Qm said

[lch]

I don't think that the Troglodytes need to get nerfed. Their trample effect is a lot less effective than size 6 tramplers, and trampling units have the problem that they always storm deep into the enemy ranks. So while their initial attack can kill a handful of units, the volley of hits from the other units surrounding them can easily kill them in one turn. The real problem, like KO and QM already said, are hordes of tramplers that occupy a large part of the battlefield so that they don't draw hits as easily as a loose group of tramplers.

Kristoffer O said:
Elephants are supposed to break easily, and devastate the own army if they do. But if you mix them with high morale heavy infantry, they do not rout as easily. This is thematically unsound: elephants that doesn't rout because they know that their brave human friends way back dont care if some of the elephants die or get poked by spears.

This seems to present the obvious idea how to "fix" this: Make morale mixing dependent on location of the units. A little like standards, units should be inspired by their comrades in their squad around them and may get morale boost through that, but not if they fight the enemy hordes on their own, while the rest of the squad is far away.

CUnknown said:
Perhaps the best thing to do is raise the resource cost on the elephants so that you can't mass them as easily, in addition to possibly raising the gold cost.

I would not raise the gold cost, but I already thought myself that they could use some more resources. LA Arco's elephants are quite resource intensive, but the normal ones can even be massed with sloth scales.

[Shovah32]

The reason Arcos elephants are so resource intensive is their armour. Rather than tough, unroutable killing machines you get unroutable killing machines that are practically impossible to kill without magic.

edit(max posted while i was typing):
Ive been hit by an elephant rush as ulm in multiplayer and avoiding them is not an option. With high resource, mapmove 1 troops and not enough provinces to mass any cheaper indies(i think i had maybe 6-7 provinces when i got attacked) i was doomed from the moment they hit me. I took a few elephants out in the final battle in my capitol by trapping them in the gate with the bonds of fire spell(if thats the name, cant remember) and hitting them with about 15-20 maul and flail troops but in the end they just ran through and killed my mages and that was me dead. Raiding round them early on is simply not an option because they can simply divert for a turn and kill your raiders/take your capitol and kill them with a second force while cutting off all of your income. The reason nations like ulm are particularly vunerable is that they have very weak early magic, very weak troops vrs tramplers(few, small, heavily armoured troops) and only a few troops who are too slow to out-maneuver anybody.