Dungeon of the Endless

[antisocialmunky]

I finally beat easy...

6 hours 30 minutes. I can do a write up of my winning strategy if anyone cares to know.

[Sullla]

Please do! I'm afraid that I haven't gotten even close on the harder of the two difficulties yet. There's something that I'm missing.

[antisocialmunky]

I'll preface this by saying that my play through on easy was not optimized. I'll let your guys do that bit because you guys are much better at that than me. I was just testing out an idea and it happened to work out pretty well. It barely worked and nearly lost on level 9 when one of my characters died. I only made it because I was able to pick up another one on the next level (Sara Numas) I look forward to you guys poking holes in my plan and giving me suggestions. Okay, here I go!

This game is extremely complex due to the fusion of mechanics from so many genres, so I think it is good to boiled down this game into 4 separate parts: Economy, Party Selection, Tower Defense, and Maze Optimization. I'll cover the first 2 in detail this post today. I haven't played that much with all the different turrets and I'm not even sure about how best to optimize the maze yet so I'll defer coverage on that until later.

ECONOMY

Resource Economy

Feel free to skip down to the next part if you already have the normal economy down. The "Resource Economy" is pretty simple. If you play civ or any other strategy game, you'll already have a pretty good head start. There are some tricky parts which I'll also cover towards the end of this section. Economy consists of the 'Endless FIDS' system of food, industry, dust, and science. In this game, food translates into stronger characters, industry lets you build things, and science lets you improve what you build and they carry over form level to level. This triumverate of resources form the standard economy.

Dust in this game controls the difficulty of the map and only apply per floor. You can best think of dust as part of the level layout for all intents and purposes since the difficulty for a specific map can swing wildly with level dust content and accessibility (dust only counts if you can get to it). You can also lose dust if your crystal is attacked. I don't know if it is a good design for a rogue like to make the level even harder if the player is already having a hard time. It would be a lot nicer if they just gave the crystal constant HP that is reset each level. As it stands right now this just seems like unecessary game ending unfun. Anyways, I digress.

Industry. So ignoring dust, we have food, industry, and science. Industry is by far the most important resource. This is counter intuitive because you need more food thoughout the game, like an order of magnitude more. However, industry is what grants you food (and science) production in the first place. Industry is what gives you extra dps so your guys take less damage and build up food reserves so you can run a net positive for most of the game. Industry is a force multiplier (with the right towers) to allow your characters to handle multiple fronts. Late game, you can save several hundred food with a one time investment of under a 100 industry worth of repairable turrets. Industry is also interesting in how costs for large modules increase by 5 for every one you build and resets every new level because it creates some interesting interactions:

1) Between levels 1-8, you will want to keep your carry over industry <60 at the end of level, ideally <40 so you can quickly throw up industry and food modules at the beginning of the next level until you run out of lit up rooms. During this part of the game, you'll want to dump excess rest into food modules and random science modules when you need some extra buildings. Around level 9, even though you start with only enough dust for a single room out of the elevator, it is still advisible that you build an industry module as one of your first 2 because you still need an enough industry for throwing up/replacing turrets.
2) For levels 1 and 2, it is not worth building more than 5 modules. Levels 3-8 however are big enough and there is enough dust that you can outrun the enemy progression curve for a little bit by spamming as many food modules as possible (while saving enough food, see #1). The number of modules usually maxes around 6-8 depending on how generous the game is.
3) If you run out of room or modules get too expensive, it is best to go into food conservation mode by throwing up turrets so you don't force feed/emergency heal as often.
4) Losing modules, especially industry ones early is crippling. The game needs to allow you better target prioritizaiton for the big rock monsters that 5 shot modules.
5) You'll almost never build more than 3 industry modules. The only time you need 3 industry modules is when the level is large and dust content is much greater than average. Even then it is rare to do build than 2 industry modules in a row at the start of a level.
6) Sometimes you'll have start a map with a large excess of industry due to having just finished a poor map layout. In this case I usually build food modules until my industry is about the cost for the next 2 modules. I then make my next 2 module industry ones.

