1hp and elephants

[N0vaxz]

Currently something is horribly wrong with the elephants as they can steamroll an entire army by themselves. Curious as to if the 1 hp system is a contributing factor to this.

Should elephants be an exception to the 1 hp rule with many hp but maybe less armor so that 1 hit wont either kill them or not kill them but instead after many hits that would usually kill a human they die?
Currently javs do nothing to elephants even if you turn the elephants into porcupines.

[paulyo122]

Elephants also struggle/get stuck going through allied units

[Causeless]

There's absolutely no way elephants should be 1hp. I can see the logic with soldiers, but having elephants be a 1hp unit is just complete nonsense.

HP allows you to wear a unit down over time instead of just making all damage probabilistic. Perhaps that makes sense with people, where for the most part any significant wound would incapacitate them, but with an elephant that's just an awful idea to be perfectly frank. You should be able to wear down an elephant over time with many attacks. That's the point.

EDIT:

I just checked the pack files and elephants are a 1hp unit.

Wow... no wonder the elephant balancing is so damn broken...

[Draco]

Lol Elephant balance is not broken, lads.

Elephants now are much easier to kill with spears and slingers. Any cav with a charge from behind also works, if you are enough quick you can rout them , and if you are not enough quick they end up diying before routing your troops. But the elephant can be very dificult to defeat in the right hands. Obviously 1 spear battalllion wont hold them, but you can kill them with 2 or 3 batallions.

Elephants cannot be killed with ranged units, it is very unlikely, but you can reduce heavily their charge and morale combined with a cav charge you can take down instantly the battallion.

[paulyo122]

Tried Skirmishers and mounted ones against elephants and they were basically useless. Even weakened against barrages of Scorpios and held off by spearmen they still took all the ammunition of the javelins with so little casualties


Edit: They destroyed the spearmen even with the skirmishers backing them up

[N0vaxz]

Even if elephants could be killed with a mounted charge this would only be because the charge has high enough damage to potentially get that 1 hp to go. In reality this is silly as mounted charges should be borderline useless against elephants rather than the go to method of killing them.

If anything the elephants should be entirely reversed with a mounted charge doing the large amount of damage that then only takes off 1 hp, with the elephant having 50 hp or so, So that a charge does the same as a javelin.

[Willhelm123]

Elephants with more than one hp would be totally unkillable. The ease of which they are killed is a tied to their mass. Less mass = easier to kill but also less mass = harder to penetrate formations so it's tricky balance. They already cannot run through formations but honestly elephants are easy to kill now with a few infantry units which still cost less than the elephants

[Causeless]

Due to the 1hp system is means it's effectively impossible to balance with javelins. It just becomes a game of probabilities at the point, and so if you want missiles to be able to kill elephants whatsoever in a 1hp system then the system would inevitably feel inconsistent and buggy since you'd have statistical errata like a single javelin killing an elephant or being able to waste all your ammo without it hurting them.

With soldiers at 1hp, despite still being probabilistic it's still a lot more predictable and makes sense from a game design perspective. Elephants are not the same. If you have 100 soldiers and each javelin has a 10% chance to kill, that it NOT the same as having 1 soldier where each javelin has a 0.1% chance to kill. The former creates a bell curve instead of the flat line of probabilities that the latter shows.

It's like rolling two dice with six sides versus one dice with a dozen sides. With the former it's far more likely for a predictable result close to six, whereas with the latter the extreme values are equally as likely as the median.

EDIT:

Elephants with more than one hp would be totally unkillable. The ease of which they are killed is a tied to their mass. Less mass = easier to kill but also less mass = harder to penetrate formations so it's tricky balance. They already cannot run through formations but honestly elephants are easy to kill now with a few infantry units which still cost less than the elephants

You don't just increase their HP without changing other stats...

If you decrease an elephants armour-blocking chance to say, 2% of what is once was but increase their HP to 50, then mathematically on paper the elephants would be able to take the same amount of damage as previously but they would be far, far more predictable. Missiles could actually have a chance of hurting them, since all missiles wouldn't be blocked out by the ridiculously high armour that elephants currently have.

This is exactly the same thing as I described above, making a linear probability chance a bell curve via utilising multiple random rolls that are more likely to end up around the median. It's just that instead of using more damage-taking entities (more soldiers), you use more hp.

This really isn't complicated or tricky to balance unless you choose to make it tricky with this ridiculous 1hp for elephants.

The downside is that if you go too far in the that direction things can become too predictable, i.e via having all hits have a 100% chance of doing damage and having huge HP would effectively mean that all the elephants would die at exactly the same time.

