Economy and starting with a worker elephant.

[LetswaveaBook]

In this topic I would solely discuss the simple economic effect of starting with a worker elephant. Once we understand this fully we can expand to discussing more complex matters.

There was a topic earlier were worker elephants were criticized. I ran a few test to compare Maurya(M) boom with Seleucid(S) boom. To reduce randomness, I imposed a few rules to play by:

1. Don't use extra berries, extra hunt(only chickens) or wicker baskets technology.

2. Start by building a farmstead and a house.

3. Aim to get fertility festival early.

4. Don't build a second worker elephant.

5. Map mainland, biome autumn.

6. Aim to start training infantry at the CC around minute 5, before that make only women.

7. Only collect only food/wood

8: End the game after 11 minutes(In practice this was most often a few seconds later)

Note that several of these rules benefit Sele more than Maurya.

Here are my results the games played first are on top,

civ (trained units) (trained infantry) (food collected) (wood collected)

M 147 45 8501 8836

S 158 14 9286 8426

S 139 38 8153 8805

S 154 56 8905 9849

M 145 35 8390 9915

M 169 31 10009 10223

M 168 44 9175 10239

M 155 46 8663 9061

M 163 35 9553 9063

M 152 35 9045 9405

S 151 52 8368 9325

S 138 42 7979 9011  (I blame this result on unfavourable map gen.)

S 151 48 9348 9050

I am rated around 1700 and the results show that I was unable to get the first 3 trials right. The fist Maurya boom was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) and I have figured out what the issue is. In the fist Sele trial I mode only women, which is not representative. And the second one was an under-performance(getting fertility festival to early) again, since I was unfamiliar with Seleucid. The 12th game seems like an under-performance, but I think it had to do with unfavourable map gen(starting wood far from the CC). I think it is a fair point to say that with a worker elephant maurya are better to at dealing with unfavourable map gens.

The conclusions are that Maurya seem to collect a little more. On the other hand these results might seem the cause because I tend to get more cheap units (women) as Maurya and less expensive units(Infantry). This seems natural as Maurya have the small houses and Sele gets the barracks for 200 wood. In most games I would not get the ability to place a 4th barracks foundation before 9 minutes, so running out of stone was not an issue for these results. It should be mentioned that at the end of the trials, Maurya still had their stone, while Sele spend theirs.

My initial hypothesis was that Maurya would completely outboom Sele. Considering the results, in most cases, the difference seems to be rather moderate. I don't think the starting elephant is the reason why Maurya is considered OP, rather I think it is one of the contributing factors.

There are some tests I would like to : namely see what Maurya would be if you start without an elephant(i.e. deleting it at the start) and then training one or more during the game. I would also like to try to get results on the Maurya boom without the restrictions imposed here.

 

[Grapjas]

Nice effort.

If you want consistent and more accurate results you would have to pick a skirmish map. This way you eliminate the rng'ness. Also i would say just play both of those civs optimally instead of limiting alot of things. End the game @ 10 min (or w/e) and then look at the results.

1 hour ago, LetswaveaBook said:

1. Don't use extra berries, extra hunt(only chickens) or wicker baskets technology.

Not sure why you are not using the tech and its a little unrealistic. It's one of the trade-off that maury has to make if they decide to not build a farmstead+tech and use the ele instead. It's a pretty big difference if you ask me.

 

[ValihrAnt]

The biggest advantage of the elephant is being able to reach resources you otherwise couldn't and keep efficiency constantly high. Skip out on a farmstead when hunting, take neutral berries or metal. In these tests you limit yourself from using any of the elephants strengths. 

The big advantage of the Mauryans is their early boom plays into great early late game. Removing the pop bonus and having it be unique to Persians is a better solution than messing with a unique gameplay quirk of the Mauryas. 

[Yekaterina]

I am beginning to think that we should keep the worker ele. Reducing the total population of Mauryans would be a good nerf and they won't be too OP. 

If we can also nerf the elephants then that would really balance out.

I am experimenting with tweaking the XML files to find an optimum. 

[chrstgtr]

10 hours ago, ValihrAnt said:

The biggest advantage of the elephant is being able to reach resources you otherwise couldn't and keep efficiency constantly high. Skip out on a farmstead when hunting, take neutral berries or metal. In these tests you limit yourself from using any of the elephants strengths. 

The big advantage of the Mauryans is their early boom plays into great early late game. Removing the pop bonus and having it be unique to Persians is a better solution than messing with a unique gameplay quirk of the Mauryas. 

All of this.

Also, the worker ele is now worse than previous alphas and almost never trained by the most skilled players. So then how is that when the worker ele was made worse Maurya suddenly became better? It's because the worker ele isn't what makes Maurya good. Maurya is good for other reasons--the main two being that Maurya has archers, which were buffed too much this alpha and hence the reason why Maurya is suddenly very good, and because Maurya's bonus pop cap allows them to have more archers than anyone else. There is already a ticket to nerf archers that will surely nerf Maurya.

[Yekaterina]

@chrstgtr @ValihrAnt Please check out my nerf archer forum. I am experimenting by editing xml files. 

I need your suggestions. Currently I gave them higher inaccuracy and about the same damage per second. I also added a minimum range. 

 

The working elephant is sorted. No need to change it. Just nerf Maurya in other respects and it will be fine.