Re: the monster stuff not really being turn-based yet, that's quite true, but mainly because we haven't started implementing macro-game combat yet. That's a pretty cool and pretty involved thing the way Keith has it planned, and we've not talked about it yet just in case something doesn't work out there, but it actually adds a whole extra genre into the mix if we can pull that off (and no, it's not tower defense). Right now the wandering monsters are just water-down tiny foes that you can easily defeat alone and on-foot. That was never the plan for long-term monsters that are more directly related to the overlord and such. You'll be seeing some monster bands that veritably feel like an army, and dealing with those yourself in adventure-mode would be night impossible.
Having to figure out how to deal with them in the strategic side so that you can get past whatever they are blocking in the adventure mode has been a goal for us from the start. And being able to use your NPCs, in the macro game, to "soften up" an overlord keep that is vastly more powerful than the current versions currently are, is another similar thing. Send in the army, bash up their army, then send in the lone hero to kill the leader. Etc. Like I keep saying, right now what you're seeing with the strategic parts of the game is something like 10% of what we have planned for even 1.0.
The exploration side of things for the macrogame is the one part that is really fully fleshed out, I'd say; and you're right, that really ties across in both sides much better than the rest because of that.
In terms of the monsters advancing toward your town, you're right you'd never go fight them on foot if they were too strong, but by the same token those monsters wouldn't even exist or be advancing on you in the first place if you weren't playing the strategic side of the game. And if you just hate strategy games and want to spend hours overleveling them by 20 levels... well, that certainly is another way to play, right? Not a particularly fun or rewarding way, but there's no reason that shouldn't be valid. And if someone has "uber skills" and wants to try to level an army with their one dude, well, that's an interesting challenge that I guess they ought to be allowed to try their hand at a few times, too.
It is true, of course, that with AI War one of the things that is really compelling is that any action you take isn't something that is cost-free. Since the AI reinforces over time and aggresses against you periodically, if you're spending a lot of time overpowering the AI piece by piece, that's just letting the AI build up somewhere else. And obviously that's a key mechanic to AI War. With AVWW... at core this is meant to be a more relaxed game than that.
The above all said, Keith sent me an email this morning talking about some ways he was thinking your ideas, or something very similar, could work in multiplayer or solo as an optional thing that players can toggle on kind of like the difficulty toggle settings. The key features of his ideas were: 1) it's an optional thing that hardcore strategy fans can turn on (ideally to some reward, or else just for the extra interest/challenge), and 2) it still doesn't cause things to happen invisibly behind you when you're out adventuring, it just forces you to stop adventuring and take a strategic turn when you've reached the end of your counter. There were a couple of specific variants he'd suggested based on your comments, and I'll make another brainstorming thread where that can be discussed separately.
That whole thing really is against the core design of the game, but then again so is any hardcore platforming component, and I want to have those as an optional thing you can do in this world, too. Lots of things can be done, from all sorts of genres, that conflict with the core design of the game -- so long as they are optional. In this specific case it will be difficult to make it optional and yet still meaningful as a way to play, but I think it can be done. Minor factions and such in AI War are all optional, of course, but they are really a lot of the spice of that game. I guess I'm coming around to seeing this -- essentially -- variant of the core game being kind of like an AI Modifier or a Minor Faction, just not something you select in a central lobby.
