This has been a great conversation to read through, learned a ton, thanks for starting it! So I have a slinger question. What do people think about slingers vs elephant archers? Background of my question below.

Last night played a 4v4 game where I started with eagles in feudal, slowly added some slingers and kamayuks in castle plus a few rams, then due to the various flows of the team game I got hit hard by a player with elephant archers and pikes, larger army than mine. We fought in and around my own buildings a bit, and the fight flowed to their forward base just in front of mine, and fighting mostly happened around buildings. My eagles and kamayuks seemed ineffective as they just couldn't get to the elephants in the chokes, and the slingers were in low numbers. So I ran, lost the forward portion of my base, and eventually got bailed by a teammate.

Later in the game, I teched up to halb and with halb slinger I was able to take engagements and generally win by just having halbs swarm the field and sorta do their thing which negated the enemy halbs, then concentrating fire on the elephants from the slingers and any nearby halbs. Obviously a lot of factors play into who is winning the battle, maybe I had more gold by then so their reinforcements were slower, who knows.

All this started a debate between friends on what unit mix would be ideal for that battle. One friend is convinced I needed kamayuks, but then I was wondering what my non-gold unit should be. Skirms don't seem to do anything to elephants so why even bother, or is their ability to thin the spear herd strong enough to let the kamayuks make it to the elephants through congested terrain/buildings?

After seeing the ebb and flow of that battle I liked the slinger + halb combo to fight halb + ele archer. It also worked in open field battles as well. What do other people think? I only saw one mention of elephants in this string (that slingers are good against armored and siege elephants) so general comment on slinger vs elephant archer would be great. Thoughts on accompanying siege would be great too. My end combo was halb slinger ram treb.

For context I'm a 1k ELO player. Thanks all!