Prestige being the DLord's Only Important Stat.
Oh, and soul energy upgrades your dungeon heart too.
Eh, Prestige and the bonus tends to eclipse the subtleties of the game. You're uber at 400% bonus to your stats, so it's hard to see the difference in choosing melee or magic. When you're not whoring up prestige (or just having it given to you when you contain pre-bulit prestige objects) the game is honestly more interesting. There's actual tactics involved in the Diablo part of it (not that deep of tactics, but there are some.)
When your prestige is jacked up, you're basically a tank and everything is equally awesome.
Put all the libraries, etc. up front. No gold, no monsters. WAAAAYYY in the back of your dungeon drop piles of gold and every single pentagram you have.
Kinda, sorta, not really. Depends on what kind of heroes are coming out of there. Mages and Fighters juice up on equipment and knowledge quickly. Satisfaction from monsters seemed tied directly to the level difference. Depending on a few factors, there are a few optimal ways to build. You can screw with quality level too (I usually stick tiny tier 1 rooms near entrance and tiny piles of treasure, just to get them warmed up but not satisfied.)
At this point, you've played about a thumbnail full of the game. You've got your opinion, but I wouldn't go telling people how to play it. You barely took the time to find out yourself before you flew into a rage.
I got to the slime escort level, and I am really not seeing the frustration.
Have you hit Laughington on Milk Lake yet? Just wait.
This is the first time Dungeons has made me physically angry. I've felt more pressured than I would have liked at times, felt a little underwhelmed by the delivery at other times...but this is the first level that's made me seriously furious.
It's touted as a vacation for you, a break from the revenge thing. That's your first warning.
Your first mini-quest is Minos asking you to smash 30 prestige objects for his pleasure. Gosh, that's a lot of fun to get stat and skill points you do want.
Then two enemy dungeon lords break on the scene, complete with huge dungeons, on either side of you. Oh and your dungeon is massive and basically filled to the gills with rooms and gold. So immeidately you know that, without serious work, the flow of heroes is totally out of your control.
And then the frustration starts. Both dungeon lords starting picking off your pentagrams, at the same time, at either end. They're leashed enough that they don't just try and convert all your pentagrams...but enough that they get your attention and will eventually work their way deep into your dungeon. Remember that zone of control thing? Yeah. Try doing anything meaningful in hostile territory.
Then they start throwing waves of scorpions and dog things at you, again from either side. Cue champions. (Which aren't all that bad, but it's more reason you have to constantly go back to your DH.)
So you start converting pentagrams. You quickly realize that you just have to focus on one dungeon lord, because they reclaim their own pentagrams lickity split. So you run into hostile territory to claim a pentagram....
And the enemy dungeon lord cleans your clock, even with really high prestige.
So you have to lure him out of his area, into yours, kill him, run back into his area, kill his monsters, claim a pentagram, and then go back to your dungeon to deal with something. Right about the time you're done, he's respawning, so you head back into his area to stop him from reclaiming the pentagram you just took...
And this is where the real frustration, for even fans, begins. Because the area of control is getting completely bent out of shape by all the constant pentagram stealing, eventually it just breaks, and stops displaying. (Placing a brand new pentagram will fix this.) So you're blind as far as where you can attack, and where you're just fucked. (The sounds still work when you enter/exit.)
And if you're unlucky enough to have to fight an enemy DL directly over a pentagram where the line of control is in his favor....prepare for real frustration. I had a pentagram I owned, with full spawns, two summoned minion guards, I was standing in my area of control and he was right on the line between mine and his, standing on my pentgram.
He killed everything, including me, because I think something freaked out on the HP recalcs for crossing in and out of your territory. He started healing for 1/3 to 1/4 of his life every 15 seconds, in addition to the passive heal he gets from his territory. It was just fucking totally broke.
Think the unfun ends there? Guess again. Both dungeon lords have guardians on their dungeon hearts. And when you kill said guardians, they will respawn them in about 20 to 30 seconds (which is 4x faster than you get to resummon your's.) It takes about 1 minute to kill the dungeon heart with everything you have.
Which basically means you get to stand there, letting the other DL and his guardian wail on you, while you burn through healing scrolls and try to just get the damn thing down.
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Like I said, I'm a fan and I like the game, but this level was complete fucking bullshit heaped on a platter. Everything I like about dungeons was shoved to the sidelines for this orgy of annoying fucking tit-for-tat game play with AI dungeon lords. I had 12 heroes escape during this level. Even knowing that's not important in the grand scheme of ANYTHING, it still pissed me off. Because if I had to choose, the dungeon management or this really obnoxious pissing contest with the AI, I would have chosen dungeon management in a heart beat.
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Topic: Dungeons 2011 - Now with 50% less thread disappointment (Read 37007 times)