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Endoperez said:
Turn or two of time to react isn't enough, and furhtermore, AFAIK elephant rush is very easy to convert from expansion to rush. It will take few turns to move about half of your armies (the ones expanding into the other direction) towards the rusheé, and unless your mages can teleport/cloud trapeze/fly you lose some research while they move. Unfortunately, Arcoscephale's fast-moving armies and teleporting mages aren't really slowed down.
If Cave Drakes were viable, they MIGHT work. They are big and have lots of hp, all Ulm's researchers can cast the spell, Ulm has the gems to summon them and Ulm wants Summon Earth Power any way - but spending gems on those is still a waste. 8 gems for 1? You'd probably need about as many as your enemy has elephants, and even 20 elephants would require you to spend 160 gems... Even if you did survive the rush, spending gems against gold will probably cost you the game in the long run.
EDIT: even equal numbers of cave drakes are just massacred by the elephants.
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Well, I disagree, a few turns to react is significant. If I've got 2 castles up and production-3 scales and my opponent takes 2 turns to gather his forces and 2 more to reach the point he's threatening my capital it's not unreasonable to think I've got 100+ troops recruited specifically to counter him and been able to research a level or two in one path. And again we're getting into this too perfect storm. You can't have an awake expansion pretender, a bunch of gold dumped into elephants, mages marching with the army and thaum-3 researched (teleport keeps being brought up) if you're talking about attacking me on turn 6.
Gah, I seem to have gotten sucked back into playing "in theory". I will comment though that cave drakes can be reasonably effective if you realize that they're not there to kill the elephants, they're there to trip them up and stall the charge to give smiths and arbalests time to do the killing. You don't need anywhere near 1:1 for this, more like 1:5. Elephants generally don't do so well if you can get them to hold still on the front line for just a couple turns which is where you want to aim for a counter.