Alternate Character Interpretation: Hints throughout Dungeon Keeper 2 suggest the Forces of Good aren't quite so goodly, such as Lord Constantine being a coward who terrifies people into surrendering their land claims or Lord Avaricious taxing his people half to death so he can hoard their gold. The officially-licensed strategy guide one-ups this by stating that King Reginald murdered his father for the throne.
The Mentor, primarily when combat happens and he rattles off a ton of announcements.
Mentor: Your minions are under attack! Your minions are falling in battle! Your minions are winning a battle! Your minions are falling in battle! Your minions are winning a battle! Your minions are fall-You need a bigger treasure room.
If you don't have a Lair for your creatures, the Mentor will repeat the line "you need to build a lair for your creatures" about every minute you still don't have one.
The Imps can be this as well, on some maps. They'll claim enemy and neutral territory whenever they can get to it. This can be a problem, especially if you're trying to avoid scripted sequences or butting up against an enemy's territory. Sure, you can lock them in a special room, but then you remember you need a few imps to mine gold and move traps.
Fairies of 4th level and higher can very easily reach this in groups, thanks to the lightning spell. On the plus side, they can't take as much damage.
Samurai can easily reach this status above 6th level, with the lightning spell, and they can see invisible creatures. They also gain freeze at level nine, and they can take as much damage as they can dish out.
A high level mistresses on the enemy side, like the samurai, can learn the lightning spell and speed up. What makes them worse is that they keep their distance. Level ten mistresses can even learn teleport.
While not an enemy, Lightning traps (there seems to be a pattern here...) are notorious for being an effective area-of-denial trap. While most traps are one-shot, Lightning traps can fire multiple times and they do a lot of damage. It's enough to one-shot Imps who will gladly storm into a room with one to claim its territory.
First Installment Wins: Both games are considered almost on par, the first one benefits from a more creepy, cavernoid and less humanoid atmosphere and the second one has several improvements in gameplay and balance alongside better level design. What tips the scales in favor of the original is the KeeperFX Fan Mod, as it keeps the game very alive and fresh three lustrums after its release; the community is fairly active and new scenarios and updates appear on a regular basis, while the sequel doesn't receive much mod love. Fans can agree the mobile game is the worst though.
Convert the Lord Of The Land to your side... then use the special items to carry him to the next level. You would be amazed how easier the next levels get when the initial waves of heroes are face to face with a stage boss that works for you. In the original, 16 of the 20 levels have an item that lets you carry a creature over to the next level and unlike Horny, the lord of the land is much less fickle, and almost as strong.
The "Transfer Creature" special, even without a converted Lord of the Land, potentially lets you start the next level with a level 10 creature which can be used to Zerg Rush enemy keepers before they can pose a threat to you, making several levels that would otherwise be That One Level a breeze.
The Dark Knight in the second game is absurdly strong for his cost and is easy to amass in large numbers. It got to the point that he's limited (if not outright banned) in multiplayer. Compare to the Dark Angel, who is even stronger but is considered balanced due to his ludicrous cost.
You can convert the Avatar over to join your cause, twice even. Have fun wrecking the enemy keeper on the final level with two most Purposely Overpowered in the game. The only downside to this is that due to the nature of the Avatar, you can obviously only do it on the final level of the game, who requires a ton of work and sacrifice to capture in the first place.
In certain maps in the second game, you can actually recruit Stone Knights. These are, by design, completely immune to anything except the Horned Reaper, so it’s very easy to have them mop the floor with your enemy.
In the second game the temple could be used to amass extra mana, and originally every creature generated the same amount of mana. This meant that if you imprisoned enough creatures and starved them into skeletons, you could task them with worshipping in the temple, and they never left to take care of creature needs because they have none. This could be taken to ludicrous levels, up to and including maintaining the Horned Reaper permanently!!! Unsurprisingly, this was changed and temple work became based on the creatures intelligence. Since they lack a brain, temple work was about the worst thing you could do with a skeleton.
To a certain extent, level 3 Imps. The only drawback is it takes around 3-4 minutes to train one if you don't find any "Increase Level" bonuses. But once you have a level 3 Imp, they learn Speed Monster, which vastly improves their productivity. They also cost 960 gold total to train up to that point, which makes it much more economical than simply summoning more Imps as the spell increases in cost depending on how many you have.
Any level where the player has a reasonably easy access to a gem seam. Once you get to it and hunkered down, you can effectively turtle on the map to build up your army before sending them out.
