i had a "gold rush" event in one of my games rather early and it spawned a titan in an important region of my empire. the thing immediately razed 3 towns within few turns and it was way too early in the game for me to deal with it. i didn't give up immediately and tried a few strategies to handle it, though. I crated a new class of troops (basically just throwaway units) with cutting weapons (the titan is labeled as vulnerable to cutting, but that probably just means that he has some sort of "plate" armor and even more defense against blunt?). i gave them the "underdog" trait (extra damage to higher level units) and extra initiative and charge. a group of 5 of those units (squad size 4) on "auto resolve" took out about 50 HP of the titan; in tactical combat, they didn't even scratch him. so i guess my observation was that the best way to defeat him may be to "auto resolve". i guess a deadly army might even kill him in the first battle with auto resolve, or weake him enough so that another deadly army can kill him afterwards.

I didn't actually kill him in that game. it was around turn 150 and it was only my 3rd game or something so i was still learning and only had maybe 5 or 6 cities and the titan killed half of them. i guess if you already have deadly armies when the event triggers, you might have a decent chance to get rid of him with the above mentioned strategy. may be it's a bit cheesy to "cheat" with auto resolve, but those titans are just a nightmare otherwise. 

I think you may be right about the auto-resolve in that situation. Kinda weird. I'll guarantee it doesn't appear beatable on tactical. Nasty critter!

Curgen's Volcano?

There's a thread (one of the monsters are cheating threads) where someone put forward the idea that you should be able to "bribe" monsters so that they wont attack you and they will leave your territory.  I think a mechanism where you can give gold & influence to deter monster attacks would be so cool in an instance like this.

Imagine, you cobble together all the wealth of your empire to bribe this uber powerful beast who then wanders off and wreaks havoc amongst your enemies.  Only to have him return 100 turns later 10 levels higher!

If you can post a screenshot of his detail screen, I'm sure that we could come up with a way to smash him to pieces at reasonable expense.

If he shows up again I will! Thanks for the offer. Unfortunately I didn't save that game. I just remember all his stuff was red bordered armor, with multiple attributes and a wicked double-bitted battleaxe - also red with multiple attributes. Now that I think, he really reminded me of the Lich King in Wrath (WoW).

Can I be honest? With 205 HP and 50 def... he won't even survive the opening salvo against my chargers. I don't understand how he's eating your stacks.

@ Babby. Thanks - I kinda thought having a dragon or two would have easily tipped the scales. Unfortunately I had only *just* found and defeated my first dragon lair, so was still trying to research dances. A dragon or two would have probably beaten him up and taken his lunch money...

Legitimate question. I probably overstated the "death stack" part in the OP, although they had been pretty deadly agains everything ELSE they had run into. I had been playing a pretty lazy game (fighting a desultory two-front defensive war while my sov ran around clearing wildlands) up to that point (challenging/challenging, large map, dense monsters/wildlands, 4 factions only). Makes for a longer game and I wanted to try out a new sov build without being bothered by the AI (*except monsters). Soooo, anyway, in spite of the game length (and remember I mentioned I'd wasted ~20% of the game chasing stupid syndicate armies around my core area), nothing was really super far along development wise. If I remember correctly, I had three hero stacks of 7 units, with 5's unit sizes. I can't remember the exact mix, but it was probably my "default" of an ice mage, a fire mage, an archer, three hvy cav and hero. All mounted, custom designs. The computer classed each stack as "deadly" (and we all know how accurate THAT is...). I used the spell that brings everybody to a tile (Call of Titans?). After all, didn't look too tough, right? Ate my Sov, sent in the back up. Ate that. Retreated remaining group to nearest city. Won battle on auto-resolve.

In any event, I think some of the suggestions about spell use/mix was legit. And btw, I used a similar stack at a similar dev level to take out Ruin of Summer without even breaking a sweat - and he has 500 hp and about the same armor. Blizzard scrolls are your friend on that one

By the sounds of it, the issue is Despair. It's one of those spells that exists to teach you the deeply profound error of neglecting your magic. It's laughably easy to lock it down with the counterspells and beat in the face of whoever is using it, but if you don't have any magic? Ouch time....

And yes, usually the autoresolve hilariously misrepresents the power of Despair so you can end up with a much better result.

General reply: PLEASE PLEASE DON'T change him!! He's the kind of frustration factor that makes me love this game more!