 67%) efficiency against CA pikes (50 or 3000 res vs 20 or 3800 res)
My gut feeling is they are still fundamentally too weak to halberdier to make them ever worth while. Sure there are some niche situations where it works but they are few and far between
For reference bear in mind that Paladin have a 69% efficiency against Halbs and a 91% against CA pikes
Interesting data. I’ve had a few games against Turks where I was able to spam elephants and their spearmen could not counter it. They do have habe camels, but seemingly not a great option either. I’d be curious to see the stats on both those matchups.
Vietnamese Elephants lack blast furnace, it means halbs get one “free” hit before dying compared to all other elite battle elephants.
With the old Chatras the 50 extra hp weren’t enough to offset it (halb hit does 66dmg after armor), now they technically can tank it.
A FU Paladin (not teuton or frank) dies in 5 halb hits, FU elite elephant dies in 5 hits, no wonder their efficiency against halbs is lower, since Paladins cost 135 res vs 190 of elephants.
Vietnamese now is a bit better, dying in 7 hits. Still a bad trade though.
Camels shouldn’t trade as good as they do against Paladins, because differently from halbs, they don’t do any extra damage to elephants (except the base bonus damage vs cavalry).
So basically they do the same damage that they do against Paladins against targets that have almost 80% more hp. Sure elephants have 1 less armor and attack slightly slower (2 vs 1.9 of paladins), but I don’t think it’s that meaningful.
Malay EBE should even be a bad trade for camels, not just worse than Paladins.
I like 3, start w 100w and maybe even get 50 more wood for advancing to the next age.
Rattans are already strong so don’t really need a buff, but reducing attack delay would make them more fun to use which is good, and wouldn’t make them OP imo, so I wouldn’t mind doing that as well.
My personal take (i.e. subjective and likely biased by my own play style) is that they don’t really have that much of an edge over other archer civs (most archer civs get very good bonuses as well) and that they have 0 advantages vs knight civs and as such in castle age they just fall off until they hit imp / post-imp where they do have quite strong compositions.
I think there are a few angles that can be taken to address this (i.e. I’m suggesting 1 of the following not all 3):
play into their anti archer role more and give them a stronger bonus vs archers (this risks making them oppressive against archer civs however).
provide some other small buff (either eco or military) that makes them slightly more competitive vs knight civs (care needs to be taken to not make them oppressive in post-imp though).
re-work elephants to be more viable in 1v1s. In theory its a great unique-ish unit that provides novelty to the civ. However its current design makes it very very niche in 1v1s and doesn’t address any of their main weaknesses.
Would the following be reasonable for making elephants more viable?
So I still argue that the biggest obstacle is that halbs are too efficient against them. However it’s not just the efficiency it’s also the fact that they kill them so quickly that its not really viable (at least in 1v1s) to properly support them or protect them from the halbs.
So I am wondering if it would make sense to keep the halbs efficiency against them the same but to slow the fight down so that support units have more chance to actually protect the elephants. I.e. I am thinking that we reduce the damage of halbs vs elephants but in turn give halbs bonus armour against elephants, this can be constructed so that they still trade with the same resource efficiency but are simply taking longer to do so.
This would in theory make hybrid compositions in 1v1s like eles + skirms more practical.
To put some numbers to this, at the moment it takes halbs 128 hits to bring down 20 Viet eles whilst it takes paladins 600 hits to bring them down. This means at the equivalence point (see my above post) halbs kill elephants ~300% faster than Paladins (factoring in reload time). I feel like my proposed change would allow elephants to live up to their “meat shield” role without breaking how efficient halbs are against them.
I like this idea, but there is a risk that make them too good at “tanking” halberdiers so that an elephant+skirm composition became unbeatable.
Of course, with little tuning it could work
But after thinking about your proposed changes, how about buffing vietnamese skirms? This way, they would be better against both archer civs and halberdiers.
Maybe giving the elite skirm upgrade for free as a power spike in early castle could be enough. This was proposed before, and rejected because it is a huge power spike, but after seeing your data I think it wouldn’t make vietnamese oppressive in castle age against archer civs.
Also, this helps to tech into imperial skirm faster.
I mean, Viper has said that he thinks Vietnamese are very good, and that they didn’t even need the Chatras buff, which ensures us that they are being picked, not because of limited options, but because they are actually considered good by (some) players.
I think it has more to do with top players making better use of temporary advantages than the average pub (which has been my opinion on them for almost a year now, call it confirmation bias) which is to be expected. In that regard, it would make sense to see it picked at the top level even though it underperforms for pubs.
Hard to draw too much in the way of conclusions due to the super wide confidence intervals but it does stand out to me that Vietnamese are not performing as highly as the Pros seem to think it does.
I’m not sure if you were replying to my last message or the one from JokerPenguin. If it was mine the >1750 group is the top 2% of the player base, at this point I really struggle to believe the “they don’t know how to use it” argument
(following graphs from 1v1 “open” maps).
