[Baalz]

Elephants vs Ulm are a bit of an overblown threat IMO, particularly since Ulm's face lift. Magma bolts decimate the shieldless pachyderms when spammed in sufficient numbers, and I haven't tested it out but it seems like iron darts/blizzard would work reasonably as well.

As far as beating elephants without using mages - no there's not really any clever placement you can do, the best you can really manage is trying to mass enough sappers/arbalests to get critical mass to bring them down before they start splattering your troops. This actually works pretty well due to your archer's range if you can get a sufficient number and your opponent is holding his elephants back waiting for your mages to tire out. 2-4 volleys of bolts does a lot when you fire enough of them at things without shields. If your opponent is instead charging straight forward with a big block of elephants, try half a dozen smiths spamming magma bolts into their face - you won't be disappointed. Moral of the story is Ulm's combat mages are their backbone, you'll struggle mightily against lots of stuff without them.

The thing about elephants is they really need critical mass plus they're expensive. If your opponent masses a bunch of them together and pushes straight for your capital, meet it with all those research mages you've got there. If he splits it into a couple largish groups, spread out your mages into hit squads and take the aggressors out one group at a time. If he splits into smaller squads, just boost your PD strategically - it has the right weapons to do some damage if there are less than 5 elephants per group. If you're to the point that you've got several largish squads of elephants...well you should really have magma eruption and blade wind by that point as well as several castles cranking out smiths, so I don't see that as too much of a problem.