Try in single player creative mode first , you'll save a lot of time. I made another wall on the server this way , takes me about 30 minutes including setting up the dirt. Not too bad for a 60x60+ wall.
This was my work. I did use lava and water, though my technique is much, much simpler and faster than what is depicted here. The castle goes all the way around the center spawn. (4 towers, 4 walls) The towers were each made using sheets of lava, and the walls were made using pillars of lava. If anyone is interested, I could show you in game. Youtube is a hassle.... Each wall segment connecting the towers is >250 meters long and takes about 3 hours for one person to make. The towers were probably a little bit more timewise, but the results are quite mixed. I actually like the streaky look to them, but a couple have some pretty big holes. Yes, it has been griefed to crap, but that is part of the design. If I cared about the survival of the design, I wouldn't have built inside the server reset zone. As they say, "Minor imperfections only add to the character of the piece." I haven't polished the tops of three of the walls yet, but I might just leave them unfinished. I kind of like the look. Make sure you check it out in the iso view map.
Hmmm, a few people have asked me this in game as I was building it. One person seemed so vexed by the idea that he just had to log off. I may work on a larger one outside the reset area now that I have my technique down. So, that is part of it. I've used this method a few times, but I played with a bunch of techniques building this, and learned quite a few things. This is a beta test on a grand scale. More to the point, it is a "sand castle" (cobble castle?). Just because you know the tide is coming in doesn't mean that building a sand castle is meaningless, just that it is transient. If I had built it outside this region in the "safe" area, it would have been reset a few days back when the big server wipe happened, so that isn't really that safe either. I have to assume that all the Empire servers will disappear at some point as well. If you really want some context, that giant ball of fusion our planet orbits is going nova in a couple billion years, so everything you know and love in the real world is going to go "poof". The only difference is the time scale.
