Elemental dungeons and x-com

Nice ideas.  Regardign the buying and selling of equipment, perhaps it would be interesting to have a mechanism whereby you could sell and shop for player owned equipment in market places of towns.

Over a long game, one or two centrally located cities might become the logical places for such markets to thiive.  If you physically moved the items to this town (via hero or soveriegn) you could them put them for sale on the market at a set price (or use a bid/ask system, perhaps timed).  That way you might end up with some unusual item which first was taken from a dungeon on a far off island, or you could sell your duplicate dragonclaw tipped dagger.  Such cities might be so beneficial to all the players that they eventually are recognized as 'protected' market towns which people would be reluctant to attack, though looting such a town might allow you the chance to obtain some of the items for sale there.  The owner of the town could also be allowed to tax such sales, so settign a 3% tax rate would draw more business than a 15% tax rate.  If such game mechanics made some towns very profitable to own, they diplomacy involving these towns would be potentially interesting.

As an expansion on the use of items, since we know that soveriegns will be able to craft special items, perhaps they could ALSO 'improve' items which you find in the course of the game.  You might be able to add some characteristics or powers to items you get from quests or dungeons, maybe adding an elemental attack of the type of your node in the town where your soveriegen resides.  Death mages could make weapons more deadly, life mages add defensive properties or heal abilities. 

If each soveriegn had semi-unique crafting abilities, then a really rare item might be one which multiple soveriegns had added special abilities to.  It would also add to diplomacy if you agreed to trade special items, each enhance them, and then return them.  Or you promise to put enchantments of items in return for a treaty you want.  If you get an enhanced item as loot in battle then you could also make it even better.

there was a rts with similiar ideas (based on DnD) where you control heroes and armies buildings ect. on the map but you still had to dungeon crawl with your heroes, it was quite a nice idea.

i have to disagree on point 2, i really don´t like this kind of leveling system (i played too much morrowind/oblivion)

X-com might not be as fun in a melee-heavy setting.

Having X-Com style combat in dungeons sounds kind of tedious, to be honest. You might do it with simple dungeons, but not anything particularly complex. If it's a multi-room affair, it'd take forever. I'd rather just kill whatever is inside, take their stuff, then get back to the main map.

Let me break this down a bit as I have some thoughts on each.

Only heroes or groups of heroes can enter dungeons: I'm not sure how I feel with this one. Some dungeons could have massively powerful monsters in them. Or worse hugely insane numbers of monsters (think Moria). I'd want at least part of my army in there fighting with me but I do agree they should perhaps have a penalty due to fighting in a confined space.

Heroes that improve based on what skills they use: I like this idea but only if every hero can start off using Every skill. Then as they use particular ones they get better in that skill. UO worked the same way back in the day.

Death in a dungeon is permanent: I don't know about this one. Elemental is all about magic right? I think there should be some form of resurrection spell for use on heroes and family members with the exception being death by old age. Unless there's a Immortality Spell, who knows.

Active fog of war with monsters that hunt you as you hunt them: I think this would have to depend on the dungeon. If it's a big open cavern there probably wouldn't be much you can't see. In a underground labyrinth you wouldn't be able to see around the next bend until you send a guy to go look. We're not sure yet if they even will implement the Fog of War on battle maps.

Equipment from defeated enemies that can be used by your heroes, studied to open up new research trees, or destroyed/sold for mana or gold: I agree 100% here. Hopefully we'll see a Vast variety of magical items and item abilities. Perhaps some of them can even be studied and mass produced for the armies.

I am a big fan of all of the above, with the exception of levelling system. I would much rather either have a "skill point" (perhaps too much micro), or some form of "specialization tree" where an initial hero decides wether to fight or cast, then wether to use swords, or crossbows, then if they chose cranged attacks, wether to shoot fast or well, etc. That would allow good customization of heroes without too much micro involved.

Also, regarding "what to do" with captured dungoen items, the choice to equip them, or use them to research unique spells/tech would also be great.

Additionally, I don't mind the idea of scrapping for gold or mana, but the ability to take those items to larger cities, and use their presence to generate a bit of gold over time (developing the appeal of your market), and increase your appeal to heroes (more hire opportunities)... Now THAT is priceless.

I'm not a fan of dungeons being too complicated. Disciples II had a simple dungeon system and that worked fine for me. If dungeons became actual dungeons, then it'd take forever to get through one and also very distracting from the strategic whole. I feel that if you want to do sprawling dungeons they'd have to be well integrated into the core game rather than having it be like a "mini game" of some sort. Frogboy mentioned something like adventuring parties indepedently exploring dungeons and I like that idea.

This might be a nice way to incorporate the way Frogboy has been discussing that the tech tree will work.  Level 1 adventuring research lets you see dungeons and send heroes into them on a sort of autoexplore.  If you want, you can research level 2, which lets you play the dungeons tactically, with the potential reward of better loot for your efforts.  Levels 3 and up increase the number of people (perhaps a limited number of non-heroes) you can take with you and how far into the dungeon you can explore.