Food is the next most important. You need food and lots of it. You need it to improve your characters and keep them alive by force feeding them. It is pretty straight forward. You will need to build up a stock pile past level 8 of around 200 (don't upgrade characters unless you have more than 300 food at this point). This is because dust shortages -> less food -> more split up characters -> each character needs to tank more damage -> squishy econ characters will need to be force fed to retain their operating bonus.

Science is a difficult one. You can probably ignore building more than 1 science module on most levels usually (unless you are going for a KIP gun late game strategy). It is really more of a luxury than anything else especially if you have a character with the +2 science (a HUGE 100% increase over the base rate). You'll need science mostly for improving industry, and food modules and getting 2-3 highly upgraded minor modules. Don't be afraid to reroll the science machines either because you don't want to be paying for useless stuff (random unupgraded turrets). One interesting aspect of how science works, is YOU PAY SCIENCE BASED ON THE LEVEL UPGRADED TO, NOT THE DIFFERENCE in tech levels. This means, you can often safely skip a minor module upgrade in favor of a major module upgrade and get something like a upgrade Level 1 -> Level 3. This also means, that sometimes you'll roll a Level 1 -> Level 3 food or industry module as your first research option (saves 40 science or 20 turns of walking around plus the 66% increase in FID production) which can put you far ahead of the early curve. Also since there are science shops, you can always save inventory to buy a bunch of science.

Now this is all very basic stuff, if you want to see it in action go watch Sullla's 'Too Easy' VOD where he explains his thought process.

Wit-conomy

The resource economy will only get you so far. Once you hit level 9 and you can only light up one room, the normal economy is finished. You will feel like you've hit a brick wall as your resources dwindle and chracters get overwhelmed. What you have to be ready to replace it with is what I'm calling the 'Wit-conomy.' The Wit-conomy revolves around a single operator character with buffing items to take their wit >20. Most items give >3 Wits mid-late game so the high wit characters will be around 18 on their own. You can boost this further by gaining copies of the book that grants 'Knowledge Is Good' (+2 Wit on all characters on floor) on other characters. Bonus resources on an operated major module I've heard works on a look up table but it appears to be ceiling(Wit/2) so you'll get around ~9 bonus resources in the late game. This is roughly equivalent to 2 extra partially upgraded modules worth of resources starting with the 2nd door after the first module is built. Often times in the last 3 levels, more than half of the resource you operate with using this character will be from the character itself.

Not only is the Wit-conomy required to go into the late game, it is quite useful in the early game for getting bonus resources quickly and adjusting your resource output for more industry in the case of lots of dust to expand without having to waste resources on an extra industry module. What all this means in practice is that you will have to take one of the economic characters (see Party Selection) unless you are feeling really lucky or willing to miss out on the of free resources.

On my Easy run, I actually tried with 2 of these cahracters but one died since I didn't have a third combat character to soak damage, poor guy went from full health to dead like a hardcore Diablo 2 character. :\

PARTY SELECTION

The Nature of Late Game Easy Mode

I initially omitted this section but the more I wrote the more I felt that I needed to provide some context. Late game easy mode is really difficult to say the least. You start with only enough dust to light up a single room in a level where you aren't guaranteed to even pick a room with a large module slot. When you eventually do find some more dust, you are so starved for large module slots that you can power that you'll invariable end up expanding in multiple directions adjacent to unpowered rooms. This leads to you having to split up characters to hold down turret farms covering different approaches to the elevator as well as spare or fast characters occupying empty rooms to reduce spawn rate. All this leads to a very challenging scenario where mobility, dps, and durability are extremely important. Any character with a deficiency in more than one category or average in all stats is going to have a hard time. I really don't think you'd be able to beat easy mode with a team containing particularly weak characters (prove me wrong!).

Suffice to say, you can't just pick up every hero you come across and run them around in a blob. Now, onto my solution to these problems.

