What's the deal with the STRONG and EPIC monsters that stand in the way of expanson?

There is no rule... similar to what happens in the real world when walking past bears or crocodiles... sometimes they do nothing sometimes they attack.

If you have a powerful attack, and defense "basically an epic or deadly army" they are not likely to attack, but they still might as it is random.

If you get a popup message, you have a free pass one turn. Else, you need to reload quick, or hope you can move before they attack you (very unlikely )

Survival rule nr 1: Never end your movement next to a monster you cannot defeat!

this!

It's risk vs reward.

Not ending movement next to monsters you cannot defeat is playing the safe side....but basically, as the difficulty increases, the assuredness of the iminent attack also increases.

ps. NEVER stop your pioneer next to a monster...it WILL be attacked.

yet...the AI's pioneers seem to be able to walk through freaking wildlands with DEADLY encounters all around and never get attacked once!

If you can build roads, you can often work your way through bad critters one square at a time utilizing the road's ability to let you move faater; move in, build road, move back; next turn build the next square and run away on road, 'till you've got a road built through the danger zone and can zip past the meanies.  

Dont build cities close so that the city borders will activate the monsters.

Which is a bit of a catch-22 because the AI doesn't follow the same 'rules'.

You're stuck with losing a city location to the AI's sub-optimal choice to which the monsters are released and they ignore the AI and come at you....OR you build the city so that the AI cannot to which the monsters are released and they come at you anyways.

I know I know....apparently the monsters aren't programmed to pick on the player.....but in my recent game with Gilden, when the AI Alter player builds a city RIGHT beside 3 DEADLY encounters.... 1 Storm Dragon and 2 Shirll Lords ... that ALL 3 ignore the Alter city and head STRAIGHT for mine 10 squares away....I really REALLY begin to wonder....

I don't follow those rules and I build cities next to large monsters all the time. They do not attack my cities, but I only play on challenging and challenging.

Interesting how different people get different outcomes.

In my experience, expanding your borders over the monster's habitat does cause them to attack my cities, eventually.  I have left both weak and epic monsters alive within my borders and usually they start roaming around and in about 20-50 turns they attack the local city.

used to play challenging/challenging. Was hoping to go back after the AI updates in 1.2

Instead it's just made hard/hard settings into really hard/ really hard settings. Which I do tend to like. I'm usually in the top 3 for faction power. On challenging/challenging ....it just wasn't a challenge.

If you play on difficulties higher than challenging then the monsters will attack your cities more than the AI, as was told to us a while back, since that adds the extra challenge to the game.

Agreed. Which was why I really liked playing on challenging/challenging. I like the AI to play by the same rules. I just didn't like how it wasn't challenging under those rules.

Having epics running around sure can destroy your expansion plans, especially when they park it next to one of your newest cities and all you can field is a stack of weak STRONGS.  Lost 2 stacks and 1 city to a rampaging epic last game.  In the case of the city, it was a 12 turn standoff before the epic 9 stack decided my city should die.

Even on normal difficulty, AI stacks and cities seem to be often very low priority for Wildlands stacks.

Saw an AI city that was in the middle of a former Wildlands area (the scrapyard, I think; wildlings, scrap golems)... with just under a dozen ~strong-rated Widllands stacks milling about completely ignoring the city as far as i could tell.

That's interesting, I'm a fairly short way into my first Ridiculous 1.2 game (just had a couple of AIs declare war on me). It's hard to be certain but the difficulty level does seem a little higher, the AI seems to be a little further ahead of me than I expected bearing in mind I had a good starting position with good city sites early. That may just reflect a slightly tricky strategic position, my two closest neighbours are aggressive and it's a two front war. But their armies are definitely a bit scarier than I was expecting at this stage, so perhaps there has been a bump up in the AI. Even just building units in fortresses could be affecting the strength of their armies. It's certainly not feeling like a walkover at this stage! That Insane challenge might have to wait.

Survival rule nr.2: Do not disturb Epic lairs if you cannot defeat the mobs!

Sure, sometimes the AI will disturb a mob. But that's close to their cities and not yours.

Well I didn't have a choice, it was either just sit there on the peninsula with my one city or try to sneak by the epic to found my second.  Sure enough, after a few passes the epic started waking around smashing stuff.  I find you often get put in that box.

Also I've seen green stacks of wandering monsters that cannot be defeated until mid game sometimes they like to camp out by your city and attack if you leave.

That's a crappy start situation, no doubt.

If the mob is really unbeatable and blocks expansion completely, all you can do is try to sneak past with your stack and level up a commander so you can build roads. With a road, your pioneers can move past the mob.

In my most recent game, I built a city right next to that giant worm guy. Eventually, the city grew so much that it overtook him. So now I have this huge worm thing in my castle haha and I can't attack him b/c my units just go into the city when I click on him. For some reason he just won't attack. Maybe he just likes his new home?

Its been extremely random for me. sometimes i can get away with planting a city next to a stack and they dont touch me and ill try it again and i get destroyed. i have been playing on hard/hard. and i sometimes see green stacks going around clearing out the other stacks and lairs near by. not sure if anyone else sees this. also so one of those random event monsters doing the same thing and died. as i was moving to kill the random event mob. wish i would have caught it on video, this game continues to suprise me every day.

Hopefully with that bug Frogboy fixed, when the monsters Target a city, they actually Will Attack it, instead of getting stuck by a pathfinding bug like they do currently.  I know on the higher difficulty levels the monsters target AI cities (and probably units) less than human player's cities, it would still be nice on a higher difficulty if an AI player city occasionally gets stomped.

It seems to me that the AI actually struggles a lot with monsters getting released into their lands and does frequently lose cities to monsters. Frankly, it seems like one of the biggest issues handicapping the AI's early expansion and making it too easy for the player to beat them.

The issue actually gets worse as you turn up the world difficulty (and/or monster density setting) and have tougher monsters everywhere. Players deal with this by not founding cities anywhere that will release world monsters that are too tough to beat. The AI founds cities everywhere, releases nasties it has no hope of beating any time soon, and ends up with a crippling problem on its hands.