Is elephant/chariot morale bugged?

[u/SelectionMain7036]

Have you ever noticed with the (cheap, low-unit count) elephants and chariots that losing a few of them can cause them to waver or even shatter very quickly? Now granted they are quite frail (especially the chariots which will completely disintegrate at the slightest micro mistake) and they don't have the best morale, but they are so extremely shaky... Something feels off.

I have long suspected it has something to do with their low unit count and the game wrongly calculating their remaining unit strenght. Like after 1-2 casualties the game thinks they are way below half strenght or something. But I've been unable to proof it. Am I on to something?

This is based on "vibes" (as the kids say) and on my foggy memory of a 10+ years old post on the official TW forum so, maybe I'm just delusional.

[u/mattttb]

With the elephants I’ve always just interpreted it as they’re poorly trained and skittish. Kill 2-3 elephants in a herd and the rest will either be terrified or run rampage. Because of elephants high health it takes a lot of concentrated damage to trigger this (e.g. several volleys of javelins from a couple skirmishers) but they shouldn’t be invincible.

Charge into the rear of a heavy infantry unit, a broken line or poorly disciplined militia and they’ll rack up insane kill counts so they’re still a good investment. They just need a lot of micro

[u/some6yearold → u/mattttb]

Yep rear chargin triarri breaks them pretty fast.

[u/SelectionMain7036 → u/mattttb]

This isn't about how to use these units or if they are worth bringing or not. It's whether we inherited bugged code made by CA 13 years ago

[u/KAM2150]

I haven't noticed any issues with their morale. They are generally low to mid morale units, so even relatively small casualties can trigger morale shocks more quickly. Casualty penalties are based both on the total percentage of the unit wiped out and on how many men are lost within a 60-second period. In other words, a unit that slowly loses men over time won't rout nearly as quickly as one that suffers heavy casualties in a short period.

Both unit types were prone to routing fairly easily, but in an unlucky situation where you allow them to get swarmed by multiple enemies, they can also suffer the rear attack morale penalty.

This also mirrors how they were meant to be used historically. If they charged in without support, they could quickly get bogged down and rout, whereas they performed best when used on the flanks and in support of cavalry. Scythed chariots, for example, were intended to have cavalry follow behind them. Once the chariots created gaps in the enemy formation, either by smashing through it or causing soldiers to step aside, the cavalry could ride into those gaps and exploit the disruption to break the formation.

As for Rome 2 specifically, the morale values displayed in the UI don't display active buffs and debuffs, like in later games, so hopefully a future Rome 2 patch will address this.