My Party Setup

I like to think of Dungeon of the Endless characters as falling into one of 3 categories:

1) Combat - Characters with no support abilities whose main job is to output dps.
2) Economic - Characters that have high Wit and Operator who are designed to sit at a resource module while the other 3 run around.
3) Support - Basically everyone else with balanced distribution of stats.

*) The Crap/Variant Tier - I guess this is also a classification. There are quite a few characters that don't seem at all playable on 'Easy'. Maybe I haven't played them enough or judged them poorly but a lot of characters are so min-maxy or situational that they are unplayable

I also consider characters with speed above 30 and the 'Scamper' passive as runners for hauling the crystal around.

The setup that I like the most which I discovered through trial and error is 1 combat character, 1 economic character, 1 runner character of support or combat type, and 1 support character. I find that this setup gives me the most flexibility and ability to hold down the fort so to speak in the late game where you have multiple fronts and characters have to operate solo.

The combat character's job is to sit on a front in a convenient room with lots of turrets and clear his front as quickly as possible so he or she and then rotate to assist the other fronts. The economic character holds one of the fronts in a convenient place filled with turrets which it can hopefully repair/support. The runner either sits in an empty unpowered room and joins a front only after all the waves spawn or opens doors. The support spends most of its time rotating between fronts, holding a minor front where his or her main job is to stall until the combat character can assist, and opening doors.

I almost always pick the economic character and the support first because it seems to be the strongest/most flexible early game. I can usually get to Level 9 with this set up without any issue. The main problem is that late game waves on Level 9 and above tend to overrun one of multiple fronts though sheer numbers leading to the crystal being attacked. This type of defeat seems like a sign that you picked a good party, played well, and could have gone farther given better RNG results or positioning. Contrast this with the the sign of suboptimal play which is resource starvation like not having enough food and industry or floating too much industry. This means you mismanaged your economy somewhere and lost.

Anyways, my winning party was Sara, Gork, The Warden, and Lady Joleri which due to ....uh... reasons is not one you can actually win with most of the time. I initially picked Lady Joleri and The Professor but The Professor died because I picked up Gork and then The Warden and could not reinforce The Professor's turret farm on the other side of the map fast enough. The cause of this death was because I was trying to baby sit 2 economic characters and just got stretched too thin. The morale of the story is that your characters need to be able to support each other appropriately. They can't just be good on their own if they drag the team down so you have to choose members based on how they will complement the existing team.

Tier Lists

Here is my personal ranked list of characters. I'm leaving off the ones I haven't gotten a good feel for off the list for now. I'm also ranking these characters as they are around level 10 which is the level I most commonly most commonly reach the late game with.

Also, it seems like there are 2 tiers of weapons. Machine Guns and Swords tend to be stronger and give you more bang for the buck than Spears and Pistols so keep that in mind when looking at characters and evaluating how you are going to use them.

Combat
1) Gork - He's the biggest DPS hose in the game. In addition, his aggro skill is extremely powerful late game to prevent the large golem-like minions and the fast minions who bee-line the crystal from bypassing the turret room he's in.
2) Elise Ness - She is basically a turtly version of Gork. She is quite good if you can get a hipster scarf on her so she can just tank damage with her turtle mode. She can function as a tanky support as well. The only problem is she doesn't really have enough offensive power by herself so something like arm chair general is quite useful on her. The fact that she's an operator is also quite useful especially with multiple 'Knowledge is Good' buffs.
3) Sara - She's extremely useful late game. Late game is largely about managing multiple fronts and Sara the one of the best characters for doing that due to here speed. She can run across the map to clean up straggers or turn the tide in a hard fight by showing up, popping her turtle mode, and spreading out the HP damage between characters. She's also the best runner in the game so there's that too.
4) Troe - He's like a hybrid of Gork and Sara. He moves around the map quickly and does a lot of damage. His AOE is quite good in the late game when a room is being flooded by dozens of guys. My only complaint is he's quite fragile since he doesn't have any survivability buffs so be prepared to force feed him. He's quite a good runner too.

