lOl this guy is funny and not in a bad way :D

And yeah the 2.5/2.5 units is surely a massive benefit of the elves ;)

The whole converting thing is a important part of the race but its surely not that alone that makes the race uber ^_^

It is all the factors added together really.

Convertions, SE, and HE.

Well, you could try looking at it this way.

Elves are not fast starters (Edit - well I guess they are, for the first day or two). Due to the fact that elves have a 2.5 and then a 4.3 offence troop (I think the sylvans are 4.3? Please correct me if I'm wrong), they're not exactly suited to knocking on people's doors. Their best 'trainable' defensive unit is 4.3 defence. Even with maxed out imps and realm imps, and a good chunk of alchemies, that still isnt going to push it any further than a 30% or so offence/defence boost. That still doesn't even give them 6 point offence/defence basic units.

Which if you note, is actually quite weak. They just have the ability to cram more in, because of their high imps.

And when looked at from this point of view, the woodland ranger is not so 'awe inspiring'. I mean, the flameweavers have a 6 point immortal offence unit and a decently space efficient defender. Why aren't they overpowered?

_________________
Anger not the dragons, for thou art crunchy and tasteth good with ketchup.

5.3, cen

elve "elites" are 5.3/4 or 4/5.3

Freelancer, you put too much emphasis on the 4 defense of the SR. Sure, turtle is nice, but other than that the number 4 says nothing. Imagine that instead of 4 dp, they would have had 5 defense. Would that make the WR-conversion less good ? considering they go back from "10" defense on their offense to 9 defense on a primary defensive unit ? Or what if the SR was a 5.3/0 unit, would that suddenly make the WR-conversion 5 times better ?

My claim is still that the conversions make the offense "nearly immortal". Shall we look what if we didn't have conversions, but in fact immortal SRs without WR-conversions, which we then compare to the situation with the WR-conversion.

The difference :
with immortal SRs : we lose nothing
with the current WR-conversion : we lose 2 SR, and gain 1 WR

2 SRs cost 2400 gold and 200 lumber
if we take 115 lumber as an equivalent of 90 gold (good imps), we get a total equivalent cost of about 2550 gold
In the WR-conversion situation, it will cost this to replace the offense.

Now with the immortal SRs, we didn't gain a WR so we have to train that defense + spy-power. Luckily we have a bag with 2550 gold
The Archer of Light (AoL) costs about 200 gold per point defense. So 9 defense is about 1800 gold. Also, 0.1 spy/mage power can be replaced by 1/10 High Priest, which adds about another 250 gold.

Of course, the WR is more space-effecient. Let us see how much :
1 WR = 1 unit
1.7 AoL + 0.1 HP = 9 defense + 0.1 spy/magepower = 1.8 units

So now we can make an estimate of when the 0.8 unit more space-efficiency makes up for the difference in price. Let us take a mere 50% banking-mod and 1 population making 3 base goldproduction. We get :

Break even time = (2550-2050) / (0.8 x 3 x 1.5) ~ 140 hours

So it takes about 5-6 days before the WR-conversion makes up for the immortal SR situation. Of course, during those 5-6 days, the immortal SR-situation would be able to grow faster and gaining an economic advantage because of more gained land, etc...

Nonetheless, in my experience with calculating units, a break-even point with units should not be longer than 4-5 days. Since that's almost the case here, I daresay that you can consider the WR-conversion "nearly immortal offense". If according to you break even points may take longer than 5-6 days, you're free to show me some numbers

d'oh, figured I'd got it wrong but was too lazy to look it up. Thanks, socaddict

_________________
Anger not the dragons, for thou art crunchy and tasteth good with ketchup.

Really? You gain NW by attacking as Elf? Hrmm.. never noticed that. But I don't think so.

In any case, the way I think of it is you lose 10.6/8 (total 18.6 military power) but only gain 9/9 (18 military power)... While you do gain trutle defense, you still have to train to replace the lost offense... and you lost more offense, than you gained in defense.

*shruGs* Just the simple way of looking at things =P

And in any case, I'm sure the spy ops you took of the top elves last round also told you that they trained AoL's. Conversion is nice, but you can't depend on it to gain defense, and having all SRs for defense is just simply too expensive. Besides, only the amount of offense NEEDED that's sent gets converted. Which means, if you need only 10.6k offense to break someone, sending twice that much won't give you twice as many converts.

Anyways, I'm glad to see new faces promoting intellectual discussions ^^

_________________
It's a bird!
No! It's a plane!
No! It's the amazing1weekflare! :mrgreen:

yea elves are a little better then the rest not only the shadowelves and the conversion and specs are good but they are also the best spellcasters in the game.
its also the most advanced race with the most tactical manovers poseble and maybe one of the hardest to play real good.

elves have one HUGE major drawback: they are so terribly boring.... BORING

lol, LL. they are very boring...but so are many of the races here...

_________________
Harry says:
"i speak my way if u gt a problam take it up wif a judge."

"Harry, first off, let me say your an idiot"
Aaron,

SHC
RSBC

yeah

_________________
please click here and recruit

They are boring when they're sitting to pum their 8-10k SEs, after that I don't really find them boring. You can attack a lot more with them than other races. Or is attacking considered the boring part ?

no the SE part is the boring part, how long does it take to train those SE's? about a week? too long...

yeah.. elves = b00ring.

and legenden, I'd say there are harder races to play than elves. Animators for instance.

_________________
I've counted to infinity. Twice

truth to be said the hard part about animators is more the times you want to be online with that race early...

Just as an adition to what The Baron was saying....

Think of it like this. You lose 2 units. Either way you lose 18.6 power like The Baron said. You lost those 2 units and gain 1 unit with a total of 18 power. Now, you either have to train more defense (explorer) to make up for the "loss" of 1.6 DP, or train more offense (attacker) to make up for the "loss" in OP equaling 1.6 OP. Now, If your an attacker, logic states that you just gained 1 DP in defense from this new unit. However, if you think of it like that, that means you are going to leave that unit home to defend. But if your an attacker then you actually just lost your 10.6 OP from your 2 units, and then "gain" 9 unusable points of offense, meaning you still have to train 10.6 more OP to make up for it, unless you want to keep attacking smaller and smaller kingdoms until you turn into a weird ass explorer. So, really, when your an attacker with Elves you gain defense, but you are still losing the offense that you HAVE to replace. Consequently, as you might be thinking, you say..."Hey, I want to attack with my new uber elite unit with reduced casualties, high attack power and shortened return time." Makes some sense as an attacker, but wait, you went from having to cover 8 DP on your attack to now having to cover 9 DP. What does this translate into? You HAVE to train more DP or just stop attacking with so many units and again, gradually attack smaller and smaller kingdoms until you AGAIN turn into some kind of weird ass explorer. Explorers on the other hand don't attack, so, they lose 10.6 DP and they gain 9 DP. Well, you have to keep making up for that 1.6 DP your losing and if you don't you will be hit relentlessly until you eventually are one of those sad sad kingdoms with 232 land and no defense. In which case you probably die.

As you see, the way your looking at this is very one sided. And if you think about things from many ways, you will see that this ONE unit does not overpower elves, and it rather is nice to not completely lose your units, but it also has its drawbacks as you DO have to continue to train units to make up for the losses either way.

I wonder if this is making any sense to anyone. Or did I just confuse the hell out of everyone...damn, did I just write all of that and what the hell am I talking about?

_________________
Be with us our friends, our allies. Be wih us through this glorious hour! May we shine through and defeat our enemies! Let us meet them! Sharpen your blades, rally your men! For tonight we go to War! To Arms my Brothers! To Arms!


{RSBC}