What I foresee is me knowing that I should get two more garrisons + a scroll or two of 'defend against ability X' before I enter the tower. This would very much ruin the experience since exploring and not knowing what will come is what makes this tense. I want to not know I win a battle or clear a dungeon.

I had not thought about the legitimacy of the map items. I am unsure what to think of that. In the end I would think a random system would be more fun since then we can share our stories about that time we entered the Tower of Time expecting goblins because of the rumors, only to face an ancient red dragon who had his minions tell us the rumors...

Imagine the horror when your army gets decimated, and imagine how much respect we would get for the different elements on the map. We will not know the dangers ahead of us and therefore we can only arm ourselves as we see fit. We should never know if we are safe. It goes the other way around as well. If an enemy army is decimated by some unforseen foe, you could jump him because he will not b able to defend.

Having the Ai intelligently handle these dungeons would maybe be a problem, but meh, we can always dream.

I'm interested in seeing canon lore spackled all over an un-modded sandbox game (I respect spackle, it's a friendly metaphor here) and I sympathize with Shurdus's somewhat 'gamy' concern even though I don't care much about winning anything. What I want most from the game lore as expressed in the un-modded Elemental UI is that it is a solid step or two up from GC2 in terms of fewer typos, reduced repetitiveness, and increased quality of explanation of the core game elements, including both specific user-controlled thingies and overall design principles.

There's some great stuff in this thread.

As for dungeons, I believe a mixture of randomly generated and fixed encounters would be good.

Randomly Generated:

You are out scouting and find a mountainside with many caves. As you explore these caves you will have a % chance to encounter one or more enemy groups. The reward will be scaled to the danger. Greater danger, greater reward. I think this is a pretty standard system that works well with keeping things different everytime.

I'm not sure how to weave story into these randomly generated dungeons, unless clearing the dungeon starts a pre-written quest arc that gets picked from a pool of story arcs.

People could write these arcs (in workshop?) and submit them to be rated and put in for others to download. Problem here is that you would need a lot of story arcs to make a pool large enough so that you'll have something new everytime. Also, I'm guessing these arcs will have map requirements of some kind. Beat any of these dungeons to start arc. Dungeon X will advance plot to chapter 2, dungeon Y to chapter 3 etc. But then the map would need to meet these requirements or generate dungeons mid game.

Perhaps there's a more elegant solution.

Fixed:

I think only really epic things should fall under the core Stardock storyline. There was mention of Imperium Galactica 2 earlier and I feel a similar way of handling story would be a very good way. Specific events popping up randomly as you play. So while you might know what to do after a runthrough, the challenges will be different due to other players/starting conditions/lay of the land or whatever.

It still keeps things interesting but allows Stardock to put in a tight, controlled storyline.

Other fixed storyline moments could be single, one off dungeon encounters. Though the degree at which we can interact with dungeons/landmarks will dictate how detailed a story we can engage with imo.

If dungeons are just things we go into to, fight a battle and click Take All, I think the reason why we went into it can be easily forgotten. HoMM did that a lot and I really didn't care after a while. What it lacked was the uniqueness. Oh it's just another tower battle map.... it's just another x/y/z. There's a lack of RPG style exploration, or at least an overview of where you are to give it a bit more meaning.

That's my food for thought. I'm quite behind on my elemental lurking so need to see what info has been released on dungeons etc.

EDIT: What about the ability to add your own names to some of the smaller/generic dungeons or landmarks? Whoever discovers it first will give it a name or if you can't be bothered, a randomly generated one. If there are intelligent creatures/primitive tribes living in them, have them already named unless you clear them out and claim the land.

After the eighty-ninth time, I think the reaction would be 'ho hum, tower of time, let's see five archers and two guys with maces, oh look I won, how thrilling'. 

Once you start randomising the content and events around things, guess what?  It's not story based anymore - it's INTERESTING instead.  I would find seeing the same things regularly at all quite boring, and I have no interest in my games being hijacked into 'another amazing event around the Tower of Time' I don't care about.  

Hiding the name until afterwards basically means there's no point having persistent names at all, since it can't affect your decisions.  In this situation, why do it at all (beyond the unlikelihood of the game being able to generate truly random events)?  Being able to know and game the event system is very unattractive to me.

What an angry thread.

Jerry! Jerry!

*Picks up the chair*
Oh no you didn't say that about my baby daddy!

Coolness.

Just make sure Uwe Boll is no where near the manuscript.

*throws chair*

*crowd goes BOOO!*

*an ice dragon crashes through the roof*

*crowd goes YAY!"