Goddamn Bats: Witches, due to their "wind" spell. It doesn't do damage but it pushes all the creatures far away, messes up your battle plan, puts your fragile warlocks near the enemy heavy hitters, pushes creatures into lava etc. If there're several witches, doing this constantly from several directions, the battle (which aren't too orderly even in the best of times) will turn into a complete mess and drag incessantly. Witches' shrill laugh doesn't help either.
Most Wonderful Sound: "JACKPOT WINNER!" You will drop anything, ANYTHING you are doing, up to and including micromanaging the destruction of a rival Keeper's heart, to zoom over to the Casino and watch your various creatures dance to Disco Inferno.
Overshadowed by Controversy: The 2014 mobile "game" was tainted from the start by EA's decision to reboot the long-dormant, PC-centric franchise as a mobile game, much to the disappointment of fans who had wanted a new Dungeon Keeper game for PC like its predecessors. That said, the insanely long Freemium Timers for basic actions doomed the reboot completely (digging a block of earth could take ten minutes, an action that takes five seconds or less in the PC games), as the "game" is all but unplayable without spending real-life money to shorten the timers. EA forcing less-than-five-star-reviewers to fill in a feedback form instead of posting direct reviewsnote if one actually filled out the form, the site would automatically block those reviews from being posted with a fake error message; as you'd expect, five star reviews got posted instantly did nothing to help the "game"'s reputation—in fact it did the complete opposite—and despite EA's later efforts to reduce the timers, by that point it was too late; players had lost interest. The 2014 instalment ended up being such a spectacular failure that development studio Mythic Entertainmentnote Best known as the developers of Dark Age of Camelotwas closed soon afterwards, and it's pretty much impossible to talk about it without mentioning the blatantly predatory monetization and how it lead to the end of Mythic Entertainment.
Scrappy Mechanic: The fact that Horned Reapers are so unbelieveably high-maintenance that they're outright made Awesome, but Impractical in terms of the amount of effort you need to put in to keep them from killing everything in your dungeon. They're the strongest creatures in the game after a certain point and are even the game's Mascot Mook, but the situations where it's not just easier to invest in Dark Mistresses and Bile Demons rather than create one can probably be counted on one hand, making finally getting the ability to summon a Horned Reaper feel like a serious Power Up Letdown.
Squick: The Dungeon Heart in DK 1 (a glowing chest that contains the dungeon's life force) is replaced by a literal heart in the sequel.
"Woodsong" in the second game. You're on a time limit and have to build up a massive force, rush your way through an enemy encampment and lay siege to an enemy keeper while the whole heroic army bears down on your army (and your now-garrisoned dungeon) from behind. And if one of the heroes deals the killing blow to your enemy, you fail the mission. The 1.7 patch makes the level much easier by quadrupling the time limit. You probably still won't beat it, but the reason is completely different from before.
"Tickle" from the first can be a bit tough to swallow for some, since it's the first level to not only introduce you to the Fairies, but has them at a level where they can cast powerful lightning magic, as well as having them placed so that the nearest gold seam needs to be carefully mined to avoid opening a path directly into them before you're ready.
A somewhat easy level trick to this is to bum-rush the gold seam in the middle and start digging along the edge to be able to claim territory and fortify the walls so the enemy keeper can't dig out. Then if you creep along to the western gold seam with the two gem seams, this will effectively stall the enemy keeper's development.
"Hearth" is the first defense type level. While you do get a decent dungeon and minions to start off with, you don't have much time to prepare (the first wave comes after around a minute and a half) and you have to defend four different spots. And as time goes on, more and more powerful enemies start spawning until the Lord of the Land appears.
"Blaise End" is widely regarded as the hardest level in the first game, you have to deal with a huge fortress filled with a terrifying amount of heroes and even more that wander around. The worst part is your initial resources are severely limited, forcing you to attack the wandering heroes pretty early just to get money resulting a long grueling level of almost non-stop fighting and micromanaging your imps so they don’t alert stronger heroes.
The following level "Mistle" is also a total nightmare, for the simple but crippling reason you don’t get a training room. You have to steal one from a nearby fortress, forcing you to rely one low leveled monsters until you can get it. The level does become more a manageable when you realize what the level wants you to do; you get a large amount of Mistresses, Bile Demons, and Trolls, allowing you to make an army of Horned Reapers which are strong even at a low level. Though of course this means you need to look after up to five or six easily angered monsters, forcing you to constantly monitor them so they don’t destroy your dungeon. Also, hoping to convert enemies? The makes this harder too by denying you the healing spell, if you want to torture enemies to your side you will need to slowly feed them chickens so they regain their health normally. All this combined makes Mistle a ridiculously tedious and stressful level.
