How do you control your army?

[Tijn]

#8226

I’ve been playing this game for hours now. Building dungeons, attracting monsters, mining gold, all that stuff is fine. But something I still don’t quite understand after all this time is: how do you actually control your army?

So far I’ve been dropping monsters into battle, and that’s fine. But how do you effectively take over an enemy base? When there are no enemies near, my monsters just walk back home. How do I make them defend an enemy room while a minion is taking it over?

I’m trying to use Call for Arms as a waypoint and that sort of half works, I suppose. Is that what you’re supposed to do?

There are also guard posts and barracks which I don’t know how to use. When I drop a monster on them, they tend to just walk out?

This is really the most frustrating part of the game for me. Otherwise it seems fine, but most of the time I find myself just hoping my monster will walk into the direction I want them to.

[fastwinstondoom]

#8228

This is definitely the most clunky part of DK1 but yes, Call to Arms is your best tool. You can power it up by holding down the mouse button when you drop it. It costs more but has a larger radius.

You can use the barracks to group up creatures, drop them in there, use the possession spell on one of them and the rest are supposed to follow you as you move about in first person. Dubious usefulness against the AI since they will just drop all their minions on you once you’re on their land.

Guard rooms do work, but they have to be a certain size and creatures will take breaks to sleep / eat / collect pay. Rarely use them but must be placed in a choke point to have any effect imo.

[dreadnaut]

#8234

If I remember correctly, if you place a guard post near water / lava, it creates a step tall enough that creatures cannot climb up from the river. Great to block unwanted entrances to your dungeon.

[Pix]

#8236

If a minion is taking over a room, you should be able to drop an army right on top of it. The same goes for attack. I’d let my imps advance and if they are getting near enough to be attacked, drop creatures on the last occupied square and use call to arms if needed. You can beat the game like this. I never made use of guard rooms or barracks.

I finished Dungeon Keeper 2 last night. The call to arms spell in that will actually get all your creatures to head to it from wherever they are. It’s a lot easier to control creatures.

[tinybird]

#8270

the call to arms (held down) is pretty much the way to go, but also – you can drop an imp at the edge of your claimed land, and they’ll start wandering around claiming whatever land they can get their hands on.

if there’s a route from your dungeon to the enemy dungeon, your imps will eventually get there – if they get attacked they’ll just run away, at which point you can dump all your creatures at the nearest piece of claimed land and they’ll start brawling with the enemy. if you beat them you can dump your imps here again and keep claiming land and rooms on the way to the dungeon heart, or again, just use the call to arms spell.

[TigerQuoll]

#8284

I feel like Bullfrog was trying to have their cake and eat it as far as tactics go.
They could have gone the traditional RTS route and made it possible to directly order/micromanage all of your minions, and give you the power to recruit whichever units you see fit.
OR they could have leaned further into making your horde an undifferentiated, uncontrollable mass, and tweaked the mechanics to suit that.

But they seem to have gone with an uncomfortable middle ground. I won’t say it doesn’t work – you do get used to it, but I felt a bit like I was fighting the mechanics rather than working with them a lot of the time.