I still don't understand why people don't just clone dungeon keeper. Reskin the graphics, change the imps to gremlins, perhaps make monsters harder to get along with and introduce 1 - 2 more of them. There! Easy! XD
I'd link War for the Overworld, but it's been linked like 4 times already in this thread XD
I honestly don't want a clone. I want someone to approach a dungeon management sim having incorporated the lessons from DK; I don't want a total rip off. I'm already slightly displeased with WFTO because they 100% ripped the look of Dungeon Keeper dungeon tiles, something I'd give my left nut for them to change.
This is my Dungeon Keeper wannabee Manifesto:
-A LIVING DUNGEON. Creatures should have things to do, tasks and they should have AI to manage it themselves. No monster should ever be standing around doing nothing. They should have lives, even if that life amounts to catching ZZZs in their lair most of the time.
-DUNGEON ARCHITECT. Players should be encouraged to build a dungeon from square one, instead of being asked to fill in the gaps in an already pre-plotted dungeon (Impire, Dungeons.)
-DUNGEON MANAGEMENT. The things you put in a dungeon should have a point, and more than one point. If you have a room that feeds guys, its placement should be important to the flow of your dungeon. If a room produces something, where it produces it should be just as important as what it produces. Resources should be balanced both against what you can produce and what you can maintain, so they stay meaningful. Enough of these freaking hard caps of "Gee sorry, you can't have more than 8 monsters until you reach Dungeon Level 10, or build <insert stupid blocking object here>." The only time I want to see a hard cap is when it's related to game performance...not because the developer has an arbitrary number of steps and requirements they want me to meet first. There's mechanics that influence pacing....and then there are mechanics that dictate it. More of the former, enough of the latter.
-SANDBOX. Enough of these goddamn campaign-driven objectives and scenarios. Nobody truly wants that, expect as a way to get to know the game. If you're not planning on a true, unrestricted sandbox mode, ask yourself wth kind of game you're actually trying to make. Because no one gets to have fun making and appreciating their dungeon when things are constantly distracting them or demanding their attention so they can micro something they'd prefer be automated.
-DOORS. Fucking doors. When a dungeon game doesn't include doors, it tells me it was too much effort for their pathfinding to deal with. I.e., they aren't that serious about AI. When I hear that a door presents too much of a challenge to someone's pathfinding, all I hear is "We want to be Dungeon Keeper but we lack the talent to actually replicate what they did."
-BE FUNNY OR DIE. Impire has really, even more than Dungeons, made me reject humor as a necessary component of these games. In DKII it was enjoyable because there was some restraint. Every successor since has acted like the humor is a bullet point feature all its own, and horribly overshot the mark in trying to achieve it. There was ONE real instance of humor in DKII...the narrator. There weren't several talking characters who spewed bad puns or were desperately trying to get a laugh out of the player. DKII's humor was genuine because it wasn't trying to live up to anything. All these DK wannabees, since, are all trying to recreate that humor, which makes it all seem forced and disingenuous.
Ladders
I'd have no problems with ladders (I like alternative entry systems that don't destroy your dungeon walls in the process) if, like you said, the gap between arrival and invasion wasn't ~15 to 20 seconds. The fact that ladders always show up at fixed intervals, and invasions follow immediately after, just further dispels any illusions you have remaining that there's something dynamic at work. There isn't. They might as well just have put up a timer on invasions, at least that way I wouldn't waste time waiting around for the invasion I know is coming.