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Kill all the leaders while leaving at least one of their citizens alive.

[Gallade]

The reason you need 1 big super hero rather than a large army, is that a level 20 creature can usually kill 10 level 10 creatures.

Some RPGs give an attack bonus for attacking from all sides at once. You can surround a larger enemy and bring them down with a party. Tribes would be tougher unless you were doing the same thing back to them. You would really need a party not one superhero, which is what I think you are after?

Yeah. As the game is now, you just need a trained keeper, about 3-4 supermonsters (Souped up doppels for instance) and everything else is useless as a fighter and is better employed making traps or as doppel fodder.

[Gallade]

A more varied combat system would also be welcome. Right now, someone can take a pretty much endless number of enemies as long as their attack and defense are low enough: a knight can trounce a horde of untrained orcs, but a legendary humanoid with good training and a weapon can take over the human castle by itself.

The only strategic variation right now is having magic users like vampires and orc shamans (and the Keeper too) with the raiding party, so that they can stun/wound enemies with magic and let the melee grunts finish them off. That's the only part where numbers matter, everything else is only a matter of having the strongest champion unit or getting in the first stun.

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Yep. And in general, the game could use a lot more depth. I could think of a thousand ways to both add more “stuff to do” and more challenge to the game. Such as…

-Capturing prisoners with a command (say, a settings in the squad menu saying “Capture as many as possible/Accept surrender/Leave no survivors)
-More uses for prisoners (Use them as slaves or turn them into undead)
-More control over production (Place orders for certain items, or enable/disable them, for instance order to not produce alarm traps or for the next 5 forging products to be swords)
-Random events to watch out even at the point in the game when you'd normally have nothing to fear. Small armies retaking the castle and strengthening the guard around it, parties of powerful dungeon raiders attempting to take you down, tribe leaders building siege engines to break down your doors/walls, members of a broken village searching for shelter in another, different tribes making alliances, civilizations readying themselves for battle once they know you're on the move (building walls, stationing guards, making barricades)
-Enemy raids having a purpose: rather than making a beeline for your Keeper, they could have a mission, such as stealing equipment and treasure, destroying certain rooms, or freeing prisoners. In the latter case, you could even negotiate for a ransom, especially if you have captured an important person such as a leader.
-More kinds of Keepers instead of the somewhat-squishy Warlock type. Keepers could start without any magic or special skills besides being able to command imps, and then pick “skill trees” and spend mana to raise their stats (Another use for Mana is another thing the game needs badly). You could specialize as…
A warlord, becoming a melee-centric fighter who gives a bigger morale boost to minions they bring into battle,
A warlock who stays back and  concocts new spells to enhance his troops and rain death upon enemies,
A scientist who plays god by mutating minions into spliced horrors,
A lich who is an undead and master-of-none in combat but has a phylactery in the dungeon  they will respawn at after a while if they're killed,
A manipulative, charismatic evil genius who can command troops more efficiently and improve productivity and negotiation with other entities.
-Enemies doing more than just sending small groups straight to the dungeon. For instance, they could destroy bridges, squash eyeballs, arm paesants, try to negotiate for protection money, team up with lesser entities (say, survivors from the bandit camp you just wrecked informing the lizardmen of your activities and joining their village) or start rituals to hinder you which you must interrupt or suffer the effects (say, a loss of Mana, a cave-in, or a powerful spirit coming to bang on your door), dwarves could tunnel into the mountain and make a breach, elves could regrow parts of the forest and populate it with tree spirits and animals, and so on and so forth.

-The ability to assign different commands to the minions you send out, so that you don't have to micro-manage them with control. Also, making them able to send them to a settlement instead of a specific point, so they can actually move around the larger ones.
Takeover = once they get to a village, they kill soldiers, capture paesants and kill the leader.
Sack = They only kill armed forces and raid chests and treasury.
Raze = They destroy everything and don't come back until the last villager is killed
Ambush = They stay put and attack anyone who comes near the general area

[Gallade]

There was a system where minions just lay about in bed all day if you couldn't pay them. Most people seem to agree that the statues and throne work better than that did.

That's because gold is non-renewable. If it was or you had other ways of rising minion's morale (say, entertaining them by capturing and publicly torturing enemies, furnishing the dungeon with treasure and other items stolen from the villages) that could stick.

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Don't burn down the elven village without a ring of Fire resistance. Being stunned by the elf lord just before it dies, only to be burned to death by the fire you started to clear the trees is awkward.

