Elephants: Balanced or not?

[geala]

Please, let the poor Hannibal rest in peace when it comes to elephants. He was a great general but had little time to use elephants. Contrary to some belief none of his elephants died during the crossing of the alps. They died exept one (Surus, the Indian) after the battle at the Trebia because of the cold winter and perhaps exhaustion. At Zama Hannibal had to use 80 recently captured and very illtrained forest elephants; they killed a lot of Roman soldiers but were finally beaten by Scipios cunning preparations.

The true elephant users were others, the Indian kings, the Successors, esp. the Seleucids, Pyrrhos, sometimes the Romans (!), the Sassanids, the Mughals etc.. Some big battles were decided by elephants, sometimes they failed totally.

I'm also of the opinion that elephants are not so well depicted in EB now. They are much to weak. It is indeed very difficult to kill an elephant with small missiles. So the elephant losses were minimal on the fields. Elephants however can be scared by the pain they receive if hit by missiles. Either they flee or run amok. The more they were trained and had trust and a good connection to the mahout the better they could stand the pain and horror of the battles. The hp should be raised therefore.

Armoured elephants should be much harder to kill even.


Some additional remarks in no special order:
1. I never heard of the use of bush elephants for warfare. Do you have a source for this? I think only African forest elephants and Indian elephants should be in the game.
2. Playing as Ptolemaioi I could recruit elephants in Meroe. At least the description of the build MIC says that. But the unit does not appear in the towns unit roster and so is not recruitable. What is to do?
3. It's a pity that Epeiros cannot longer recruit armored Indian elephants. I would like to insult you therefore but unfortunately you are right in doing this, because Pyrrhos seems to have used unarmored ones and the crazy plan to breed a herd in Epeiros of course never succeeded. The only successful breed ever seemed to be the later Roman herd of African forest elephants (even today breeding of elephants in Europe is extremely difficult).
4. I saw that close combat cavalry with + factors against elephants exists in EB. That is not very realistic because horses are frightened by elephants and even well trained horses were easily killed by elephants if they dared to come close.