If I remember correctly that's the reason AE chose to go with 1hp initially, I believe, to avoid the issues like with Rome 2 where everyone seems to start dying at once. I don't think it's correct to bastion 1hp as being the answer-all solution, however. It's just another tool that can be used. There's nothing wrong with using higher HP values where it makes sense.

[Willhelm123]

It is tricky because you're basing your argument on a factor which doesn't exist. Armour doesn't have block chance. It has weakness vs missiles of either 1 or 0 which has no effect.

Elephants already have little armour but even giving them 0 still doesn't weaken them to missiles. The 1hp system works perfectly for everything except elephants but even melee against elephants is working well now it is just missiles which are the problems.if I set missiles to even 1 bonus v elephants they instantly kill them. THe only thing I'm yet to try is to give missiles the bonus and then give elephants invisible shields with a very high missile block chance but if that doesn't work there is little else to do. Feel free to tweak the files yourself.

[Petellius]

It is tricky because you're basing your argument on a factor which doesn't exist. Armour doesn't have block chance. It has weakness vs missiles of either 1 or 0 which has no effect.

Elephants already have little armour but even giving them 0 still doesn't weaken them to missiles. The 1hp system works perfectly for everything except elephants but even melee against elephants is working well now it is just missiles which are the problems.if I set missiles to even 1 bonus v elephants they instantly kill them. THe only thing I'm yet to try is to give missiles the bonus and then give elephants invisible shields with a very high missile block chance but if that doesn't work there is little else to do. Feel free to tweak the files yourself.

I've been tempted on the shield idea, I think that could work tbh.

[Petellius]

Also something people forget its not the elephant you have to kill but the single commander of the elephant (so one of the guys on top) so the balance is a little weird anyway.

[Causeless]

Feel free to tweak the files yourself.

I've done some proof-of-concept modifications so that elephants can be hurt by javelins, yet while keeping their health in melee around the same as before.

Just to be clear, this isn't really meant to be well balanced, it's just to prove that with AE's current battle mechanics it's still possible to have elephants which can be hurt consistently by missiles. There's some obvious flaws I haven't touched, for example arrows etc cannot hurt elephants.

I gave elephants 4hp here, which seems to be a decent compromise. It should probably be higher, however, perhaps around 40hp, and have the javelin bonus scaled up to compensate and have arrows provide a bonus (albeit smaller) too.

Please note that I tried to keep the melee vs elephants unchanged from before, using a pure dice-rolling method instead of HP (by giving melee attacks a bonus against elephants equal to their increased HP). This was just as I didn't want to change any of the AE balancing other than missiles. However I personally believe that utilising multi-HP properly with elephants (even in melee) is a better idea as it allows elephants to be slowly weakened over time, and damaged by weaker infantry even if they do not kill any elephants outright.

Download the file here. Sorry about the large file size; I didn't really want to spend too much time on this so didn't bother separating out my changes into another file.

I noticed that elephants can seem to do absurd amounts of damage in melee sometimes. I thought this might've been due to my changes but I re-tested in the unchanged mod files and it's still like that as elephants can seem to shred apart some units. I tested with 2 units of tarantine hoplites in hoplite wall and they took absurd losses in melee and only inflicted a single loss against a unit of elephants. Then, the elephants routed after just one loss, so to be frank, I think elephants need some all-round balancing. I don't think missiles are the only issue.

[You_Guess_Who]

if I set missiles to even 1 bonus v elephants they instantly kill them

Yeah, too bad it's have to be an integer.

[Causeless]

Yeah, too bad it's have to be an integer.

It's not really an issue. It's identical whether you have a non-integer bonus of 0.1 against elephants with 1hp or an integer bonus of 1 against elephants 10hp. This isn't a flaw or shortcoming of the game, it's a flaw with deciding to go with 1hp.

It would've made a lot more sense if instead they had soldiers with 10hp but have all weapons do 10 damage. Then it'd be functionally identical to the 1hp system that they want, but they'd be able to have extra detail to balance certain edge cases, especially missiles.

[Petellius]

One thing to keep in mind, at least as far as I am aware, though haven't tested this in a long time, is that the damage bonuses for melee don't actually work.

[Willhelm123]

Well its either on or off. It does work but for melee makes little difference, but for projectiles it goes from canthurtanelephantstesticles to pro ivory hunter lvl 99

[KAM 2150]

They did a lot in Rome 2 in melee, has it changed that much in Attila?

[Willhelm123]

It really depends on all the stats you give them. We could make them destroy formations immediately if we wanted, the problem is inf killing eles not the other way around, but i think it will be solved now.

[KAM 2150]

I've meant damage bonuses mentioned in Petellius post as originally I wrote before you made your reply ;P

[Vardano]

I did not try battles yet, but you say 10 units of archers won't kill elephants? Are javelins useless against them too?