Baby Dungeon Help

[MorganM]

Are there any guides? I can't seem to find any.

What buildings are on the "must have" list and which ones are optional or not needed?

Do you ever stop leveling up your heart? If so what's a good place to stop?

Is there some room, upgrade, heart level, trophy score, etc that triggers being matched more often with high level keepers?
I'd like to stick with the majority of my matches being similar level. However even at level 3 heart I'm already getting dunked on by people with scores in the thousands, immortals, and spells... even though I don't even have reinforced walls, a dark library, or an immortal.

Other guidance or advice?

[Starduka]

In my opinion, with the current scoring scheme, there's no point in stopping developing a dungeon and keep it as a baby.
What you can do is develop it in a way that makes it easier for you to attack others and defend your dungeon.
Here's a few guidelines:
- claim mines and quarries only as needed.
- In early stages, build your attack party with skells, trolls and immortal. Train skells and trolls as you can and get tiny asap, to use it on your raids. Train and use horny, while you don't have tiny.
- build 2 hatcheries and upgrade them asap till lvl8 (allows 35 skells and 30 trolls)
- build and upgrade warehouses and treasuries as needed.
- build library, to start leveling up the spells (will become handy in future)
- don't build graveyard, temple, torture chamber and don't upgrade training room. Leave those for latter.
- keep your trophies low, by loosing raids on purpose ("sandbagging"), in order to get easy dungeons to raid. Later in game, when your dungeon is developed and your troops are trained, you can decide to go up in trophies or not.

[MorganM]

Thanks for the guidelines; really helpful.

You advised on holding back on building / upgrading some rooms... is there any point where I should hold-back upgrading dungeon heart? For example would that help with sandbagging? Or is matchmaking really just dependent on trophy score ?

[Starduka]

Matchmaking is based on trophies and DCR (dungeon composition ratio - the red number on top left of your dungeon).

Delaying the building of graveyard, temple and torture chamber is a way to control the increase of dcr. Dungeon heart is nice to upgrade (it gets a great defense power at level10). Doors are one of the items that do bigger increase in dcr, so you may also want to delay them for a latter stage.

Walls don't increase dcr, so they are a good way to improve your defensive strength.

[MorganM]

More great info; thank you!

Does upgrading my dungeon heart increase my DCR?

What is ACR and where is it shown ?

[hell hole keeper]

ACR is a term that describes your "attack capability." This stat is not shown in the game. It is based on the level of your minions, spells, and immortals.

The key to this game is "raid, raid, raid." Consider every loss while on defense or offense a lesson learned. Build dungeons that look like the ones that you find hardest to beat, then view replays to see how your opponents pick apart the dungeon that you had trouble with. Take note of tricky strategies that make your attack plan fall apart and try incorporating these tricks into your own design.