Reduced 89%Original 593 x 492So this is the problem. This is turn 273, the AI blocked me off from the main continent, you can see the borders of two different AI factions here. it took me the first 175 turns to hold off the monsters long enough for my immediate neighbor to become overwhelmed and die of monster attacks because every AI in the game is teching the adventure tree and apparently only the adventure tree by the looks of it. Half of those monsters are level 7 trolls with 208 attack power, some of the are pack drakes, and there's one giant black widow, all above 80 attack power. The rest are leftovers from teching up so fast and not dying, averaging around 15-30 attack power each. I have been fighting a nonstop flow of these things, 4-5 kills per round, for a hundred and fifty rounds now. I finally managed to get more than 2 cities when my immediate neighbor died mysteriously after no conflict with me whatsoever. I'm now stuck at five cities and can barely defend by nothern border (I'm about fifteen squares south of this image with my northern border on a penninsula, blocked by the red faction visible at the bottom there, and a one-city NPC faction, between whom there is a mountain range and a one square wide passage through which these monsters continually flow in my direction avoiding everyone else.
THIS IS INSANE! OMG FIX IT!
You have 2 difficulty settings when you create a new game. First one is when you chose a map size. That difficulty is actually WORLD difficulty. Apparently, when you chose high difficulty there monsters spawn more frequent and level up (new levels of monsters show up, to be more precise) much faster. From the looks of the pictures, you chose ridiculous difficulty level and powerful monsters are all over the place as a result. If you choose normal the monster spawning/leveling is much tamer. If you chose beginner difficulty you will actually deal with low level monsters for much longer time, actually, you will get less gold and experience from monsters as a result. It's quite different game.
AI difficulty for factions is set in the window where you chose which factions to play with. You set difficulty for each faction separately and they default to world difficulty.
You can set up quite different games this way. For example, if you don't want to deal with many monsters and would rather fight other factions then set world difficulty to beginner or lower, and then set each faction's difficulty to hard or higher. If you like many monsters set world difficulty higher, etc. You can even mod difficulty settings in the xml files.
Actually, I don't think this part of the game is broken at all. You have great flexibility in setting the game exactly as you want it and you can even customize it further by modding the game files.
