How to deal with elephants

[sector24]

Honestly, the only way I've dealth with elephants successfully is to find the province that they're being produced in and use spells to reduce the population/resources to 0 or the put the unrest over 100. Once the elephants get on the field, the only thing that will stop them is an army much larger and more expensive.

[Gandalf Parker]

And again I am forced to wonder why there are unstoppable tactics.
Not wondering that there is one, but that there is more than one. Wouldnt that mean that one such tactic (for example, elephants) can be challenged by the other such tactic (dual-bless, Vanheim, etc)?

[OmikronWarrior]

Starvation will send morale to the pits as well (-4, I think). Still, the issue with elephants isn't so much how low or high their morale is, but what it takes to trigger a morale check. Your best bet is to a spell causing fear (such as Frighten), as almost any other method involves inflicing a lot of casualties (which is very hard to do to elephants due to their very high HP) or getting close with a creature with the Fear attribute (which means expossing that unit to the tramplers). A morale of 8 means their is a roughly 50/50 chance of a rout depending on the current survivor bonus. Considering how not all nations have easy access to death magic, this isn't much of a solution. In the "qm said" thread, I propose a new game meachanic which pits the tramplers morale against the total weapon length in the desired square.

[sector24]

It's not that Elephants are unstoppable. Dual bless is great, except that you either sleep your pretender or take bad scales or both. Meaning you have to commit a higher % of your resources to kill his elephants, while you beats you by simply having better scales or more research or both.

I'm not sure what you mean by Vanheim. Although they are a ridiculously powerful nation, trampling is the one thing that really messes them up. I think the reason people talk about elephants so much is because they require no strategy. Oh look, elephants. Build a fortress in that province, all of a sudden you can make 7-8 elephants per turn. Look at me I'm a master tactician.

[Gandalf Parker]

Well my favorite response tactic to any large unbeatable army of any type is to create armies of stealth to whittle down their support funds by taking provinces, taxing them at 200%, fading into the wilderness to attack another province two or three away. This forces them to invest in PD, move armies around internally instead of massing them to attack someone else, and make some hard choices about budgeting for awhile. It might not be a "winning" strategy but it has been known to cause them to lose their "winning" strategy long enough to knock them off the top rung. Its a great ally-tactic.

[Xietor]

"Well my favorite response tactic to any large unbeatable army of any type is to create armies of stealth to whittle down their support funds by taking provinces, taxing them at 200%, fading into the wilderness to attack another province two or three away. This forces them to invest in PD, move armies around internally instead of massing them to attack someone else, and make some hard choices about budgeting for awhile. It might not be a "winning" strategy but it has been known to cause them to lose their "winning" strategy long enough to knock them off the top rung. Its a great ally-tactic."

And my favorite tactic is to mind hunt the stealth commander before he can stealth away and kill his leaderless army.

[Rytek]

No mention of an awake pretender killing the pachyderms?

[Shovah32]

Xietor said:
And my favorite tactic is to mind hunt the stealth commander before he can stealth away and kill his leaderless army.

*Insert stealthy astral mage here*

@Rytek:
Certain awake pretenders, generally size 6 pretenders with good defence/high prot, can handle elephant rushes. Size 6 is almost required without high fear and/or awe(trampled to death without - berserk elephants are evil). The high protection/defence on the size 6 is important because elephant trunks, although only at attack 10, can pack quite a punch(17 damage).

[Sir_Dr_D]

Xietor said:

And my favorite tactic is to mind hunt the stealth commander before he can stealth away and kill his leaderless army.

i noticed that. what you have done to my spies is not very nice. But I must say, nice job.

[Dedas]

I'm posting some small replays on the first page when I'm using the different spells in the list against elephants. Be sure to check them out.