Although this isn't the battle winner, I've created a perfect anvil here - a very dense enemy line - that would've been destroyed by the Elephant hammer, getting more than 1200 kills. However, I had four units of Carthaginian Pikemen in ranks of 8 holding the centre with 4 Loricatii in reserve and two Liby-Phoenician hoplites on the flanks (6 ranks deep). Again, I've exterminated most of the Latin skirmishers and mercenary slingers within seconds, having good cavalry dominating the flanks. Roman armies required a different set of tactics - ironically, a compact phalanx worked here). One thing that still affected me is that I lost a lot of mercenaries (but this is what they're for, since you cannot recruit solid Carthaginian hoplites everywhere, whereas affordable mercenaries are these can always be brought back immediately) The battles would've been most of the time over in less than 2 minutes). So with my two (sometimes three) units of African elephants, I placed them in my frontline after destroying most of their skirmishers and charged straight into the line, with a followup from four units of mercenaries (Scutarii, no fire-at-will, obviously). Iberian armies have a lot of light units that are being put into the frontline of the army. So I try to come up with different solutions in order to fix that.Д¬urrently, playing as Carthage in the 'Hannibal at the Gates' campaign, I got to fight barbarian (mostly Iberians), Hellenic (Emporion, Massilia, Syracuse) and Roman/Italic enemies - now, in all the armies I've used against them, I had elephants all the time. That is because in Rome 2 battle lines are stretched out thin and even if an elephant dissolves two on the charge, when they automatically go beserk they start going to the others but creating chaos amongst my own lines too.

One issue that I've noticed is that the elephants, despite their usage in stomping enemy troops, they end up murdering some of your units too. However, I've noticed when playing with Carthage, Seleucid Empire and Epirus is that elephants are important to the army they contribute to. In DEI, there's just much more strategies and applied tactics that can be used to deal with the enemy.

Rome total war 2 elephants