How to build a dungeon in Dungeons?

I'm looking for some advice on the new game Dungeons (the successor to dungeon keeper).

The gameplay differs quite significantly from the old Dungeon Keeper (in a fun way though), however, I'm kind of lost on how to lay out my dungeon most profitably.

I'd like to hear from others, what constellations of placing your rooms and pentagrams works best for you. So far it appears to be a trade-off between letting heroes accumulate lots of soul points and still be able to kill them reliably, but I haven't found a setup I'm satisfied with yet.

I will post my currently preferred dungeon setup as an answer as well, so it can be rated and commented upon separately.

PS: Bonus points, add a comment for any fansites/wiki-sites dedicated to Dungeons. So far, I haven't found zilch on the web, which is kind of strange?

Solution 1:

Here's my current way to build a dungeon:

With the dungeon heart at the center, I keep the incoming ways from the gates separated and leading to the heart in a star-like shape. To go from one gate to the other, heroes have to pass through the dungeon heart, in which I place all of my pentagrams, i.e. once a hero reaches the dungeon heart area, there's a wall of monsters all crying in unison:

Thou shalt not pass.

Then, well outside the pentagram area I build a special room between each gate and the heart. Each gate gets a special room, depending on the most frequent hero type it spits out. Together with this special room I place the largest currently available gold chest (one per gate).

How this works:

• Heroes come in, and walk into the special room unharmed. They build up soul points through the room and the gold chest, before going deeper into the dungeon.
• After leaving the first room, they have to walk through the dungeon heart area.
• In that area they are slaughtered. Quick and deadly.

Advantages:

• You never slaughter a hero without soul points.
• Due to the free access to the special rooms, you can get kills with massive numbers of soul points.
• When a champion enters your dungeon and goes for your dungeon heart, you do not even have to intervene personally. The large amount of pentagrams before the dungeon heart even kills multiple champions without any problems whatsoever.
• Heroes do not escape your dungeon. As they are either masochists or sadists, they will venture into the dungeon heart area to satisfy their urges, which will invariably lead to their death.

Disadvantages:

• Huge costs, as you have to set up a lot of the special rooms.
• Heroes die at the heart extremely quickly. Unfortunately, sometimes they do so quickly, that they can't even swallow their healthpotions (=you lose possible soul points)
• While you are not yet rich, you can usually only afford one type of special room per gate. This means you lose out on soul points for about half of the heroes entering your dungeon.

Solution 2:

As you probably figured out, most heroes like to battle as well, not just get loot - so I usually make lots of small rooms connected by a small corridor with all sorts of loot (armors, weapons, books and gold).

In some rooms, put some not-very-strong monsters so the heroes won't die, but will still have fun. At the end, make a big room with lots of strong monsters to kill the heroes (it's best to keep them as far away from your heart as possible). You don't necessarily have to put it close to the gates, because you can use prestige gimmicks to lure them to the area at the beginning.

You can't afford all of this immediately, so be patient and slowly develop your dungeon.