Qm said

[Xietor]

"As for 'rush-breaker' units in general, they are basically the same thing as rush units- almost exclusively big tramplers or bless units. If there is something that needs to be fixed here, it's that such a small subsection of units can utterly dominate the early game."

A very good point. As most nations have the ability to implement some type of strategy if they can survive an early rush. But how can you achieve that to which QM alludes?


After some thought, here are 2 possible solutions:

1. Limit the max bless of any unit to 9/4. While some units will still be very very good at 9/4, at least they will not have the benefit of the second "9" bless.

2. Tramplers- eliminate the morale boost of combining tramplers with high morale troops. Cap the trampler's morale
at 8, and do not allow it to be buffed. Make trampling the double edged sword it is intended to be.

In many games I see Elephants fight to the very end, their morale buffed by being combined with some slow moving but high morale infantry, all of which are alive.

[llamabeast]

1. This would make a good house rule. I think it's one I'll consider using in future.

2. I agree, actually this is a really good idea I think. This isn't something we can do ourselves, unfortunately. It would be great if the devs could add a unit property that means they can't be mixed with other types of unit in a single group (or the game always considers them to be in a separate group to any other unit types the player may have placed in the same group). This property could then be added to elephants to prevent boosting their morale. It would also be easy to put in their flavour text. "Once panicked, elephants become hard to control and cannot be steadied even if their riders remain confident of victory", or some such.

I like this idea because it leaves the elephants being powerful, but gives them some weakness that can be targetted. Spells such as Panic and Frighten could then easily drive them off (which seems reasonable).

Of course in the meantime we could have a house rule that elephants can't be mixed in with other units, but it would be a bit hard to enforce.

[Kristoffer O]

Hmm. Not a bad idea. Perhaps if animals where unmixable?

Hmm, that would make summon animals a bit of a bother though.

Unless animals were mixable with other animals. But the lion elephant corps feels a bit ridiculous

[CUnknown]

I'm not completely convinced that the early game is broken, especially if the CB Scales mod is used. If you take a large blessing, you're paying the price with an imprisoned pretender and/or crappy scales. I'm against an artifical capping of blessings -- it doesn't add viable strategies, it removes them. Of course, if you're just taking about a house rule, go for it, but if you're talking about something you want to see in a patch or for Dom 4, I'd be against it.

As far as the elephants go -- it seems to me that a 100 gold unit should be pretty devastating. And they are, so I don't quite see the problem. If you're saying that they are too good for their cost, then the simple solution is to raise the cost (in gold or maybe resources). Perhaps to 120 gold, maybe even 150 if you think they're really broken. We shouldn't be making rules that apply only to a specific subset of units. The rules of the game should apply to all units, imo.

At 150 gold, elephants would be so expensive to employ that they had -better- be really effective, or no one would use them.

[llamabeast]

I don't think anything so dramatic as "the early game is broken" either, far from it. But a few things can be frustrating for players. An elephant rush is an example - if you are Ulm or some other race with no obvious defences, then the elephants will kill you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Even if your army is worth twice as much gold as theirs.

Now I think it would be a shame to make elephants less good, or to make them cost too much more, because they are mainly good fun as they are. The trouble is that although elephants have a built-in and well-designed weakness - low morale and the tendency to trample your own troops once broken - that weakness can be avoided by what's essentially an exploit, that is mixing the elephants with high-morale infantry. The fact that that works doesn't really make thematic sense.

Kristoffer - I was thinking the same thing about animals. Perhaps you could have a new property "hard-to-control animals" or "easily-panicked animals" (obviously come up with a much better name!), which applies to elephants, but not to lions.

[Kristoffer O]

The problem is not one elephant or 5 elephants, but 50 of them.

I haven't seen this, but this seems to be what it is about. When you pass a critical mass of elephants there is nothing that can stop them and they become worth far more than the 150 you buy them for. Especially since they trample every routing unit, effectively eating up the entire enemy army, regardless of size.

Elephants are supposed to break easily, and devastate the own army if they do. But if you mix them with high morale heavy infantry, they do not rout as easily. This is thematically unsound: elephants that doesn't rout because they know that their brave human friends way back dont care if some of the elephants die or get poked by spears.

So in short: Elephants are fine at their cost as long as you don't get too many. At that time the game mechanics for trample might make them unbalanced. Especially if used with the silly tactic of mixing them with elites for better morale.

[Shovah32]

I think EA Agarthan troglodytes, although obviously less common, are even worse.
50 gold for a 37 health, 7 protection, size 4, 16ap(2 mapmove), MR12, morale 14! trampler who can go toe-to-toe with other large units(2 attacks, attack value 12 at strength 23) is a very nice deal indeed.

[CUnknown]

50 elephants would cost 5000 gold as is, and if their cost was raised to 150 each, that army would cost 7500 gold. That's an amazingly expensive army for the early game! For the same cost, you could get ~150 heavy knights. My money is on the knights. 3 lances hitting one elephant will kill it, right?

Perhaps the best thing to do is raise the resource cost on the elephants so that you can't mass them as easily, in addition to possibly raising the gold cost.

As far as it being a silly tactic or an exploit to mix in high morale troops with your elephants... I see what you're saying from a role-playing perspective, but from a gaming perspective, it's not an exploit at all. If you did the same thing with a different kind of low morale troop, there clearly wouldn't be a problem with the strategy. It's only considered silly in this case because of the name and the RL characteristics of the unit in question.

I actually like role playing, even in multiplayer, to a certain extent. But when things like this come up, I take a gaming perspective usually.

Anyway, if you do want to do something like this Kristoffer, I prefer the 'elephants cannot be mixed with other units' thing as opposed to the 'elephants have their morale capped' thing.

[Xietor]

The fact is tramplers were given the low morale because they were not intended to fight to the death. In a way, adding high morale low cost infantry units to their group severely undermines the risk of having them turn on your own army. And it takes no great general to mix the units either.

Rather than raise their cost, and have them continue to fight to the death, I would think the more logical solution is to allow them to rout after they have received substantial damage, and trample their own troops.

That is the double edged sword of using the tramplers. No, I do not think you should be able to just raise the cost and continue to have 72 hp tramplers that fight to the death.

[quantum_mechani]

The main issue, as KO says, is not so much the infantry mixed with small numbers of elephants, it's the elephant hordes so huge they don't even need the moral boost. It's true, the equivalent gold cost in knights could probably easily stop them, but they can't be massed anywhere near as fast, especially with the base game barding costs.