The Most Economical Option: Spearline or Battle Elephants
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It appears that the best counter to rock-paper-scissors is the spearline versus the battle elephant.
A fully upgraded halberdier can deal 66 damage to a fully upgraded elite battle elephant.
This makes them ineffective against most civilizations that have access to decent halbs or pikemen.
Even early on, two or three monks can render them useless, and later on, even weak units can deal 66 damage to them.
In a scenario editor test of 7 Frank Paladin and 17 Halberdiers versus 5 Burmese Elite Battle Elephant and 14 Burmese Champions, the Franks won easily, even though the Burmese had extra armor and attack.
This suggests that the battle elephant is best used as a surprise unit or a finisher when you are already winning.
Elephants are like paladins: a power unit that is supposed to punch through almost everything without necessarily being cost effective.
However, elephants are slow and tank virtually all units bar halbs whereas paladins are fast and countered by camel units as well.
The thing is, when you punch through without being cost effective, you need to do damage immediately after that.
Elephants are quite slow so they can’t raid like paladins can.
Instead, they need some serious support.
All of the above leads to the conclusion that elephants are more of a team game unit.
Your allies can support your push and take advantage of it with siege and DPS units even if you can’t afford those in conjunction with 40 fully upgraded Battle Elephants.
As for halbs, they are designed to be cost effective, not population effective.
Almost all of the units they counter can actually 1v1 them, with pikes being even worse.
This is why punching through can actually work.
It’s also why the spearman line is ineffective on its own and needs support from siege, archers, monks, fortifications, etc.
Yes, they are a bit of a finisher unit.
They also beat nearly every unit cost efficiently except monks and halb.
Whereas other units have more soft counters.
Thus they need to be hard countered by their counters.
Donno if elephants could use a slight buff, but they are also close to being oppressive as they once were.
To be honest the halb bonus damage was created where there were only Persian War Elephants in the game, and is balanced around countering those.
So it feels a little excessive against the weaker battle elephants.
Maybe it could do with being adjusted downwards a bit against those, to somewhere between the anti-knight and anti-WE damage?
this is a result of the game having to be balanced around ultra camp fest walled up maps, and the rest of the maps everyone plays
changing the pop on BE would also make it easier to buff them, and not end up with the BE spam of old days, but still have a viable unit
but even without said pop change, there’s definitely room for tweaking.
eg giving them additional elephant class armour (i think at minimum it was something like +4/6 is needed to tank 1 more hit from pikes/halbs), so anything with bonus vs ele does less damage
Elephants also can’t run away from spears so they must take the engagement regardless of how bad it is.
Which is a very big difference from cav
Elephants do fill a few roles like:
1.
Basically better rams, stables cost 175 wood, and battle eles don’t get killed by every melee unit, so in an all in fc push they’re pretty unstoppable.
2.
Incredibly population efficient, in a game with low pop cap or with lots of resources, elephants are extremely useful because despite being countered so hard they are statswise better than every thing else
3.
Team games, for example a khmer or burmese player can go for elephants while their archer using teammate goes for arbelests, the elephants defeat everything in melee and against halbs they can run while the archers kill halbs
4.
Sudden switching, if your opponent has no anti elephant units you can create a few and kill a bunch of things, Vietnamese can do this well as nobody in gonna invest into pikes against archers.
the best use for them 1v1 is as Malay as part of the a combo with xbows.
They are cheap enough to make 3-5 and provide a giant meat shield in front of your xbows.
They are countered by pikes and monks, something that your own crossbows counter hard.
And they also hard counter counters to your xbows: skirms and mangos.
In case enemy goes knights, they soak up damage while xbows do killing.
Even if the knights get on top of your xbows, as long as the eles are there as well, they soak up lots of damage and even dish out some damage of their own.
Also like to use them with Burmese: You build literally one and send to attack right after you hit castle age.
Your opponent will go heavily into pikes/monks and then you arrive with with 30 longswords….
The damage of halb is definitely too high vs battle elephants.
The bonus was created at first due to war elephants, units with 450/600 HP.
Then later when battle eles with about half the hp were added, they still are taking the same amount of dmg as war ele, presumably to not be too OP.
I think some small reduction could be nice at least, but could be tricky to implement.
By the time you’re at halb you should always expect the opponent to have a two unit comp (at least).
The thing about playing elephants is, unless you’re ~~stupid~~ inexperienced, you know the danger and you look to get around it.
And even then you can still win in the right numbers and then there’s elephants in the eco and it doesn’t matter how cost effective the trades you’re taking are, the game is slipping away from you.
So it’s not as straightforward as you think, but it does have an impact on the popularity of elephants (n.b.
Bengalis resist both conversion and bonus damage and Malay are so cheap they can chuck them away anyway, that’s why you’re more likely to see them.)
I would like to see a cheap, generic technology added for civs that need it, granting elephants 15%-20% bonus damage resistance.
I guess pure battle elephant is only viable against civs that don’t have halbs.
If you have ranged units behind, that changes things a bit.
I don’t agree.
Malay and Bengalis elephants both beat halbs once you take into account the population limit, Khmer and vietnamese aren’t too far off.
Not to mention the difference of halbs getting slaughtered by ranged units while elephants are tanky.
Elephants are ofc more difficult to make and sustain, and they are perhaps still very slightly too nerfed even after the recent -10f change but I don’t think they are too bad against halbs at least.
Sure halbs are a counter, but its not like its paladin vs skirms, or teutonic knight vs halbs. – I certianly perfer the current situation to when in the past you could just mindlessly spam elephants and slaughter halbs as they were so OP.
Let’s look to history.
Elephants were used as the ultimate shock troops.
They’re meant to surprise the enemy with a strong force, but they’re not that great if you’re prepared.
If your opponent knows they’re coming, chances are you’re not gonna do too great.
Elephants need support from either infantry or archers to work.
If you’re using infantry support, the comp falls apart in the face of micro pike-archer, since archers can target the infantry directly.
If you use archer support, it loses to knights, since they can focus archers and retreat when low.
They don’t make sense as a unit.
If you use them, it has to be either because your opponent went full archers and mixed in skirms to counter yours, or because you really like elephants.
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