So I hate fighting Black Dragons. They're fast, healthy, high-initiative, do a lot of damage, and are immune to all my best methods for dealing with units like that. I've found basically three effective strategies for dealing with them - one is to use battle cry plus mass-dragon slayer and just cut them to pieces. It's painfully bloody and means I'll have to be careful to resurrect everyone once the battle is over, but it works. The second is to hide all my vulnerable units in the farthest corner and go plant a red or black dragon right next to their black dragons; with any luck the rest of my units will be out of range and their dragons will spend all their time attacking a unit nearly immune to fire damage. But that requires I have red or black dragons in my army, which I often don't, and that their dragons be on one side or the other. The third is to use traps. A well-placed trap will do 5000+ damage to them, poison them, and cost them their turn. When this works well, a high-intellect mage can kill 18-20 black dragons without them ever even getting a hit in. On the other hand, sometimes it doesn't work well at all. Two cases really spring to mind.
In one such case, I dropped my traps as I thought best, then proceeded to summon angelic guard with my royal griffins. The angelic guard appeared where I hadn't expected, and in fact on top of the trap I'd just dropped. Half the guard died right there, then the black dragon flew in and killed the rest plus damaging through them to the unit I'd been trying to protect all along. But that was at least a forgiveable mistake I suppose, because it was unlikely the angelic guard would happen to appear there.
The second case was a little worse. I was fighting the dragon cave in Monteron, which has about 33 each of reds, blacks, and emeralds. Feeling very cunning, I stuck two of my units in a line then put a trap at the far end. For some strange reason, the black dragons didn't try to attack that line, but instead flew right past to attack someone else. Then the red dragons, who couldn't reach my units this turn, used their ranged breath attack to hit the units I'd put in a line. Then the emerald dragons flew up, landed on the far side of my trap, and clawed one of my own units onto it.
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