"A basic fighting creature of average ability. Orcs are good for guarding key strategic points in your Dungeon, and for bulking out your army."
— Dungeon Keeper Manual
These purple-skinned creatures primarily spend their time in the Training Room. They are attracted to a dungeon by the former in tandem with a Barracks. Orcs do well in both rooms, taking a relatively short time to train and naturally assuming leadership in a group.
Orcs can also help significantly in the Workshop; although they don't manufacture of their own accord, Orcs are ace manufacturers, and once augmented by their Speed spell (learnt at level 5), sped-up Orcs are second only to sped-up Trolls. But those green-skinned cousins specialise fully in manufacturing, to the practical point of cowering from everything else, while Orcs are all-rounder fighters, bearing a buckler and a mallet, and are keen to battle.
Ingame animation of the Orc
If an Orc has finished training or cannot train for whatever reason, they often choose to take up position at Guard Posts. This can be a useful early-warning system if they end up in the right positions.
The Orc was added towards the end of development, when it was realised another mêlée unit was needed. Mark Healey believed he could easily add one; this was achieved by modifying the Troll to add hair and change its skin hue to purple.
On the Dungeon Keeper Goodies Disc, there is an animation of a Troll wielding a mallet and a buckler, just like the Orc does. Evidently, this is what became the Orc. It also suggests that the Troll was originally a fighter, and that the Orc, apart from his appearance, is merely the original incarnation of the Troll.
Evidence of the Orc's eleventh-hour, impromptu implementation exists in GUI2-0-1.dat: the Orc's icons are well separate from those of the other creatures, which are all grouped together. The Orc's icons are the 496th and 497th images there, whereas the others come at indices 177-234 (indices are counted from 0). In between them are various GUI elements, including most of the Keeper spells and Creature spells.
Ironically, the mallet the Orc carries would be better suited to manufacturing than the Troll's mace, whose primary, if not sole use is as a weapon rather than a tool. This is supported by the fact that the Workshop's icon is a mallet. The Orc's mallet was originally wielded by Trolls before the 1996 revamp, when they were more combat-oriented; it is arguable that the Orc is essentially a revival of an earlier incarnation of the Troll, given this and the fact that it is a modified Troll.
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