Slitherine

I have just re-read the rules and realised that my group of two elephants is even less useful as there only needs to be one stand taken off and they autobreak and are removed anyway

Elephants are indeed fragile but remember that they do add 1 to their death roll and if the draw or win they add a total of 3 so as long as you give them support they are very hard to kill.

Correct, I am obviously going with just the two elephants from the Carthage starter army. I will no doubt make the group bigger when I buy some more but at the moment, it is causing me to re-think my strategy for elephant use (which is not necessarily a bad thing)

The problem is that you can't have elephants in BG's of more than 2. You need to make sure that there is another BG of something either side of the elephants to stop them getting overlapped or ganged up on too much by shooting.

One method I saw used was to have the elephants in a column which makes it particularly hard to get enough hits on them to kill one.

hammy wrote:The problem is that you can't have elephants in BG's of more than 2. You need to make sure that there is another BG of something either side of the elephants to stop them getting overlapped or ganged up on too much by shooting.

One method I saw used was to have the elephants in a column which makes it particularly hard to get enough hits on them to kill one.

Cheese already? Surely not historical?

I have to admit that a column of elephants does look rather silly...

For impact a column may be good but they still need to be flank protected cause they will have to pass a CMT for getting only 1 hit from shooting.

jonathanc wrote:

hammy wrote:The problem is that you can't have elephants in BG's of more than 2. You need to make sure that there is another BG of something either side of the elephants to stop them getting overlapped or ganged up on too much by shooting.

One method I saw used was to have the elephants in a column which makes it particularly hard to get enough hits on them to kill one.

Cheese already? Surely not historical?

I would think not. On the other hand, in well over a year spent reading hundreds of discussions about various rules mechanisms in FoG, this is the very first one that strikes me as possibly being genuine fromage.

Cheers,
Scott

It is I suppose but fromage that makes your own troop prtty useless.

As they have +s you really want to use them or lose them as they say IMHO

Si

PS if you really want El power go for Indians with 12 of them grouped in 4s. That has punch.

Carthaginian army, standard one anyway really lacks heavy hitters against legionaries, especially skilled swordsmen legionaries. Elephants make pretty good legionary killers as long as you keep them flanked and shielded.

IMHO

shall wrote:It is I suppose but fromage that makes your own troop prtty useless.

Cool... as long as players are rewarded for fielding elephants in historically viable ways, rather than bunching them up in "columns" on the tabletop, then I do not detect the odor of cheese!

Cheers,
Scott

Just planning a refight of Magnesia 190BC and done a lot of reading around how western armies used elephants...it's sometimes v difficult to model how elephants were used historically, as at this battle with around 20 of them interspersed in pairs amongst the 16 000 man phalanx. With FOG having them in a BG of two, there's nowhere to put them "historically". It seems this wasn't a one-off, small no's of elephants were sometimes spaced out across the army's front.
No criticism of FOG, I don't know any ruleset that models the "magnesia deployment" on a figure basis. Just we should be open-minded about how elephants were deployed and how that is modelled. For all I know, it may be that eastern armies that used them in large numbers sometimes marched them to battle in columns, using them as much as mobile shooting platforms (whilst busting into enemy formations) as terror weapons?

Martin

WhiteKnight wrote:For all I know, it may be that eastern armies that used them in large numbers sometimes marched them to battle in columns, using them as much as mobile shooting platforms (whilst busting into enemy formations) as terror weapons?

Unless one or more of the ancient sources actually describe elephants being used in that manner, I wouldn't be inclined to think that they did so.

Cheers,
Scott

mmm. In real life, I wouldn't see a point in using them in column. The romans split their lines and let them charge through, so using Elephants in column would mean theres less frontage and less devastation - most commanders I think would want to maximise the frontage and thus maximise the disruption of the enemy.

I agree that game wise, it does make sense to do this - but in order to eliminate any stench of cheese from my person, gudging by the responses on this thread I think I will avoid it and use them in line and not column!

shall wrote:PS if you really want El power go for Indians with 12 of them grouped in 4s.

Simon means 2 BGs of 2 elephants side by side.