To the wandering monsters, I do not know what is going on with your game, but I have wandering monsters.

I've got wandering monsters as well (I've got monster AI set to Insane).  There should be somewhat less of them, now, though, since you won't have the wild lands armies wandering outside of their lands anymore.  

I haven't gotten far enough to see how many cities the AI players are making, yet, though.

Hi,

did some fast tests ... when playing without monsters (setup screen set monsters to none) the AI is expanding fine and founds new cities.

Even with sparse the AI player concentrates on building troops and seems not to build any Pioneers.

Other observations:

- Wraith "Sentinel of Hadug" starts with plate, but wraith never get better armor than leather

- I modded the game to give Pioneers the Stealh Ability ... it works, but moving near a monster they were still attacked

  iirc this happened too with a Tarth unit in a previous 1.2 game. Weren't they supposed to be stealthy as race?

  imho Stealth is broken ...

At least the frequent crashes are now with 1.3 gone ...

this could explain the strange attack ... iirc the monster simply moved into the unit which looked as if it was attacking

I was not aware that there are two types of monsters

The monster he refers is the two group of creature factions. There are Monsters and Ruffians and the Denizens of the Wildlands. The Denizens of the Wildands is a faction where they are not repelled by Stealth. The first is not repelled by Stealth but can accidentally attack you if you so happen end up on the same tile.

As to the crippled AI, I've just ran a game and watched the AI. The entire group of 5 AI's settled a city and proceeded to build up troops into that city (never moving them out of the cities). Magnar decided to move troops out of his city only because it was FULL. Also, during the first 50 turns, I didn't observe any pioneer units being built at any of the AI's cities.

In my current game, the AI players each have multiple cities.