Transforming spells are useful for traveling around if you get blocked by mountains/sea - but primarily for creating mountain passes.

It can also be easily exploited to gain significant advantage against the AI

one major use of the land spells is to help mitigate movement. flat land require less movement points than hills, and mountains block you. You can use the spells to raise land to make an outpost to increase your trade revenue in your major cities through caravans. This makes gold easy to get when you want it.

another reason is to make choke points so it is easy to defend your kingdom/empire with a small army.

Careful tossing theses spells around as they can destroy goodie huts and notable locations. They also move units around that are caught in the are effect of the spell.

The name of the spell book is a horrible immersion breaker, at least for me; it just doesn't work with the MoM-successor, Tolkien appreciator, Song of Ice and Fire fan talk.

The spells themselves, generally speaking, make sense in the hazy framework of the post-Cataclysm game world we're supposed to be in.

The 'balance' stuff I can't say much about because the game's still changing rapidly and I've never cared very much about scores/winning/whatever. I'm still waiting for a TBS with a 'victory condition' that depends on both surviving to meet a milestone and having 'made some good friends' along the way.

Thought you 'raised' land to secure trade route...forming a valley of sorts where hungry bears won't enter and ruin caravans.

-.-

I've used it to cut myself off from a couple AIs who were menacing me in order to have space to cast the spell of making. I've raised land to provide a pathway around a rival empire's territory to a place I wanted to found a city. I've cleared paths through mountains for caravans.

They're actualy pretty useful spells for misc. work. I'm still waiting to hear what revive and desecrate do though.

Edit:

Historicaly the civs have done that.

Although... useually... you don't have friends at the end

So basicaly they change the terrain that you fight on, and therefore the bonus. Interesting.

That's actualy pretty useful.

I'll double-check that, but when I was playing around with magic, I remember being able to turn some fallen land around an enemy city into fertile.

to the OP, Last night I found a quest where the tile I had to go to was on an island.  It was the Maggie Ring quest.  When I traveled to the yellow icon, to my surprise I discovered it was on an island.  Since I was playing as Relias, and had no terraforming spells so I could not reach the tile and complete the quest.

I have also used terraforming to change the land scape.  I have destroyed the land to around my capital city to create an island, and then make a land bridge to it.  Then I only have to guard a narrow strip of land.

ok thanks for the explanation.