Research: Elephants, Healing, and Multiple Hit Points

[Kraxis]

With the changes you have already made, I think a moralechange isn't needed, or rather it might prove disaterous to the elephants.

You have made the eles weaker against archery and other ranged weapons as well as weaking numbers and hitpoints. So to keep the eles effective one has to send them in to trample. No more fighting, just keep going until you reach the other side as the elephants will likely not be able to last long inside a big bunch of infantry. But that means the elephants will suffer from massive moralepenalties as they are flanked on both sides, possibly even surrounded by enemies at times (and here we are talking about units). That makes the lowered morale dangerous as you risk the eles routing every single time you charge them, not to say what will happen if one of them gets stuck and killed.

[Paul Peru]

I don't think the morale needs to be lowered.
In my experience getting them to rout or run amok is easy enough.
Using HA, I can usually get rid of them without taking heavy losses.
This has been the only solution in my Armenian campaign so far.

Unit size reduction looks promising.
This, along with some armour reduction and mount effects while maintaining cost seems about right to me.

Yesterday I tried a custom battle: me all-pachy Cartman vs. AI with Gaul units of it's own choosing. I won narrowly. Several ele
The point: the flaming arrows of the forrester warband actually downed one beast. The charred hulk looked rather foul-smelling.
(vanilla 1.1 default settings)

[Red Harvest]

Remember how the game uses elephants (and encourages their use by you): you charge them in with your cav and infantry right behind. You don't stand them there fighting, you just charge through. With unmodded base elephants I just send them back and forth through the enemy army until it is torn completely up, and there is nothing to stop it. The AI is quite good at this ( hey, I just praised the AI for something!) There is not a requirement to keep some separation from friendlies and no real penalty for following right on their heels. Historically, this was a bad idea since elephants can cause terrible disruption in your own men. Even running amok, my own elephants cause little problem in my armies so I just ignore them. When running amok they should be treated as having the attack values of an enemy (and horrible morale effects.)

So the elephants don't suffer morale penalties from being isolated and unsupported, because there is a horde charging just behind them and with them. Unless they run into a pike phalanx frontally, this is the way to go.

CA has done some odd things with the relative balance of units, but it is a challenge to fix. The best example is horses vs. elephants. With reduced stats, horses become a problem, hence my extensive mount modifier changes. One thing I've seen with the smaller elephant units is a loss of "mass" vs. cav. The elephant charge bogs down earlier and will halt vs. elite cav. Some of the loss of mass is good vs. infantry, but against cav, the horses should clear a lane.

I'm not surprised horse archers could handle the elephants, the beasts will tire rapidly. That doesn't work against an infantry army. Well, it can if you have flaming arrow archers. But they weren't all that common in most armies of the day... The legions of the Roman Republic relied on the pointy stick approach, and that doesn't work in RTW. Javs are worthless although the skirmishers can do some harm, IF nobody else is around to charge into the skirmishers.

Flaming arrows do really kill elephant morale, but they deserve a big asterisk for several reasons (buggy, plus the questionable bonuses the seem to give vs. infantry, etc., and why is this effect magnified tenfold for elephants?) Regular arrows do almost nothing. I've read that Scipio liked to use slingers vs. elephants and found them quite effective.