Re: Qm said
I think the best fix would be to adjust the rules for mixed squads so that the cowards in the squad can break before the braver troops.
Instead of having the squad share morale and break as a whole, it could have partial breaks where everyone with morale less than X panics and runs. The braver members of the squad continue fighting, until they take enough casualties for the squad's "rout number" to exceed their morale as well. If there were troops with drastically different morale (like mammoths and wingless), half breaks would be pretty common. Fear, standards that only cover part of the squad, and Battle Fright could also cause part of a squad to flee while other parts fight on.
That would make combining cowardly tramplers + brave other troops dangerous - the tramplers might break first and trample their braver comrades on their way off the battlefield. Cowards would remain cowardly even when surrounded by braver allies - it takes something like a standard or Sermon of Courage to really improve their morale.
That might require enough changes to the morale system to make it more of a Dom4 thing than something that could be done in a patch, though.
In the short term maybe elephants just need to cost more resources. They may not wear much equipment, but the effort involved in catching or breeding an elephant and then training it for war is far from trivial in its own right (*much* harder than doing the same for a horse). A high resource cost would make it difficult to accumulate elephants quickly, especially without productivity. Training a large force of elephants would take years.
And really, how likely is it that the people of a sloth-3 province are going to bother to take the trouble to raise and train even one elephant, let alone several? That would be far too much work.
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