Elephants for everyone, not just India and Siam

[Optimizer]

In Civ 4, all civs could have War Elephants. In Civ 5, they are restricted to India and Siam.

I have an idea to allow War Elephants, later upgrading to Naresuan's Elephants (maybe with a more appropriate name) for every civ, requiring Ivory.

War Elephants should be able to move through rough terrain, and be unaffected by spear or pike units. They would have no defense bonus.

If India and Siam need to be compensated for having no unique units, they could get some extra bonus from their unique buildings.

 

[Shiggs713]

just a thought, but in civ4 they received a bonuses versus other mounted units. What would counter them if they were unaffected by spears or pikes?

 

[Paasky]

Javelinmen. Elephants were the tanks of old: almost completely indestructible, their smell terrified horses and their stomp made infantry shiver.

 

[Optimizer]

Introducing a special unit to counter war elephants would be a bit wrong. But bombardment units would be appropriate.

 

[DasGuntLord01]

Siamese and Indian war elephents can stay intact as their special units, but pull back the strength of the other nations war elephants to 18 or 20?

 

[Zetetic Apparat]

I think this is a very interesting idea.
My thoughts:
War elephants shouldn't be mounted (i.e. they don't receive a penalty facing pike etc.), but melee.
Should receive a penalty (50%? 75% even?) against any kind of ranged unit.
Should receive no defensive bonuses (similar to mounted?).
Should receive a bonus against mounted.
Required tech: Horseback Riding or Mathematics possibly? Something to put at the time of Horsemen, and still requires having been through Animal Husbandry and the Wheel.
Required resource: Ivory. Now this seems problematic to me - I don't think it's trivial to make a single resource act as both a luxury and a strategic one. They would need to be heavily limited in production though.
Strength: 14-16? This seems to make them a pretty good counter to mounted and still worrying effective against infantry, whilst hopefully making them very vulnerable to ranged fire.
Moves: 3. But can ignore rough terrain.

I don't think that they should upgrade though, but keep them as a dead end for any Civ except Siam. Or at least, make it so that they only upgrade for Siam.
India can keep their Elephant Archers (as I would rename them) - being both earlier and not requiring Ivory. However, perhaps these should be upgradeable to War Elephants?

I might try to have a go at implementing this, but Ivory will be the pain I suspect. I don't know if I'd have to add Ivory as a strategic resource and then replace every instance of IvoryTheLuxury with it (following map generation), or what. I'd rather not remove Ivory as a luxury though.

Edit: Ah, one possible thought about Ivory. It probably would be possibly to make it so that you could only build them in cities near a source of Ivory (I'd think). This would hopefully make them rarer (but not really balanced...) but might then overpower India's upgrade-ability of Elephant Archers.

 

[Agent327]

Elephants were the tanks of old: almost completely indestructible, their smell terrified horses and their stomp made infantry shiver.

Unless that infantry was Roman legionary.

 

[DasGuntLord01]

Unless that infantry was Roman legionary.

And the Elephants had just, you know, marched over the Alps.

 

[Kruelgor]

Would be funny if injured elephants retreated uncontrollably and possibly trampled their own friendly units, like what Scipio did to Hannibal.

 

[Paasky]

Unless that infantry was Roman legionary.

Historical footage from 216BC, Battle of Cannae: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNyzoWZQ6mk

 

[Dave Lawson]

If you create a new early game unit, give it 16 or 20 strength, and give it a hefty bonus against the only other contemporary unit with a respectable strength (horsemen) you have a recipe for outrageous imbalance. Already a pack of horsemen is quite arguably overpowered, can you imagine a pack of these elephants? Sure, you make them weak to ranged units, but given the high movement speed, the elephant will still ride down an archer.
With a couple of promotions, horsemen outpace their counter: spearmen. This is because of the discrepancy in base strengths (12 v 7). Can you imagine how irrelevant the weakness to archers would become after a couple of promotions on an elephant given that discrepancy in base strength (20? v 6)?
I love the idea of adding elephants, maybe even a couple of elephant units. But I don't think you should set their base strength any higher than horsemen, and arguably even lower than that, unless you plan to at the same time mod archers to give them a bonus vs elephants.

 

[Optimizer]

Coming to think of it, India's and Siam's unique abilities are already strong enough to survive without a unique unit.

 

[evrett37]

elephants for everyone is completely unbalanced...I mean..can you imagine the poop!