WARNING: Wall of text
Im making this thread as a sort of 2-in-1 of why elementals are silly/broken and thus potential fixes, and why I think they should be banned from future tourneys (should there be more) for the time being. This isn't going to be your standard 'trees op pls fix' nonsense, and I'll most likely do a poll concerning elementals in tournaments. Get ready for some hardcore theory boys.
Problems with elementals:
1. Charrogs, charrogs, charrogs.
All of what I believe to be the fundamental issues with elementals is somewhat link to these fuckers. You can make a charrog in 16 seconds (fire queue time), it has 9 bars of health (armoured) and an ability that allows it to do more damage, run faster and burn everything around it. Burrow can be used as a getaway for sticky situations. These give mobility to a unit of which its only weakness would otherwise be mobility. (Its also the only unit in the game that gets all its abilities for free - and it even gets 2 of them!). And now compare this to 20s speartons with 6 bars health (armoured): so a charrog is produced 25% faster, and has 50% more health. A charrog is more or less a spearton which is permanently in spear wall, but has better mobility and strong AoE damage output. Pretty strong right? And it only costs 33% more gold (and double mana but for ele that doesnt matter anyway). Oh - and who cares about that 33% gold cost because...
2. Earths
They queue in 4s. Normal miners queue in 8 seconds. You can expand your economy at DOUBLE THE RATE of an O or C player. Sure they have the animation of turning into a chompler, but that doesnt affect the rate, only the initial delay. Because they come out so damn faster, the ele player can have about 1.5-2x the size of the opponents economy within the 1-2 minutes. This provides a window of opportunity where they are naturally so far ahead that they can produce charrogs without delay, taking tower immediately and eventually swarming the opponent. vs O it forces a wall because letting charrogs burn miners is terrible as they dont regen like C, and this immediately forces them into a turtle of some sort. And since you have free tower now...
3. Ele Tower Spawn
If you didn't notice, tower spawn 1 & 2 are both 4/3x the gold cost of the appropriate unit for O and C. And tower spawn 1's mana cost is 1/3 of the gold cost. Seems fair considering you're potentially able to get 2 spears/jugs, but risk losing tower, so the cost should be about inbetween that of 1 and 2 spears/jugs. (total resources for ts1 = 800, total resources for 1 spear/jugs = 500, total resources for 2 spear/jug = 1000). Now compare these with charrog tower spawn.. oh wait, its exactly the same. (resources of 1 charrog = 700, resources for 2 charrog = 1400, resources for ts1 = 800). The price of tower spawn is essentially the same price as just getting a charrog. And dont forget these values are total resources - the 100 resources difference between a charrog and ts1 is 100 mana, which we already established is no concern for ele. If we follow the pattern, the cost of ts1 for ele should be 1100 resources overall - 800 gold and 300m (rounded).
4. Rock, paper, scissors
OvE is literally this in the early game. There's no fixing that however without changing the entire structure of the empire (sort of). I wont go into this too much, Im quite sure everybody already knows it.
5. Commital to tanks
The only point of making multiple tanks in a standard game is for backup incase the first one dies and leaves your behind row exposed. Order and Chaos need to commit to producing tanks, which over their lifespan will have approximately 0 damage dealt. But ele can commit to producing ranged, high damaging units for their tanks. This means that they can maximise damage output by making a tank just before the other one dies. You'd think the utility of this is not that much, but this is the difference of permanently having 1-2 more fires attacking. Very strong.
6. Cycloids
This is my last point, and its not really as problematic as the previous points, but it just makes broken units even more broken. Now I dont know the exact % value for how protect works, but I know its pretty high - definitely more effective than spear wall. It lasts 10s and the cooldown is 20s. So just having 1 of these will allow an even on/off split of practically invincible tower spawns. But because cycloids also have tornado which is stupid strong against archers (kills them in 2 shots), it becomes worth it to have 2. This means permanent super stronk charrogs and permanent dead archers. They're expensive and fiddly though, so I just think a reduced duration of shield (even like 5s) will be a beneficial change.
All these combined make an impossible matchup for OvE when played correctly, (and a silly CvE). Rain summarizes it quite well in this part of our recent video: https://youtu.be/PXVZSZ5B1iY?t=1h11m11s
How to fix:
Aside from the little suggestions I made in some of those points, I don't believe that straight up decreasing hp/dmg or something similar is the real answer to this, because the way the empire functions as a whole is quite reliant on the statistics and abilities of a lot of the units. The real problem is the rate that ele can get ahead early with 4s earths, and then produce monster units really quickly, leaving no window for punishment.
1. The first change I think is necessary is to make a global cooldown on combinations. This would include earths converting into chompler going to a cooldown of 8 seconds like a normal miner. Because elementals needs their 4 basic units to still come out quickly during the entire game, their queue times need to be relatively short (and unchanged), so by making a global cooldown on units such as charrogs will not only solve the problem of ele being able to produce charrogs at the rate that they can produce fires in the mid-game, but it will solve the point I made about "Commital to tanks", as they would need to try and make charrogs incrementally so they dont get caught out by having too few tanks and charrog being on cooldown. Of course, each unit should have different cooldowns, similar to those of the respective role in the other empires (tank, support etc). Also to top this off I think certain combinations should cost more mana (namely the spell-casters) to balance the eco a bit.
2. Secondly, I think certain combinations should not be instantaneous. (much like how earth turning into chompler is). They could range anywhere between 2-5 seconds I believe, and when fusing global commands do not affect them (like trees in root and unlike V's in possess), and they cannot be cancelled. Obviously they can still take damage and if one dies the fusion would be cancelled. This would further solve the "Commital to tanks" (honestly that issue is much bigger than most people think), but would make the dynamic between E and the other empires most interesting. Let me explain: SE, like any other rts, is a reaction based game. The way that O and C have to react is to retreat/change composition/make specific techs etc. These all take time. Elementals allow instantaneous reaction-based gameplay (excluding tech), provided they always have at least 1 of each of the basic units - which you always should anyway. Example: if you suddenly see that he is reacting to your trees by making albows, you can instantly make a cycloid where the battle is taking place, to negate this unit straight away. The O player just spent a million years making albows and getting the correct tech, all to be countered in 1 second. Silly.
Of course theres plenty of things I havent mentioned like blind gate/combustion (which I think are both interesting concepts but poorly executed), a lack of a buildable for chomplers etc etc. In terms of a buildable for chomplers I feel that something that gives gold in the late game could fix their issue of getting gold exhausted so quickly, much like passives (but for the time being they're able to end games so fast it never comes to that). I could talk about them for ever though so I'll stop here.