Economic
1/2) The Professor - He's basically preorder DLC so you might have missed out on him. He has the highest wit in the game, the turret Overclock ability, and Armchair General - Armchair General being one of the best buffs in the game as it is global and a total of 120 free attack (roughly an extra character for 9 seconds. Late game, he's probably the best economic character in the game with his max 17 + 4 from Knowledge Is Good (usually 16 + 2 at end of game) Wit. There's no better character for setting up a Wit-conomy and holding down a turret front. The only thing he's missing is repair, but it is not really a big deal if you can partner him with Sara or Hikensha. Also to note is his defense and health are quite low so that can become problematic when he's getting rushed by hordes of minions.
1/2) The Warden - Tied for first. While the professor is stronger late game, the Warden is stronger early game and more flexible overall with his max 15 (usually 14 at end of game) wits. He's not just free resources. His dust ability can make dungeons much easier in the early game, leading to snow balling into the late game. I find that his extra dust ability falls off late game when he becomes more useful for the Wit-conomy and Armchair General. He also has above average armor and health values so he has quite a lot going for him.
3) Rakya - Rakya has max 13 Wits (12 usually at end of game), she trades off the economy for combat. She has a machine gun and so has high DPS at the cost of speed. This combined with her squishiness makes it hard to pull her out in an emergency if she is about to be overrun. Also, because she has a lower wit and tends to take too much damage, it is harder to run a food surplus with her. She is quite inflexible but quite effective if the rest of your team is built to accomodate her weaknesses (like Lady Joleri's Hold The Line) and you have enough food to force feed her with.
4) OPbot - In my opinion the worst economic character. Despite having a max of 14 Wits, he is designed with a bunch of utility skills that have no synergy with sitting in one spot and getting free resources. I think he's one of the weaker characters in the entire game despite having slightly better health stats then Rakya.

Support
1) Lady Joleri - I think this is the best character in the game over all. She has good stats, abilities, and covers so many utility roles (runner, tanky support, combat). Her Dust Thrist gives her passive offensive stacks that don't dissipate very quickly. Her active abilities give her great stalling power. It is hard to come up with a reason to not pick her every time.
2) Hikensha - Where as Lady Joleri is skewed towards tankiness and mobility, Hikensha is skewed towards DPS and utility. With an Occam or other high end sword and her Sacrifice ability, she can more than double her damage output. Unfortunately she requires some care to use and can run you a food deficit over the course of the game.

I actually haven't had much luck getting other supports into the late game, that being said I still have a few characters to unlock and try out and I'll update accordingly

[Sullla]

Thanks for such a nice writeup, antisocialmunky. I've been playing this game quite a bit this week, and finally emerged with my first victory on "Easy" difficulty. (I still maintain it's foolish to name the harder of your two difficulties "Easy", constant confusion for anyone describing the game.) Here's a couple of comments.

* I've been playing using the Infirmary Pod the last few games instead of the default Escape Pod. This setup gives your heroes significantly more health (about 2.5 times their normal HP) in exchange for no auto-heals after each turn of combat and no items or abilities with health regen. This probably makes the game easier, but only because it strips away a lot of the ridiculous and cheap insta-kills that kept eliminating my heroes on the default settings. I enjoy the Infirmary Pod because it turns health into another resource to manage, and the gameplay is less focused on twitch reflex healing in the midst of combat. I will probably run most or all of my future games on this setting. It's more interesting and should arguably be the default setting.

* I generally agree with antisocialmunky about which heroes are strong, with one character missing from that list: Max. This guy is probably the best hero in the entire game, since he has a series of incredibly useful utility skills. Max gives you +2 science per turn, every turn, for the whole game. Keep in mind that the default starting science rate on the harder difficulty is only 2 science/turn. Max doubles this. I keep taking Max every game and never build a single Science module, ever. And I still have enough to research everything I want. No one else can do that. Add in Max's awesome Pilfer skill (+1 dust every time dust is found starting at level 5, then going up to +2 dust at level 10 and +3 dust at level 15), plus the ability to Operate, plus the ability to Repair, and you're set for utility skills for the whole game. So what if Max has mediocre combat skills? Heroes who output DPS are easy to find, as antisocialmunky stated. Max is the one indispensable character for me.

