How to Use Elephants In Battle?

[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?