Point to make. Elephants are not distributed evenly all over South Asia. There are parts where elephants are not as common, e.g. mountainous areas. So then how do people break village/town walls?
You walk the elephant to it.
Or use longer range siege weapons.
First⊠thatâs questionable if this would actually be possible. But whatever.
And how DID they break into stone defences? Surely NOT as it is depicted in the game.
And btw this is the overlaying context of this discussion. Itâs not relevant if you could batter down gates with eles. Itâs pretty clear they couldnât be used against stone defences and the game is very, very inaccurate here. I think it would be more accurate to history if these civs would get rams even if we donât know if they used them. Cause the rams could be used for that opposed to the eles.
And I donât get how you can get from âbatter gates downâ to âdestroying castlesâ as it is shown in the game. Thatâs NOT the same thing.
I donât get why at some points there is a super high demand on historic âaccuracyâ (though in many cases itâs often one single interpretation when there are several) but on others the points made are completely irrelevant for the artistic representation:
The ramephants are just historically inaccurate. But itâs ok. As so many stuff in the game. And we donât do ourselves a favor in acting as if they would be. Actually the opposite, it reminds us that itâs a game. An artistic presentation, not a super accurate history simulation or whatever.
Itâs the artistic freedom of the developers and itâs allowed here as other stuff should be aswell.
Seems implausible to make a sweeping claim as you have. Elephant corps are not easy to maintain and while they were distributed naturally, harnessing them extensively would be difficult. Alternate methods for siege gate/wall breaking would have to be used. Tunnelling was one but battering things is not inconceivable.
Other than the lack of rider (Which AoE2 has never been consistent on), they are not inaccurate.
People just seem to not understand that things are not uniform across different parts of the world.
Like antiquity-era political parties as civs�
With armored elephants, preferably against the gates (as gates tend to be weak points in a wall - you can only thicken a gate so much before it stops working as a gate). There are videos of elephants breaking concrete walls. Theyâre a strong animal (far stronger than people). They run faster than people do (making them faster than battering rams). I donât know how the weight of a battering ram would compare to the weight of an elephant, but I doubt that a battering ram would produce more force. Why would they need a wooden battering ram when they already have elephants trained for war that can do the job?
I donât know whether they exclusively used elephants as battering rams, but apparently some gates in India were fortified with iron spikes specifically to guard against elephants (source: https://www.quora.com/Was-a-war-elephant-considered-cavalry-or-a-siege-weapon). And elephants would easily be able to take down a simple palisade (no weak point required, and likely no armor either).
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Thanks for posting that. I tried to post pictures of it, but they failed every time.
Did you really just answered a post from me where I say that walls and stone defences arenât the same thing with quoting the part about stone defences with a point on gates?
Iâm just scratching my head now, cause Iâm literally out of words now.
Tho there is still one thing what made me cinge even more. This is the part where you completely neglect that we speak about a sensible animal. Maybe they are strong, but that doesnât mean they can just run into a gate and nothing happens to them. Maybe less on gates when they break through. But if they run into stable walls with full power, the elephants would actually DIE from the impact.
Apparently, though I think that if you canât take down a fortification with an armored elephant, you also wouldnât be able to take it down with a battering ramâŠ
Also, if you want to take down a castle, the best place to target is generally the gate (because as I said, gates are a weak point). And castles inevitably have gates. I suspect against towers elephants would be less practical, but the same is true for battering rams.
I also think that the elephants would be able to target higher than a battering ram normally would (in fact, the quora article has a drawing that includes an elephant attacking the top of a stone wall - taking out a battlement seems both useful and practical).
But the most important point is that there is sufficient evidence that elephants were actually used against fortifications (enough that anti-elephant countermeasures were developed for gates on stone fortifications). And there is video evidence of wild elephants taking down modern walls (no run required). Considering that, there are at most few buildings in the game that an elephant wouldnât be able to at least damage.
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