Qm said

[llamabeast]

So do we feel this would help with the elephant issue? I've lost track of exactly why.

I guess perhaps animal leaders would not generally also be human leaders - so it would be harder to mix elephants with infantry. But still definitely doable with a Sceptre of Authority or whatever it's called (cheap low-level fire item).

Also you could have less elephants per group. Would this make much difference. It's not completely obvious to me, but I don't have a lot of elephanty experience.

[Velusion]

Xietor said:

Having Pangaea's Commanders have master animal leadership(and switching vine ogres/vinemen to animal leadership) would allow them to lead the legions of vinemen, wolves(call of the wild)lions etc.

Vinemen aren't animals. Why not just give Pangaea animal AND magical leadership abilities?

Of course - this change is pretty far reaching, assuming we are all talking about what I'm thinking. Namely requiring anything marked "animal" to be lead by a leader with an appropriate ability (Beast-Mastery?). Are we talking about a game wide change or just a localized fix for elephants?

IF it is game wide many nations would need to be changed to insure that some leader of theirs could actually control summoned animals.

This also would innately make animals weaker - as they would be limited as to who could lead them. One easy way to counter this is to slightly buff most of the animal spells/recruits (decreasing gems/gold cost, increasing the amount summoned, making them stronger). Another thought it to make most summoned animals come with a leader (aka call of the Wilds).

This would be a sorta big undertaking but I think would be a good overall change.

[Velusion]

llamabeast said:
So do we feel this would help with the elephant issue? I've lost track of exactly why.

I guess perhaps animal leaders would not generally also be human leaders - so it would be harder to mix elephants with infantry. But still definitely doable with a Sceptre of Authority or whatever it's called (cheap low-level fire item).

Also you could have less elephants per group. Would this make much difference. It's not completely obvious to me, but I don't have a lot of elephanty experience.

Recruitable leaders that can control animals might be limited to only manage 10-15 animals. This would make their squads smaller so they will be easier to break via morale.

[Sandman]

About the animal leadership idea... Bandar Log has elephants, and all their other recruitables are animals as well.

[Wick]

Another approach would be shapeshifting like the Black Hunters. When the Mahout is killed the elephant would be split into it's own squad.

Or for laughs use linked shapeshifting like Mahout -> 1st Guy in Howdah -> 2nd Guy...

[sum1lost]

Or the elephant dies and you get a bunch of little mahouts running around!

[Wahnsinniger]

I have no real experience in MP games yet, so I can't comment on the Van-rush problem.

However, maybe the issue with Elephants (and Argathian Trogs) is the trample ability. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Trample doesn't take into account the enemies' weapons at all, does it? This doesn't seem right, as a normal attack always has to check if the enemy has a longer weapon that can repel you. Trampling is attacking with your body like a weapon with zero length!

I've never actually heard/read/seen in Real Life about the effectiveness of say, a wall of spears, in stopping an elephants charge, but in many games they assume that long weapons can often stop a large charging enemy. Perhaps Trample should take into account the weapon length and the number of enemies that try to "stop it" before successfully charging into the square. (Trampler Size and Strength would also probably be taken into account)

Yeah, one lone militia with a spear isnt' gonna stop a charging elephant, but a wall of pikemen several ranks deep would probably be able to convince an elephant not to run amok through their ranks.

So maybe the issue isn't morale, it isn't gold cost, perhaps its the Trample istelf. I doubt this is mod-able, thus in the meantime, for this and other rush problems, just Don't Allow Rushes in your MP games!

[lch]

Wahnsinniger said:
However, maybe the issue with Elephants (and Argathian Trogs) is the trample ability. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Trample doesn't take into account the enemies' weapons at all, does it?

You roll for defense against trampling. I don't think that repel works against it - it would make sense, but only for long (length 4+) weapons, IMHO. Trampling takes lots of fatigue and makes the attacker vulnerable because he is surrounded by enemies after he is finished trampling for one round, so I don't think it's too powerful. The problem is a stampede of trampling elephants... Wait, that's a problem in real life, too.

[thejeff]

The problem with the animal leadership fix, is that if you limit animal leadership to special commanders then does every nation get one? Just those with recruitable animals? Or national animal summons?
If the point is to not be able to mix it seems you'd have to have special animal leaders. I guess if you also added an indy elephant handler to the indy provinces with Elephants it could work.

If the point is to keep elephant squads small, then the other animal summons, many of which rely on a large number of weak creatures become even more underpowered. And the animal commanders from Call of the Winds/Wild become even better. All the elephant squads will be led by Black Hawks...

I like the idea of repel working against trampling. It'll hurt elephants a lot and other tramplers (especially pretenders) less or not at all.

[llamabeast]

I was thinking the same things as thejeff. It could easily become a messy and confusing fix. Lots of special cases, like Bandar Log and the Black Hawks, will make it much less useful.

Personally I would imagine that a better approach would be along the lines of giving the elephants some special morale rules. Perhaps someting like QM suggests. Perhaps the threshold for being damaged causing a morale check should be lower, and perhaps all morale checks for units involving elephants should be at the elephant's morale, rather than the average. This could all be built into an "Easily Panicked" attribute that would be given to elephants and might apply to other units too (although I can't think of any at the moment).

I also think the idea of using repel against elephants sounds good. Actually I would say improving the effect of pikemen and longspears would be a major improvement to the game in general. It seems funny that they are not particularly good even against cavalry. But that is a whole separate issue I guess.