The top most room of the eighth floor was easy. Just a copy paste of the monsters on the first floor. That also made figuring out the total points spent a breeze as well, after all, he did spend the full 1,000 points there. That settled, Doyle moved his attention to the first room.
A big room full of glass platforms and bridges. Yeah, that’s going to be goats and kobolds. Sure, he has all these other monsters, but that is a little hard on anything else. Assassin vines? Nowhere to hide. Myconids, cattle, or axebeaks? They would fall off the platforms too easily, especially the axebeaks.
With that in mind, Doyle decides that kobolds can be on the ground with goats on the platforms. Though he does decide a pair of kobolds should be on the glass platform with the stairs up. Then he pauses and ups the number to six along with three groups of six on the ground.
As for the goats? He decides to go for the baseline variety. Mostly because wood and grass don’t exactly scream glass to him. Doyle shrugs to himself and places four groups of ten. Though with the size of the platforms, they spill out some onto the nearby bridges. Discover more novels at novel⸺fire.net
Doyle gets an overview of the room and nods. That was a decent amount of monsters for the room, now to arm them. The reason for all the kobolds is ranged attacks but they still need a defense. With that in mind, he throws leather gear at all of them along with bows, leather quivers, and twenty wooden arrows each.
Doyle could afford to give the arrows a metal tip, but wanted them to have more of a bludgeoning effect to them so as to push people off the platforms. Besides that, though, he gives two kobolds in each group a shield and a club. Happy with that, Doyle also throws the goats leather helmets and barding, IE system adjusted tunics. Because when he tried it, the tunics on the goats ended up looking just like it, which makes sense as that is kind of what the stuff is. After that, a quick pass makes it so a random piece of the leather gear, the shields, and all the goats’ stuff will be loot.
This brings him to the second room. A room that he didn’t really need to think about. It was for the axebeaks. Especially since he had the fancy 900 point bank breakers. Good thing he has points to throw around now.
On the entrance side of the room, Doyle places four randomly placed regular axebeaks. More because it felt barren than anything else. As for the ceiling? Three groups of four axebeaks, all led by a Windcutter Axebeak. And because of how costly those windcutters are, he decks them out in full leather gear as well.
With the second easiest room finished, Doyle moves onto the third and fourth room. Twin rooms that are inherently connected through unseen portals. The good news is that his dungeon monsters will be able to just ‘get’ the two rooms. However, to take advantage of the room they need a little more cunning and a good bit of speed.
Doyle knows that his kobolds have the cunning, but they aren’t quite there on the speed bit so of course this led to mounts. However, he doesn’t want to just have wolves. If anything, the goats would be a better solution with only a little bit of change to the room. Of course, he also turns a side eye towards the axebeaks. After all, they are his fastest creatures when it comes to direct charges.
The two rooms however aren’t exactly designed for straight paths so Doyle throws away the idea for them. Though it does turn his thoughts back towards the second room. He doesn’t want to make all the axebeaks into mounts, but he does have all those fancy windbreakers.
This prompts a quick backtrack as Doyle can’t help but put a kobold rider in full leather gear onto each of the windcutters. Then to arm them he gives the trio a set of three spears tipped in bronze. Two to throw and the third for melee combat, which has a chance to drop as loot.
Backtrack finished, Doyle takes some time to try and figure out if goat riders or wolf riders would be a better choice. While there are ways to use the third and fourth room’s gates to hide, the areas are a decent size. This means that any attempts to hide will be obvious.
On one hand, Doyle figures the pack tactics that wolves would bring could be useful. They already know how to hunt together, after all. The problem is that this isn’t really prime wolf territory. It isn’t a forested room and the grass isn’t high enough to hide them.
On the other hand, the goats are just so much sturdier and stronger. Sure, the wolves will get a little bit of a buff from being commanded by the kobolds, but the goats have per level boosts. They might not be adding up like the kobolds, but five extra points into physical stats every level is going to do work.
In fact, the normal wolves have fallen far behind everything else by this floor. So much so that Doyle makes a note to himself that he needs to figure out a path for them. Sure, the elemental variants provide a method of upping their power, but that can only do so much. Even the assassin vines are advancing more than them.
Of course, this little revelation instantly swings Doyle’s opinion on what to use as his kobolds’ mounts in the twin rooms. Though since the room is supposed to be more of a maze, he decides to go with a stealthier approach. Sure, a nice cavalry charge isn’t ever out of place, but he has grassen goats for his kobolds to play with.
