The Conquest War Elephant

[SwitchbladeNGC]

Never understood why they don't require Ivory but the Statue of Zues does.

 

[Aggie]

I, through experience, believe this to be not true, although I don't have a lot of experience with C3C armies, which, of course, are supposed to be improved.

Anyway, War Elephants are possibly among the greatest UU's out there.

Is your experience based upon PTW or Vanilla? If so, then that is an entirely different situation. I am talking about C3C armies (because this thread is about C3C War Elephants). Things changed drastically in C3C:

-The AI almost never builds armies
-They rarely attack armies that have units with a decent defense for that age. A knight army is virtually safe in the Middle Ages.

It's a common tactic to send a knight army into enemy land to pillage. It won't be attacked and can rip their improvements to pieces. It is so succesful that it is getting banned from certain Succession Games (EDIT: to increase the difficulty level, creativity and challenge of a game).

 

[Pfeffersack]

Never understood why they don't require Ivory but the Statue of Zues does.

The problem with it is that ivory is a luxury and not a strategic ressource.Beside the happiness effect of luxuries the main difference between both is in distribution on the map.Strategic ressources are scattered all over the map, even with a minimum distance between the sources IIRC; luxuries tend to come more in clusters.This would make it more dependent on luck to get them for building units and would be a disadvantage for the Indians - how likely is it that one special civ (=India), out of say 16 on a huge map will get access to ivory? So they would fail in building their UU in many games.Even trading isn't always possible.
That is the reason why the SOZ is often called unbalancing or purely depending on luck, too.Of course, a simple solution would be making ivory a strategic ressorce and replace it with one of the new bonus ressources (sugar, tobacco, fruits).

 

[Bad Brett]

War elephants upgrade to cavalry just fine. You can also upgrade horsemen to war elephants -- kind of an odd picture, that. All UUs (except maybe berzerk -> guerilla -- I'm not sure on that one) are in the upgrade chain now.

Arathorn

You can upgrade beserk to guerilla... I'm 99% sure. How about samurai -> cavalry?

 

[Arathorn]

Samurai to cavalry works, no problem. 100% sure in PTW and 99+% sure for C3C. The only one I question is the berzerk upgrade chain. I'm not saying it doesn't...I'm just saying I don't know.

Arathorn

 

[norwegianviking]

Well if it does upgrade the vikings Have a HUGE advantage with it's UU. It already has the best aditives to stats from the longbowman it could then also be good into the modern age!

 

[Bad Brett]

Well if it does upgrade the vikings Have a HUGE advantage with it's UU. It already has the best aditives to stats from the longbowman it could then also be good into the modern age!

Are you insane? I'd rather have 6.2.1 amphibious units than a 6.6.1 soldier in modern age!