Thanks for showing interest, guys
I'm getting back in to the swing of things again here, funny how it seems to go in 6 month cycles. Setting aside half an hour to an hour a day to plug away at new code.
Currently in the process of breaking the hero 'AI' to put it back together again. Starting to implement sales metrics, a town overseer (The Mayoress), rewriting contracts (including generic non-seen contracts implemented via the mayoress and her noticeboard) as well as personality-based decision making and augmentations to shops (might manifest as simple 'signs' in the first instance). It will need a whole new dungeon-crawling set of logic as well, and I am tending towards keeping heroes in town far more than currently. Drivers to go underground should come from the needs of the town - or for glory-seeking heroes (Barbarians) but by and large a Mage would be stupid to go down on their own just for kicks (unless the drive for knowledge can't be met by the shops in town).
Also trying to design a system so that heroes group together and go down in Parties, but not outside of concept for that one yet.
Remains to be seen how it will all work, but hopefully you will start to see real patterns emerging in the behaviour of certain types of heroes in the town, directly affected by the behaviour of your shop (e.g. social heroes will be more inclined to visit busy shops, antisocial heroes will be more inclined to visit quiet shops etc.) and things like contracts will be more useful (if not necessary) to get any signficant dungeon / hero behaviour.
(Unchecked dungeons will be dangerous as they generate monsters, but on the other hand the Mayoress should also exist to try and deal with those, with the available resources of the town).