Universal Dungeon Maker : Dark Lord (by GameCoaster)

Game is too hard on the default level in my opinion. Without cheating it is very frustrating trying to get to day 100. I've never been further than 80 something.

 

Good. Do you have a decent strategy that you are using recently?

 

Who do you play? Try Elizabeth. She has good viability early on because of her bite(vampire) skill. On the other hand, Lilith is weak in the beginning, but it gets better later.

 

Got past day 100 with Rebecca. I had 3 of the trap damage boosters (amplify) running, with ice and boulder in the first two rows. This is a weird strategy; the bolder traps get tripple damage on the slowed monsters (thx ice traps), and with the 3 damage boosting facilities, they do OK damage to the normal monsters. I then had two of the giant battle rooms on either side, and two groups of monsters in the middle. Worked out out, BUT without the 3 amplify facilities the traps wouldn't do enough damage to fuss with. Rock trap levels up pretty quickly but ice trap does not. So it was very random that I was able to set this up, and if you have facility succession there are surely better ways to play.

I feel like without facility succession the specialty traps are not necessarily worth the time and cost.

 

Checking in. I got my Floria up to lv.340 on difficulty 10 and then got curbstomped by the angels there. Unlocked a ton of dark stones, which got me all 4 monster successions and 1 facility succession! But getting totally -- and i mean totally -- whomped by lv.340 got me discouraged for a while.

my strategy that got me up to lv.340: Warhorn and two shock towers in the center lanes near the entrance, ice arrows in the entrance corners, hatcheries along the side, vulnerability-inducing battle rooms leading up to the Dark Lord. I had 5 special monsters, including Death Knight at the entrance, Arachne as tank near the end.

Floria mostly casts seedshots, alternating heals (seedshot x5 --> heal) in tougher levels.

Now I'm back trying another Floria build, this time spamming warhorn rooms at the entrance (Three so far...!) My biggest jump is the boss on lv.120 where all the characters get lv.10 haze. If I can crack that, then it's just a matter of keeping my monster lvls ahead of the curve. Hopefully it's enough to kill the lv.340 hoard. =D

 

Just unlocked Emma!

 

Cool! You really seem to play this game well. I usually play with Marielle, but I will refer to your strategy when playing Floria next time. Thanks!

 

Huh. I was actually coming here concerned the game was too easy. I always end up getting bored around level 120 and just letting the monsters win. Then I only get 20 stones. Does collecting them become any faster eventually? Difficulty at 6 currently and sometimes I don't even get any stones.

 

After posing this question elsewhere, I think someone has very kindly modelled 1,000,000 heroes, each taking up to 100 steps.

I think it’s been done correctly - ie, all enter in square 1, and exit if they touch square 16 (column 6 middle). Backtracking / 180 degree turns not allowed.

Central squares are 1, 4, 7, 10, 13, 16. The others are top and bottoms in their relevant columns (so 2 & 3 are C1, 5 & 6 are C 2...). 2, 3, 17 and 18 are the corners.

Long story short - the central squares in columns 1 and 2 are nearly identical. Corners are poor, for any measure of relative footfall. Footfall diminishes as heroes progress.

This is only really relevant for traps tho, and even then it’s complicated to work out how to apply it - particularly when using traps whose damage stacks.

 

Which is why my Warhorn always goes on 1 or 4 (Central) to trigger it.
Interesting about the corners.....I may try just a central trap policy from now on and put hatcheries and battle rooms etc on the sides/corners.
I do also like to place a Gigantify room centrally just outside my dark lords room. Saved my bacon many a time especially with a tank in situ.

 

Here is my synopsis after 8 days of play (interrupted by real life unfortunately)
Lilith is quite squishy and getting her to level 10 took some time.
My first goal was to get her to day 100 and then move on, just to get the abyss stones.
Next I went to Tania who packed more of a punch and getting her to day 100 took half the time. She is still my favourite.
By now I’d got lucky with abyss upgrades and had two monster carry overs and one facility.
I then met Floria. Wow. So far I’ve got her to day 240 which is the furthest of all my dark lords and it was pretty simple to achieve. No traps, just pack your dungeon full of mobs, get them levelled as much as possible, spam heal, rinse repeat.
That one run alone freed up about 30 abyss stones.
Now I’m experimenting with Emma after seeing some of @nyanpass gameplay videos. She seems a much more trap orrientated lord.

I’m up to difficulty 6 but if I’m starting with a new dark lord I will drop that back down to common difficulty just to make it easier to get that new lord to day 100 to free up the abyss stones. The next goal is to then get the dark lords levelled up to release their different skills.

At no stage have I ever been bored.....just one more run, one more trap, one more monster, one more relic......abyss stones - what will the next draw reveal??
it’s a drug!!
Anyway, I digress.

 

I have yet to get a warhorn. I got distracted by this as a statistical exercise and, tbh, have been bodging at it in my spare time instead of actually playing. Even once I'd realised the broad / inevitable structure.

Wrt corners - yeah. Tbf, this is problematic data, insofar as it doesn't really account for the fact that battle rooms and traps do very different things. It definitely suggests that if you want to get people debuffed, hammer the first few rooms; but that's obvs what people had realised, anyhows. It also doesn't account for intentional sequences. (I think the next-most-interesting analysis would be what proportion of each room's inhabitants come from which of each of the surrounding rooms. I may ask if it's possible to pull this off in the same format as above; though I think it should be possible to work it out.)

Errr. What else.

Sides shouldn't be ignored, as such. They're mostly either about on a par with the next column's central square, or (after column 3) better / more visited than it. I think this means that they become more useless at a faster rate than central squares.

The absolute worst squares are the top, side four. I'm unsure what implications this has for design, other than I'll definitely keep on prioritising these for non-damaging facilities!

 

Been past 100 days with both starter heroes now...easy once I realized a few things I was doing wrong. Both are level 7. I guess I'll move up a difficulty.

Is there any point to continuing past day 100? Seems like it might be better just to reset and see if you can get something good in abyss shop. Facility succession would be a huge help.

 

@ArtNJ yes there is incentive to go higher, you get more rewards for breaking day 200 & 300 and some other things like not using the merchant for 100 days.
As you can imagine it gets progressiv harder as the days go by so most reset at 100 to build up their abyss unlocks which will then help you to get further and further and survive longer.

 

Definitely a warhorn is good. And the effective placement of the warhorn is in front of the entrance.

O=warhorn
XXX
XOO <- Entrance
XXX