Quote Originally Posted by Red Harvest
I've shuffled some of the defensive values around and the results are satisfactory in that the elephants now have some missile vulnerability while maintaining some melee defense. I've cut base level elephant armour to 5, war elephant to 7, and armoured to 9. Defensive skills have been upped to compensate (5, 7, and 7 respectively.) I did cut out 2 total points of defense from the first two elephant types, and 3 from the armoured elephant. Combining this with halving of the hit points makes for reasonable pachyderms. The big bruisers still pack a wallop, but they are killable.

What I am seeing in small custom battles vs. single elephant units is this: javs and missiles still don't have much immediate effect, but they are causing damage by reducing hit points. Eventually beasts will start dropping if they take enough fire. After only a few fall, the unit routs. A few velite units are sufficient to handle an elephant unit between thrown javs and melee. The javs/velites get a big bonus in melee and can deal with the elephants. However, the elephants will usually rout one or two of these units before being contained. So if the elephant has follow up support (and they usually do...) the pachyderm will remain an excellent shock unit.

In the five or six test runs I did with the towered elephants, I only saw one archer killed--and that was apparently by a javelin. In all other cases the beast went down first. The frequency of crew kills is probably 1/10th that of the animal itself--unless the mahout is getting killed sometimes to bring the beast down. I find it unlikely that the mahout is being hit, because if so I would see more random kills from early volleys by archers, and that *never* happens.

Guess it is about time to try them in a campaign.


Try it with bolt throwers . Realistically {ie in RealLife Total War ;p}, a Balista should have little trouble killing even an Armoured Elephant , however even full stacks in custom battle cannot get more than half at best it seems , and despite the huge target , seem to miss at rediculously close ranges {they seem to target the Mahout , not the Elephant :/ } which compounds matters {it isn't too unusual to have the elephants reach the line of Balistas without a single casuality , and they very often still have most of their number alive when they rout} .

Grrr