How to deal with elephants

[Dedas]

The thing with these counters is that they are easy to access and that you can use your research mages to cast them without preparation. They are intended to complement your expansion or defense army.

[Ygorl]

We have a policy of never dealing with elephants. We don't even like dealing with those who do deal with elephants.

[parcelt]

I think this is an excellent listing, in a recent MP game I was facing some big elephant hordes (30 to 50 elephants) from Arco and to my great frustration I couldn't really deal with them. I guess that doesn't need to happen again! Thanks for putting this together Dedas.

[Ironhawk]

Dedas said:
The thing with these counters is that they are easy to access and that you can use your research mages to cast them without preparation.

One of the problems with your suggestion is that it requires mages at all. As you say above you can even just use your research mages.... but if I have to pull my mages away from researching for several turns to go and fight elephants and then have them walk several turns back to a lab when its over thats bad news! Even if I win, I will be like 4-8turns behind in research. Thats just no good.

What I would really like to see is a list of units and formations that can counter elephants. I know for a fact that nets are quite dangerous to elephants, for example. So Ichythids (of all things!) are pretty good against them. Gladiators too, tho those are incredibly hard to deploy.

Does anyone else have purely military solutions to the elephant problem? Oh - and dont bother just sayign "archers" - they dont work. Either they dont do enough damage or the enemy player just kills them all.

[GameExtremist]

In my experience archers are useless...maybe massed flame arrows might be helpful but if you are facing a large elephant horde they will be at and then through your front line in 2 turns...

I've found falling frost and magma eruption work quite well...blade wind too, poison cloud is another. Shadow blast works great too as it deals great damage and also paralyzes too.

Soul slay will work a treat, it deals instant death if they fail their MR save.

[Dedas]

I didn't mean that you should wrap all the mages in your kingdom together to go on some crazy elephant cleansing crusade. What I meant was that you can use them as backup to stop an elephant rush happening at your front door, instead of just sacrificing your army alone in a no win fight. They could topple the odds in your favor with the right low level spells, spells that I wanted to make a list of. Oh, and we are still talking early to mid game here.


Yes, nets work well on elephants actually, as it stops their trampling for a turn (they soon break free thanks to their great strength) and lowers their defense to 1. So yes, against a few elephants this might work, but when you have a wall of them, well then you need to split them up, netting them piecemeal. This is where you combine nets with spells.
In other words: it all revolves around disrupting and dispersing the "wall of trampling". If it comes too close to your lines you are dead. You have to smash that wall before that happens, then it is fairly easy to you crush the bricks that falls through with your regular troops.

[Sir_Dr_D]

Unless you have flaming arrows wouldn't massing indy barbarians be more effective then indy archers?