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Elephants - How can I use them and defend against them?


Yekaterina
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Hi all, I would like some tips on how to defend against a large wave of elephants in late game. In a game, I committed my entire army of ~140 fully upgraded infantry including 30 champion swordsman to fight against a wave of around a dozen elephants accompanied by some enemy skirmishers, as the result, I lost everything but killed very few units, that's even after I tried to snipe their ground troops with champion swordsman. I have never seen anything like this, so any suggestion on how to survive against elephant attack would be very helpful. I tried to shoot at the elephants using infantry skirmishers and slingers, to no effect at all.

In addition, if you can give me some advice on how to use elephants myself, that's even better!

 

 

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1. check that your forge techs have been researched. Your enemy may have had a substantial advantage due to researching upgrades.

2. Don't commit the fight to only the elephants. If too much of your army is only attacking the 12 elephants, then the enemy can easily defeat your army. After this, they are down 12 elephants, but your entire army has been defeated. So, If they are not an immediate threat to important buildings like a fort or a civic center, you should focus on killing the army accompanying the elephants. Then once you have an advantage, then go after the eles.

3. when using eles, you need a sizeable force to accompany them. There are also heroes that effect eles such as Seleucus Nikator of the seleucids that provide valuable bonuses to elephants. Elephants can also be strong versus infantry because they can 1 hit depending on the upgrades and hero auras available.

general tips for fighting (under the current balance of the game):

  • do not attack an enemy with a long, strung out army. Say if you task your army to attack something far away, your ranged units will arrive first one by one and get melted. It is easy to lose a fight even with a massive number advantage like this.
  • generally prioritize ranged attack upgrades and pierce armor, as ranged units are generally more powerful and influential in fights than melee units.
  • if you see enemy defenses (temple, fort, etc), this a good indication of where not to attack, just go a little bit past them and make the fight awkward for your enemy. Likewise, don't spend time putting up tons of defenses in one area, just for your enemy to walk around.
  • Don't take a fight you are not very confident in.
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9 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

2. Don't commit the fight to only the elephants. If too much of your army is only attacking the 12 elephants, then the enemy can easily defeat your army. After this, they are down 12 elephants, but your entire army has been defeated. So, If they are not an immediate threat to important buildings like a fort or a civic center, you should focus on killing the army accompanying the elephants. Then once you have an advantage, then go after the eles

This is a good idea! Yesterday, that player had some skirmishers standing very close to their elephants. I tried to aim at the skirmishers, but sadly, my champion swordsman decided to stab the elephant after they have killed just one infantry. Is there a hotkey to force them to attack infantry only and not elephants? In terms of infantry, I definitely outnumbered him and outgunned him with those 30 Iberian champion swordsman and full upgrades, including the steelwork tech.

The difficulty arises when the elephants get close to my units and they just kill my infantry in 1 or 2 humps...

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14 hours ago, Helicity said:

Hi all, I would like some tips on how to defend against a large wave of elephants in late game. In a game, I committed my entire army of ~140 fully upgraded infantry including 30 champion swordsman to fight against a wave of around a dozen elephants accompanied by some enemy skirmishers, as the result, I lost everything but killed very few units, that's even after I tried to snipe their ground troops with champion swordsman. I have never seen anything like this, so any suggestion on how to survive against elephant attack would be very helpful. I tried to shoot at the elephants using infantry skirmishers and slingers, to no effect at all.

In addition, if you can give me some advice on how to use elephants myself, that's even better!

 

 

Guys already replied, but let me add 2 ideas:

1. Do you analyse replays and to see on your own what you should have done? Why did you let him make so many elephants, which are not cheap units at all?

2. Maybe you should also check whether you were already way much behind in term of macro? This is what happened to me - I was like "wtf, I am not experienced to counter that unit" but in fact I was too much behind so I couldn't do anything...

Edited by BeTe
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1 hour ago, BeTe said:

Guys already replied, but let me add 2 ideas:

1. Do you analyse replays and to see on your own what you should have done? Why did you let him make so many elephants, which are not cheap units at all?

2. Maybe you should also check whether you were already way much behind in term of macro? This is what happened to me - I was like "wtf, I am not experienced to counter that unit" but in fact I was too much behind so I couldn't do anything...

That's why I wasn't so specific.

It would be nice to see the replay.

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I play a lot with ele at the moment maybe it was with me you had as opponent this game?

