Qm said

[RamsHead]

As I was saying last night on IRC, I think animal leadership would be a bad idea. It would most likely make it more difficult to use animals, many which are rarely used already. It can also have unforeseen consequences and unbalance other things in the process. For example, when Machaka's riders die, they become animal spiders. Will all of Machaka's commanders have animal leadership? Will I have to haul around some other commander so I can keep using the spiders? If the problem is elephants than I think the solution should stick to elephants.

[DrPraetorious]

But the lion elephant corps feels a bit ridiculous

Ridiculously *awesome*, you mean!

Actually, question - if I have a mixed unit of undead and normal units, and my last undead leader routs, does the entire unit rout or just the undead?

My biggest problem with messing around with animals is that all of the Bandar are animals. OTOH, the bandar are supposed to be pretty weird, so they could have their own crazy morale rules.

How's about this -
* Animals are not figured into squad morale, as with mindless or berserk units.
* When an animal is injured (or otherwise hit with morale damage) the squad morale is not influenced.
* Whenever an animal suffers a morale hit, all *animals* on your side take the morale hit. Alternately - all animals in a certain size-dependent radius could take the morale hit, but this might be CPU intensive or something.

This would mean, for example, that you could "let loose the dogs of war!" and any humans in the same unit wouldn't care if the dogs got killed.

It would also mean that a mixed force of elephants couldn't be stiffened *either* by spiking it with phalanxes, or by arbitrarily splitting it up into smaller groups (each of which might break individually but the whole group wouldn't.)

Finally, it would mean that all humans are racist against Vanara.

[DenStoreFrelser]

DrPraetorious' idea of splitting animals off from sentient creatures seems pretty good. If you do this, the elephants will always have abysmal morale (Unless you put them in a group with other, braver animals...). If you also add animal trainer commanders with standard abilities that only affects animals, you allow players to continue to use elephants against each other without resorting to silly uses of heavy infantry.

I don't think Bandar units should be seen as animals in this regard, as they appear to be intelligent enough to be considered people, except maybe the markatas. Pangea seems like a more likely candidate for special rules. I guess it wouldn't break the game to just give animal standard effects to their leaders, but that would "force" you to send dryads and the like to the front lines.

Also, if you do implement animal leadership, you might want to consider having units require their own size in leadership. I'm sure you can think of a decent excuse for this, and it would reduce the increase in power for cheap animal summoning spells.

[MaxWilson]

Kind of a tangent, but do weapons on a trampler, e.g. the long spears on LA Arco's elephants, actually do any good? If they get repel attempts that's nice, otherwise they seem kind of useless.

-Max

[Kristoffer O]

Repel and attack when meeting a size 6 monster. Not very useful, but a bonus.

[Sombre]

They don't repel smaller enemies?

[Kristoffer O]

They do.