I beat Karador easily with no losses as a warrior. My army was red dragons, black dragons, giants, cannoneers and inquisitors. I had to use up i think 3 or so of my gift scrolls (no time back upgrades at that point) to get back my losses, which included one red dragon. A few necro calls on bone dragons and vamps (which then sat on other dead stacks to prevent necro call and draw some fire) and he was only able to raise skeletons and zombies, which died to my dragons in droves.

Screenshot, just for fun:

It's easy at lvl24 with necro call and inquisitors, a bit tougher when none of that is available. :mrgreen:

As for the battle log, set a bigger resolution or enlarge it in photoshop. (just realized that's part of your signature, well might as well answer the question anyway :P )

Yeah, the weird thing is, i didn`t really delay on going and attacking Karador. I agree that lvl 24 sure helped :), but i really don`t remember why i was that level at that time. I only had level 1 of the experience skill. Maybe i just was doing alot of running around and owning, i dunno.

As for necro call, it`s one of the garunteed spells in the game. When you get the chronicles of the lost town (for that quest early on), you can use them. Their use grants you one scroll of necro call. Agreed that inquisitors sure help, though. That and a sacrifice scroll in the freedom isles, and then giants in your army :)

As for the pic. I don`t have photoshop, and don`t know how to use it (it`s just not something i`ve ever needed to use) as for a bigger resolution, I`m not sure how the helps (i`m not really a very tech savvy person), so please explain.

I'm having trouble defeating Karador as a level 23 mage on Hard. The trouble is used up all my mana early on on Geyser and Fire Rain and he used Fear and Hypnosis on my stacks a lot which I was pretty much powerless to stop. In the end, he won through sheer numbers and the crystal helped by raising undead stacks. My army consisted of cavalry, sprites, dryads, elves and green dragons. Perhaps not the best composition in this case?

I'm also intrigued by the going solo with green dragons strategy. I don't think I would know how to pull it off, though. Perhaps this strategy also calls for Lina to be high level, and I have hardly used her so far (or in any other playthrough), so my chargers are really weak.

Okay, I've just tried attacking a random necro hero only with green dragons. I cast invisibility, then fire rain in the same turn and the first thing the opponent does is cast magic axe pole on my (invisible???) green dragons. What the heck is going on?

I tried the solo green dragon strategy once. I am not sure if you need a beefed up charger since green dragon is still your core mana source. My charger was something like 6 points recovery with a total of 4 charges.

Btw, does the necro hero stack in your 2nd post contain any thorn type armies?

Added:
On Karador - Do you have target spell? Also try destroying one smaller stack to keep him busy using necro call spell instead of fear/hypnotize.

Killing Karador without losses is very easy - more so then killing Haas this way!

The trick is to keep him from casting harmfull spells at your units, as he has a wide selection of those (Fear, Hypnotize, Fire rain). This can be easily achieved by killing one of his stacks every round (Bone Dragons are likely candidates for this). Assured that you kill one stack, he will always cast Necro Call on them.

I beat him by having Lina cast Ice Shards in the first or second round - the AI is often very dumb, and his Death Knights kept hacking the shards for 3 rounds, by the time they got through I killed all his other units.

Try to stand on the corpses of the heavyweight units (knights, Necros) to ensure he or Karador's crystal doesn't raise those - Totems also work fine. Just be sure you don't destroy the corpses!

Then, when all his units are dead, I used the reliable "Superchargers + Resurrection" combo for at least 20 rounds to resurrect all my losses. I always made sure to have at least 5 Rage in reserve, and when I ran out of rage to cast Superchargers, I "stepped off" of a skeleton or Dead Spider corpse, let the crystal raise it, then - before giving it a turn - casting Rage taking on it. :) This way, I had no losses at all. Just remember not to let the raised unit get a turn, or Karador will go whupass on you with spells... :)

For the record, I was playing a Paladin and my troops were: Black Dragons, Royal Snakes (my killer stack with Snake Ring and frog Fiona as a wife), Black Unicorns (I only used them against Undead, I use Evil Beholders otherwise),Griffins (with banner of Griffin I had around 450 of them at the endgame). Of course, I also wore items to help me against Undead (Silver Sword, Holy Shield)

I killed karador on hard loosing only few skel archers( cant rezz them) without restoring it for countless numer of rounds, karador had like half of his mana in that moment.
Teleporting demon to the enemies in the beggining then the slaughter starts ..Timeback him at end f 2nd round. Enemies will be very hardly damaged by that time actualy just finish them with rest.Skelleton Archer with DA gets rid off the dark crystal quite fast.Units i had : Skeleton Archer,Inquisiitor,royal snake,demon,emerald dragon ( actualy dragon had nothing to do :P )

Yeah but try to do it without this "bug exploit". Any stupid can do it your way.