Which difficulty were you playing? You should have seen Brad's test build over Christmas break - that was a nutso experience. He had troll groups spawning early and constantly. The troll warrior is a hero killer with that special it has to do 3x normal damage attack.

Anyway I've found the monster spam to not be a problem when I focus on making all cities at least level 3 and pushing back monster spawns with the ZOC. I've actually found that it reduces the monster threats to a point where I wisht the spawns were increased.

K - I recommend the following to help (as a guy who plays ridiculous as a living):

• Forests - do not leave any forests uncivilized near your faction. They are the # spawn point for monsters and ruffians.
• Borders - Minimize the length of your kingdom/empire border exposed to monsters. You can do this my mildly city-spamming, getting the level 3 ZOC, and using natural barriers such as mountains and oceans to block access.
• Unprotected caravan routes - If you're making routes outside the border of your kingdom such as through wastelands to other factions, then you have no choice but to manually protect them. This is per design. Derek had the exclamation point warning put in to tell players something is inside your ZOC but the point is if you're going outside into the wastelands, you as a player need to watch your stuff.

I hope this helps!

PS - you can also try a bard/charisma build sovereign. My dude just travels around to low level cities, levels by killing monsters/ruffians, and uses his charisma to boost prestige. His bard stuff comes into play by hiring heroes and the cheap and letting them fight other factions. Works pretty good and really helps to solve the problem you're mentioning.

Ya know, DSRaider, I think I might do an AI test on monster spawns like I do on the strategic AI factions. I've noticed the same thing and the fact you're noticing it too has me wondering if something's hosed in the code. Brad's build over x-mas was nuts - the recent builds aren't anywhere close to the challenge that build had.

LOL, yeah. That was the build where my sovereign, Janusk, and my capital were all killed by a bear on season 7. Quickest loss ever.

You can auto-resolve safely if your armor is like twice the attack. The team did rebalance armor in one of the patches so uber-heroes do take damage. It is way better than before. I used to auto-resolve everything for convenience but now I need to be careful.

I auto-resolve a lot of the fights once I get into plate and above, and never seem to have issues. The only time auto-resolve still fails me is when I haven't been watching my cities and a bunch of monsters have gotten close to one of my resource-generating champion dumping grounds which I've left a few decent guards with as well. They love throwing those unarmed cloth-wearers into the fray.

I also find it annoying how weak the monsters are, slowly pushing up and first game on hard world setting tonight. I'd love to see some elementals or even a few daemons come to fight one of my towns over silly swarm spiders and bandits. Be even better if they bring some lovely loot, getting salted pork all the time gets so passe. Then again, the AIs are just as bad, steamrolling the opposition in plate armor while they're basically pumping out berserkers (poor armor, big hammer. Nice try guys, you aren't going to get any hits for me to feel the pain).