How to Use Elephants In Battle?

[Robespierre]

I Just can't suss it out. How do you use pachyderm formations to win a battle? There must be something I am missing here.

[Enron]

For me elephants are used mainly to lower the moral of the enemy. I have used elephants in RTW but not in MTW2. The problems I have found with elephants is that they will go rouge on you too easy. since they are intelligent animals they have a sense of survival that is evident in the game. if a group of elephants are engaged in battle for an extended period of time they will go rouge, become uncontrollable and stomp/kill all that surround them friend or foe. I use elephants to turn the tide of battle to shock the opponents troops into routing.

to keep elephants off of your troops, concentrate all of your archers into attacking the elephants with flaming arrows. if you have horse archers or archer chariots have them attack the elephants also. after a few minutes of having flaming arrows shot into them the elephants will go rouge.

therefore is you plan on using elephants then leave them visible to the enemy troops to frighten them. make some false charges at the enemy to heighten the fear factor. the timing of the elephant charge is critical, when you time the charge correctly as soon as you see the elephants hit you opponent and their troops start flying in the air the rest will rout/run away. do not use your elephants to chase down the enemy troops use a light cav unit. so basically keep the elephants near the battle but always in the middle of the fight and then use them to break the back of your opponent.

also in RTW an elephant can be used as a battering ram to break through a wooden wall.

[Yaropolk]

after a few minutes of having flaming arrows shot into them the elephants will go rouge.

I've never seen an elephant in makeup

[Privateerkev]

First use the Elephant Artillery for counter-battery fire. Keep them as far back as you can. Have your regular Elephants screen the artillery ones. When all of the enemy's artillery is gone, move your elephants to one flank. Move them around and have the elephant artillery shoot down the army's line with enfillade fire. Have the regular elephants on the artillery elephant's flank. Watch for flaming arrows. Run your elephants back if under flaming fire to keep them from running amok. If your army is in trouble, run your elephants into the enemy's flank to rescue your army.

Arty

enemy army
----------

----------
your army

EA and E

After enemy arty is destroyed, do this:

--------- EA and E
---------

Hope this helps!

[PBI]

What PrivateerKev said for Elephant artillery.

For normal elephants, especially for the Rajputs on BC where elephants are weaker but more plentiful, the key is to use them aggressively and get them into the thick of the melee for a quick rout. If they are mixed up in melee the enemy will be reluctant to fire upon them with javelins or fire arrows for fear of hitting his own troops. Elephants can overcome many times their numbers of infantry or cavalry in melee and even spearmen don't give them much pause. Even better, they only have to kill a few men to get the others running, so usually a single unit of elephants charging into the fray at the height of a melee battle will be enough to swing it decisively in your favour.

In melee, look out for axes and halberds, these are the only things with a reasonable chance of hurting the elephants before they are routed. If it looks like your eles are getting bogged down, double right click somewhere outside the melee (preferably behind the enemy line since the eles are pointing that way anyway) to get them moving again; they will brush the enemy units out of their way and knock them down in the process, which won't kill many but will completely disrupt the enemy unit. Once they are out of the fight, turn them around and charge them back in.

If you suspect one of your ele units is in danger of stampeding (it is under attack with fire arrows or it is starting to take casualties in melee), give them a wide berth. A crazy unit of elephants isn't the end of the world, and can quite happily carry on killing the enemy and scaring the **** out of them, but be aware they will die quicker themselves so expect them to start losing elephants. Never, ever, use the "kill elephants" special ability if they go crazy, you'll get them back after the battle anyway and a unit of eles is invariably far more valuable than whatever unit it might squish while crazy.

For all types of elephants, avoid javelin cavalry like the plague, they will tear through a unit of eles in no time. Same goes for if you are facing eles yourself, send jav cav against them to pick them off relatively cheaply. Bow cavalry by contrast are pretty much helpless against eles except in huge numbers. Javelin infantry are less of a threat so long as you charge them with your eles from outside their range, so that they don't have time to get a volley off before the charge hits them.

I find the best unit setup to use with elephants is to combine them with light cavalry. The elephants do the heavy killing work and break the enemy center, while the light cavalry screen them from the hated javelin cavalry and tie up any enemy foot archers. If the light cav get into melee trouble the elephants come to the rescue.

Be very wary of using eles in a siege, the narrow streets stop them charging properly and they can be something of a liability what with all those fire arrows around and the danger of a elephant running amok and crushing your entire army on the way out of the city.

[Old Geezer]

PBI's advice is excellent. Elephants do best at stomping and frightening - hopefully, the enemy and not your men. So, keep them away -far far away - from flaming anything, but especially ballista bolts (which are accurate and have long range). Never be stupid like the AI and park them in front of a city gate and fire at men on the walls. In fact, when attacking a fort or city, I'd just leave the elephants at home. Also, it is not a good idea to let heavy cavalry charge your elephants in the posterior portions.

