It seems that this black dragon thread turned into discussion about alchemy vs. neatness
.
I do not recommend picking alchemy at all, regardless of the character. Unless you play the game for the very first time and want to see what spells do. honestly, you only need to max out maybe 1/4 of all spells in the game. I personally find great majority spells in order magic mediocre and of limited use. Some suggest going for neatness level 3, but personally only go for level 1. Buy all artifacts 1-3, keep those 5-10 which may eventually be used/upgraded and destroy the rest. I never really felt in great need of crystal, besides when short, you can always prioritize which spells to upgrade first. Example: Calm rage is a great spell, but do you need it to be level 3 untill very late in game? no.
By the way, i managed to defeat gremlion with single black dragon, see screenshots
It turned out to be mathematical exercise.
1) Gremlion summons up to 5 towers, i had to make sure that all of them are evil, in order not to get attacked due to imunnity. He actually summoned 1 friendly gremlin which i had to kill with 2 x death star at the great mana cost.
2) Gremlin attack was 85, so i wanted to have 145 on dragon in order to receive 1/3 damage only. My defence 130 + wanderer scroll (10) + defence command (
= 148 achieved that goal.
3) dragon has 95% magic resistance, so gremlion damage was 46-54/round.
4) therefore my time to kill him was 1000 (dragon hit points) / cca 50 = 20 gremlion magic attacks
5) btw it says in info thread that when gremlion wants to place a tower and cannot due to all hexes being taken, he does nothing. I hope i got it right. But it is not true. once he had all 5 towers placed he kept casting magic attack every single turn.
6) going back to 4) I therefore had cca 25 rounds (+5 rounds for placing towers) to kill gremlion = my 25 + 6 initial double castings = 31 castings.
7) gremlion hitpoints 154000 / 31 castings = cca 5000 damage per casting to him.
obvious choice therefore was fire arrow costing 31 x 5 mana = 155 mana overall + having cca 80 mana in reserve for higher damaging spells .
9) question was how to get fire arrow to do 5000 damage.
10) I had fiery bow - +50% to fire arrow spell + 65 intellect = 4615 damage and it turned out to be enough.