Mack10
Yes, absolutely sure. I implore you to play Elf and tell me about it. You will get continuously smoked until you decide to become their spellcaster for your security lol. You will have dreams of being an effective mage--shrouded in SH and ice storming the dads at 2am. Then you will try to maintain your mages in a real round without a sugar daddy and realize how fucked you are when your 2 def mages get caught, because they will. And often.
Your BR isn't representative of the problem imo. The way I look at it is: the total stats they can house in the 1 GH/acre versus the average upkeep required, as compared to other races. This stat density determines relative army strength. Elves are the only race with more raw maintenance than stats. And yes sacrifices must be made to be good at magic, but it's too much. And then you're supposed to compete with other races that have more building room and thus more GH on average. You have the worst stat density(by far) and the least amount of space, on average. But at least you can bless people for gp and stay safe.
Also remember that as Elves transition to late game, so do others. And you're still stuck with 1900gp mages with 2 defense. For perspective 100 mages cost 190k gold and 3k/tick upkeep in gold. These mages then die to a few RT's, you gonna get your next tech or 100 mages? Remember you are gold starved already, you aint picking the 100 mages over anything. So the status quo has been to only have enough to SH, if that's your thing. I dont want to give them a light armor either as I believe it is iconic of them to only cost gp, but it would solve so much.
Mage balance specifically, I would personally start with:
Mages gain Temporal armor, permanently increasing defense by 1 for every year(1 month irl) in game
-MAYBE increase base def to 3, depends how hiding performs
-Decrease range to 5
-that upkeep has to be destroyed. Start at 50%
-decrease gold cost by a difficult to determine but significant amount. Start at 50%. Let's make mages a hallmark of the elf army and identity again, they deserve to be a badass unit.
-monitor ice storm with increased mage use. Ice storm should be balanced around mages, not mages balanced around ice storm.
Simply put, mages in their current form are too valuable to use in combat but also too expensive to keep in GH when you're already at a massive disadvantage. Elves don't need to be as good as the others, they just need to be better than they are now and mages are one of the worst offenders on the army list. btw I dont think ATC for Gnomes are great, I would buff cats. I think Bals are good but not comparable to mages, mages have 12 stats for 32 upkeep and bals have 30 stats for 28 upkeep, yes bals also cost wood but they also actually have some scaling. But I think the bigger issue is that humans are OP.... they are the race that truly gets to have its cake and eat it too.