* This run where I won didn't even have particularly great luck. I nearly died on the first floor thanks to the exit spawning about as far away as possible, and having only two heroes at the start of course. Nasty escape race, just barely made it. I had two heroes who used guns (Max and Deena) and no guns turned up the entire run, either in drops or from the merchant. Their DPS was weak from start to finish. There were few good options available for research choices, especially in terms of Food modules. I got Food II pretty early, but then no Food III or Food IV until finally the former showed up as an option on Floor 9. Yeesh! I lost out on hundreds and hundreds of food over the course of this run there. I bought two items that added to Wit from the merchant using dust, only to have both of them disappear from my inventory on the next floor. They just vanished completely! Argh, buggy game. Then on the final floor, I had the worst luck possible finding the exit:



The exit was in the 30th and last room opened. Not by my choice, trust me! I would have gotten out of there sooner if possible. I actually opened every door in the dungeon except for about six of them on Floor 11, when I realized that I was running a net negative on resources and it would be better to head straight for the last floor while I still had nice surpluses of food and industry. The last two floors are absolutely brutal in this game. You'd better know exactly what you're doing in terms of where to build turrets and how to manage monster spawns.



Here's the end of the run stats. I hate that the game doesn't save this information after you see the endgame splash screen. The Hall of Fame screen is quite disappointing:



All that it does is list the score, heroes used, and difficulty level. The cool stuff about game length, monsters killed, doors opened, etc. gets dropped and never appears again. This game's ending definitely feels anticlimactic to me. You work so hard to get to the last floor, then see one splash screen, and it's over. Indie game and all, I know, but still...

* There are some neat things going on in Dungeon of the Endless. The gameplay is unique in mixing so many genres together, I've never seen a game that works quite like this one. And it is hard, very very hard. That said, a lot of the challenge comes from cheap game mechanics, not good strategy game design. Take these guys:



I hate these assholes. They completely ignore your heroes to attack modules instead. Modules are basically your economy in Dungeon of the Endless, you absolutely need them to increase your industry and food income. These crystal guys zero in on your modules and kill them MUCH MUCH too easily. Your modules die in something like five hits from these enemies. That's all well and good in the early game, but I've seen spawns with as many of eight of these jerks at once, mixed in with dozens and dozens of other enemies. Remember you don't directly control your heroes in combat in DOTE, so you can't focus fire the crystal guys or anything like that. They waltz in and destroy your stuff without you being able to do a thing about it. When you're playing on the harder difficulty and resources are extremely scarce, this whole gameplay mechanic is cruelly unfair to the player.

* And these monsters:



They blow themselves up to deal massive suicide damage. Remember, you can't target specific enemies in this game. I've lost multiple runs where a hero was full health, looking perfectly fine, then a suicide monster blows up and one-shots them. By the way, they also damage modules too, so one suicide monster can easily do 100 industry worth of damage by taking out a module and all of your defensive turrets at once. The only solution is to micro your characters out of the room when you see them coming, which is again tedious and difficult to do when your characters are fighting in three or four different parts of the map at once. Needlessly frustrating for no reason. This is why I like the Infirmary Pod, since one suicide minion can't end an entire run with an absurd one-shot kill of a hero. It's easier, but only because it cuts out the ridiculous crap of the default settings.

Oh, and the game doesn't let you click on monsters in-game, and gives you no information at all about what they do. Another little "fun" touch.

* A word on turrets: they are absolutely essentially to success in the later floors. Antisocialmunky is correct: your heroes can't do much of anything at the end of the game. It's all about setting up a turret defense and letting them do most of the work. I strongly recommend using the machine gun turrets (I think they're called the "Smoking" ones?), which fire every 0.1 seconds and output tons of damage. I had them everywhere on the last few floors, upgraded to the tier 4 version, and they were killing everything in sight. I've heard that the Tear Gas debuffer (cuts monster defense) is also excellent, although I haven't used that yet personally. Make sure to get something though. You can't fight for long without turret support.

