Guide me into elepult rush!

[peewee69]

Hi all!

I'm often trying to get an elepult rush going, but never appear to be very successful!

I want to start a new game on emperor difficulty simply for the purpose of gaining the knowledge of the decisions to make in order to achieve a successful elepult rush.

My first question would be; what do I look for in a good capital site? I assume having elephants nearby is a good idea. What about marble? I have tried building the oracle, aiming for completion when I research maths, so free tech to be construction. Is this a viable plan?

Also, how many cities should I aim on founding before starting the elepult production? What kind of sites should i look for? High hammer sites? High food for whipping?

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[Chase_2_Rabbits]

I'm sure better players than me have done an elepult guide in past, but a few pointers:

Yes, elephants are pretty much essential to the plan! Ivory is not easy to trade for in the early game, but it can be done.

A good capital is a good capital; there's nothing special about an elepult rush in that respect. 2 premium food sources, gems/gold is a big help, plus some rivered FPs/grassland. Standard stuff. A lot of forest is useful as you won't want to whip your capital too hard if you can avoid it.

Whipping and chopping is going to raise an army faster in the early game than even a premium production site.

I never bother with the Oracle if I'm elepulting. It may not be the worst idea ever, but if you have a high enough research rate to fill in the techs you need quickly enough for a good Oracle date then you may as well avoid the gamble and just tech to construction the old-fashioned way. If I'm PHI, I would consider running 2 scientists to bulb math with while I'm slow teching HBR.

4 or 5 cities should be fine for an elepult rush.

I find that the hardest part of an elepult rush (or any early rush) is stabilising your economy after the war. Executing the rush is the easy part.

 

[Seraiel]

4 cities are optimal for Elepult.

A very good capital site imo has 2 resources of food (preferably Grains) and 2 Gold, a river and Forests.

Benchmark for Elepult on Deity is 10 Elephants and 5 Catapults at 500 BC. Less and later is possible, but may get difficult, reaching those numbers even earlier will make it easy. If you play Emperor, you can reach those numbers a lot later.

 

[peewee69]

Thanks for the tips.

I've been generating maps over and over again, but I have yet to come across a 2 food, 2 gold (or gems) site. However, I have found a few starts that could be good enough candidates:

View attachment coast 1 gold.CivBeyondSwordSave



Although only 1 gold, I have selected Elizabeth as leader and FIN gives extra gold from the coast. No river, but lots of woodlands. At least jumbo's are close.


View attachment 2 pig 1 gold.CivBeyondSwordSave



Again only 1 gold, but 2 pigs and jumbo's. On river and with woodlands.


View attachment possible.CivBeyondSwordSave



This one may be possible, but is scarce with food (1 cow, 2 FP), but does have gold, marble and jumbo's.


View attachment at least we have gold.CivBeyondSwordSave



2 gold, but only 1 cow and 2 FP. Plus, the only sources of elephants (x3) will be in the German capital, making trading essential.

Please let me know what you thinks about these starts. If none of them are any good, then I can continue regenerating maps for another few hours, but I am getting bored of doing so!

 

[Pangaea]

Internet is horribly slow today so I didn't have the patience to open all pics (don't use world builder though, it's better to play without map and AI knowledge). You don't need a HoF type map to pull off an elepult rush. Okay, good food and some commerce helps, but you don't NEED double gold. As long as elephants are nearby, that should be enough. You don't need them in the capital, because you're going to get a few cities anyway.

Oracling construction helps, but you can slowtech it too. I'd say it's best to get construction before HBR, so you can start producing catas. Then sort out war elephants when HBR is online, using trees and whips, preferably with good OF.

 

[Qactus]

Oh dear. If you play with full map knowledge, you might as well just worldbuild your elephant-gold-food bonanza.

Any of these will do just fine, except the one without jumbos. It is true that a gold mine makes getting the oracle and research in general a lot easier. But you really don't need two of them to cruise with elepults on emperor.

In addition to what has been mentioned:

-Get Construction first so you can already get started on Catapults while researching Horseback Riding.

-Regarding promotions, just go with combat. Shock seems nice against the odd spearman, but unless you promote every jumbo to shock they will never pair up.
Amphibious elephants are of course The Superior, but for now just go with combat.

-Also have one or two shock axes with you for stack defense. Once I had a nice mongolian Ger-powered Elepult stack conquering some metal-less AI when suddenly Shaka got bribed into the war and jumped at me with a stack of Impis out of the fog, eating up helpless jumbos. That taught me a lesson.

-When your opponents get Longbows, your window of opportunity is closing. You'll have to decide if you use up your units for a last conquest, or save them for a later Cuir/Cav upgrade.

 

[Tatran]

Internet is horribly slow today

The problem is probably at your side, although I had some problems last night with vids on one or two tubes, for you know...

 

[Pangaea]

The problem is probably at your side, although I had some problems last night with vids on one or two tubes, for you know...

Yeah, this time it's on my side, my fault even. Had forgot to pay some bills over summer, and apparently my internet provider took offense to that

Got an sms earlier that it should be sorted, but they still haven't fixed the throttling

 

[Gumbolt]

I think too much focus here is on bulbing construction. Maybe better to get currency and build a strong economy. On the high levels the Ai will tech construction. HBR can be self teched.

