[Baalz]

Not generally where MA Ermor is headed early, but if you happen to be at const-4 consider forging ethereal x-bows. With their precision, and the elephant's size and MR more or less every time you fire you kill an elephant. just stick them on scouts set to fire, fire, retreat. Bad guys won't get far when they lose several expensive elephants each fight. This also works very nicely with the fear spam suggested above, killing half the elephants will usually route the rest of them and if you're being attacked by more than 20 elephants you'll need to invest more than 25 pearls to stop them.

Cons-4 also gets you rat tail whips, which are often overlooked but both cause greater fear *and* give you animal awe (excellent for stopping the trampling and dropping the already low moral into the negative range). N1 indie mages are a dime a dozen, etherealize a few cheap commanders with rat tail whips and back them up by more with ethereal xbows and you'll stop a ridiculous amount of the beasts without bothering many of your mages to run around nor taking any casualties.