{"id":780,"date":"2007-10-16T17:54:49","date_gmt":"2007-10-16T21:54:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/10\/16\/flailing-elephants\/"},"modified":"2007-10-19T13:05:23","modified_gmt":"2007-10-19T17:05:23","slug":"flailing-elephants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/10\/16\/flailing-elephants\/","title":{"rendered":"Flailing Elephants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Big Huge Games&#8217; Andrew Auseon at the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.ign.com\/MS_AgeOfEmpires\/2007\/09\/20\/66808\/\">Asian Dynasties blog at IGN<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A good example of when the element of history bowed to the element of fun was the Flail Elephant. The Indian civilization can train a siege elephant that swings a weighted chain from the end of its trunk. The only accounts of this ever happening were with Sri Lankan elephants, and even then it was infrequent and not very effective. This begged the question: do we include units that don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have mass of supporting research simply because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re cool? Our answer was a resounding \u00e2\u20ac\u0153yes.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d We included the Flail Elephant because it was a wholly unique siege weapon, complementing the Indian civilization\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s elephant-based military. Once a player has a chance to batter an opponent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Town Center with this chain-flinging giant, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll realize that we made the right call. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The annoyingly common but incorrect use of &#8220;begging the question&#8221; aside, this sounds like a lot of fun. Sure, it falls into the <a href=\"http:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/2007\/07\/10\/well-what-do-you-know\/\">Mayan Hornet Bomber<\/a> category, and it turns its back on the strong historical grounding the core <em>Age of Empires III<\/em> game. But, you know. Elephants.<\/p>\n<p>The campaigns will mark a return to the old fashioned <em>Age of Empires<\/em> campaign, where you have to help famous people do famous things. I wasn&#8217;t aware that the Indian Mutiny of 1857 was &#8220;still controversial&#8221;, but I suppose everything is somewhere. Having just finished Niall Ferguson&#8217;s <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&#038;location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FEmpire-Demise-British-Lessons-Global%2Fdp%2F0465023290%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1192571368%26sr%3D8-2&#038;tag=flaofste-20&#038;linkCode=ur2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=9325\">Empire<\/a><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=flaofste-20&amp;l=ur2&amp;o=1\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" style=\"border:none !important; margin:0px !important;\" \/><\/em>, I think this could be an interesting conflict to dramatize.<\/p>\n<p>I have a lot of work to do before this comes out&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Big Huge Games&#8217; Andrew Auseon at the Asian Dynasties blog at IGN. A good example of when the element of history bowed to the element of fun was the Flail Elephant. The Indian civilization can train a siege elephant that swings a weighted chain from the end of its trunk. The only accounts of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[29,9,10,41],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5GFeQ-cA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flashofsteel.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}