Phants are pretty good against the Ai even with longbows. A mix of pults and phants will take down most cities before engineering. You don't really need a double gold site for a phant rush. Especially on Emperor or below. Ivory should normally suffice. Plus a reasonable start. Lately I have been plagued with food poor starts.

I don't agree about adding 2 gold to start just to do a phant rush. If you are a seasoned enough player you should not need this kind of help.

 

[Pangaea]

Although the AI tends to tech construction early-ish, they're not too keen on sharing it, which I think is why many advocate getting it yourself, one way or another.

 

[stevenburns]

The key to an elepult rush is starting techs and leader traits, for me. Except for the obvious elephants, any of these leaders have a good chance to successfully do it: Hatty, Willem, Gilgamesh and Louis. CRE provides the chance to build the cap library quickly and secures an early math bulb. Tech construction and then HBR. The chance to trade for any of these are to rare to rely on, imo. Dates and numbers are the ones @Seraiel mentioned.
The cap builds two settlers after the worker and 2-3 warriors, then comes the library. Second city provides what's needed the most, most probably settler #3 at size two. Any other city but the capitol builds nothing else but units and a barracks.
Elepult is my personal #1 choice to attack. Catapults hurt anything significantly enough to ease up the defense until longbows and base strength 8 phants plus promos are strong enough to attack spears and even weakened longbows.

Elepult to me very often means eliminating one AI at any cost and develop from what you've got. On Deity that usually means 8-12 cities, maybe more, by 200-300AD. That's a situation you can hardly REX up to. Especially on my regular settings, Standard/Pangaea/Normal.

 

[enKage]

Get a good leader.

My 2 proposals
Lincoln and Gandhi
- Lincoln starts with agriculture and that makes it only 2 techs from writing = quicker scientists. Maths is to bulb. Gandhi as above, but opens also nice Oracle chance to get construction.

Probably Lincoln is better because charismatic --> more promotions for elephants. IMO Liz loses wiith both leaders

 

[Gumbolt]

The issue here as I see it. You need ivory and a phant rush may not be optimal. For instance on my current game I did a chariot rush first. Although maybe I might do a phant rush later with ivory nearby? Would I need more land? We'll see.

 

[GKey]

You might want check this out:


Link to video.

Just one of AbsoluteZero's videos, there are many others.

 

[Tatran]

The elephant rush by AbsoluteZero is probably not a good example.

AZ reached a stalemate and gave up with a huge outdated army, low population, way behind in tech and one AI (Joao) who was running away in size.

 

[GKey]

AZ did many elephant rush videos, this is just one of them, may be not the best one, but it certainly has educational value and is fun to watch.

He did terrific job showcasing decent rush, while keeping it been entertaining (for this he had to avoid heavy micro, with every turn taking more then 10 minutes).

 

[Tatran]

It has certainly educational value.
AZ probably would have won the game if his initial SoD, including 2 GGs, wasn't wiped out by Gandhi.
The AP DoW resolution (war with Gandhi) screwed him. Every civ had the AP religion except Gandhi.

 

[Gumbolt]

Completed a phants rush today on immortal using Americans. By time I had wiped out the Ai's 5 cities it was 560ad. I ended up with 10 cities. Managed to trade for maths. Had to self tech construction which took 4-5 turns. I started game by chariot rushing an Ai due to poor land. 4 AI left. Should be comfortable for cuirs. Missed Oracle.

I think the average city with 5-6 defenders you can easily just suicide 3-4 pults without fully bombarding. If you can get odds of 50-60% after the initial catapult attacks you are in good stead. Bit behind on techs but manageable as the Ai will tech every tech that is not really required.

Watched the AZ rush. Pretty impressive stuff. Shows how a few cities can produce enough units for higher levels.

 

[Seraiel]

You should bombard cities that have no Walls, because on those, each Catapult does 8% bombardement dmg, so a city with i. e. 40% can be bomarded down to 0% with only 5 Catapults.

A city with Walls however has 50% and each Catapult only does half dmg (so 4%) so it would need 12.5 Catapult attacks to get it down to 0%. Having 5 Catapults is common and investing 1T on bombardement is ok, building 12 Catapults however would delay the attack-date by too much, and bombarding for more than 1T is only then good, if the city has a massive amount of defenders, because the AI will probably whip every turn, and it must not get harder than absolutely needed.

Often, it's also very advisable to attack with 1-2 Catapults first, then send in the top Elephants against the top-defenders, then let some Catapults attack again, and beat the rest with the remaining attackers. Elephants are stronger than Catapults, giving them better chances than the Catapults have, and leveling the siege, so it gets to 5 XP is very important, because then, one can spec Accuracy which also allows for bombarding Walls-cities with few Catapults.

 

[Gumbolt]

Yep the first city I bombarded fully. The others 3-4 all had walls. Yep attacked with strongest phants after weakening the defences. Probably could of cut off Sumerians iron sooner. I only had 2 pults left come final city. I had been whipping them as I used them up. The phants mostly survived. My losses were not bad. Lost 12 pults and 4 phants. Killed 13 vultures, 11 swords, around 10+ archers, some chariots and 1-2 catapults. Took 23 turns but some of that was waiting for his stack to leave his city to attack me. Had a medic chariot from previous war. I have 10 phants left and all other Ai at pleased.

Really not that bad.