The Joy of Elephants

[Cadarn]

I've seen many a reference to the unit discoveries that (usually) trigger an outbreak of player-inspired conquest.......Cavalry, Cavalry, Cavalry and Praetorians .

I know they are slow, but what's wrong with the Elephant? If you can farm an Ivory resource, or trade your surplus health resources for Ivory, you are in pole position for a classical era invasion.

STR8 with a 50% bonus against mounted units is very powerful, and in practice they only have problems with fortified city-defending Spearmen and perhaps Archers with promotions in good cities. Far, far superior in usage to Swordsmen IMO (they chew up Axemen for breakfast, especially with the +25% vs melee promotion).....although they can't earn city raider promotions themselves.

Also, they have a long shelf life as that +50% vs mounted makes them a good bet against Knights.

So, create a nice stompy stack of Elephants, give them a couple of axemen as anti-spear support and crush your foes into the early game dust!

[axi]

They are expensive. I go from swordsman to maceman, without building more than 1-2 elephants.

[gus_smedstad]

http://www.rathergood.com/elephants/

I agree. Even fortified Spearmen aren't that much of a problem, since the Spearmen almost never have City Defense promotions like Archers. If I have Elephants, I may delay researching Iron Working until I need it to chop jungles.

They're cheaper than Macemen, and we know Macemen are good. The +50% against Melee of Macemen frequently matters less than the basic strength of 8. The main drawback of Elephants is that they can't take the City Raider or Cover promotions like Swordsmen and Macemen. A Swordsman with City Raider III is actually slightly stronger than an Elephant with Combat III against cities.

- Gus

[Deity Dude]

It'd be nice if they moved 2 like in Civ II

[Blake]

Elephants + Axemen defending a stack of Catapults is simply sick. There is nothing - nothing, that can attack elephant+axemen with anything near good odds. Well there are Praets, but everyone knows Praets rules.
Axemen, Horse Archers get destroyed by Elephants.
Spearmen, Swordmen get destroyed by Axemen.

Hell, even Pikemen are still going to get wrecked by Axemen. Knights and Macemen have trouble with Elephants.

It's one of those cases were the best bet is sacrificing catapults on the offending stack, the good thing is the axes and elephants do need to be stacked pretty deep, so the catapults will do a lot of collatoral.

When you get Ivory it's well worth beeling to construction and indulging in some chop-fueled Elepult.

[The Lardossen]

I like elephants, the tech is already there because it's the same tech as for catapults, which you always want. They're like spearmen+, they can capture cities, clear enemy mounted units, and waltz over swordsmen and axemen.

[rewster1]

Elepult... nice word. Watch for Greek phalanx if you decide to go with elephants... 5 base str + 100% against mounted. Though if you are smart enough to include axemen, no worries. They aren't terribly expensive (sure, compared to swords and axes, but they also kill them, so you get your money' worth), and you get them in the classical era, instead of having to wait for macemen to have a str 8 unit.

[joncnunn]

Myself, I tend to only build Elephants when missing both Iron & Copper while having Ivory.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Blake
Elephants + Axemen defending a stack of Catapults is simply sick.

True. That's a large chunk of your production right there, too.

Elephants are slow and expensive. They can't even catch up to wandering Warriors pillaging the land. This makes them only good for offense IMO, in which case I rather have some other units.

[gus_smedstad]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Elephants are slow and expensive. They can't even catch up to wandering Warriors pillaging the land.

Don't you build roads?

- Gus

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by gus_smedstad
Don't you build roads?

Unfortunately, roads can also be pillaged.

[gus_smedstad]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Unfortunately, roads can also be pillaged.

True, but that rarely affects my ability to chase speed-1 units with speed 1 units. The fact that they've pillaged the road in the square they're in, or in a square or two behind them, doesn't affect the roads I'm using to move my pillager-chaser.

Heck, I rarely have trouble catching speed-2 units with speed-1 units because they stop to pillage. This becomes more pronounced once I have Engineering and can move 3 even with Elphants and foot units. For that reason in my experience, Elephants are hardly offense-only. Quite often I'll keep a couple on my side of a border to chase down those pesky Horse Archers.

- Gus

[CerberusIV]

Elephants don't require a horse resource. If you don't have horses then they make sense - especially if your enemy does have horses.

OK, it's not often you have ivory and not horses but it does happen.

[Civrocx]

The trouble with creating a strategy using elephants would be ....you have to have ivory.

Chances are if you have ivory your neighbor will have ivory.


Other than that their great, but they make to much noise!

[Arrian]

I typically build WE's sparingly, for the sort of use Blake talked about: they go along with my attack stack. If they're needed to help take down a city, fine, but they're there mostly for defense.

+50% vs. mounted... they do horrible, unspeakable things to HA's. Spears can fill the same role, but not quite as effectively, and they're much more of a one-trick pony. WEs can kill enemy axes too.

-Arrian

[Cadarn]

Originally posted by Civrocx
The trouble with creating a strategy using elephants would be ....you have to have ivory.

Chances are if you have ivory your neighbor will have ivory.


Other than that their great, but they make to much noise!

Ivory, in my experience, is a less common resource than iron, copper or horses. In practice, if your civ has ivory then not many (often hardly any) others will. I have happily given the AI lopsided resource trades to acquire the stuff.

If I have ivory, I don't bother with horse archers, even for home area defence as I reason that my road network will allow me to get to any wandering enemy with an axeman or spearman (or Elephant) easily.

As for value for money, I really don't see the arguement. The things don't die easily so you save the costs of replacing heavy losses....plus, they get promoted and become harder still to get rid of.

Shame there isn't a Civ 4 Carthage with a nice, stompy Unique Unit

[Blake]

But the really nice thing about the ivory requirement is it is visible from the start of the game, if you're going to be able to use elephants then you know it!

[Shaka II]

Originally posted by Blake
Elephants + Axemen defending a stack of Catapults is simply sick. There is nothing - nothing, that can attack elephant+axemen with anything near good odds. Well there are Praets, but everyone knows Praets rules.
Axemen, Horse Archers get destroyed by Elephants.
Spearmen, Swordmen get destroyed by Axemen.

Reminds me of my game as Romans with three sources of ivory beside my river through Rome. I actually bypassed Praetorians, using my local copper mine to build 23 axemen to take over China and America, the latter stages accompanied by War Elephants and Catapults. Never built a Praetorian in that game.

[joncnunn]

On the real world, playing as Egypt is one way to see the value of War Elephants.

The Ivory is a ____ of a lot closer than the Copper and Iron sources from Egypt's starting location.

Perhaps I concentrated too much on building up cities and not enough of settling new ones, but on my current game I just discovered Education and just now got Copper within my cultural boundary while Iron is still one tile outside it. Consequently, I've been using War Elephants to fight barbs. (War Chariots are too weak against the barb axes / swords.)

[I founded 4 religions before building my first settler]