The only time my elephants are ever put into the frontline: Mountain Pass Battles

[Tanaka]

And they are slaughtered. Why? I want my elephants on the flanks in big open field battles not out front in mountain pass battles. This needs to be fixed.

[CHOO CHOO]

I've never had a battle with Elephants in which they didn't charge straight on to get killed. Just stopped using them.

[Nats]

Originally posted by Tanaka:

And they are slaughtered. Why? I want my elephants on the flanks in big open field battles not out front in mountain pass battles. This needs to be fixed.

This might be one example of when playing in FoG2 might be very worthwhile. But in my experience putting elephants on the flanks never works as they get cut off and killed before getting into the battle. Using them as tanks on the frontline seems to be the best way to use them.

[Hannibal0216 도마도 재배자]

I just use them in FoG2. But they are pretty situational and not that great either way.

[mister.hister]

Don't use elephants in mountains. They get a hefty penalty there.

[CHOO CHOO]

That might be it. Most of my elephant battles have been against Epirus; half of them against Epirote elephants (easy victories for me), half of them using elephants from the captured Epirote regions against the remnants of the Epirotes (lossy victories for me, since all the elephants died).

And Epirus is pretty rough ground.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by CHOO CHOO:

I've never had a battle with Elephants in which they didn't charge straight on to get killed. Just stopped using them.

Exactly for the cost and poor use I see no reason to recruit them. They are never used effectively.

[Tanaka]

Originally posted by mister.hister:

Don't use elephants in mountains. They get a hefty penalty there.

Fine if they get a penalty it's just the placement that drives me crazy.

[mister.hister]

They should be automatically repositioned as flank support in such battles, yes. Less micromanaging by swapping them in and out but then again no elephamts would be used in mountain battles, lol.

[Nats]

Elephants only get penalties in mountains and swamps I think it is but not hills. Only one of Epirus' zones has mountains. They are good when playing Epirus because you get one elephant unit free.

[CHOO CHOO]

Well, then I guess Epirote infantry is just plain good at killing pachyderms.

[Gilmer]

I've used them and they worked well. But they only have 3 points, so they can be killed easily if you don't have a big advantage (in game battles not FOG2)

[Nats]

I do wonder if the unit types have advantages against other units as they do in FoG2. For example spearmen good against cavalry but not armoured infantry, chariots good against light infantry but not cavalry, archers good against infantry but not cavalry, etc.

I assume that is the case in the default battle system as well as in FoG2, but it doesnt show in the numbers if it is. FoG2 has a very complex interrelationship between units types.

[cranky corvid]

Units have no special type-based advantages against each other in this game.

I'll mention how the attack and defense values actually work in FOGE, since it's particularly important for elephants. When there's a battle the game always assigns one side as the attacker and one (usually the side that has units that didn't move) as the defender, and the attacker's units rely solely on their Attack value in melee combat, the defender's solely on their Defense value, the opposite value does not factor in at all.

Because elephants have a very high Attack value but low Defense, they're very strong when their side is the attacker (though not in mountains, where the terrain penalties render them mediocre) and rather weak when their side is the defender (completely worthless if defending in mountains, because the way terrain penalties are factored in means they won't get the full support and terrain defense bonuses either!).

The most consistent trick to ensure you're the attacking side so your elephants are actually useful is to keep moving and have numerical superiority compared to the enemy, so your army is the one that pushes the enemy back when your and the opponents' armies advance into each other.

It's true that the way the battle deployment system works makes them a finicky and niche unit. The big problem with them is that they have a bad support value, but a high deployment priority since they are a frontline unit, so if your combined number of elephants and heavy infantry types (which have higher priority than elephants) is larger than the combat width, the extra elephants sabotage your army by kicking out the actual decent support units from the support line. As such, elephants can't be coupled efficiently with reserves of high-end units, putting a limit to the overall strength of any armies that contain them.

In the beta patches, their support value has been buffed to +2, making that less of a catastrophic issue, although it's still not possible to create an optimal unit composition with them since they'll continue to kick out archers, still vastly superior support units, from the support line.