How powerful was Elephant in real battle..?

[Serpent]

I have heard and read that elephants ware not so powerful as many may think. Actually roman army didint even see point to produsing these kind of units. Because soon Romans found good ways to counter them.(Whit infantry if I remember correctly.)

Now are elephant tank like units that can trampel everything.

[Ldvs]

They're not unbeatable in the demo though, order all your archers to target the elephants and they'll run amok quickly once their crews got killed.

[English assassin]

IIRC elephants were not terribly successful against Romans at least. They found it was quite easy to wound the animal with javelins, so that its handlers lost control and it simply charged about at random, or, even worst, turned tail from the javelin throwing Romans and piled back into the carthaginians.

There is also the problem that so far as I know domesticated elephants are captured wild elephants (ie not bred in captivity). I assume this was so in Roman times. I have never quite worked out where the Carthaginians got their elephants from (since if there are wild elephants on the Libyan coast its news to me). I assume they traded with India, but they can't have had many. I think Livy says how many Hannibal had after crossing the Alps and its very few indeed.

So even if they were any good you would not be able to have many in an army.

[KillerKadugen]

They wouldn't have to trade with India because they had the African elephant. I have heard that they were smaller than the Indian elephant. Also, there used to be elephants upon the African coast, but overhunting and trapping have led to their extinction.

[hotingzilla]

No, African elephants were bigger than Indian ones.

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King shows how powerful yet how limited they are in battle.

They are good when dealing initial charges, but once the enemy army have gotten enough trampled, they will develop a tactic to counter. Throwing javelins and shooting the crew down.

Alexander the Great also came up with a counter against the elephants when he first sae them in a battle.

[Shoraro]

No, African elephants were bigger than Indian ones.

True, except they didn't use the African elephants which survive today, which are apparently untameable. They used African forest elephants, which were smaller than Indian elephants and are now extinct.

[katank]

yep, the african eles they used were the same variety that the persians used and in one ele battle, the Indian eles completely bulldozed the smaller African ones.