Help me please? Karador on Impossible

[Sigma88]

Mage: level 25
leadership:16194
atk 9
def 15
int 24
132 mana
Wife: frog feonora

Troops full stacks:
Sea Dogs
Royal Snakes (with upgraded snake ring)
Demon (with demetrius)
Archmages
Emerald Dragon

This battle, as suggested by the difficulty, is impossible for me. It's going fine, until one of my units gets hypnosis, usually sea dogs and down goes two of my units. I am trying to use necro call on defeated units but they don't survive long enough and end up getting necro called by karador anyway.

I've just about given up. I know impossible is like impossible but didn't know it was a HUGE jump from Hard mode. I thought hard was pretty easy, at least with a warrior class, since i ended up with no casualties with the karador battle. But this just seems impossible for me with a mage.
I don't know what else i can do besides changing up troop composition and siding out archmages and emerald dragons.
And i wonder how hard baal would be.. i haven't even tried fighting him yet.

Is there anything else i could/should do to win this fight? Perhaps some of you would like to try out my save file for the heck of it. Otherwise I'll just give up and start the expansion. All i really wanted to do was play all 3 difficulties(besides easy) with all 3 classes but karador on impossible is a roadblock for me.

[Fatt_Shade]

Hello Sigma88
I`m glad you`re having fun still. About your suggestion for save game, post it here and i`ll try. Just post what version are you playing, and if you`re using any mod (i was planing to play again soon, and will try to help).
As for advice still low intellect for mage, his best weapon isnt army, but spells with units with controlling abilities.
Karador have all undead army, and they mainly have great poison resistances, and some physical, only necromancers magic. So it good idea to use units with high magic dmg per leadership (inquisitor is great here, for dmg and holy attack and resurrecting your fallen troops, druid or dryad also magic dmg and summon units to harass enemy). If you pick some of them, lose demons and get some other meat shields knight or horseman are good choices. Also giants arent bad ides since only ghosts are flying and his jump attack will dmg all undead units, run as close to enemy you can and leave him there. Cast magic shield (archmages) and peacefulness spell and rage skill gloth armor no him and just jump when ever possible.

Post here save game, with version/patch info and i`ll try to help you. Take care

Edit : or sen save game file to ladovinka@gmail.com (my mail)

[Sigma88]

Hey fatt shade. Thanks for replying. My game version is 1.6.4.
Actually my mage is level 25, not 26 as stated above. I'll change after this post to reflect what i have now. I'll post a link at the bottom for my game save, you'll need to download from a file sharing site.
I know there is a later patch BUT for some reason the game wouldn't start after patching. So i uninstalled it and reverted back to the latest patch that i recently had and played with. I am not willing to upgrade to the latest patch though so please do as much as you can with the current one. Also, this is the patch where I cannot get mirabella as a wife, the game will crash if i select the option to get her to marry me.
I have not used any mods or any outside/third party programs for this game. I am playing this legitimately, no game scanners to see what i can obtain in each game either. But you're welcome to do so if you're willing to take that effort to help me anyway, i've already ran through just about everywhere and manually scanned each area to see what i can buy from shops.

Also, if you are using a mod to scan my game, can you currently find out my game stats as of right now? Game stats as in how many enemies killed, battles engaged, previous wives, casualties, etc?
I just want to see how many casualties i have right now. I know i have very little except from the beginning of the game where i didn't give a damn about how many units i lost until i got the resurrection spell, which i only managed to find in demon land.

If you're wondering how i even managed to survive all this, i went with cheap tactics and almost absolutely no damage spells. Rather than use stuff like sheep and blind against melee enemies, i forced enemy melee units to use running and then i slow them and scatter my units around like an idiot running wildly while my ranged characters take them apart. This saves lots of mana for sacrificing and resurrecting but makes the battle ungodly long sometimes.

http://depositfiles.com/files/4fjvup15z

[Sigma88]

Update:
... I beat it... but I feel like such a dirty cheater and even then I don't think this battle was even possible. I didn't use actual cheats but took advantage of how leadership worked. I made it so that I went into battle with extreme amounts of one unit. I used sea dogs because it was the only thing available in high amounts at this moment. I used over 1400+ sea dogs in this fight, they went out of control and decimiated the undeads somewhat slowly. But hey it did the job and ended up with 100 left. Two of my other units died and the other two survived with half leadership left.
Hey... I guess a win's a win but with my analysis, I honestly think this battle is not winnable.
I seriously hope i don't have to do this against Baal.

[Sigma88]

Baal was retarded easy and I just beat the game. It took me about 10 tries to see what other methods i can use to fight the horde of enemies from the last boss. The ancient ents were the biggest problem, they have extremely high defense and i could only kill 1 or 2 per turn... and there's about 65 of them, 3 stacks each having 20, 23, 22.
My team was the following:
15 Archdemons
104 Demons
14 Cyclops
13 emerald dragons
23 Ogres.

The only reason why i choose this group was so i don't get controlled every turn since my troops were all level 5s and last boss kept casting sheep/hynosis/pygmy. In all honest truth the cyclops were very useless, i should've used Bone dragons, they are actually MUCH better. The only reason why i didn't consider them was because i thought all undeads were weak to fire but not really.

My first few attempts i was about to give up. My troops were:
Archdemons
Demons
Royal Snakes
Sea Dogs
Skeleton Archers/Ogres

It didn't work, closest i got to was destroyed all dragons and left with 2 stacks of 20 ancient ents, then got obliterated. That's why i had to change up my troop composition and got the idea of using just 1 stack that's not level 5.

MVP troop: Archdemons. Don't underestimate them when compared to 2000 sprites or something. Divine armor + stone skin. Damage from 20 ancient ents, theoretically 2000. With both buffs, reduced to a measily 70.

Lastly I went and killed every enemy i had left over and luckly leveled up at the last enemy to 30 and got a leadership option. Final leadership 20900+ and that's without any equipment that gives me leadership. Also i used 10 rats so i should have 500 more.

P.S. I am not playing impossible mode again.