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Dungeon Keeper General Hints and Tips

None of my tactical advice matters much if you are planning to conquer the world from a single hole in the ground.  To build a good, effective Dungeon, you have to have an   overall idea of where you are, where your money is, and where trouble might be lurking.

What's the Lay of the Land?
When you're first presented with a new realm to conquer, take a good long look at the entire map. Remember the areas with gold, potential danger areas, and  the entrance portal closest to your Dungeon Heart .   You'll usually find that enemies come from the opposite end of the map, and (in cases where more than one entrance portal is present) close to far-flung entrance portals.

Now start planning your rooms. You'll want to keep your first few rooms in a nice, tight area around your Heart.  You don't want to expand too quickly, or you're likely to encounter some unpleasant surprises, such as water or lava, which are difficult to defend. Choose a nice, big space for a Treasure Room (preferably near the gold) and then plan a large lair and a modest  training room immediately adjacent. You'll also want a slightly smaller area for a hatchery (at least 25 tiles), which should be in a central location near all your rooms. Start building these four rooms first, even before you claim the Entrance. A good-sized lair, hatchery, and training room will ensure that you get a few Bile Demons and Demon Spawns immediately. 

In any given realm, there are a limited number of monsters available.  You want to make sure you attract the right kinds of minions the first time.  It won't help you if a bunch of flies and beetles take up precious space.  Also plan on making your rooms square whenever possible - square rooms are the most efficient.

With your initial rooms, it is not necessary that you fill them immediately. For example, you should plan a big lair, but only put lair tiles down in a relatively small area at first (5x5 is a good starting size for your  lair, Treasure Room, and hatchery.  3x3 makes a good training room for starters).  This will save you money and make further expansions much easier.

Also, try to keep a relatively large area open for expansion.  In later levels, you'll need to build at least one sub-division of basic rooms to keep natural enemies apart.

Now you should claim the nearest portal and start mining some gold. Your first minions will start to arrive.

Now, choose a location for your library.  Make sure it's in a relatively out of the way spot, but with easy access to the lair and hatchery. You don't want  monsters strolling through your Library every time they're hungry or trying to get paid.  Make sure, your Library has only one doorway.  Again, plan a large Library, but only place a few tiles (nine is a good start). Some researchers will undoubtedly appear and you'll soon be able to start building more advanced rooms.

A Room with No View
Once you have the first five rooms built and a comfortable amount of gold, start having a few of your Imps reinforce the walls (you really need a solid number of Imps at the beginning of the game - eight to ten is a good start). Strong walls are the key to a solid dungeon: Your enemy can't get through them without casting Destroy Walls.

As you expand, make sure you cast Sight of Evil to see the area your Imps are digging out. This is to avoid unwarily stumbling upon caverns, water, or lava - which can't be protected.  If open areas can't be avoided, make sure to build rooms on the border where your minions spend the majority of their time, such as lairs or training rooms. And if you're building multiple rooms in wide-open areas without the benefit of walls, don't place differing room tiles next to one another; leave a buffer of at least one square to ensure maximum efficiency in both rooms.

Building from here on out should take advantage of what you've already accomplished. For instance, if you've built the larger rooms to extend to the edge of the map, you can build smaller rooms between them that will be inaccessible to enemy explorers. The reinforced walls of the border rooms will serve as blockades to the smaller rooms.

The value of reinforced walls can't be stressed enough. Not only do they protect your dungeon, they make your rooms more efficient.  On a related note, impenetrable rock, while it does protect your rooms, does not add to their efficiency.  To keep your rooms at their maximum level of efficiency, keep a small buffer of wall between your rooms and the rock.

Tunneling for gold will eventually be your downfall.  Gold walls can't be reinforced, so leaving a border of unmined gold won't help.  You'll eventually need all the gold you can lay your  hands on anyway.  If you've reinforced all your walls, these empty gold veins will be the weakest spot in your dungeon, so plan accordingly. Between these empty veins and your dungeon, plan for long corridors with lots of traps and doors, which make a nice barricade between you and whoever wants to destroy your Dungeon Heart.  As with the open spaces, you want training rooms or lairs located at the weakest points of your dungeon.

If you can, try to establish some sort of backfield where you can build rooms like Libraries, Workshops, and Torture Chambers without worrying about these expensive rooms being overrun immediately if things start to go against you. Once you progress to the point where the really expensive rooms like Temples and Scavengers become available, you should have nice, safe areas to place them.

Initially, make sure your first Lair is located centrally amongst your Treasure room, Training room, and Hatchery, so that your monsters aren't wasting valuable training time going to and from the bank, work, and dinner.

When you have a fair idea which direction your opponents are going to be coming from, build your largest Training room on that side of your dungeon.  Nothing ruins a hero's day worse than popping in to see a roomful of sweating monsters just itching for a real workout.

Another vital building technique is to use your Sight of Evil spell to scan an area where you'd like to place a new section. This way you can make sure you do not  open an unknown cavern before you are ready to deal with whatever  lurks within. There is nothing worse than a few high-level heroes popping in to say hello, when all you've recruited are two Beetles and a Fly.

Beware the Glitter of Gems
While gems are a permanent form of gold, do not assume you can flag them for digging and just forget about them. First of all, they do not produce income very quickly.  For fast cash, you still need to dig out some good old gold.  The second problem with gems is that they will draw the attention of all your Imps if you're not careful.

A good rule of thumb is to dig gems in bursts.  Flag them for digging for a few minutes, and then unflag them with another click of your magical pointer and let your Imps go back to doing a little real work before sending them back.  It's also a good idea to lay treasure tiles directly around gem squares.

Here are a few general strategies to keep in mind:

Subdivisions: If you think the battle for a particular   realm is going to be a long, hard one, try to establish a set of secondary basic   rooms (Lair, Hatchery, and Treasure combinations) close to the front lines.   This allows you to have a group of monsters close to possible action at all times without sticking them into guard posts.  It also might be a good idea to build a small Prison and Graveyard in the same area so that your Imps can be more efficient--but try not to do this before you have steel or magical doors to protect them.

Short trips to the bank: Always build small Treasuries next to your gold veins so your Imps don't waste time trotting back and forth to your main gold reserve. If you feel you should move the funds to a more central location, just move the dough yourself.

Fire sale: By the time you have penetrated your opponent's Dungeon to the point where your Imps can start taking over rooms, it is unlikely you will need them, and very likely that the ebb and flow of combat will soon put those tiles back under enemy control. If you're in a scorched earth kind of mood, just sell off the tiles as soon as you capture an enemy room. It means more money for you and nothing for the enemy.

The long, winding road: Give your enemies a dangerous road to follow into your realm.  A couple of long passages that double back on themselves, filled with doors  and  traps usually do the trick.  I particularly like to place boulder traps in long corridors with no side passages.  A single well-placed boulder trap can take care of a lot of enemies if you're lucky.

It's always fun to put a couple of good gas traps in front of a heavy door, and sit back to watch your enemy choke while the monsters pound away.  Finally, as a last-ditch defense, place the majority of your Lightning traps around the heart of your Dungeon.

If possible, make sure that you design your dungeon so that enemies have to travel through training rooms and lairs to reach your Dungeon Heart.  Since your creatures will spend a lot of time in these rooms anyway, you can have these rooms act as guard posts without forcing creatures to be idle while on "Guard Duty".

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