The Joy of Elephants

[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]