Good feedback!
It should spawn like a strategic, not like marble.
Here I'm proposing that the strategic resource is only accessible via the building. Currently ivory spawns very rarely, less than most other strategics and luxuries, so on this proposal alone, these units will be a relatively rare occurrence (even rarer than they are now, really). I assume everyone voting on this one will also vote on the ivory frequency proposals, and align their choices accordingly. Can always adjust this aspect in future rounds or other proposals; here I want to restrict scope just to focusing on moving the existing luxury elephants into the strategic system in the most palatable way possible, changing only whats necessary.
3. It's only useful as a strategic for a single unit, while most (all?) other early strategics have several units tied to them. It's not viable to create other units based on Ivory, at least not without getting very creative and outside the box (working/entertaining elephants)
4. War Elephants aren't all that great according to this one guy on Discord.
Assuming the 'obsolete' flag still works as it once did, this strategic will disappear from UI as soon as chiv is researched. I don't think its necessary to have it behave like other strategics, from player perspective it just won't exist once it no longer has a purpose. There ARE a few other elephant models out there in other mods, I think thematically maybe there's room for one additional elephant unit, but this kind of thing is out-of-scope for this proposal. As you note they weren't the best weapons of war, though they did make some notable appearances on the battlefield in the eras they're present in civ.
1. Adding a building prerequisite on Military Theory delays the production of War Elephants further, which makes an already questionable unit further delayed.
1. Move Kedda to trapping, so that it can be built as soon as camps on elephants can be built. This eases the timeline for getting War Elephants out.
Good idea, adjusted OP
4. Would "Captive Elephants" be tradeable strategic resources?
yup
5. What happens if the city loses the tile with the ivory (eg if America buys it or it gets citadeled?)
khedda will remain in losing city, and will continue to function normally. It won't be able to build one if it hasn't already. America's city will be able to build one. Will work the same way as when city with stable loses its horse tile, or stone works loses its stone ie building itself unaffected. While thematically imperfect, I don't anticipate this to have an unbalancing effect. If you really want to disable opponent's elephant production, you can still capture city and sell/destroy khedda
6. I'd suggest increasing the amount of Captive Elephants granted to 2 or 3. 1 feels too weak compared to what other strategics grant. Although, I can see the case for 1, since in it's timeline, it's uniquely strong and a civ with 3 War Elephants by the late ancient era would be extremely powerful. Imagine if that civ got 2 ivory?
not against this necessarily, but I think its also possible that 1 player could build 2 cities close to a single ivory and get 2 kheddas out of it. Even if it were only 2 strats per khedda, suddenly we're getting 4 elephant units out of a single ivory tile. Player w/ 2 ivories could get a lot of elephants. Strikes me that these kind of quirks are less concerning if its 1 strat per khedda. I envision elephant as remaining a relatively rare unit.
7. This is still a wonky mechanic compared to most (all?) other luxuries, it's just wonky with more steps. It does solve for the AI's valuation of Ivory somewhat, but would the AI recognize there isn't any value in Captive Elephants after the classical era?
8. It's a little odd that Ivory could still be traded, while the Kedda would still be providing Captive Elephants. Not super odd, but still feels strange.
I suppose this wonky strangeness issue is somewhat subjective, but yes I understand what you mean. imo its tolerably wonky: though we're implementing things in a different way than anything else in VP, this is only a problem if its a problem, and all of the moving parts here are robust, work fine. I see it this way: effectively we're keeping the existing mechanism, but limiting elephant units to 1 (maybe 2 in rare cases) per ivory plot, and giving the AI a way to value the luxury component and the strategic component separately, rather than all bundled. We are also adding a small production or trade premium to each player's first elephant (ie the cost of a 1st tier building or of trading for the resource) -- theoretically we could have the building auto-built when the ivory improvement is complete, though this would bring this proposal out of database-change-only paradigm. Human will understand how this works as its fairly close to existing mechanism, just with an extra step as you say; AI understands all these mechanisms too, arguably better than it understands the status quo ivory/elephants. Ultimately the kheddas and elephants will remain entirely optional, as elephants are now; can just skip 'em w/o losing out on anything important.
2. War Elephant should still require a barracks, so it's not something that can be spammed immediately at trapping. I'm not sure how I feel about War Elephant effectively requiring two buildings, but we're already into odd territory here.
agreed; but it'll just feel a little odd at first I think. And odd is fine, its broken we don't want.