I'm not sure how to counter this kind of gameplay, but i can tell what's annoy me when i do this strategies.

What i prefer to do is ele + slinger it's really efficient, but once i start attacking i almost produce only elephants (at leas with 3 ele stable) in continue, so my eco is focus on that : 50 women on food and 15-20 guys on gold. if you kill my slingers, it will be hard for me to replace them because I won't have enough stone and wood to replace them.

What you have to know is also that in fact i lost a lot of elephants and they keep coming again and again to replace just as a meet shield, so if you go in my base killing few women or capturing my ele stable, it's over for me.

Also those armies are slow if you move you army fast enough my ele would not do any damage.

Now few tips to play like that :

Ptols are great good food eco, slinger are great with elephant, awesome.

Koushites : Ele are cheaper (best is to play ptol with a teammate as koush) beware archers are not as strong as slinger you'll have to focus on eco to replace ele and archers

Mauryas are great +20 population easier to have a good eco, archers are weak, but you can build ele sable sooner, wich make ele faster.

Make at least 3 ele stable and produce them in continue do not hesitate to put them in the middle of the battle, and loose them. keep ele in a control group, and beware to make them attack units all the time, if not they start destroying stupid thing all around.

Have fun!

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Seleucids have the best melee eles in the game due to the elephant hero giving additional attack and speed to elephants in an aura. I enjoy Seleucid elephants because you don't need many of them to cause a lot of damage. You can think of the hero himself as 2 eles due to his 2x damage and much greater hp, and with his bonus you can make hero+2 eles and it will be as effective as 5-6 elephants.

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1 hour ago, andy5995 said:

Only one reference to "elephants" in the Gameplay FAQ. Maybe someone will add some of the info from this thread...

Probably wise to hold off on that, however, because there are some huge changes to eles:

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/27391

This will make them less effective against buildings and much more effective against units.

Edited by real_tabasco_sauce
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  • 2 weeks later...
On 17/02/2023 at 2:40 PM, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Probably wise to hold off on that, however, because there are some huge changes to eles:

https://trac.wildfiregames.com/changeset/27391

This will make them less effective against buildings and much more effective against units.

Thanks for the FYI @real_tabasco_sauce

 

@Stan`It's usually best when the docs get updated along with code changes (or in this case, major changes to a game unit). Otherwise there's little hope of the docs being updated at all, or keeping them up-to-date.

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On 28/02/2023 at 3:54 AM, Stan` said:

@andy5995 Obviously it is best, yes. I suppose the committer did not know elephants were referenced at all in the FAQ.  At least I did not. Also it raises the question of whether we should update the FAQ before the updated has been released, to avoid confusing players.

The change is mentioned here wiki:Alpha27:Gameplay

@Stan`Agreed, but the question isn't a difficult one to answer. It's a common thing that projects face. You either have different docs for each version (e.g., after a release, you copy the existing docs and make changes to them as the code changes before the next release), or you do something like the meson project and just amend the documentation to note when the change was made.

image.thumb.png.7b191252c56420360e42bcfc4f13dde9.png

image.thumb.png.cb60cd1d36a84fa861ad9e1eaa6d9600.png

 

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31 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Feels like something they do after a release?

@Stan`The doc changes are included with the patch...

Here is a not-yet-merged patch where the doc changes are added to the "snippets" directory:

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/pull/11445/files

 

Then, iirc, when a release is made, the docs in the "snippets" directory get merged into the website documentation:

https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/tree/master/docs/markdown/snippets

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Right so that would require trac pages to be versioned somewhere (in svn it would seem) and then somehow generate the docs from that... That sounds hella tedious. Also I assume more people read the Meson docs than people read the trac wiki. 

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2 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Right so that would require trac pages to be versioned somewhere (in svn it would seem) and then somehow generate the docs from that... That sounds hella tedious. Also I assume more people read the Meson docs than people read the trac wiki. 

For 0ad, it would be a matter of the wiki being updated before the patch was merged. The patch submitter or zirs accomplice adds the new info to the wiki, leaving the prior version untouched, annotating when the changes were introduced.


 

Quote

 

(Added in A26)

Elephants can kill female citizens

(Changed in A27)

Women can kill elephants easily, but elephants can fly.

 

 

Anyone who plays a26 can clearly see what feature ze doesn't have yet.

 

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