* The other big strategy aspect comes from knowing which rooms to power to control monster spawns. This is enormously important, and something that I'm still learning. You want to set it up so that monsters spawn and then walk through rooms with turret defenses, which is easier said than done. It's also much better to have 4 spawns in 4 different parts of the map, rather than 4 spawns all next to one another creating one huge mob. Monsters move at different speeds, so retreating to spread them out and kite the slow monsters can work too. I will have to try and stream some more to demonstrate some of these tactics in action. It's better seen visually than written out in text.

* This game really needs a difficulty level between the current two. The lower one truly is "too easy" once you learn the mechanics, while the harder one is brutally difficult in all sorts of cheap and unfair ways. Some kind of middle ground would be nice.

Whew. That should be enough for now. Happy that I have at least one legit victory done.

[antisocialmunky]

Wow, nicely done. Any plans for a write up?

I actually did the Infirmary Pod level today to level 12 as well. However I only had 3 rooms worth of dusts and eventually got ran over pretty hard . I've never tried the Smoking Gun turret. From the sound of it it seems quite good. I'm actually mixed on the tear gas now that I've played around with the slowing. I also got to try out Max in that game. He is quite nice to have but I think the Warden is overall superior since his skill isn't as based on map layout luck and he has the super high wit for guarding a minor front in the rear. I mean pretty much got hosed by luck in that game - 12 rounds only to be dust screwed even with max. If I had The Warden, then I could have gotten a few dust out of the hordes of enemies level 12 spawns.

Also, I've come to the conclusion that Gork''s ability and hipster scarf significantly help with the last level, mainly against the enemies you are talking about. When I play that level with out, I actually like having the enemies all spawn from a single direction. I usually have tons of powered and empty rooms filled with cheap Prisoner Prods to do a defense in depth strategy.

[haphazard1]

Finally got a win on Too Easy , after dying on level 12 twice. The two failed runs just could not find any dust and eventually got overwhelmed. The successful run was the exact opposite -- tons of dust, plus a dust merchant that I unloaded a ton of items on for more dust. There was even a science merchant, that I used my excess science to clear out his inventory so I could sell it to the dust merchant. I opened 32 doors on level 12 (was going for the open all doors achievement), and was able to power (or occupy) all but one room at the end.

I agree with Sullla that Max is a great character. The bonus science is very valuable over time, and pilfer also is extremely helpful. His operator skill pretty much goes to waste, though, because he needs to be your door opener for pilfer to pay off. Still well worth having, IMHO. Hikensha (probably spelled that wrong, the lab experiment blade wielder) also has the passive that provides science. I picked her up as my fourth, and with both her and Max I had oodles of science without ever needing any science generators.

antisocialmunky, the Smoking Gun turret can be very useful. It has huge damage output, but the overheating mechanic means it drops out of extended fights. Although if a fight is really long it will complete cooldown and start firing again. If you have a configuration which separates out the enemy waves by speed, like a couple powered but undefended rooms before your defended rooms, the Smoking Gun is great for smashing each wave with the gaps letting it cool down.

Off to try the infirmary pod next, and maybe unlock some more heroes. Assuming I can survive, that is.

[antisocialmunky]

Anyone still playing this?

[Wyatan]

Actually, haven't played it yet.

I tend to be monogame, and currently I'm having a Shogun II relapse. DotE may be next... or Defense Grid II... or The Banner Saga... or...

[Sullla]

Hey, good timing. I was just working on a short writeup / review for Dungeon of the Endless on my website. I don't think that there's enough depth to this game to be worth playing long term, but I did get my money's worth to date. Here you go: http://www.garath.net/Sullla/dote.html

[Westbrook]

Great write up Sullla. Enjoyed your DotE streams. Big fan of the idea to have a final boss floor on level 9.

I really hope strategy game developers hire you as a consultant!! Civ6 needs you.