Trample balance discussion

[chrispedersen]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

For some reason I seem to find that slingers do well against elephants. Maybe its a wrong impression but I still fall back to it whenever Im faced with elephants. Or maybe its just because I can put alot of shots in the air cheaply with some chance to do damage and cause a rout.

You are correct Gandalf. Slingers are cheap, and hordes of them generally defeat elephants. Even if they make it through the missiles, there are usually enough to force a morale check.

[archaeolept]

i've seen many elephants. they would have difficulty trampling even a small riding drake

probably shouldn't be size 6

[Zeldor]

There are way too many size6 creatures. Elephants, Golems, Dragons, Juggernauts, they should have some size difference.

[llamabeast]

Elephants are huge. They are bigger than horses, and dogs. They're bigger than camels. Hell, I could go on listing animals they're bigger than. They're definitely pretty big.

[lch]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Hell, I could go on listing animals they're bigger than. They're definitely pretty big.

For example bats and south american mammals. I'm pretty sure you know a couple.

[DonCorazon]

Looking at trample in the grand scheme of things, I don't see nations with elephants really dominating the Victorious Nations record. In fact, when it comes to Arcos and the Bandar nations, they rarely appear, so I have difficulty understanding the motivation for changing a core mechanic that would hurt nations that already struggle. Not to take the thread off topic, but if we were focused on balance then I'd say Pythium's hydras are more of an overpowered unit for what they cost in gold and resources and looking at the big picture of national summons. My point is, yes elephants are powerful, but they provide a slight edge for nations that are in need of it, and any apparent imbalance does not seem to be reflected in the elephant nations dominating games.

[llamabeast]

I think they're just not very fun to fight. Unless you can muster paralyze or something, you're basically stuffed. I've always found them to be quite unfun for that reason.

[Xietor]

Elephants are not supposed to be "fun" to fight. If you read about historical accounts of their use in Ancient Greek times, they were a terror in battles. While Lord of the Rings battle scenes has them too big, it actually may not exaggerate the terror they cause even battle hardened troops.

Given these accounts it would be justified to give them fear. Obviously that would not be good for balance. But arcos needs its elephants. I challenge someone to play ma or la arcos and not use elephants.

If elephants are nerfed, arcos needs a better sacred. maybe a chariot with good armor, attack, and defense that does not trample. And the national summon cannot use s gems. arcos heart and soul is its s gems. a sirrush either has to be so good it is like an abomination, or it needs to cost n gems. As it is they are useless as a 10s item.

maybe if you could get 5 of them for 10s, and move them down the tree a bit. But at 10s a piece they might as well cost a 100s a piece. no one in their right mind would buy one.

Too many arcos units use spears. thematic yes. But maybe a sacred unit with a sword.
Greeks knew what swords were you know. And swords do more dmage. and 25 gold for a heart companion? they are not as good as the 15 gold units which are all i buy when i have the gold and resources.

Now this thread is not about arcos., but that is the nation most hurt by an elephant nerf. bandar log has strong nationals and good sacreds, and caelum gets cold bonus
and better attack mages.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Xietor

bandar log has strong nationals

What? No it doesn't.

Agema: Completely ignoring graphics when it comes to the size of units is counter-intuitive and silly. They are there for a reason.

[Agema]

Originally Posted by Sombre

Agema: Completely ignoring graphics when it comes to the size of units is counter-intuitive and silly. They are there for a reason.

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.