Deadly mobs?

Well, it's not easy.  Some spells that help a lot are Blind from death 2, and Shrink from Life 3.  Slow is kind of helpful now too from water 1.  Healing items, like pork, potions, things like that.  Spells like Curse from Death 2 that lowers enemies defense to 0 for a few turns is really helpful.   If you can build troops with ranged magical staffs, they can hurt a dragon pretty well.  Ice is better than fire. 

There are a few other post around, and even a video of someone beating a dragon on turn 50.  Take a look at those. 

Thanks for the reply, i'll see if i can find the posts. 

It depends on the mob, there are plenty of effective strategies for most of them, post what you need help with and I'm sure people will chime in. Just saying "deadly" mobs doesn't really help because they are very different so you have to deal with them differently.

Shrink for the win! Also, unlock magical apparel and whatnot. You can have 75% fire resist and high dodge that deals with dragons I think. I have tanked a dragon with a melee hero and two healers. The dragon killed itself in the end. If that bug is ever fixed, I still would have won. Shrink and healing.

But what level are you guys when you take a dragon down?

For a face to face brawl with a chambercoil dragon ( the weakest) level 10+ on 2 heroes, some archers, one unit to tank and a few hard hitters (infantry, cavalry with blunt weapons) should do the trick.

Obivously if you have Juggernauts it's easier

Does Shrink works on Dragons? damn that's crazy !

Don't forget to use spell on them if you can before engaging one (freeze, tremor) to lower its initiative for exemple.

Anyway, try to avoid settling a city close to a dragon lair, even if the location is appealing, you might unleash something you don't want to deal with early on.

Level 12 or so, it depends a lot on the equipment and weapons you find. I could swear in the campaign I found a weapon that had a bonus against dragons but hell, I might be getting confused with something from GW2.

There's at least 5 strategies that work very early:

1. Stacking dodge and casting blindness.

2. Size manipulation

3. Fireproof henchman pileup

4. Juggernauts

5. Ranged troops and curse

There's also #6 which is a bug exploit.

Use a fireproof, high initiative unit, pay REAL attention to the turn order and breath cooldown, and have the dragon barbeque itself.

My first encounter with a chambercoil ended before I could move -- my entire army went up in flames.  So an impulsive caster with an opening resist fire spell might be a good thing.

Also if you can turn the ground to mud, you get a lot of control against fast and aggressive opponents.

Another approach is to ignore it, and suffer any city loss while you build up your strength.

If you have strategic spells you can slowly kill it without ever engaging it in combat (perhaps 700-ish mana over a dozen or so turns)

One thing that definitely helps with dragons and other deadly mobs is,

having your own dragon in your army

Of course you´ll first have to reseach a last tier civ tech (Dances with dragons) and have a dragons lair within your borders in order to archieve this, but your armies become next to invulnerable with a dragon in them