[Gallade]

On reflection, I'd prefer a more fuzzy population limit. As population increases, the morale goes down. Monsters desert or turn hostile, the population goes down again. Symbols of my dictatorship such as a throne and statues would help remind them who is in charge. A steady source of food cheers everyone up. Whippings would only go so far, but a good pillaging of local towns would always be popular.

The current system is about right, but a bit too exact. A statue is worth exactly 1. A throne worth exactly 10. Food worth exactly 4. etc. It feels like these numbers ought to be invisible to the player, you would find out something was wrong when they start fighting each other.

That's what I meant with hard cap: it should be somewhat realistic and with various degrees on the quantity/efficiency scale, and not just a clear-cut limit. Keep a few trustworthy monsters with you, and they'll be happy to work and fight for you. Expand as much as you want and you get superior numbers, but the minions' morale gets low because of the crowded lair and you need to strike a balance by providing for them.

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The thing I like most is the ASCII graphics. I use them all the time, not that the graphics pack isn't good, but it just has such a nostalgic feeling about it. It would need to have some long-term goal to it, though. Like how in Dwarf Fortress you can now build a kingdom by building a fortress, retiring it, and building another and so on.

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It's called “Hit points”…and it's not so much a hidden mechanic than a logical concept. Ogres are big, so they can take more damage. Keepers are small, so they can take less. That's why they have more tricks up their sleeve to avoid damage, such as invisibility, illusions and swarms of flies. They're not your average RL warrior which can just hold a directional key and kill everything in its path…you have to think every move.

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Legendary humans and legendary beasts are pretty much your Champions. They and Doppelgangers who have absorbed enough creatures are pretty much invincible to anything except a tribe leader spamming spells or getting in a VERY lucky hit. You can send them to the human castle and they'll take it over by themselves, or after you have conquered everything you can start killing off your weaker minions to make room for more legendary beasts, and get your succubi busy on making you an army of them to make an unwinnable Adventurer map with.

[Gallade]

it will be great to add some kind of difficult control like this one:

the enemy streght over time and attack rate and size can change a lot the difficulty

That would need a good rebalancing of the game, but then again, the game already needs some good balancing to begin with, so why not.
For instance, in this case enemies could get stronger over time (as opposed to receiving reinforcements if they lose some fighters but not their leader), so you would need to have some way to make resources renewable. Especially gold, since that is what caps your population the most (Add in trade caravans that occasionally travel the roads, and set up minions to ambush and rob them?)

That, and…the minion cap is nonsense to me. When you are still setting up, gold is scarce and you can only get one more minion by buying a statue for 300 gold. When you can buy the throne, you HAVE to be ready to stand up to endgame-level assaults anyway, so you might as well take over the castle and tower. And in the end, you get enough gold to get your cap to at least 40-50, but you don't really have any use for those extra minions except make the dungeon harder to complete in Adventurer mode (in other words, bragging rights).

Would make sense if population size and limit depended on the rooms you have built and the type of minions. I would make it like this:

-No more “hard” population cap
-Higher and/or incremental cost for living spaces (Dormitory, ritual room, graveyard, lair)
-Each unit occupies a space of a certain shape and size in the living space. For instance, Ogres need a 4×2 section of Dormitory, Vampires must have a 3×3 section of Graveyard, Orcs and Goblins only need 1×2 slices of Dormitory, Bats and Ravens have a 1×1 Cage and so on.
-Minions that you obtain in ways other than immigration (recruiting, finding, Succubus breeding) will stay neutral until they have an adequate living space

[Gallade]

This isn't any Rogue Like scenario…you're fighting against someone who is just done taking over this part of the world and most likely wrested heaps of treasures away from villages, castles, and even a freaking dragon. The odds are not really in favor of a random hero…

Still, it should let you gain the trust of survivors, get more people to immigrate into the map and band them together. Maybe even reclaim the human castle and defend it from the Keeper's horde.  It would be sort of like an Anti-Keeper mode, where you're trying to diminish the keeper's influence by sending and/or leading raids to his dungeon. Maybe even do the opposite of what the keeper does, such as scrounge up a treasure and offer it to a dragon in exchange for their help, or rebuilding the Witch/Elementalist's tower and gain support from their elementals…

In other words, while Keeper mode is centered around picking off your enemies one by one, Adventurer mode would be about making allies one by one until you have enough forces for the final assault.

[Gallade]

Windows 7 32 bit version 6.1

Graphics card: Intel 4400
Basically, I can't play for more than a couple minutes (without any other application running) without the game slowing down, glitching, and eventually crashing the whole computer.

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