The Guard Room is a room in Dungeon Keeper 2 and Dungeon Keeper Online.
Description[]
| "The Guard Room is an ideal resource for defending the outer reaches of your dungeon. Creatures placed in the Guard Room are duty-bound to remain there, and seldom leave their posts (unless, of course, they are hungry or in need of paying). As well as managing the Guard Room, they also make patrols around the dungeon to check on any Guard Posts in the vicinity." |
| — Dungeon Keeper 2 Manual |
The Guard Room generates a natural rectangular attention defense area of effect zone around itself, which is a huge area on the map, way larger than the room itself. The size is determined by how far the rooms tiles reach towards North, South, East, and West; not how many tiles the room has. It is excellently visible on both the minimap and the full screen map. Eventually the player learns where to place it to be effective with experimentation. Creatures using it will patrol the room like a conscripted paramilitary police force, making it useful for defending weak spots in your dungeon.
Most guards need breaks in their duty to go eat, sleep, and pick up wages on payday. Thus the Guard Rooms effectiveness naturally fluctuates, which makes it vary in reliability at every moment.
Guard Creatures[]
These are the creatures that default to guard duty in the Guard Room:
Evil Creatures[]
Good Creatures[]
However, any creature can perform guard duty in the Guard Room, except Imps and Dwarves.
Guard Post Connection[]
One unique particular trap connects directly to this room, the Guard Post. Build examples of it on an empty claimed tile of yours for it to start functioning immediately, if you have a Guard Room. They are a circular-effect point-defense extension to your Guard Room system. The Guard Post has two functions:
- Summoning patrols.
- Sending out distress call to multiple guards in the nearest Guard Room if enemies come close to it.
Tips[]
- The room has no appliances at all, neither on the walls nor in the middle of 3x3 room segments, only decorative items appear. So feel free to put as many entrances and exits as you want, thematically it would require many anyway, even forgo using walls altogether (and give up having decoration items) if you want.
- Even a 1x1 room works! Like in the case of a Lair, a Hatchery (though inadvisable), a Treasury (also inadvisable), Wooden Bridge, Stone Bridge, the praying function sidelines of the Temple (even if you may indeed decide to build a pool segment for it somewhere else), and the Hero Lair (the latter not built by the player).
- Pro tip: Rooms that work in 1x1 sizes can become corridor rooms. You can build '1x?'-sized corridor rooms to form patrol route rooms (can become crowded at junctions with creature body collisions), or encircle important locations, or even encircle your entire territory, with the added bonus of dispersing your guards between different Hatchery and Treasury destinations this way to ease the stress on each individual one of them. However, with so many Guard Room tiles, you'll get an absolutely unnecessary amount of Dark Elves which you can keep transforming into Skeletons and Vampires, or sacrifice in the Temple to get Elven Archers with Sight of Evil, or Trolls that can be further sacrificed to get Warlocks.
- It attracts Dark Elves through the Portal, who spend most of their time there. Regardless of the limits of your largest Guard Room, the number of Dark Elves you may get is the total number of Guard Room tiles you currently own.
- The Guard Room is one of the rooms that will cause unhappiness between converted heroes and your normal creatures if the creatures that hate each other are guarding in the same room; especially if they need to share the same Lair - which is the most avoidable approach to utilize by far! If you have both evil creatures and heroes and you want all of them to guard, it is best to build separate Guard Rooms for all of them so they never meet. However, as hunger and payday may tend to bring all sorts of creatures together to the same Hatchery and Treasury respectively, it is best you build separate twin-half dungeons for both types of creatures you own. Like the two hemispheres of a brain. This also involves building two separate Casinos.
- Further creatures that may be worth using as guards:
- Skeleton: Being the most obvious advice, performs guard duty non-stop without such guards needing food, pay, or sleep. However, they are best employed in a Temple to make sure they get access to the only automatic healing they can have.
- Salamander: Has nothing better to do.
- Goblin: Way better use here than in the Temple.
- All scouting explorers you'd want to keep away from danger: Firefly, Rogue, Thief, Fairy.
- Monk: Smart to delegate one of the healers to cover the guards too.
- Creatures specifically not worth using as guards:
- Bile Demon: Too slow to respond to threats, may wander too far and get too far from food or gold, thus getting mood shifts even more frequently.
- Mistress: It is way more economical for them to get tortured just by the sheer fact how beneficial that is.
- The highest mana generating prayers: Dark Angel, Wizard.
- Vampire: Also high mana generation, and may be called to a Guard Post through water which damages it, if the level was water.
- Places worth putting a Guard Room close to:
- Near your Treasury. Guards, and possibly Royal Guards, may see through Rogues' and Thieves' Invisibility, also see through their Cloaking special ability. Effectively stopping them from stealing your gold.
- Securing a Prison. At least either its entrance, or where it meets the direction threats emerge from.
- Defending against an indestructible Hero Gate and what may come through it.
- Around a Gem Seam that you are mining.
- Even possibly covering your own Dungeon Heart if needed.
- Mechanical synergy: A structure frequently paired with Guard Rooms, especially around previous or inherited wall breaches as replacements for missing walls, is the Barricade. It allows projectiles to intentionally fly through it so guards in a Guard Room on one side and hostiles on the other can shoot each other. Sentry, Lightning, and Fear Traps also tend to be present here.
- If your guards may rush out to meet opposing forces through a Secret Door, the interlopers won't even see where the threat is coming from!
- On your dungeon layout's ideal security spectrum of outside corresponding to danger with potentially a Guard Room, and the innermost core housing your Dungeon Heart which you must defend at all cost, doors tend to and should be particularly strong on the theoretical straight line between these two locations, with weaker doors being responsible for branching outward. Magic and Steel Doors tend to be considered strong, Braced Doors kind of an in-between, Wooden Doors the weakest mostly used to regulate access.
- Best if you can make Guard Rooms expect hostiles from the north with avenue orientation! Creatures attacking from the south do more damage.
- If the area you'd want to keep an eye on isn't large by any scale and money is not a factor, you might be better off building a Temple at key locations instead. You can build the same corridor shapes to make intelligent use of limited space, your creatures seem to return to the same Temple you assign them to, the creatures get healed after combat, and you don't need a central pool.
Bugs[]
- In newer versions of the game, regardless of the size of any of your Guard Rooms and what capacity they say they have, they tend not to be enough, creatures wanting to guard will change their minds, and the Mentor will exclaim "Your guard room is too small.". Even with more guard-defaulting creatures than your room capacity, the Guard Room will still mostly by barely populated, underused, and will seemingly shrug off most potential guards that may momentarily intend to serve there. And even with LESS guard-defaulting creatures than your capacity, most guards fail to make use of it. Sadly it just doesn't work, or just barely. Creatures can even ditch guard duty while reporting to danger at a Guard Post!
Trivia[]
- Guards reporting to danger always run. Likewise if a Guard Post has triggered an event of significant interest.
- The Guard Post is so sensitive, it sees even peaceful hostiles, even through walls, even without a route to reach them to perform melee attacks on them by responders within the trap's effectiveness range.
- In short and heated multiplayer matches, having either a Guard Room, Dark Elves, or even a Guard Post, may be unnecessary to the point of being detrimental to attention, effort, funds, and military power.
- This room is similar to the Guard Post from Dungeon Keeper (not to be confused with the Guard Post trap).
- Visible on alpha and beta version screenshots of the game, the Guard Room went through many changes. Initially it was called Guard Post just as in the first game. It also had no floor tile textures at all, simply using a slightly brighter version of the claimed tile and using the iconic wrought iron torches in room corners just as later retail does.
