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[nenjin]

In order to get gold you have to dig

Small quibble. In order to get gold, you have to kill heroes. That's it. Every hero comes into the dungeon with their own gold. If you're short, just go on a murder spree of newly entering heroes, and you'll easily recoup the gold lost when one left.

But yes. Where Realmforge decided to place the Hero Level Cap relative to your Monster Level Cap is a big part of how fast you fall behind.

[Neonivek]

Heros don't have sizable amounts of gold actually. They just seemingly multiply any gold they take (and even that may not be true). (It is also one of the reasons why having a hero escape is a loss.)

So you still need to mine for gold.

[nenjin]

In the demo I killed heros and they had, on average, 30 gold. Even if they have less in the campaign, it's a matter of numbers vs. difficulty. Gold is not a finite resource. It's infinite when here's are factored in.

[Shades]

After playing the second level, which is much less stupidly laid out than the first, I still find I'm getting frustrated at mechanics. Namely the way heroes seem to react too randomly to the items and creatures you lay down. Sometimes they will follow the corridor were they can see gold, critters and items to admire and other they just ignore them and walk off randomly, thing is they seem to do this each time they interact with something which means you often get them bouncing back and forth in a small area rather than exploring your dungeon.

I'm still also finding I have to hunt down heroes too often with my avatar, I tried ignoring them for the most part but I was slowly losing gold doing that so it won't work out long term.

Finally the linking up of creature spawn points with control points bugs me, you get few enough population as it is without having to waste some sticking a bunch of bats down randomly just because you need to extend the control in a certain direction. They are just going to sit there for the whole game and do nothing so they might as well not have spawned.

I've not given up on the demo yet, I'm hoping it will get better as I progress but I have to say it's not selling it for me yet. Possibly I don't 'know how to play' yet but generally I find I don't enjoy games that force me to play in a way that isn't natural for me.

[Neonivek]

I am a bit surprised no one actually decided to buy this today.

Or at least comment on it here.

[Sowelu]

Oh!  It's out?

I pre-ordered it.  I'll give it a try when I'm home. 

[nenjin]

It's crashing repeatedly for me at the Happy Hills level. So I've been tinkering with that.

After playing the second level, which is much less stupidly laid out than the first, I still find I'm getting frustrated at mechanics. Namely the way heroes seem to react too randomly to the items and creatures you lay down. Sometimes they will follow the corridor were they can see gold, critters and items to admire and other they just ignore them and walk off randomly, thing is they seem to do this each time they interact with something which means you often get them bouncing back and forth in a small area rather than exploring your dungeon.

Here's the deal, straight from the horse's mouth:

It's true that hero hapiness (we call it "admiration") and hero satisfaction are two different values.

When designing the UI, we tried to hide the hapiness from the user to not have too many strange numbers and sliders displayed at any time. Beside, it is actually much less important that soul energy.

Maybe that was a mistake, maybe not. Surely, some users actually are more confused about both concepts now Sad

So how it works precisely:

Heroes stroll around in the dungeon, looking for some interesting things: prestige gimmicks*). When they look at a prestige gimmick, their admiration for the dungeon increases up to a maximum. Admiration drops over time. When they reach 50% admiration, they get into a "bad mood" - state, which is displayed as a lightning-cloud as bubble over their head. Sidekick will say something like "heroes don't particular like your dungeon".

Bad mood itself is not critical.. yet. But once the admiration of any hero reaches 0, he will get pissed off with the dungeon, stomp one time and cry in anger and then will directly march to your dungeon heart. Sidekick will comment this with "heroes got angry and marching toward your heart". The thing is, that when one hero got pissed, he will infect all currently "bad mood" - heroes and they join together in one stampede towards the dungeon heart.

The best way to increase admiration is to let the hero admire prestige gimmicks. Here, the quality of the gimmick is important: The higher the quality, the more admiration the hero draws out of looking at it.

This means, if you build one big hallway with cheap +1 gimmicks, there is a huge probability the hero will walk there (choosing randomly one prestige gimmick in an area will most likely choose one of the gimmicks in the hallway). But looking at each gimmick won't give a lot admiration to the hero, so he may still end up in a bad mood.

*) There are some exceptions as healing wells (can be used multiple times as strolling target) and need gimmicks (need gimmicks don't give admiration when used, but act as a possible strolling target).

So. It's important to know that heroes tend to sense thing radially within a certain distance. That's what tends to screw up my designs, is putting say a treasure chest or spawn right next to a wall that paralells a long corridor. Heroes tend to sense the goodies (and the prestige objects) closest to them, and use those as their guide. Their radial sense for monsters seem to be much smaller, on the order of 4 to 5 tiles.

Finally the linking up of creature spawn points with control points bugs me, you get few enough population as it is without having to waste some sticking a bunch of bats down randomly just because you need to extend the control in a certain direction. They are just going to sit there for the whole game and do nothing so they might as well not have spawned.

So just leap frog your pentagrams and destroy them behind you. It costs more but it's a way around the limitation. You don't even have to wait for the new pentagram to be built before destroying the old one; once you've dropped a pentagram down legally, anywhere, your control sphere will usually stretch to ridiculous degrees to accommodate it.

