Single black dragon - how far can you get?

[DGDobrev]

travelingoz is completely right. Hento, please check the lvl 60 thread and see the screens:
http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...07&postcount=1

You will notice I got 1048 crystals which is pretty much enough to build up every spell in the game to lvl 3 without investing in alchemy at all. Now imagine you picked alchemy along with that. It reduces the number of crystals you need to level up a spell by 50%. how many crystals would you have left in your inventory? What would you do with them?

This is why I talked about efficiency. KBAP likes efficiency much more than KBTL.

[impy]

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.

[DGDobrev]

Well done

The info thread is correct (I had him skip a turn), however, chances of doing that are very low, like from 1/30 upwards for each round (so it's not guaranteed that he'll skip a turn even once in 30 rounds), because the chances of him casting his mass attack when there's nothing he can hit or there's nowhere to place a tower are so high.

[Zechnophobe]

Doesn't he only place three towers? Am I just remembering only a run through on Hard, and he does 5 on impossible? I am completely not recalling him ever using 5.

[DGDobrev]

It's 5 for all difficulties. Maybe you were either destroying them too fast or he was more interested in using his mass attack than summon towers?

[Zechnophobe]

Weird, did I just get horribly lucky? I seem to recall having my two stacks of Green and Red dragons only dealing with 3 (two total stacks). All were evil gremlins, so I just ignored them. This was in my last no loss impossible paladin game. Or, it is possible I am just completely not remembering it correctly.