Dungeon Defense

Important Basic Information

To properly defend your dungeon, you need to know which rooms cannot be raided:

Non-Raidable Rooms:

 Den
 Hallway
 Library
 Proving Ground
 Arena
 Spellcasting Chamber
 Temple
 Prison
 Portal Room
 Guard Post
 Dragon's Lair
 Crypt
 Coven

Raidable Rooms:

 Vault - Uncollected gold only. Gold displayed in the "gold" section of your resources is safe.
 Farm - Uncollected food can be raided.
 Storage Room - Everything in your storage room not covered by Safe Storage can be raided.
 Elements Confine - Everything not in Safe Storage can be raided. This is a priority target because Safe Storage is more expensive and
 the items contained within are often far more valuable than those in the Storage Room.
 Tavern - Food not in Safe Storage can be raided.
 Mine - Uncollected resources can be raided from any mine tile that does not contain furniture, regardless of its location related to active
 nodes and stacks of uncollected resources.

List of Furniture that will provide Safe Storage:

 Potion Rack
 Test Tube Rack
 Ward of Containment
 Ward of Isolation
 Ward of Banishment
 Equipment Rack
 Smith's Storage
 Equipment Vault
 Locked Cellar
 Spacious Hideaway
 Smuggles's Strongbox
 Dark Nook
 Trinket Rack
 Trinket Closet

Safe Storage IS NOT per resource! Safe Storage protects up to the listed number in TOTAL resources stored in that room. If you have 3000 Safe Storage in your Elements Confine, and you have 2500 Primordial Earth and 1250 Primordial Ice stored, you can lose up to 750 Primordial Elements (3750 - 3000), and you will lose them in a roughly 2:1 ratio between P. Earth and P. Ice. Resources that are stored in comparatively minute amounts are normally safe (10 diamonds are safe in a room that contains 1,000 other resources if it has any Safe Storage at all), but anything within the 5% or so range in comparison to the other stored items is fair game for raiding.

Reprisal Dungeon Defense

There are two common methods for dealing with reprisals, and one method that is rarely used but can still be effective.

The first method is to simply let the settlement raid your dungeon, but ensuring that everything is collected and in safe storage. Because Settlement Raids are often announced hours before they arrive, you should have ample time to ship materials to your other dungeons. If you do this, it is good to develop the habit of occasionally or frequently moving excess raw materials to your other dungeons. It also helps immensely to constantly be crafting in your Raiding Dungeon to burn through materials, especially if you raid multiple T2 settlements as the resource gain can quickly outpace your ability to transfer materials to other dungeons. It's a good idea to become familiar with this practice early, as this is the best way to handle player raids of unknown strength as well.

The second method, which is often used by players who wish to gain enough more resources from raiding and by players who have excess resources that they are unable to sell, is to maze and trap your Raiding Dungeon and then set your creatures to hide. This is often done with rows of firetraps and possibly freeze traps, normally multiple traps wide and in a long line of at least 5 tiles. Many dungeons using this method will have over 30 traps at the beginning of their dungeon. There is no need to adjust room makeup with this method because any enemy who makes it over the traps and makes it back through is going to loot his objective regardless of where that room is. There are variations of this which involve creature use as well - these usually have the Den near the end of the lane of traps so melee creatures will engage, and will design their rooms such that Dark Elves and potentially Warlocks spawn within range of the entrance. As the reprisals get stronger, it is common to see one or more Dark Priestesses added to the dungeon just to keep the defenders alive.

The third, and rarely-used, method relies on creatures instead of traps and/or a maze. The rooms are arranged such that one or more "tanking" units (Ogres, Balrogs) will always spawn within awareness range. Those units will then engage, drawing the majority of enemy attacks. The remaining creatures should spawn within the appropriate range, allowing ranged units in particular to do damage without recieving much in return. This defense relies heavily on units such as Ogres and Dark Priestesses, and requires that most or all of your creatures be at a very high level. This means that the upkeep costs for the Raiding Dungeon will be astronomical compared to the trap-laden Raiding Dungeons, and there will be long periods of downtime between raids because the creatures must be in the Dungeon and at full health when the Reprisals arrive. Still, for Overlords who are wealthy and like a challenge, this is a viable option.

PvP Dungeon Defense

There are three different types of PvP "assaults" that can be launched against your dungeon. You can identify which one you're facing by comparing the ETA of the attack to the distance between you and the attacking player. The types outlined below are in order of speed, as Thieves are faster than all other creature types and so are the easiest to identify. If you're not sure which kind of assault you're facing, see how long it would take a Warlock to raid the dungeon of origin (without actually starting the raid). If that time is exactly 5x as long as the incoming attack, you are facing a Poke. If that time is closer to 4.5x to 1.0x as long as the time of the incoming attack, you are going to be hit by a Raid. If that time is actually shorter than the time of the incoming attack, chances are you're going to be Pillaged.

The Poke

NB: Changes to the combat AI made on 2nd Feb 2012 significantly change the way dungeons are scouted, Thieves should now be spent on the new dedicated 'spy' missions, research is ongoing but much of the below needs rewriting.

