[HoneyBadger]

Well, inevitably it's an abstraction. It has to be, considering the confines of the game. The mage you use to cast the spell, you can assume is the engineer overseeing the work, and the earth gems, special resources and terrain features utilized in the project. Making it cost earth gems, rather than just resources, is again a way to balance this out.

And you're absolutely right, there *are* other ways to stop Elephant Rushes. Good ways, infact, but not always ways that are effective or useable early in the game, for certain Nations.

As far as it cutting into turn limits (which I agree are kind of short, atleast for me), I'm aware of the problem, and there are things that can be done to mitigate the problem (like making them 1 hit=1 kill). Elephants themselves, though, with all their HP, and the possibility of regeneration, are just as much of a potential battle-lengthener as a bunch of barriers would be.

And there are some *really* interesting things that could be done with these kinds of units-Ice, Poison, and Fire have already been mentioned by vfb, but how about phantasmal wall (etherial), wall of clouds (flying), wall of shadows (stronger in darkness-as a deterrant to undead, for Nations which lack other undead/darkness deterrants), etc. (how about a spell that spammed a bunch of blinking walls?) and all the different immobile monster "walls" that could still attack, but couldn't otherwise move?

There's a lot of creative stuff that can be done with this.