[Robespierre]

So far using Rajput elephants the idea is to combine them with swordsmen to engage any hard centres of resistance especially spears since surely eles count as cavalry therefore spears will get a bonus countering them, and to take a few (light) cavalry along for chasing routers. however this is a pure assault army and rather fragile, it has no spear and bow component to hold ground, no ability to stand ground, and if the eles run amok then little ability to even regroup. so it may be a risky approach.

[Old Geezer]

How many units of elephants are you using in an army? (I take it you are using the mod Broken Cresent.)

[Robespierre]

Hw many? A few, i think that's 7 or 8 or so , plus the general. Lots of elephants. Many elephants. Plenty heffalumps. However it does look likely that this army will be creamed by the Ghorids, they have all the classic elephant-disposal infantry named above.

in the event this is proving the bloodiest campaign i ever have played at TW, mostly because the Rajputs are lightly armoured and the ghorids have bows.Rajputs are the ultimate side for the player who loves cheap expendable cannonfodder. the biggest threat was indeed firearrows causing elephants to run amok and trample their own side, which caused many more losses to the swordsmen than enemy action. the follow-up cheap spear and bow stack lost over 400 men fighting horse archers, shocking carnage amongst the conscripts. i love it.

[Old Geezer]

Why not an entire army of elephants and one general for the morale? Charge them straight into the enemy as fast as possible and they enemy can't get off enough fire arrows to do much of anything. I don't see how any infantry can stop the elephants except pikemen in deep ranks attacking from several directions.

[seireikhaan]

Just started up a campaign in BC with the Rajputs, and I'm finding it great fun, being the turtle I am. I've seized all of the nearby rebel settlements, and am finding the economy to be absolutely no problem at all.

I had a small war with the Ghorids over Delhi and the two settlements to its east. The two to the east were pretty much undefended, but I had a battle on my hands for Delhi. My advice would be to make sure to have at least 3 or 4 units of Indian javelin cavalry to support the elephants; plus, if you run into anyone using elephants themselves, you got them nailed. The cav are great for charging archers and foot javelins, thus freeing the elephants to go wild on their cav and infantry. Of course, you'll always run the risk of the elephants running amok, but if you bury them deep enough into enemy frontlines, they'll still take a large number of enemies with them while going crazy.

Longbows are quite nice to have as well, for warding off javelins

[Robespierre]

as for the faction, the Rajputs, i think i need to conquer the Ghorids and Sindhs completely, before they get too big and tough. If it were a straight fight, i would have lost this war, unable to replace my losses after the capture of Delhi as fast or well as the Ghorids. however the Rajputs do start with a really good diplomat and now the Ghaznavids have agreed to pile-on to Ghorids together, for a rather large number of ducats mind, so there is at least a good chance of a win. i must remember this next time i play the Ghaznis!

bows are ok in a spear 'n bow force, but in an assault army such as the elephant-grenadier division i have outlined they are out of place, because the spears cost too many slots. maybe some can be brought on as reinforcements, but then they tend to dither round the far edges for too long rather than getting stuck in at securing my flanks.

[PBI]

I found the best mix for a Rajput field army to be equal parts elephants, light javelin cavalry and Hindu longbowmen. The longbowmen make up your main ranged attack force and can put the enemy infantry under a morale-crushing barrage before your elephants charge in to crush them and control the center of the battlefield. The elephants are also sufficient to deal with any cavalry threat to your archers. Your light cav screen the elephants from enemy jav cav and also run down any foot archers or javelins. Heavy cav have terrible acceleration in BC so your light cav will almost always be able to flank the formation, charge the archers, and dance back out of range before the enemy can react.

An all elephant force would be nice, but the main thing limiting your growth as the Rajputs is the availability of elephants so it'd take forever to build such a stack. Not to mention of course it would be helpless against jav cav. Another advantage of my unit mix is that every single unit has a missile attack, so the enemy is under a constant withering barrage of arrows and javelins. The Rajput units are a mix of the uber-strong but expensive elephants and extremely cheap, lightweight infantry and cavalry which can be retrained as quickly as you lose them with little in between until the late game, so it makes sense to build your army with this philosophy in mind: Your elephants are your main killers, but are expensive and need to be protected with a thick screen of cheap, expendable units.

The big advantage you have over the Ghorids is that they have no spearmen whatsoever. This means that their infantry is almost always easily crushed by a single elephant charge. This leaves their main strength in horse archers (which your foot archers should deal with), jav cav (which is only a threat if it gets past your own cav; pin them in melee with your cav and rush a unit of elephants in to crush them) and heavy ghulam cavalry (which are no match for your elephants). Their numerous poweful cav will probably kill a lot of your own cav and archers, but as I mentioned, these are expendable; their recruitment cost is barely more than their upkeep and in BC you can recruit more units at once per settlement tha in vanilla.

Oh, do be careful turtling against the Ghorids though, I think they are one of these factions like the Kypchaks who get huge batches of free cash every turn despite fielding huge numbers of troops, so they will pretty much always outproduce you.

[Robespierre]

Since we are on the subject of BC campaigns, what of the Sindhs? Is their only purpose in the game to be difficult?