Difficulty: Hard.
Your Portal max: 18 creatures.
Starting forces: 8 Imps (1st level)
Starting gold: 7500
Possible minions:
Attracted through portal: Dragon, Warlock, Bile Demon, Orc, Dark Mistress, Tentacle, Vampire, Hellhound.
Can be found elsewhere in level: 2 Archers (6th level)
Rooms:
Known at start: Basic Five, Guard Post.
Can be researched: All others except Bridge.
Spells:
Can research: Speed Creature, Call to Arms, Conceal Creature, Cave-In, Heal, Lightning, Protect Creature, Destroy Walls.
Doors/Traps:
Can be manufactured: Iron, Magic Doors: Alarm, Gas, Lightning, Lava, Boulder, Word of Power Traps.
Enemies: Tunnelling Heroes.
It's been a long time since the Heroes mounted a serious assault. But you've gotten them
worried: they rely on there being conflict between rival Keepers underground, so that
Keepers can keep each other from becoming powerful enough to challenge the surface guards.
Here, there is no conflict at all: there are no enemy Keepers. So the Heroes are forced
to stage pre-emptive strikes.
BUT, the trouble is, you only have 18 creatures. Which isn't a lot. There also isn't a
great deal of gold near your Heart. Worse still, if you dig right through the northwestern
gold seam, or towards the gems on the western side of the realm, you'll let in some enemies
at once. In fact if you dig through the southeastern gold, you'll also dig into open tunnels.
There's enough space for you, but gold is going to be at a premium. (You CAN get over to
the large seam of gold on the eastern side of the realm without digging into open space by
digging in a straight line directly east from your Heart, which should help with that
problem at least.) And the trouble is, the enemy drops are on a timer - they come at random
intervals. If you actually succeed in walling them all out by fortifying your walls before
they arrive, you're only storing up trouble for yourself later - when you break through the
walls, they'll ALL come in at once (although if you have built a big enough workshop to make
Boulder traps, this is not necessarily a bad thing.)
Better, instead, to dig a long corridor straight out of your training room, break into open
space, fortify everywhere else, and let the enemy break into it and waltz straight into your
Training Room as and when they arrive. That way your goons can get straight back to training
once the initial invasions are stopped.
And whenever the enemies break in, as soon as you've won the fight, you should break straight
out again and send imps out claiming and looking for Specials. There's an Increase Level in
the southeastern corner (guarded by a couple of Archers), and a Multiply Creatures just
behind the gold to the northwest of your Heart (guarded by half a dozen 3rd-level Dwarves,
if they haven't followed the Tunnellers in.) There's also a Hidden World to the southwest and
a Make Safe in the northwest corner - pity it's guarded by lots of poison gas traps, and you
have to make your dungeon permanently unsafe to get it...
In the Prison to the north of your Heart, near the second Portal, there's a bonus: a couple of
Archers, thrown into prison by the heroes for using kittens as target practice. Release them
and they'll join you at once.
Ideally, you want to fight off the first few waves of heroes, manage to lay your hands on the
Increase Level and Multiply Creatures, and use them in that order
just after the Lord of the Land shows up, before you get to fight him.
You will need a good few Bile Demons in this realm, because the heroes have several Witches
who like using Wind and Poison Gas Bombs, both of which Bile Demons are immune to. And you
need them to be properly trained - indeed, the amount of time you need to spend training will
probably mean you can't really do much with the Workshop. Also, be prepared to use Lightning
spell, if you have the gold - it's good at taking out Witches and Fairies (of which there
are also several.) Orcs, Mistresses, Warlocks and Dragons go without saying. You probably
won't have the gold or the time to build a sufficient Graveyard to either attract or create
Vampires, and you *certainly* don't want to build a Scavenger Room: there's nothing to
scavenge, and Hellhounds are more trouble than they're worth - they tend to run off knocking
down doors that you didn't want knocked down or getting killed, and they don't even stand up
to much of a beating.
If you can, imprison your fallen foes and starve them (there isn't the spare time to torture
them, or the spare gold to heal them during torture.) Don't bother letting the low-level
Skeletons train, use them to staff your Workshop (instead of your bile demons, who are
training) - and throw them straight back into the front line when enemies come, as expendable
minions to weaken the next lot of invaders so that your real army
doesn't have to get too badly hurt in the process of finishing them off (because if your troops
get hurt, they have to rest and therefore can't be spending that time training, so they'll be
weaker when the next lot of slightly more powerful heroes arrive, so they'll get more badly hurt
and have to rest yet more... so, avoid this downward spiral.) Skeletons of level 5 or 6 can be
allowed to stay on and train, but use your level 2 and 3 skeletons as cannon-fodder against level
2 and 3 foes.
(If the minion you transferred from Tulipscent is a high-level Horned Reaper, you'll have a much
easier time of it: he can single-handedly slaughter all the low-level parties that come in, while
your creatures don't ever have to break off their training. It also means that you can dig
straight through the northwestern gold at once and let him take out the Dwarves that guard the
Multiply Creatures. So when a party of higher-level heroes comes calling, the rest of your army
will have had that much more training and be fully fit to support him in the fights he can't
handle alone. Always pay him by hand before pay-day, and put him on research or guard-post duty
to stop him getting angry.)
(Also note: THERE IS NO TRANSFER CREATURE SPECIAL IN THIS REALM. In realms 18, 19 and 20, you're
going to have to do without transferred creatures unless you've gotten the ones from the Secret
Worlds 2, 3 and 4.)