Reducing Elephant Unit Size

Reducing Elephant Unit Size:

When I first tried to do this I started with the base Cathaginian Forest Elephants. I could not reduce the number of elephants below the original 6 without having the game fail to load, so I gave up and reduced hit points instead. (I also decreased armour but increased defensive skill, so that they were slightly vulnerable to missile fire.) Since then I figured out how to shrink the base elephant units.

Recently, I revisited the unit shrink problem and I've got it worked out now as to how to reduce the elephant unit size, and how to make it look decent. This is going to force me to do some new unit balancing, but it feels right from a game unit scaling approach, especially for historical battles like Trebia.

1. Reducing base elephant unit size for the "forest elephant" types with a single rider, you cannot reduce the crew below 6. However, you can double the number of riders per elephant and reduce the number of elephants accordingly. I chose a crew of 6, with 3 elephants (vs. default of 6 and 6 which is 12 and 12 on "large" unit size.) On large scale this modification results in 6 elephants with 12 crew. There is a graphical glitch which must be addressed and I will explain this in a moment.

2. Reducing War Elephant and Armoured War Elephant unit size. These are easy, just reduce the number of men/elephants from 18/6 to something like 9/3.

3. Fixing the graphics issue with the smaller base elephant units. The new extra crewman on the forest elephants is standing above the elephant as if there were a platform. (He also has a bow, but he can't use it without being given the appropriate stats, such a change might be a bit ahistorical but that is up to you, for now I'm not going to give him bow stats.) Also, if this unit has the army captain on it, he will need to be repositioned to account for the new crewman. You can't make the extra crewman sit down, but you can put him on/in the back of the elephant so that he looks natural unless someone makes a close inspection. He will be sprouting from the back of the elephant at upper thigh level. With the leather bands across the back of the elephant this blends well. Add a rider to the descr_mount.txt file and relocate riders as follows in bold below:

type elephant forest
class elephant
model elephant_forest
radius 4.4
x_radius 1.0
height 2.5
mass 10
banner_height 0
water_trail_effect elephant_water_trail
root_node_height 1.8
attack_delay 1
dead_radius 2.5
tusk_z 2.25
tusk_radius 1.5
riders 3
rider_offset 0.0, 1.0, 0.75
rider_offset 0.0, 0.15, 0.2
rider_offset 0.0, 0.15, -0.2

4. Balance issues have been discussed alot previously. My general suggestions at this time are to decrease armour but increase defensive skill to increase vulnerability to javelins and regular arrows. Also boost the elephant's bonus vs. horses both in the elephant stats and in the various unit mount effects (cav should be extremely ineffective vs. elephants.) Some hit point reduction for elephants is probably still in order, but if you reduce the unit size, the hit point change will need to be smaller. It might also be desirable to make the elephants more skittish in melee or under missile fire by reducing the base morale level from 8 to 4 or 6. Elephants should be powerful but brittle units able to cause decisive disruption in skilled hands, rather than just batter through everything in their path like robots. A poor general should get very poor results from elephants so reducing morale might help achieve that. Even Hannibal had trouble using his effectively at Zama, while other generals often had disastrous results with elephants.