Suggestion - improving Elephant archer with... battle tanks?

The Indian unique unit Elephant Archer is frankly a little underwhelming. Pew-pewing on a high-hp but slow fort is not very impressive. It deals 1 damage more than Arbalest, but with a shorter range and a depressive speed that makes it absolutely useless to catch up to or not be outmaneuvered by anything without a trunk. They're costly to mass and for the same gold you could get a much larger cav archer army.

I caught an idea while playing the classic Warcraft 3 custom map the other day - why don't we make the elephant archers into battletanks?

We allow the Elephant Archer to fire while moving. It's a simple change that reflects reality. The guy on top of the damn beast can turn around and shoot arrows at whatever he so wishes as long as it is within range.

The idea is simple and would introduce a new mechanic to AoE2 that would make Elephant Archers super fun while bringing up new emergent gameplay - all the while without busting them out of proportion.

Whenever enemies are within range of the Elephant Archer, the archer on top will shoot at them, and when the enemies move out of range, it will stop shooting and simply stand still. Like so, EA become moving towers, a force to be reckoned with that can march into an enemy camp while hailing down arrows, and likewise, maneuver (albeit slowly) while shooting about themselves.

I imagine right-clicking an enemy would force the elephant archer to move towards that target and fire at them if they are within range, but if the target is killed or moves out of range the EA would fire at other targets.

This would also give the Indians some much-needed flair and would help carve out their distinction in the civ roster.