Qm said

[CUnknown]

I'm not completely convinced that the early game is broken, especially if the CB Scales mod is used. If you take a large blessing, you're paying the price with an imprisoned pretender and/or crappy scales. I'm against an artifical capping of blessings -- it doesn't add viable strategies, it removes them. Of course, if you're just taking about a house rule, go for it, but if you're talking about something you want to see in a patch or for Dom 4, I'd be against it.

As far as the elephants go -- it seems to me that a 100 gold unit should be pretty devastating. And they are, so I don't quite see the problem. If you're saying that they are too good for their cost, then the simple solution is to raise the cost (in gold or maybe resources). Perhaps to 120 gold, maybe even 150 if you think they're really broken. We shouldn't be making rules that apply only to a specific subset of units. The rules of the game should apply to all units, imo.

At 150 gold, elephants would be so expensive to employ that they had -better- be really effective, or no one would use them.

[llamabeast]

I don't think anything so dramatic as "the early game is broken" either, far from it. But a few things can be frustrating for players. An elephant rush is an example - if you are Ulm or some other race with no obvious defences, then the elephants will kill you, and there's nothing you can do about it. Even if your army is worth twice as much gold as theirs.

Now I think it would be a shame to make elephants less good, or to make them cost too much more, because they are mainly good fun as they are. The trouble is that although elephants have a built-in and well-designed weakness - low morale and the tendency to trample your own troops once broken - that weakness can be avoided by what's essentially an exploit, that is mixing the elephants with high-morale infantry. The fact that that works doesn't really make thematic sense.

Kristoffer - I was thinking the same thing about animals. Perhaps you could have a new property "hard-to-control animals" or "easily-panicked animals" (obviously come up with a much better name!), which applies to elephants, but not to lions.

[Kristoffer O]

The problem is not one elephant or 5 elephants, but 50 of them.

I haven't seen this, but this seems to be what it is about. When you pass a critical mass of elephants there is nothing that can stop them and they become worth far more than the 150 you buy them for. Especially since they trample every routing unit, effectively eating up the entire enemy army, regardless of size.

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.

So in short: Elephants are fine at their cost as long as you don't get too many. At that time the game mechanics for trample might make them unbalanced. Especially if used with the silly tactic of mixing them with elites for better morale.

[Shovah32]

I think EA Agarthan troglodytes, although obviously less common, are even worse.
50 gold for a 37 health, 7 protection, size 4, 16ap(2 mapmove), MR12, morale 14! trampler who can go toe-to-toe with other large units(2 attacks, attack value 12 at strength 23) is a very nice deal indeed.

[CUnknown]

50 elephants would cost 5000 gold as is, and if their cost was raised to 150 each, that army would cost 7500 gold. That's an amazingly expensive army for the early game! For the same cost, you could get ~150 heavy knights. My money is on the knights. 3 lances hitting one elephant will kill it, right?

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.

As far as it being a silly tactic or an exploit to mix in high morale troops with your elephants... I see what you're saying from a role-playing perspective, but from a gaming perspective, it's not an exploit at all. If you did the same thing with a different kind of low morale troop, there clearly wouldn't be a problem with the strategy. It's only considered silly in this case because of the name and the RL characteristics of the unit in question.

I actually like role playing, even in multiplayer, to a certain extent. But when things like this come up, I take a gaming perspective usually.

Anyway, if you do want to do something like this Kristoffer, I prefer the 'elephants cannot be mixed with other units' thing as opposed to the 'elephants have their morale capped' thing.

[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.

[Xietor]

The fact is tramplers were given the low morale because they were not intended to fight to the death. In a way, adding high morale low cost infantry units to their group severely undermines the risk of having them turn on your own army. And it takes no great general to mix the units either.

Rather than raise their cost, and have them continue to fight to the death, I would think the more logical solution is to allow them to rout after they have received substantial damage, and trample their own troops.

That is the double edged sword of using the tramplers. No, I do not think you should be able to just raise the cost and continue to have 72 hp tramplers that fight to the death.

[quantum_mechani]

The main issue, as KO says, is not so much the infantry mixed with small numbers of elephants, it's the elephant hordes so huge they don't even need the moral boost. It's true, the equivalent gold cost in knights could probably easily stop them, but they can't be massed anywhere near as fast, especially with the base game barding costs.

[krpeters]

Thoughts on elephants & morale:

An easy way (for the programmers) to eliminate the "combining infantry with elephants" bug would be to weight a squad's morale by each unit's (original) hp. So it would take 7 heavy infantry to balance out one elephant's low morale... at which point the whole advantage of using elephants (high attack, low resource) would be eliminated.

Regarding the huge effectiveness of an elephant rush... I've used this strategy often, it does seem unfair that smaller squads get pasted. Keep in mind, though, that the effectiveness depends on concentration. If that 50 elephant squad breaks off into two 25 elephant squads, a moderate (100) sized light-infantry contingent can take them. So when you see the elephants coming, get out of their way, then charge into the enemy's territory (how many 50 elephant squads can he have?) and force him to chase you.

Alternatively, the problem of so many elephants in a single squad could be addressed by changing the squad rules limiting units in a squad by hp. A rating "50" commander would be able to lead 500 hp-units of troops -- 62 vaetti, or 7 elephants. Forcing the elephants into many squads could disorganize them sufficiently. (How is a single commander herding 50 elephants in the first place???!!!)