I miss the giant armies of spiders in the forests on turn 1

They still exist sometimes.

Let's make getting a half-decent military a bit cheaper early on and bring back the hordes of monsters.  That'd at least delay city-spam.

I miss venturing out into the wild, beating up monsters and taking their lunch money.  I was really enjoying facing bigger and badder monsters constantly!  Now, I just go beat up on the other kingdoms/empires, which somehow doesn't have the same 'adventuring' flavor to it.

Now, you actually have to go track the monsters down, and someone already stole most of their lunch money...

I liked the monster hordes as well.

me too

Devs, just make it optional (and starting money/resourses) please.

The nerfing of monster quantity and loot went too far, definitely

I don't mind reducing the gold from monster battles, but now it's hard to find monsters at all and yes, that's boring as hell.  And now you find a pack of monsters and discover those archers (or catapults) you wasted money on are completely useless.  The game has been boring, frustrating and down right annoying since these changes and I'm losing faith that it'll be a fun game after all the patching and hotfixing is through...

This player has turned sour.

No pleasing you people, eh?

I would like to see more creatures spawning I have to agree, it gets anemic very quick it seems. Should I really still be seeing a single level 1 wolf at turn 400+ with 9 levels of Adventuring under my belt?

Definitely need a bit more monsters. Just curious, is this across all world difficulty levels or just the lower ones?

Before 1.08, the map was completely covered in monsters making it hard to even move.  Now, the pendulum has swung to the other side and you can barely find anything.

I think they nerfed monster spawns a bit too much.

I've got my most unbelievable city spammed map ever: Ihave roughly 50 cities and own 75% of the entire Large map on turn 180, most shards and two crystals are under my control, didn't even have to fight for 'em. In fact, I've been enjoying the city spam so much I've not been doing the conquest thing like I normally do. This is the first game I've played in which only one AI has declared war on me, Yithril. I actually havent seen yithril armies because their entire country is blocked by mountains in the north (apparently they dont like to use the "Lower Land" spell from the earth book, which I consider almost essential given the way mountains are designed in this game). It's unbelievable, very few monster, although I have so many cities with caravans that every game at least one or two caravans get killed somewhere by a random monster, but they're so cheap I just replace them turn after turn; I don't even bother trying to protect 50ish caravans. 

This was a completely new game since Friday's update patch nerfed my archers in the last game, so I wanted to start a new game. I haven't built archers as of yet to verify they work, but I'll build at least one to see if they work. The lack of monsters & combat has had a side-effect: my guys are not levelling up as much & my giants are weak at starting levels: fire giants at level 1 with 20 hps are weak, I've lost two already to otherwise fairly weak level 4/5 monsters. It's actually nice to have a few weak monsters, so you can level up to level 3 without losing something. I disagree with reply 10, it's always good to have some weak monsters, as you constantly recruit & train new guys that are weak ,and weak monster help level-up without dying. Weak monsters also kill caravans just as easily as stong ones.

Exactly.  Without even reasonably tough challenges on the board and a sense of danger when sending out that first pioneer, the game has lost quite a bit.  You no longer have to be on your toes early on.  In v1.0.7 (and earlier) I had taken to escorting pioneers with at least 2 peasants if not my main stack just to make sure that the random low level bandit or darkling didn't kill it.  And if that big spider army veered too close... run!  At least the big stuff normally stuck to the forests and could be avoided much of the time.

Now, I just don't care.  There's just nothing out there that's in any way threatening once I get my first combat spell.  Lack of monsters does make early expansion a bit easier, but it was already somewhat unchallenging anyway.  The only activity you have now is expanding your view on the world enough to grab at least 1 metal, 1 crystal, 1 shard early on.  Unless I can do that, I restart because the rest of my game is arbitrarily gimped.  The biggest enemy now is the random number generator behind resource distribution.  Without a sense of danger in the early game, E:WoM has yet another totally boring facet.  Like it needed one... 

I like the idea of adding a slider to game setup.  Maybe two: (1) Monster Spawn Frequency and (2) Monster Potency.  And allow marketplaces to have exhanges where I could swap materials for metals or crystals or gold at some exchange rate.

Same here.

I say: keep monsters of all sizes there, even at the beginning--a little danger adds some flavor--just make them unlikely to attack unless a unit or army is stationary for a turn or more, or builds a city nearby.  Even high level monsters can be present at the beginning and cleared over the course of the game.  A strong stationary spiders could always spawn baby spiders that move around and cause trouble.

Most of these features need a slider

Monster spawn

Resources

Heroes

Hostile heroes

Think Civ 2, almost everything was adjustable so the worlds were how we wanted them to be.

Can a developer explain why early spawns got nerfed?  This was not a part of the 1.08 changelog.  

I only saw this: "+ Late game monster respawning reduced. "

Late game monsters were, indeed, out of control, but early to mid game were fine in 1.07 IMO.