Er, wow. I felt monster spawning was out of whack. But that's insane. Late game I went north where I had maybe 7+ units hanging out. And it's been said by Brad that monsters will start to congregate in unclaimed territory as the game goes on. But monsters spawning back to back doesn't sound right. They also seem to pick a favorite area to spawn and just breed like crazy.

Must have had a Viagra Meteor Shower in that part of the map! Darn I'm in turn 300 and surrounded on all sides by unfriendly factions can't even explore because I'll end up tresspassing. Glad not all games play the same, so far so good.

The higher (world) difficulty levels up the spawn rate.

Monsters only spawn in forests outside national borders.

In the late game with the adventure level maxed and very few valid spawn points you get this, I consider it to be an XP farm.

Sammual 

Happy to oblige, thanks for the karma!

Yeah the creatures spawn way too fast and grow wayy to strong in a short period, I wish there was a way to delay their appeance, perhaps a way to stop the adventures from causing a ruckous?

So far this is why I research adventure slowly, when I'm ready. It's the only counter, and you'll still get hit with a lot of monsters, but they'll be low level, and you can fortify some guys if they're near your borders and the monsters will just throw themselves at them.

I really LIKE the mechanic they've set up, it just needs some tweaking and some more variables added into it. Like, it needs to consider population density vs. space. One monster stack should need x tiles to spawn, and x tiles of free space to wander. I'm pretty sure monsters fight each other, since I come across a lot that are missing HP, but it's not doing population control well enough.

It also seems like monster spawning is on a fixed timer. At least, I get the message from Janusk on what seems like a regular basis, every 30 turns or so. That, plus normal monster spawning, is probably leading to over kill.

And I think that's what they don't want; the land to get cleared. I think they sort of want the wilds to be an xp farm...but probably not to this degree.

I Believe, and feel free to correct me if Im wrong, but that the message from Janusk that tells you about 'new and terrible monsters' appears any time you or one of your AI opponents researches a new Adventuring/Domination tech that says 'Unfortunately, this will also release more dangerous monsters into the world' in the description.

This means that depending on how fast you and your AI opponents do that research, the games wilderness and the amount of notables (and even resources) differs.

Its an interesting mechanic, and I like the idea. I just think it needs tweaking both in implementation and in how the AI responds to all the wandering monsters. I also feel you, the player, should be able to adjust the specific amount of random spawns in the games settings.

Wow thats on normal?

My first thought seeing that picture was "So you put it on ridiculous and the monsters was ridiculous?"

On normal though...omg.

I experienced something similar on Challenging, all i did was run into monters and more monsters..and more monsters...

Yepp, I can confirm this from an earlier normal difficulty game of mine, my first serious one after playing and probing around for a bit. And I should say, that I abandoned it.

In that game one of the NPC factions (Kraxis if I remember it correctly) got lucky and had several "Lost Libraries" around their starting location. Of course their tech research went through the roof ... and sadly also mostly into "adventure tech research". Having barely touched this field myself, the world monster NPC level nevertheless was five at around turn 90. So while everybody was just picking up speed or getting steamrolled (the AI factions were rather lagging behind in troop numbers or resistance), the monster had already finished the race.

I had big monsters popping up everywhere in my backyard and in 50% of the cases also in nice stacks that rivaled one of my main armies at the front ... as if a single troll warrior would not have been bad enough so relatively early in the game. So instead of going after the AI factions I had to concentrate on a mindless never ending monster respawn. Not exactly my definition of fun ... or even a strategy game in general. Monsters as a nuisance? OK. Monsters as a bigger threat than the enemy factions? Way beyond not OK.

In the terms of CIVILIZATION: the only thing that kept an AI with medieval units from being outclassed by my riflemen and cannons was a never ending barbarian invasion of tanks and bombers in my backyard. 

If that's what I was aiming for I could play a Tower Defence game ... or whatever those flash games are called.

Thus I seriously hope, that the whole monster system gets a big overhaul.

Rabenhoff

My current games goes again in the direction "monsters at the top of the food chain". It would be bearable, if not every monster stack would be tougher than everything the AI has ever thrown at me. *sigh*

Rabenhoff

Heh the adventure research is powerful, has good benefits. But I just had one of my towns defenses devastated by a sudden shriek attack. My boys with their leather armor and spears didn't stand a chance :<

Well there's tech that directly influences spawned Adventurers in the Adventure tree. 

Dang, this actually sounds interesting...because winning even light to middle-range monster fights can net you a lot of Gold, and shop stuff costs only Gold.  You can be turning your champions and units into killing machines, semi-desperately holding off the lunatic Wild, with a dynasty doing the same.  It 'helps' matters that the Legendary armour is fairly low on the magic tech tree, and turns a kitted-out champion into a defensive beast.