I did not like Dungeon Keeper first time round. The optimal strategy is turtle, making missions 3 hour affairs. Furthermore, you get to keep your best monster in the next level, so you need to mine every map to death if min/maxing.
Multiplayer was very wonky strategically too. The outcome was decided in the first 10 mins based on whether you could out recruit monsters, but the death blow could not be dealt until about an hour later :s
The actual concept was pretty amazing though. It certainly stuck in my mind for one of the coolest concepts for a game. Playing the baddie is always fun. Just the actual dynamics of the game were pretty flawed. I bought Dungeon Keeper 2 though anyway, haha.
In the days when I had too much time on my hands, I used the editor to pit every combination of monster against each other in the arenas. The balancing was way-off, and monster's fighting abilities are inconsistent with their description in the manual.
For instance, dragons, supposedly tough hombres, are singularly useless. No matter how many spells they learn, they only ever use their puny fire breath, presumably due to a bug.
Your best troops are orcs by a large margin, followed by mistresses. At high levels, orcs can kill everything except the horned reaper in single combat, and are incredibly cheap to train (1/10 the expense of reapers, and 1/2 of mistresses). Build an army of these guys as soon as you can and you're sorted.
It's a great concept, but for this sort of game, I thought Bullfrog's Populous: the Beginning, was infinitely superior. Get hold of that in GOG! It plays beautifully under WINE (even better than on Windows, and not arbitrarily limited to a maximum 800x600 resolution).
Powermonger I liked better than populous. Populous was too many levels and maps were too big IMHO. I never understood the ecenomic strategy (build big houses or small ?) but I was quite young (small then big I spose).
The actual concept was pretty amazing though. It certainly stuck in my mind for one of the coolest concepts for a game. Playing the baddie is always fun. Just the actual dynamics of the game were pretty flawed. I bought Dungeon Keeper 2 though anyway, haha.