The first type of PvP assault is a scouting run, or a "Poke," which is normally done with a low-level Thief. If the Thief escapes the dungeon alive, this will determine: the makeup of your dungeon, the resources currently being mined, whether there are any storage rooms that lack enough safe storage, what creature types and how many you have in your dungeon (via counting beds), etc. The player will also know what rooms are the easiest to raid, and what traps and furniture are in your dungeon. This information greatly benefits a player who intends to raid your dungeon, and so it is in your best interest to deny this information by killing the thief.

The main problem with that solution, however, is when the targeted dungeon is not your main dungeon: some secondary dungeons lack effective traps, and all secondary dungeons have multiple entrances. The lack of traps, however, is easily resolved from the very early game. Assuming the attacking thief is low in level, a series of 5-6 Spike Traps can be placed at the hallway leading into all of your raidable rooms. The thief will not be able to disarm more than two at most, and will normally die to the traps alone, although it never hurts to have your Warlocks defend your dungeon as well if you know you're facing a poke.

This leaves the second issue, however. This issue is fairly easy to resolve, but it's best to wait until you have finished at least the +25 tiles research to do so. The idea is to connect all of the entrances together by connecting them to the hallway from one entrance and then removing the previously-necessary hallway tiles to those other entrances. This leaves only one path of attack into your base, which you can then trap and maze to your heart's content (and tile limitations, of course). The connecting tiles are normally made into tiles that serve some sort of function, but you must exercise caution here. No matter what tile you use, you are opening yourself to being damaged in some way. Various advantages and disadvantages will be discussed in the sections for the two other attacks. For the purposes of the Poke, combining entrances is standard, and the outside tiles should be unlootable (Den, hallway or Library tiles). Do not make the outside tiles mine tiles if you care about the Poke because crafty player will always target the Mine with their poke, as it'll always be in an expansion dungeon and many players plop mining tiles on hallways and other approach avenues, making it far more likely for the thief to escape alive.

The Raid

Most Raids are not performed blindly, unless the intention is to crush your creatures and/or gain info in situations where Thieves are unlikely to survive. Sending a large, powerful army into an dungeon with an unknown layout and creature makeup is a recipe for disaster, and many players will do their best to avoid this. Note that a player may start a raid and then time a Poke to arrive a minute or so before the raid does, minimizing your ability to surprise the player by changing room makeups and dropping traps. This is not often done, however, which gives you several options to deal with a raid.

As with reprisals, the most common way to deal with a raid is to have your creatures hide and leave nothing available to loot. This has the disadvantage of giving your opponent a look at your entire dungeon layout, but you can mitigate this by shifting tiles and picking up all of the beds of your Den until the raid arrives and leaves (immediately put the beds back down afterwards, of course). If you choose this option for dealing with a Raid, be sure to save the replay so that you know what your dungeon looked like when that Raid arrived. Try to maintain this layout if that player continues to raid, and ensure that the outside lootable rooms in particular have nothing so all the raids prove fruitless. Most players are likely to stop raiding after a short period of time if they gain nothing from the action.

If the raids continue, or if you want to deny your opponent information, you will most likely want to risk the creatures in your Dungeon to ensure that the Raiding force takes as much damage as possible.

• The first step is to pick up all the traps in your Raiding Dungeon and ship them to the Dungeon that's under assault; the traps will beat the raiding force in almost every case, with the possible exceptions being raids from within the same mountain and Dark Elf raids from directly-adjacent mountains. Because this dungeon is not a raiding dungeon, there is no fear of strong reprisals and so you can be confident that all of your creatures won't get wiped out by a Settlement Attack. This allows you to keep them on defense while you cannot keep tabs on the game.

• The second step is to move all of your library tiles into the inner part of your dungeon unless you're relying solely on traps. Assuming you're using your Warlocks, replace those Library tiles with collection tiles but fill every one of those tiles with furniture. Normally a raiding force that encounters a lootable tile of the type it was directed to attack, it will perform the raiding animation and take any resources from that room type that are uncollected or are not in safe storage. However, collection tiles that contain furniture cannot contain stacks of resources, and thus the game tags them as unraidable. This does not apply to Storage Rooms and Element Confines, as stacks of resources do not build up in these rooms - this tactic works only with Farms and Mines. If you don't have enough Mine furniture to get this to work, and your opponent knows how your dungeon is supposed to look, you can probably safely use Farm tiles unless your Farm looked like the only easy target (and this assumes that it existed at all). Food is almost always available for 1 gold per unit, and is widely considered to be the resource with the least value, so the only reason a player would raid your Farm is to see your dungeon layout. To be absolutely sure, however, the Farm and Mine tiles that fill the connection wings should all contain furniture.

• (Continued) If you do not have that much furniture - which is normal if you have not played for a long enough time - you can either just use Farm tiles, or just sell all the tiles and just use Hallways instead until the raid is over. The downside to these is that they're both terrible solutions if you won't be able to check on the game for a period of half a day or more, as those solutions severely diminish your research and/or mining rates. In this case, you may have to rely on just traps and set your Warlocks to hide and use Library tiles instead.

