In Dungeon Keeper there are a few rooms that are severely overpowered:
- Prison
- Torture chamber
- Graveyard
- Scavenger room
On Dungeon Keeper maps you now have two choices: Either you don’t give the player access to these rooms, or you allow the player to become far too powerful.
Not giving the player access to these rooms is not very nice, as they are the most fun rooms in the game and are what set the game apart. This is the reason why many levels do give you access to these rooms, which often ruins the level completely.
The problem with these rooms is that each of them allows the player to add the strength of his opponent to be added to his own. Attack the player with a group of heroes once, and the next attack must be at least twice as strong because the player now has the heroes in his army as well, perhaps aided by skeletons, vampires and ghosts. To add insult to injury, once you’ve converted some heroes the scavenger room can be used to claim the rest of the good heroes currently on the map.
I’ve made this topic to discuss how to make the best possible maps with this limitation in mind, but the fact remains is that these rooms are completely unbalanced and that makes it very hard to make fun maps. If Bullfrog only took a few more days to polish the game this could all be averted. How? - By balancing these rooms on a per level basis.
Prison
The biggest culprit is the Prison, with imprisonment on, every hero and creature you face gets captured and can be used to make the player more powerful – skeletons, converts, free training, you can even drop the heroes somewhere to attack a rival keeper.
The solution to balance this would be to have capture success rates for heroes and creatures on every map. Say on some maps you would succeed in capturing 40% of heroes, others just 2% of heroes and yet others the full 100% of heroes, all based on how many heroes the player will face and how much resources the player has.
When the percentages of this are low, the player will be a lot happier when he manages to capture a strong hero, as it will now be a significant addition to the army strength. Basically it is something special instead of something expected.
The prison itself can be nerfed a bit further by also having the ‘PrisonSkeletonChance’ be lowered on a per level basis – so only about 30% of creatures dying from starvation come back as a skeleton.
Torture chamber
With the Prison nerved, the Torture chamber is already less powerful of course, but a bigger change is needed. Right now, if you want to, every hero you have in your prison can become a member of your army, as long as you keep healing with the heal spell or chickens. If you don’t want to, at the very least you can get as many ghosts as you want. Ghost in aren’t that powerful, but they can still add to the creature limit, which limits what a map-maker can do with a level.
Right now a creature will eventually be ‘broken’, when broken he will either be converted or reveal map information, in the latter case torture will continue and when he runs out of health he will die and leave a ghost.
What would have balanced the torture chamber is if during torture the hero or creature could just die suddenly, and not always leave a ghost. For example on map y when a creature is broken it has a 25% chance to be converted, 25% chance to reveal information and 50% chance to die.
Sacrificing enemy creatures in the temple would have been nerfed accordingly.
Graveyard
Simply put, Vampires are very powerful, and every 10 corpses will get you one vampire. On levels with a lot of fighting you could get an awful lot of vampires and become unstoppable.
Again, what could have helped is on a per level basis determine the effectiveness of this room, but what also could have helped is if imps would not have left dead bodies, if vampires would not be attracted by just the number of corpses but also the size of corpses (e.g. a level 10 giant would be more attractive for vampires than a level 1 dwarf) and finally the condition of the corpses: Sometimes corpses explode, burn, freeze or are just beaten to death, if badly damaged bodies are less attractive to vampires this would force the player to be more careful in killing opponents if he wanted to get vampires, and not get as many.
Scavenger room
Don’t need a lot of words to explain this one: If you have a big scavenger room you can get all creatures and heroes of the map of the types you already own. Look at level 19 of the original campaign, you can beat the heroes without ever having to fight them if you just use this room effectively.
Solution would again have been similar: On a per level basis give determine the effectiveness of scavenging – for either creatures or heroes.
In my opinion these changes would have been relatively easy to make, give mapmakers a lot of flexibility, and would much easier allow for more fun levels.
If only Bullfrog would have not rushed out this game out of the door, or at least give it some post-release support, things could have been a lot different.