Is it, or will it, ever be possible to create "dungeons" in elemental?

I think Brad said so ...bullet #3 or 4 in his latest thread from Sept 5th.  It is coming I believe for free!

They did this in some of the "Tactics" games (like Suikoden and Final Fantasy) - and I think they did it in King's Bounty (I only played the demo, but I remember going into a cave or something getting into battles with spiders).  This can be a fun diversion, but if it happens too often it can derail the momentum of the game.  Especially in multiplayer (and even more so if they put in time limits)...  I do like the idea and hope they do implement it, within reason.

I'm hoping this gets done, been pushing for info on this for awhile.

If you are shooting for multi sectional Dungeons, I would approve.. However you should only be able to take champions and summoned creatures inside, no army or 'Units'.

I would be surprised if this did not happen in Elemental eventually. It would fit in so naturally with the Adventure side of the game. It would require a fair bit of work creating dungeons for specific quests so it sounds like it'd be an expansion feature rather than something in a free update.

I must have lost said quote!  Nice to know!

What he said! Only summons and Heros in there, no units...

This would rock, but how would this work with multiplayer? Would a hero spend the entire game in a dungeon?

Maybe this would only be implemented for SP...

Age of Wonders had dungeon crawling. They have to be careful and not do it the way AOW was done, long and boring. I would guess it would be turned off for multiplayer, not much fun waiting on your opponent to finish dungeon crawling.

This is actually a good argument for treating multiplayer as a separate game with its own rules and play mechanics, but when Brad suggested that, all he got was whining from people who were upset that multiplayer was being "gimped".

It is possible for a quest to load a specific tactical battle map. It wouldn't be a true dungeon crawl (at least for now) since the AI just charges you, and there may be a limitation on the size of the tactical maps as well as difficulty finding good cave-y or dungeon-y tile sets, though I imagine some more artistic modders can create them. The other limitation is that creatures don't really "drop" stuff. Loot just gets assigned as part of doing the quest. For example, you can make the quest check if a specific monster was killed, and then give the player something for it. But you can't just have a monster drop stuff. Also, you can't do any trigger work within the tactical battle map, it ends when you retreat, you die, or all the enemies die.

What's the xml for this?  I must have missed it when I was going through the files.  Or could you point me to a current quest that does this?

Check Quests_Level5.xml (the Master Quest), Quest_Part2_TheGreatTree objective. If you scroll down to where it creates the fight with the spiders:

This would be awesome.  I wouldn't care if the dungeons weren't all that big either.  Just a small maze, a few random encounters, some loot, and the quest encounter.  This would be a nice change of scenery to break up the city management part of the game.

Thanks Annatar11!  Just what I needed...

Since I was wanting to mod the max army size I asked Brad about increasing the tactical battle map sizes in addition to increasing the army cap. I know the army cap is in the XML but he stated that creating larger tactical maps was in fact possible but just too complicated to explain in the IRC window at the time. So making a full fledged dungeon map should work. Getting the enemy armies to treat it like a dungeon and not just a battlefield to rush across is something else entirely however.

there was talk of giving units a patrol or waypoint script, but short of that there are several options for keeping enemies in place.  You can put down "objects" that need to be destroyed so you can move further.  If no such object exists you could just make a new unit like "stalagmite" (or stalagtite?  I forget which grows up and which grows down) and give it either zero moves or negative moves to keep it still.  Make them on the same side as the enemy and that will keep them still since they wont attack their own.  There are already spells for raise and lower land, maybe make it so that a "gate" must be raised by a spell before you can progress further (even if that gate is just an underground mountain).  While these ideas are a bit silly, they could just be temporary patches until better code/options come along.

Stalagmites "grow" up. Easy way I once used to remember was in the name. Stalagtites have to hang on tight to the ceiling in order to not fall. Stalagmites might one day grow to touch the ceiling.

/end cave lesson

I see what you're saying with cheesing it for now, could definitely work.

The other problem (besides the monsters/enemies moving to contact) is the lack of fog-of-war on tactical maps.  Knowing where everything is when you enter the dungeon takes some of the fun out of it.

There were RTS games like Earth 2150 which had tunnel systems underground that offers strategic options to ambush enemy base.

An uncharted unknown randomly generated tile based maze filled with monsters is a nice way to open up gameplay options where armies can march underground undetected by enemy forces on ground from A to B. Tunnel entrances should be dotted around the map but may need researches to recover their locations.

In addition, dungeon can offer loots in form of monster drops or treasure chest. Hell you can even design specific 'lost technological' structures of old civilization in a dungeon that offers dramatic game changing advantage such as terraforming the terrain, cause starvation by changing weather system etc.

Actually updates and expansions are free. Expansions are more than likely going to be downloadable just like updates through Impulse.

It was an old 4X game but there was one that essentially had three layers of overworld. There was the surface, there was a layer of caverns below, and then a layer below that. That might be workable for a MP dungeon as it would be part of the map itself rather than something running in isolation.