• The third step is to remove everything valuable and not in safe storage by shipping and crafting, and shifting room types, sizes, and placement to maximize your chances of winning. If your opponent saw that your Mine tiles were exposed when he last raided you, place your Library adjacent to you Mine tiles at the end of a long winding maze designed so that your Warlocks will be able to constantly fire at the enemy creatures. If he saw that you have several Primordial Nodes and a large Elements Confine, refrain from collecting resources in your mine and instead get rid of as many Elemental Confine resources and add as much Safe Storage furniture as you can get from your other dungeons, and then sell every mine tile containing a resource. Once again, even if your intention is to kill the raid, the last thing you want to do is both fail and reward your opponent with loot from your dungeon!

• The fourth step is to contact that player. Let him know that you're an active player and ask him to stop attacking you. You can mention that if you see a raid coming, you'll take every possible measure to ensure that he can't loot anything. Do not make threats, do not counterattack, and do not escalate unless the player has made it clear that he doesn't care. Far more players are just raiding the dungeons of players that seem to have stopped playing, and it is far faster to use a large raiding force to loot everything in a room over the span of 2-4 hours than to constantly sit at the computer and task thieves every 1.5 hours or so. These players will almost always stop raiding if you let them know that you're still playing, as there are plenty of other potential targets that actually are inactive and very few players will want to risk the possibility that you'll eventually wipe out their force with traps or a surprise defense with overleveled creatures.

• If you do choose to retaliate, you can find some information for this under Active Player Raiding in the Raiding article on this wiki.

The Pillage

This is the most dangerous attack you can face. Players who attempt to pillage your dungeon are very serious about causing damage, as the game rules are that you must pillage from a secondary dungeon. A pillage-capable army costs a large amount of resources to maintain and the word "slow" does not begin to describe their speed on the Overworld map. Because of this, and because a large line clearly reveals the dungeon of origin, even more tiles have to be dedicated to traps because a targeted player could easily raid the entire dungeon with Thieves and Dark Elves and have them back in time to defend after a x2 or even a x3 raid, or counter-pillage from a similar dungeon or through a friend that has that sort of dungeon. An attempted pillage is not to be taken lightly.

While Vampires are capable of pillaging a dungeon, they have low initial pillage values and very low pillage gains per level compared to Ogres, Balrogs and Arch Fiends (and surly Dragons if they ever add them). Those creatures are among the slowest in the game, and they are rarely sent out without one or more Dark Priestesses to keep them alive, Thieves to disarm traps, and Dark Elves or Warlocks to counter a range-attack-focused dungeon. Ogres must be leveled a bit in order to be effective but Arch Fiends start with a rather high pillage rate. This often requires a huge resource investment, and so the supporting creatures are normally similarly-leveled in order to keep everything alive. This sort of force can easily wipe out even a well-prepared player.

Keep in mind that pillaging creatures will take no resources, but will remove random tiles in a room instead. If this enough damage is done to the room to remove all the tiles it can downgrade the room. An attack from a player's non-APC dungeon cannot be a pillaging force even though it may contain creatures with high pillage values, so if that is the case refer to "The Raid." Pillaging creatures can remove/destroy furniture that's placed on the tiles they target, so it's imperative that you do some things ahead of time.

• Firstly, you should pick up all the expensive furniture in the room types the player will likely target. The most important rooms to protect are the advanced rooms such as your coven and portal rooms and your crafting rooms, as they cost the most to replace and take the longest. If your storage rooms are attacked and you have resources that exceed your storage capacity, those resources will remain until used or shipped away, so don't worry about losing all of your storage. As always, empty the storage of any crafted resources and minimize the resources used to feed your army while leaving nothing to loot. It is absolutely critical for you to pick up your beds right before the pillage arrives because you creatures will go on strike quickly if they have no bed. You can rebuild destroyed room tiles and drop the beds safely after the attack passes.

• The second thing you need to do is fill your dungeon with tiles corresponding to the rooms the opponent is likely to attack. The goal is to minimize the chance that they will downgrade the room. By adding more tiles, you also decrease the chance that any unmoved furniture is destroyed. The cost of the tiles often pale in comparison to the resources required to level any room beyond Level 3.

• The third thing to do is either defend as best you can, counter attack, or just close your eyes and pray. If the attack is as powerful as you feared, and the player continues to pillage your dungeon(s), you may want to request help from other players (This is why Alliances are important) who may be able to match the pillaging player in army strength. A powerful pillager is a force to be feared, but if his attacks are indiscriminate and he begins to grief other players, it's possible that a large number of players work together to eliminate his force by coordinating raids and pillages to all land within a very short time period. The player is either forced to defend and lose his entire army, or will lose practically his entire dungeon to pillages and raids. If you have well leveled, fast moving units you may want to counter attack the dungeon that has sent the pillage. A Dark Elf moves over twice the speed of an Ogre so once the incoming attack has hit the 50% traveled mark they can't recall their army. This is still a gamble as they may have units defending the dungeon. It is best to send a thief as a spy if you catch the attack early enough and then decide.