[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Agema

No. It's the size stat that is there for a reason. The reason for the graphics is they make everything look prettier: you could do the battles with ASCII symbols representing everything (like Nethack) and get as much information out of it. Similarly WRT the sphinx, I know it's a statue in-game. My point is that the Egypt statue is not reflective of what sphinx has to be: there are statues and bas-reliefs of sphinxes from India to Europe, many (all?) of which are much smaller.

What I'm getting at is that I think people are applying too much logic and reality to it all. It's a game. It's about the interplay between various statistics, attributes and effects, where the designers put a lot of time and effort into making it work. Hence if elephants should be nerfed to size 5 you should make the case with whether they are unbalanced or not.

When you start basing arguments on the fact you can fit more than 3 humans into the area an elephant takes up, or that a mammoth was 20% larger than an elephant is in real life, guessing that Niefel giants were supposed to be 15, 20 or 30 feet tall according to Nordic myth, or that the in-game graphical dragon has 28% more pixels than the in-game graphical elephant, it's all missing the point.

No, I think it is you who is missing the point. For one, saying the graphics are just there to look pretty is ludicrous. They are a massive boon to play - you can at a glance tell what sort of unit it is, what weapons and armour it might have, even guess at resistances and other attributes. Of course you might want to know more, in which case you can look over the stats, but to have /just/ the stats would make the game virtually impenetrable.

Realism can serve a similar purpose. When you call a weapon a sword or a short bow or 'fire breath' people immediately have some idea of what it will do. They can still go and look at the stats (which are 'hidden' for a /reason/) if they want to know exactly how it works, but believe me people would enjoy the game far less if a unit called a 'knight' with a heavily armoured powerful looking graphic was actuall a hoburg with a pitchfork. According to your logic there wouldn't be a problem there - It would still be just as pretty, in terms of gameplay people would only need to look at the stats to know. Yet it's clearly absurd and counterintuitive.

You're also putting far too much emphasis on the design decisions of the devs. I'm willing to bet KO doesn't even remember why krakens are whatever size they are. He's said numerous times he isn't even very concerned about balance and he's often very surprised at how things actually work in terms of gameplay. I'm not criticising him here, it's just the way he is.

People have already, many, many times discussed the balance of elephants and tramplers more generally. When people talk about size and graphics and so on, they are considering the other effects a change in size has - besides graphics. Whether it will make the game less intuitive, or has a 'wrong' feeling about it. That's precisely the sort of thing KO thinks about, not so much balance and stats. He primarily wants an elephant to be an elephant (as he envisions), not unit X to do Y or Nation A to be stronger than nation B at point C in the game.