This, of course, necessities a slight physical change to the rooms, but it was a small one. Doyle just spread a decent number of goat sized bumps all over. After all, it doesn’t matter how well the goat might blend in if it is the only thing sticking out of a completely flat bit of ground. Then, after some exhaustive calculations (IE picking a random number that felt right), Doyle placed down a single group of twelve grassen goats and twelve kobolds.
The kobolds get another round of leather gear as well as bronze tipped short spears. Sadly, the goats can’t exactly be armored if they are going to take advantage of their stealth skill. Still, they are more than sturdy enough to handle things so after making a random piece of the kobolds leather gear loot, Doyle moves on.
This leads on to the fifth room. A room that Doyle takes a single look at and is tempted to just move on. The room itself is fine. Sure, the crazy spatial nonsense going on really stretched some of his abilities, but that was the plan. The problem is that even with his monsters knowing how to deal with it all, none of them can physically deal with it except assassin vines.
Now, those vines aren’t the worst of monsters. The problem is that this room has literally nowhere to hide. Even though the terrain is quite nasty with all kinds of sharp drop offs and jagged cliff faces, the delvers will first see it as just a flat stone room. The assassin vines would stick out like the sorest of thumbs.
The delvers might have a hard time killing the thing, but they wouldn’t ever be surprised by it. Doyle, however doesn’t want to leave the room completely empty. It contains one of the wildest terrains of the whole dungeon and his current best bet at triggering the elemental animals bonus. As it is, there isn’t a volcano floor that can help add a fire themed template on them. Though the question is whether “space” would count as an element.
That path sounded like it had a bunch of potential but it had already disappointed him to some degree. Most of that coming from expecting more from a five point path than reasonable. He had missed it at the time, but the path didn’t give him an elemental variant of the assassin vine. Sure, it could be argued that it already had the element of wood like how he got that wooden goat, but it didn’t feel fair. Though some part of him did question if it was because the path specifically mentioned animals. Still, Doyle held out hope and placed five normal goats.
Doyle shakes himself and shifts to six, seven, and eight. A trio of easy rooms, though not quite as straightforward as the second room. Believe it or not, the vine room was going to be filled with assassin vines and their elders. The only problem is that the longer he looks at the room, the more he realizes that it needs to wait.
While the monsters for the room are easy, he isn’t quite able to figure out how many to throw at it. Doyle sighs and puts the three rooms aside until the end. This, however, leads to rooms nine through twelve. Another power block, except this time he really could just call them a single room. There are no gates between them as they have been put together in one physical space.
The biggest catch of the four rooms though has to be the lack of gravity. To play with that, Doyle knows he has to have at least one elder assassin vine. While they aren’t all that fast, the lack of gravity and all the handholds will allow it to fly around the room. Especially with the two triple length vines they sport.
With the elder in place and acting as a more active predator than usual, Doyle decides to take one of the active monsters and turn it into more of a trap. That monster is the myconid sprouts. They won’t be able to move on their own, but when placed throughout the room, they create wonderful mines.
Not only do they work as mines, but they are the epitome of point efficiency for the role. Sure, the sprouts won’t be able to do much damage. Damage doesn’t matter though as the spores are what matter, after all, Null G is a lot less fun when paralyzed. This means Doyle can get away with the smallest sprouts.
At the cost of 50 per 100 points means each sprout costs half what a goat would. Doyle doubts that the sprouts could ever match the goats in most things, but he managed to find the one. The small size is even a benefit as it makes them harder to spot. Doyle was quite pleased with this and so decided to spread out two groups of them. The biggest shame is that whole group thing. Got to keep them close enough or they become multiple groups.
That just left the kobolds. Because of course the room would have kobolds. There just wasn’t any other monster that could manage the floor. Though it would have been funny to have just a random cow floating in the center of the room, kicking its feet.
How many kobolds you might ask? A group of 40 kobolds, all decked out in full leather gear. Though not just normal leather. Doyle specifically used leather made from ashen cattle so it took on a deep gray color without using any dyes. That all was easy. The tricky part was deciding on what weapons they would use.
Magic was an obvious one. Who cares about the physics of Zero G when throwing fireballs? It would however be a little much to make all of them mages. Ten of them would be enough, with four of them being healers. Another ten get bronze tipped spears so they can do a bit of shish kebabing, ten receive an iron dagger each, and the final ten get to try out unarmed combat.