Qm said

[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.

[Edratman]

Just out of curiosity, how often do you see a 50 elephant rush in MP? I'm a SP solely, but amassing 50 elephants is very expensive and quite time consuming. I've never even considered accumulating that many.

[Ewierl]

thejeff said:
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?

I agree with those who think Nature magic should increase Animal Leadership, if the latter is going to exist. Maybe water too, so that underwater nations don't get stuck with unleadable Krakens. But this does seem like a top-heavy solution.

Repel vs. trampling seems both good and bad; it makes sense for the spearman to get a jab in, but doesn't make sense for the spearman to actually make the charging elephant skid to a halt. Maybe a sort of partial-repel where you can't actually stop the trampler, but can get an advance hit? This too seems like an unwieldy solution.

Also, agree with those who don't think Elephants are useless by Conj 3. Generally, elephants become useless when you can field MR-or-lose spells in enough numbers to stop them... and the mage numbers can be harder to match than the research, when 30 elephants come charging into your lines 2 rounds into the combat.