Management / Sim Dungeons 4 - fourth time's the charm

[Adeptus]

Played Dungeons 3 (was free on Epic) and it was quite fun. I played only skirmishes, not campaign, so I am not rating the story and writing.

 

[Dr1f7]

ok mr. kalypso but i still ain't paying $50 for your game hmu when it's in some dollar bundle

I played it for "free" on game pass

Been playing this lately and, you're right it is fun. I've played all of them to some extent and I think this is my favorite (although I did really enjoy the first one but that one might as well be a different series entirely).. it's really just improvement on everything from dungeons 2/3. I'm even finding myself enjoying the goofy writing in this one, I think they kept the humor while kinda toning down the pop-culture references (idk maybe i just haven't gotten to 'hawk tuah' level yet)

I still think that the demon portal spell is overpowered and shouldn't exist. It's just lame that the best way to defend my dungeon is to instantly drop my whole army on top of any invaders. There would be a much more interesting dynamic between the overworld and dungeon layer if there wasn't a "port my whole army anywhere" button

 

[Dr1f7]

played a little more and yeah i'm just annoyed by the balance with this game and general design decisions

units are too strong combined with the fact that you can just pick up your entire army and drop them on top of invaders in your dungeon totally invalidates any consideration for base design. Why go through the trouble of creating an intricate dungeon to defend against invaders when I can just put shit wherever and, when i am eventually invaded, just "lol pick up my whole army" and drop them on top of invaders

traps are extremely underpowered compared to units. In order to build a somewhat functional maze of traps to deal with invaders, it cost about 13k gold PLUS 6 little snots required to constantly work in the workshop. Then it took probably a half hour to actually build the thing. And even then some stronger enemy units would still make it through the trap maze, requiring me to recall my army and just drop it on top of them (which killed the invader in seconds)

for 13k gold I could have instead completely upgraded my army and rolled over everything AND still had thousands of gold left over to rebuy entire armies if needed! this doesn't even take into account the opportunity cost of having a third of my little snots constantly working in the workshop, when they could have instead been mining even more gold.

finally, many of the campaign missions seem to have unlocks tied to completing the mission quickly, which again pushes the player to just build a big army real quick and roll over everything (since designing dungeons and placing traps etc takes so much time).

So I'm kind of forced to ask, what is the point of giving the player so many options when there's evidently one viable option that blows everything else out?

This is close to being a good game but they really need to:

• remove the ability to pick up your whole army and drop them anywhere in the dungeon
• remove overpowered relocation spells such as demon portal and group teleport

also would be nice if they would remove the campaign tasks from taking up the entire right side of the damn screen and just put them in a journal or something that you could check via a button, i'd like to see the game not walls of text

this is the kind of game that's frustrating because it's close to being really great but a few stupid design decisions ruin everything

 

[Dr1f7]

another recommendation is that instead of making a bunch of bum-rush missions where you're racing against a 15 minute clock, make missions that are meant to last 2-3 hours so you can really focus on designing dungeons/exploring the underground part of the map
idk wtf the devs were thinking with some of their design decisions here