War Elephants

[IagoAlberto]

You're absolutely right on the lifespan UncleJJ. Elephants are good at a number of rolls, not as good at any as specialists, i.e. city attack in lieu of macement, stack defence in lieu of pikemen, but they do all those well enough. I often find my most highly promoted cavalry or gunships are upgraded elephants, since they last so long win so often, really a great hammer investment if you have ivory.

 

[badger_md]

Great discussion, but I should probably rephrase my initial question. I'm thinking more in practical terms with the answers I'm looking for. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

My question should have been stated as such:

If you have access to ivory and you have a neighbor whose people need to be liberated by you from their government's oppressive rule (whether they know it or not), would you ever intentionally choose NOT to build eles? (please leave UU out of the answers.) I'm not saying that you need to wait to attack until they come along only would you use them if they were available?

I can't imagine NOT building them and attacking with them in that window before all the AI get longbows.

My concern with that issue is that it takes one of the "interesting choices" out of the game. I think attacking with eles before longbows is essentially a no-brainer if ivory is available.

Curious what you all think. Thanks for the great discussion so far.

 

[Perugia]

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite work like that, in BtS at least. The Pinch promotion is only available to elephants once you have Gunpowder yourself in BtS and also in the other versions, IIRC. So if your elephants can have Pinch you can build your own muskets. Also, all mounted troops can get the Pinch promotion, even chariots and HAs although they aren't strong enough to do much at that stage of the game But I find Pinch promoted knights to be very strong against muskets.

In Vanilla the pinch promotion does not depend on having Gunpowder. I wonder if pinch was nerfed like this in Warlords or just BTS.

Are you really sure of this, to my mind not allowing Pinch pre-gunpowder seems rather inconsistent with the other anti-unit type promotions unless these are also affected. Do you know whether in BtS you can give units the Formation promotion without knowledege of one of the mounted units techs eg Wheel, AH, HBR etc. Do you need Archery to give your melee units Cover? Also can you give units the anit siege promotion without knowledge of a siege tech such as construction or steel. What about Ambush, do you need to have Tanks available before you can give this to Gunpowder units?

Back to your post, yes of course all mounted units can take pinch but I agree most don't have enough base strength to use it effectively. I agree that knights are certainly stronger against muskets than elephants but you may have ivory and not have horses or be following the Education path to Gunpowder not the Guilds one with a view to skipping Knights in favour of Cavalry (available at Military Tradition in Vanilla).

 

[TheMeInTeam]

As of warlords and later, you need gunpowder for pinch. In BTS you need military science for some of those cool but usually impractical promotions (like blitz), too.

 

[Jerrymander]

Yeah, sucks that Phants got nerfed in BtS. I still remember that game. Wow, that was on Prince, too. I really need to get back into playing.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Great discussion, but I should probably rephrase my initial question. I'm thinking more in practical terms with the answers I'm looking for. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

My question should have been stated as such:

If you have access to ivory and you have a neighbor whose people need to be liberated by you from their government's oppressive rule (whether they know it or not), would you ever intentionally choose NOT to build eles? (please leave UU out of the answers.) I'm not saying that you need to wait to attack until they come along only would you use them if they were available?

I can't imagine NOT building them and attacking with them in that window before all the AI get longbows.

My concern with that issue is that it takes one of the "interesting choices" out of the game. I think attacking with eles before longbows is essentially a no-brainer if ivory is available.

Curious what you all think. Thanks for the great discussion so far.

I intentionally left them out of a game where I had ivory, because I was using horse archers exclusively and wanted the speed. It was one of those pangaea maps where rolling capitulations was possible. I wanted to hit as many people before feudalism as possible. With HA's, that was four civs! .