I've been trying out the elves recently, and I've noticed a few quirks I thought to bring up. Setting wise, I've been playing using the Smartmap, as Thessa, although I have no idea what her traits do
.
First off, although elven workers can farm or cottage forest squares (which is fun
, they can not realize the advantage of a river in a forest square (no +1 commerce).
For some unknown reason, some (many?) tundra squares can not be worked (cottaged or farmed) but others can (again under forests). I'm not entirely sure what that is. The squares seem in all other ways identical :/.
Elven Archers do not have hill defense bonuses. This seems odd to me. I understand they have forest defense bonus, signifying the Elven native terrain idea, but it seems odd to me that they would not be able to take advantage of the intrinsic benefits of archery from a position of superior height (which seems to be the theory for the archer's hill defense bonus in the first place).
I know a lot of conversation has gone on about Treants, but I thought I would make a few comments, without regard to their frequency of appearance... mostly. First off, I thought it might make nice flavoring to tie the strength of treant (or type of nature guardian effectively) to both tech (more advanced religious techs yielding better guardians) and potentially the quantity of nature mana in one's network. Or have the amount of mana effect appearance rate maybe. When they appear, they are around, it seems, for too little time. So long as they remain in an ancient forest, it seems like they aught to last a little longer. They are slow, which seems fine, but it exascerbates these other issues.
Forest Native Promotion. I think the elves really need access to a forest native promotion, requiring an SDK mod, which would negate the 50% terrain bonus for forests of their enemy's. Certain units, like treeants and the like should start with it. (similarly dwarves might get access to a hills native promotion as well). Beside the logical sense of it, it seems important for the feasibility of the elven nation's set up. Once you've got 90% of your territory covered in ancient forests, it can be remarkably difficult to chase down enemy infiltrators in your territory, because *every* square gives them such a large defensive bonus. Unless you out tech your opponent's substantially, it's just not feasible. Again, of course, I play on raging barbarians and large maps, so I have to do a lot of fighting, and other player army's that do arrive tend to be quite experienced in their own right.
Just a few things I've noticed so far...
