Quote Originally Posted by Slaists
Well, elephants themselves do not cause that much damage even if they charge head-on. They trample units and trampled units can stand up afterwards and continue fighting. The real damage of the elephant is destroyed formation which can be exploited by troops charging behind the beasts. At least, that's how it is in the game. As to being overpowered: I do not think so. I could deal with elephants (separating them from the army and then driving around or even routing them) before the patch. It's the AI, that has real problems dealing with human led elephants...
I would have loved to watch you try that vs. the AI army I faced. It charged the elephants right in with cav and other units chasing right behind. There was no opportunity to control the action as you or others have suggested. It was one of the few times the AI "schooled" me in how to best employ a unit.

No the elephants don't necessarily kill all that many on their own (although I often kill a hundred or more when I employ a single unit of base elephants), but they do cause units to rout, or more importantly: masses of units to rout. Much of the reason I'm modding them is so that they won't be so indestructible in my hands, on very hard. I found I could use them with near impunity.

The elephants were not decisive at Trebbia (after some difficulty early in the battle the Romans were figuring out how to deal with them...but other things happened like cavalry envelopment and a rear ambush attack.) At Zama Hannibal charged 80 elephants into the Roman infantry and they had little effect--actually some ran amok back into his own lines and cav. With the scale used in RTW for elephants, that would be about 2 to 4 units of War Elephants (although base Elephants would be just fine) vs. a full Roman stack. Trebbia would have had no more than 37 elephants split between the wings (2 units.)