Fabius

Jumping back to this, what about instead of melee elephants it gives ranged elephants? We don't have a champion elephant archer yet, and a ranged elephant might be more beneficial to Rome than a melee elephant. One would have to create a model from scratch though, we only have Indian elephant archer models currently.

Honestly I am hoping they try this for A26 in spite of feature freeze, would be nice to have something properly new for Roman players to play around with.

True, but you will be floating plenty wood anyway, 300 extra wood ain't that much.

Sometimes I would simply delete my civic center and place a few camps then rebuild the civic center back again. Veteran Triari and A23 scorpions where awesome

I am half turtle so yes lol. That being said, everything got dropped down to 11 pierce damage, I am not sure that the reasoning is quite so valid now two alpha's later.

Great, that leaves only Rome then, "nod nod wink wink"

Great. There is the benefit of using army camps to guard key border areas against attack as well. I still wonder why they can't be built in ones own territory though, is that just for balance? What about siege walls, would it be to much to move those as well?

If you add a stone cost to blacksmith players simply build markets as those don't cost stone, its less useful than 3 blacksmiths by far, but since you rushing P3 it doesn't matter. Since Rome and Athens have the worst P2 options, how can one improve upon those? A thought I have had for Rome is perhaps moving the Castrum to P2, meaningful access to veteran rank troops, chance at earlier pressure. Athens I dunno about, my sphere of interest centers in Rome. Honestly why not make heroes P2 as well, at least we would get more benefit out of some of them, or make it graded so some heroes are P2 and some are P3.

Also the logical response is 3 markets and then P3. Or more reasonably a blacksmith and two markets

Eg if i wanted to play Rome, what are my options in P2 to defeat my opponent? Do I try and raid him silly with horses? Gauls at least have fanatics which are rather fun though honestly I think to expensive to really be useful. Britains have wardogs in P1 which lends some interesting flexibility into P2. Sparta has skiritai which are cool. And other factions have mercs which as we are all know are quite strong though only Ptolemies, Carthage and Seleucids can pull that off well. That leaves Athens which has nothing, Iberians has nothing, Maurya and Persia also. Kush has macemen but thats it and they rather gimmicky.

Not really sure how a more expensive blacksmith is going to help. Forcing people to have a slower P2 does not solve the problem that P2 is literally irrelevant unless you plan on goin full merc and killing your opponent. The base issue is there are very few useful options in P2.

Sounds like a reasonable idea

Match limit as in only 5 per match? I was thinking more 5 on the field at any one time rather, much like you have in DE with merc limits.

Interesting idea, but that would basically just be fire cav, also I think they did it for just one battle which failed spectacularly and after that tried other things. Roman Elephants can be justified far more than chariots from my perspective.

So I have an idea to put forward. And I did a little research prior to ensure this would be historically reasonable, which it seems to be. So the idea is for a Roman unique tech that references the spoils of the Punic Wars and allows them to train a very limited number of war elephants, roughly 5 I am thinking, maybe more if you deem it fit. My brief research brought up their use in the Grecian conquests and the use of captured Carthaginian elephants after the Punic wars, so I think this is reasonable overall

One could use smaller catapult stats as well, with how much damage catapults are now throwing out there is a lot of leeway to work with.

Ah cool. Yes I remember rams being able to fight units rather well lol. Merge upgrade sounds interesting

Awesome. I would love to see catapult turrets as an option in the near future.

There is already a fair bit going in P1, we need some more things in P2. Also P1 rams may be a bridge to far in my opinion. The only way I would accept that is if we got P2 catapults.

The Roman dream

I don't remember A24 being that immobile, I just remember annoying archer blocks and having to use consular guard as that was the only thing capable of blunting them effectively. I will also point out that catapults have far higher crush damage now, which I will say I am looking forward to as I believe they are now strong enough to kill a ram in one hit if upgraded. So perhaps it is best left until A27 since I think that the new potential for active defense may negate any need for a wall upgrade

Its a trade off, and you would not turn all your pikes into rams anyhow, that would be a grave error in judgment

Ideally it would be good to see some kind of wall buff for A26 already rather than A27.

Definitely agree.

A sensible player would work with that and try to channel the opponent into crossfire and other disadvantageous situations. If you want to encourage players to think beyond P3 = Ram= victory then you need to give them more options and better ones. That is reasonable