And here's a list of day 1 patch notes....which include some promising tweaks to custom games:

Updates to Dungeons: Steam Special Edition have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted.
Upgraded DUNGEONS to use Microsoft .NET 4.0 (lower memory footprint, faster startup).
Modified graphic assets for Radeon R520 core compatibility (Radeon X1000 series).
Switched to hlsl shaders for lower memory footprint.
Added ribbonbands for all weapons.
Improved shader effect quality for many game object surfaces (crystal, lava, water, invisibility, ...).
ReturnToDungeonHeart spell now opens a portal that can be used to travel back. This will not work in old saved games however.
Allow switching the game language in the in-game options.
New minor features and improvements:
Goblins fetch their gold from a gold pile in throne room, not from the room-center.
Shift-Click in attribute panel now increases an attribute by 10 points.
Increased default autosave interval to 30 minutes.
Dungeon displacement can now be deactivated in options.
Rotating camera with right or middle mouse depends now on setting in options.
Added low shader quality option for improved performance on less capable hardware.
Allow selecting 720p resolution in options.
Added configuration option to deactive build-after-teardown.
Added buff loop animation for heroes.
Tweaked several game textures to reduce memory footprint.
Custom game: buy spawn credits with soul energy.
Custom game: Hero entrances can have a "spawn now" button.
Custom game: Increase or decrease hero level with soul energy.
Heroes don't cast townportal if they didn't learn the spell yet.
Enhanced GUI modding hooks.
Improved memory monitoring, which can be disabled in config.
Improved performance of displacement texture.
Included more sound effects.
Optimised some models, for improved rendering performance.
Clip mouse cursor to game window in fullscreen mode, for multimonitor setups.
Custom game list now shows the map type.
Minor improvement of positions for all wall gimmicks in the sunken temple setting.
Tweaked tooltips of campaign map challenges.
Minor balancing improvements.
Fixes:
Fixed several reported crashes.
Various minor map fixes.
Fixed tortured heroes not running away after being freed by the champion.
Fixed Minos special attack spells.
Fixed displacement bugs on GeForce 7XXX series cards in maps with multiple dungeon levels.
Fixed: Sentries didn't stop moving when they died during patrol (sliding bodies).
Fixed problem with Alt+Tab during startup and in campaign map.
Fixed rare audio crash if audio device was lost during the game (e.g. unplugging audio cable).
Repaired some challenges.

[Draco18s]

Oh my god.

Dungeons SUCKS.

Imagine Dungeon Keeper minus the dungeon keeping.

Instead, you personally, beat the crap out of heroes.  If a trap or monster kills them, you only get HALF THE BENEFIT!

Oh, and you have to lure them in with the promise of treasures, let them steal some (so they get happy) and then beat them up yourself so you can steal their soul points (which are used to place tacky decorative objects around the dungeon for "prestige" which makes you better in combat).

Like whoopy freaking do.

[Sowelu]

If you think that's the point of prestige, you haven't read the manual, or the thread, or something...Well, one of us is missing something anyway.

[Draco18s]

If you think that's the point of prestige, you haven't read the manual, or the thread, or something...Well, one of us is missing something anyway.

There's a manual?

Also, why would I read the manual, isn't that what the tutorial is for?

Except that the tutorial(s?) covered almost nothing except that "prestige is good."  I figured out (some) of what it did by accidentally mousing over the dragon head at the top of the screen.  "You are outside of your territory, therefore your stat boosts from prestige are reduced."

[Sowelu]

Also, why would I read the manual, isn't that what the tutorial is for?

From now on, every time I see someone complaining that modern games are dumbed down, I will quote you on this.

I'm just assuming there is one, since I haven't been home to check.  But if there is, right-click it in your steam library, there's probably a "view user manual" thing.  There was for MUD TV.

[Draco18s]

Also, why would I read the manual, isn't that what the tutorial is for?

From now on, every time I see someone complaining that modern games are dumbed down, I will quote you on this.

I'm just assuming there is one, since I haven't been home to check.  But if there is, right-click it in your steam library, there's probably a "view user manual" thing.  There was for MUD TV.

MUD TV was just terrible, but for other reasons.

For Dungeons there is not a manual in the right-click menu in Steam, nor in the game's main menu.

The tutorial level(s?) are also forced upon the player upon starting a new campaign.  They also draw it out quite a lot.  "I must get to the dungeon lord, the manual says something about WASD keys" and then you walk down a really long corridor, one about four times longer than it needed to be, populated by all kinds of things (which the game doesn't even touch on until later) before it gets to the next part, casting spells.

I also skipped a bunch of in-game hint windows simply because they described things I'd already done.  Like ages and ages after.  You also can't pause to read them.  God forbid you should be allowed to pause the game to read the tutorial messages.

Also, the voice acting sucks, so I started skipping those as well.

[Detrevni|inverteD]

I think it's an alright game sans the absolutely retarded Hero AI. If that's sorted out, I would probably buy it. But not for the price it is at now unless they do some serious patching.

The best approach is to not think of it as a Dungeon Keeper successor, because that is an unwarranted title and will only lead to complete and utter disappointment.

[Draco18s]

I think it's an alright game sans the absolutely retarded Hero AI. If that's sorted out, I would probably buy it.

Ugh.  Watching them ooh and ahh over tacky decorations has to be the lamest thing ever.

The best approach is to not think of it as a Dungeon Keeper successor, because that is an unwarranted title and will only lead to complete and utter disappointment.

WELCOME TO WHY I BOUGHT THE GAME.
And why I regret doing so.

Dungeons will be the last, ever, game that I pre-order.  I don't care what anyone says about it, I will not buy a game before I can pirate it to make sure its worth money.

This includes Portal 2, now as well.

Edit:
one last point:
The controls suck.  Move, Attack, Interact, and Rotate Camera all bound to the same mouse button?
I found myself frequently getting a slight camera rotation instead of a move order.  Or a move order instead of an attack (because the heroes are so skinny) or getting a move instead of a "teleport that dead hero to the prisons" because the hitbox on the Interact With Corpse is not, in fact, the entire corpse.  And if you double click, you start, then stop, that particular action.

[Neonivek]

I think the moral the game is trying to get across is that

People who are unhappy or depressed are less of a person and have no soul.

While happy people are the only people who can really claim to be human.

Also dying from anything but dirrect confrontational murder makes you less of a person.