Kraxis,

The cataphract horses have a mass of 6 vs. 4.5 for the others. Makes sense as they were the heaviest horse around at the time, and were carrying a lot of weight as well.

I haven't tested my new elephants yet. But I'm taking a different slant on it. I want the elephants to be well capable of breaking containment and causing lots of disorder, but not necessarily kill everyone doing so, I want them to be vulnerable if they stay put and melee, and I want them to be vulnerable to missile attack. So I reduce their hit points as much as feasible, give them disruptive punch, but not so much killing power, and with luck make them vulnerable to missile attack. I also am going to cut the unit size in half. I really think I can do this with the current engine and get a realistic elephant attack. (I've been enjoying reading about the disruption of Pyrrhus elephants, Porus' and even the Roman elephants in a couple of battles. They badly disordered phalangites.) As a note, even forest elephants should have at least 4 times the mass of the heaviest horses in the game if not much more.

My radical idea at the moment is to adjust elephant armour vs. hit points with the goal of a single hit point elephant but with substantial "armour" but not so much that an archery barrage can't stop them. I will give them very, very high defensive skill so that cav and infantry, etc. have a tough time killing them. My reasoning is that CA went the wrong route with the elephants. They changed the combat engine to allow a huge range of attack and defense, but instead of using that for things like elephants, they used lots of hit points instead, which completely skews missile vulnerability. So I'm going to see what happens if I take the opposite course.