Elephant play in the early game is very hard to use, because all your enemy really needs to do is make a monk, and you instantly can’t use your elephants aggressively anymore.
This got me thinking about ways to make them a bit more viable, specifically on a small scale like this. I think the answer is with monks.
See, in theory, once THEY have your elephant, you can do the same thing in reverse, but the problem is, your elephant is probably closer to your units, so by the time you get it back, they’ve probably done quite a bit of damage with it and distracted your army.
So here’s the idea. I’ve got two different variants.
- What if you could task a monk with faith to DEFEND a group of units? Basically, if an enemy monk tries to convert a unit from that group, the defending monk would expend its faith to nullify that conversion. That way, if they want to convert your elephant, they need at least one more monk than you.
Of course, they can always kill your monks, but that in itself creates play and counterplay. And since you have the most expensive units, they do still still have an advantage - just not as overpowering of one.
- What if instead, monks could be tasked with a ‘faith shield’ of some sort, which would slowly deplete their faith, but completely block conversion while it’s active? Maybe the rate of depletion would vary depending on the number of units being protected, so you could shield one unit almost indefinitely, but more would use up faith faster and faster, eventually forcing them to get more monks. And, of course, without 100% faith, these monks couldn’t convert, just heal.
Hopefully, this would allow people to use a small number of elephants early on, without making them too overpowering later on!
Thoughts?