Talk:Elephant Archer (Age of Empires II)/@comment-96.244.45.134-20171019012915/@comment-2003:DB:F3D6:1B95:D12F:FBEC:EF87:114-20190729123000

"Indians ain't renow for their gun powder fire power until they start trading with the Dutch," - don't act as if you knew history. The Mughal were a known gunpowder dynasty, which predates the east-india trading company. My guess is that said mughal were the main focus of the Indian-civ we have in the game (judging by the art-style it's pretty much guaranteed)... which is a shame, as it leaves out the hindu majority out of the game. There should prob. be more than one indian civ; and while we are at it: more than one slav civ, also (russians vs. polish, atleast)

"insted of an archer mounted on the elephant i would be a hand cannon." + "The thing is, there is actual historical evidence of cannons being mounted on elephants." ... I think, in a way, you are both "wrong". A cannon would make sense to me (Timurids in medieval2-tw), a handcannon? - not so much... A cataphract-camel or even a camel riding hand-cannoneer (camel-conquistador, if you will) would fit the theme even better, though. They could still need an elephant for identity's sake, but not this one. The main selling point of elephants is their brute force; like heavy cav breaking enemy formations, reaking havoc; the archers are just an added bonus, seving some extra protection. An elephant archer, given the engine we have, just cannot provide that; it's either close combat or ranged combat, not both. It would atleast need a strong trample damage, added to it's ranged attack. And more HP, to justify the cost. So either they get totally creative with the EA's armor class, bonus damage, bonus-damage-received (like cataphract), their armor (3+0 rather than 0+3) and maybe [higher]attack-damage+[much lower]accuracy, to shape it into form to be a very unique pseudo-ranged-unit being feared by spearman mor so than archers (be bold! - break players expectations!) -- or they need to drop this bad idea of a useless special unit entirely.Let that fat glass canon board it's own special short bus, straight out of the game... if using your resources on your civ's special unit feels like a waste 99% of the time, then it is just bad game design.

"Artillery at the time was more psycological so it didn't actually need to hit anyone." - inconsistent argument. Esp. since early hand-cannons had the same selling point. Terrible accuracy, but detrimental to enemy morale... Besides: what sense does a ballista elephant make in that light? - it doesn't have the same devastating morale-effect as terribly loud and explosive cannons have, but would suffer the same, in this case even more detrimental, downgrade in accuracy. (I think I know the answer to this. But do you?)

"cannons were not used until later" - baseless argument. They were used later, they were used earlier; the only question is, in what way and to what effect (even more so: what does define a cannon? - the smelting-and-casting you mention suggests you are thinking of the specific leap that was the Feldschlange or Culverin; yes, that came much later. Long long after the korean Wan'gu or the turkish basilic, for instance, which both fall within AoE2's timeframe). The whole "historical accuracy" is a very weak argumental path to follow, anyway, given all the many historical inaccuracies in this game. Game-mechanics should always be the more important argument, anyways. And if self-propelled siege-units, gunpowder-units with civs that never had them, and not with civs that actually did have them, phantasy-units like armored Eagle-warriors, phantasy-encounters with african or south-east-asian civs, monks converting enemy units from different religion, speaking a foreign language, and female knife-throwers (& men armed with nothing but a torch) being used in professional combat -- if any and all of those are welcome and fun, so be it. So give me that Bombard-Elephant, if it serves a proper purpose in the game! - I am all for it!

"Elephants are not as strong as many people think they are" - baseless argument. You do have a thing for those, don't you, Marinus? just saying: Even at the very end of AoE2's time-frame, cannons already came in a number of sizes.

"I think you are confusing the Indians with the Japanese. " - quite the arrogant fella, aren't ya? - btw.: japan got introduced to gunpowder-units by the west; when earliest missionaries arrived, and a temptative trade started. So maybe YOU are confusing the two? - otherwise I have no effing idea, how you'd even make that strange cross-comparison (they are entirely different cultures, many, many thousand miles apart; and only one of them knew elephants). Who in their right mind would get those two confused??? Are you at all familiar with the term "projection"??

"They got it from the Chinese " errr.. no, they did not O.O -- the chinese were very stingy when it came to letting any foreigners in on their secrets and crafts (try smuggling some silk-moths out of china during that time, and you know what I mean) ... "spread thanks to the Mongols." - you can't even be consistent, can you??? ... Islamic empires spreading east were the actual "donors" of gunpowder, for their brutal conquest of india (slaughtering millions!), not the chinese, not the mongols. Unless you are counting the persian Timurids (who may or may not have plaid a part in that), with their Turco-Mongol dynasty on top, as "mongol", which would be somewhat inaccurate. It's as if you'd call the british "french" from the day on, that William conquered them from the Normandy (or the normandy "viking", for that matter; yes, there's a joke hidden in there).

"didn't use guns until they were introduced by the Dutch." - so you too, huh?. Just because two say the same fallacious thing, it does not become any less untrue. There were a bunch of islamic "gunpowder empires" predating earliest european colonization of asia. They even have a page of their own on wikipedia; that may not be the best source for historic facts, but they are still doing better than you. Oh... maybe I should phrase that in a tone you understand: "I think you are confusing the Mughan[etc.]-Indians with the suppressed hindu majority of it's time" (as if peasants would be wielding state-of-the-art weapons at any given point in time) - or the other way around, it really doesn't matter. Maybe you'd have a better understanding, if you'd think of pakistan rather than india, when reading "india" in AoE2? (before being split up, both of these countries were considered "India", and their cultures were widely entangled) - it still would be inaccurate, but maybe it would give rise to an epithany... in short: " 'Indians' aren't indians", so to speak...

Fun fact: after the official "conquerors" expansion, or even during the making already, the makers of AoE2 actually toyd with the idea of making an addon (oh those good old times, when we knew nothing about "DLC"s...) purely centered around india, with it's fascinating culture and history. If they followed through with that, there'd probably be more than one "India"-civ in this game, and we wouldn't be having this much confusion... and it would certainly be more worthwile than having multiple questionable entries from south-east asia and africa, which just do not fit the knights-and-castles theme of the actual game at all... How lovely it would be, to have some suppressed hindu culture sticking it to their oppressors, righting history, slaughtering as many mughals in the field as possible...