another sick challenge from impy:-)

[Harush]

Hah...I've already done #1. My rule was zero spell book damage and no damage from phantoms. Meant I couldn't use sacrifice either.

[impy]

i played no loss impossible mage game with single red dragon.
Game was lot less nail biting than playing with single black dragon, due to heal/stone skin combo. Defeated everything in the game but ktahu & baal without using any wanderer scrolls apart from 50% exp. If you're interested see my previous thread about single black dragon for info. See screenshot after killing gremlion.
I got to ktahu and was wondering if he can be defeated. I had cca 250 mana, 6o int, 42% base phys. resist, 128 base defence on dragon + 61 scrolls ready (10 death stars, 4 geysers, 15 ice snakes, 10+ lighting etc.)
Idea was as follows:
1) first round : survive ktahu physical attack. It is doable as i mentioned earlier. I had twink.boots, caution 2, leather dress, belt of the victor. Heal, stone skin, hide in the corner where dragon can be attacked by 2 creatures only.
2) ktahu summons units. preferably 2 units of hayterans. Point is, that the whole battle with ktahu would be very long 40+rounds. Eventually the whole screen will get filled up with lizardmen summons. After killing ktahu one has to kill them all as well. My idea was to let hayterans which cannot reach dragon to lay eggs and have half a screen filled up with low numbers of hayterans, which can be easily killed by a few fire rains at the end.
3) dragon stays in the corner. Ktahu's attack does about 250dmg. So every 5 rounds cast stone skin, every 3 rounds heal spell. In between fire arrow to ktahu, occasionally calm rage or magic spring.
4) once lower on mana, save mana for stone skin, start using scrolls for damaging ktahu - my scrolls alone could do 70000+ damage!
5) this strategy works perfectly, got ktahu down to 80000 hit points and started to dance around my pc. But then the inevitable happened. Ktahu summoned gorguanas (again). Not a danger damage-wise, due to my 95% magic resist, but double damage for 2 rounds ability. That immediately brings ktahu damage to 500/round. I killed them easily the first time while i could cast two spells /round. When it happened again, after turn 30,I was effectively forced to cast heal every round and at some point 10000 death star to eliminate gorguanas. But then I could not heal or cast stone skin = game over. The only way to go then, is not to use up those 6x 2 castings/round at all, and save them only for the moments, when gorguanas appear. But it's gets soo messy.

[fable]

Did you try waiting with red dragons? That way you get doubled damage for only 1 turn, because the counter will decrease the same turn.

[Zechnophobe]

That's not true. Waiting does not end effects on a unit. Only finishing a units turn ticks down the duration on effects. Waiting would have potentially the exact opposite effect.

Hmm, unless you meant to wait so that he uses the ability before you go for the turn. That would actually work come to think of it.

Oh, and did you try summoning a phoenix so that you can 'go' with you dragon, and then cast spells on your dragon during the phoenix's turn? I found that immensely helpful for combats like this.