Qm said

[TwoBits]

Now that I think about it though, while an 'animal-leadership' rating might tame elephants/mammoths/ to some extent, it doesn't necessarily solve the problem of a trampler rush.

Many nations can put together a rush based on chariots, troglodytes, or minotaurs. While you might categorize the later two as animals of a sort, where do chariots fit in? With the right scales, they can be just as nasty as elephants - they're cheaper, and often have better moral and protection to boot (I scoff at your slings and arrows!).

Maybe units with long weapons DO need a bonus against tramplers (heck, and charge bonus units while we're at it!). It would give us a reason to actually buy those pike-men/spear-men...

[thejeff]

There's a long way between Black Hawks at Conjuration3 and when normal armies aren't useful any more.
You could use your animal leaders with 10 elephants to expand and push research in Conjuration. Should be able to get there within the first year and have a nice backlog of elephants waiting for a leader.
(On the gripping hand, do any of the elephant nation even have Nature magic and income? Arcosephale, though only N1 right? )


More importantly, even if it addressed the elephant rush problem, it introduces all sorts of micromanagement and unforeseen hassles. Does every nation get animal leaders? Do no animal leaders have regular (or magical?) leadership? What about the ape nations? Do they only have animal leadership? So they can't use independents? Nature mages should get animal leadership. But then you can mix elephants and regular troops. Unless no nature mages can lead regular troops. Do indy elephants come with animal commanders? Are the various summon animals (pack of wolves/bears/lions, etc) spells now even more useless?

In general, the problem is tramplers, particularly elephants and this fix addresses animals in general.

I like the repel idea better. It's more specific to the problem.

[MaxWilson]

It's easier to find a counter to chariots/minotaurs, because more nations have access to size 4 creatures than size 6, and chariots can't trample anything of size 4 or bigger. That way, you can at least put up a front line with archers behind it, whereas elephants just trample all over your whole army. (And of course they do more damage, since trample damage is (8 + 2*size difference) AP.)

That said, I'm not entirely convinced that you can't delay an elephant horde for a few rounds with the right tactical placement. Tramplers do great against large masses of troops, but tend to spend a lot of movement chasing down stragglers. Break your 300-man army up into 20 15-man squads and see how much time that buys you. I doubt it would win the battle vs. a large horde, but it might let you inflict a few more casualties.

-Max

[Ironhawk]

All we really need to do to fix elephants is to drop thier protection. It's really as simple as that, guys. Drop thier prot to like 5-6... maybe 7 and you will see a radical difference in thier usability. Instead of just plowing unstoppably through any number of troops, they will get cut down by arrows and the hordes of the troops that surround them after a trample. If they are unsupported by infantry to take heat off them on the ground and archers to counter-attack the enemy shooters, they will be cut to ribbons -- as it should be.

[Warhammer]

Historically elephants were done in by their morale. They also tended to not be coordinated extraordinarily well. How about reducing the maximum number of elephants in a squad? Come up with some number and the player is forced to have more commanders. With the smaller squads, more morale checks will be made, which will force them back on their own army.

Thematically, you could have the limit be based upon a size factor. With smaller troops, they are in a more compact area making them easier to control. The larger the size, the more area they take up making them more difficult to control.

[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.