Difficulty: Very easy.
Portal max: 14 creatures.
Starting forces: 4 Imps (1st level).
Starting gold: 2500.
Possible minions: Fly, Beetle, Demon Spawn.
Rooms: Treasure Room, Lair, Hatchery, Training Room.
Spells: Create Imp, Possess Creature.
Doors/Traps: None.
Enemies: 1st-level Heroes (Tunnellers, Dwarves, Thieves, Knight)
Well, now you know how to create the most basic dungeon. Build a Treasure
Room, Lair and Hatchery, connect your realm to a Portal which you’ve claimed,
and mine out gold to pay your creatures with (and to pay for the construction of
the rooms.)
(Note: An important fact that you will be grateful to know for later is
that the best construction for a room is square or rectangular, with all the
walls fortified and doors placed in the gaps: you can’t place any doors in this
realm, but you can do all the rest of this. Also, your rooms must be big enough
to hold the creatures that work in them. 3x3 is the absolute minimum for a room
to be of any use whatsoever, 4x4 is better, and in later realms you won’t want
anything smaller than 5x5. With a portal maximum of 14, a 4x4 lair is probably
your best option in this realm, or possibly 4x5 just to make sure. You will
always be told if your creatures do not have a big enough lair..)
But how do you get creatures that are tougher than 1st-level Flies and
Beetles? Well, the most obvious answer is to train them into higher-level Flies
and Beetles. So, once you’ve made your basic dungeon, you will get the ability
to build a Training Room: build it and drop your creatures in it. (You will be
told if you are trying to drop too many creatures into the room: if it isn’t big
enough, build a bigger one.)
And you’re in luck: because Training Rooms attract not only Flies and
Beetles, but also a new type of creature - the Demon Spawn, a creature that
really enjoys training up to higher levels. Once it gets to level 4, it can fire
missiles at its enemies, and once it gets to level 7 it can heal itself. Better
still, a 10th-level Demon Spawn, if you continue training it, will become a
mighty Dragon! However, training costs money (the numbers rising out of each
creature's head every few seconds are the cost of training that creature for
those few seconds) and there isn’t enough money in this realm to train the
Spawns into Dragons yet.
(Note: If you dig towards the southeastern gold deposit, you will find a
secret vault containing a well-stocked Treasure Room, which you may claim for
your own. Do this early enough, and you will have time to fortify the walls to
the south - the direction from which the heroes come.)
Eventually, the heroes will start to tunnel towards your realm. Once again,
you can fortify your walls to keep them out until you want to let them in, but
if you have 3rd-level creatures or better, it's not really necessary. They will
come in waves: first a Tunneller Dwarf and a Thief, then a harder-hitting
Mountain Dwarf (the two kinds of dwarf are usually simply referred to as
"Tunnellers" and "Dwarves", then a larger party with three creatures, and
finally the Lord of the Land - another Knight who is weaker than most of his
kind, though stronger than the Earl of Eversmile. Defeat all the heroes and you
will be victorious, and free to despoil the surface lands once again...