[0.95] Frustrated...annoyed brief thoughts..

You can turn down the monster density in the options, it might be in the advanced tab. Myself, I put them at dense, I love leveling up my troops.

it's not the density that's at question. It's the toughness at such an early stage of the game. As is, your city has to split production between buildings, pioneers, scouts, resources, and troops. The early game takes too long. Add a tough wandering monster and your'e wiped out pretty fast....or at the very least beaten to a point where you'll never catch up to your opponents.

Yes, I agree that this can be quite aggravating. Although no monster is unbeatable, it is really annoying to face the strong ones early on in the games. What reason? I don't know. Maybe the AI player decided to upset a goodiehut.

Yeah I know that I can turn down the density.. I don't mind the initial density.. but it feels like when the initial explore is done the world releases some random god-like mobs that have no purpose other than to make you miserable and you cant do a damn thing about it.. the game might as well just randomly destroy chunks of the map.. and that's really not fun at all.   And let's not forget that that's the whole point after all.

It is not the game per se. It is AI players building their outposts without regard to monster lairs. Had the same problem with a rather cramped starting spot and in turn 56 I had 2 obsidian golems and 1 slag rampaging through my empire (playing as magnar) and randomly stomping my improvements and cities. And as in previous betas they seem to ignore the AI but unfailingly take course for my empire if I glimpse them from afar (if they are already in the cultural borders of an opponent of mine). All is well if I start of isolated but oh woe me if there is an opponent close by.

I agree about the problem being the AI's impunity with monsters and lairs.  See https://forums.elementalgame.com/429560/get;3208892.

Yeah, exactly as Steven mentions in that thread.

It really makes me wonder, are wandering monsters as a feature really worth it?  I can see having monster lairs scattered about the map being cool challenges for my heroes,... but the pure randomness that the rampaging monster armies bring.... I'm not seeing any fun or upside to them.

I have discovered that the AI in FE mainly does only 3 things.

1 - Demands money from you.  (stupid and unnecessary)

2 - Declares war on you for no apparent reason. (stupid and unnecessary)

3 - Cheats.  I don't care what the devs may tell us, the AI, in one way or another, cheats it's head off.

The wandering overpowered monsters are definitely a fun killer.

In Stardocks defense (and not to put words in their mouth....it's just what I think I read in one of Frogoby's threads somewhere...but I'm not going to look for it) is that Stardock isn't going to work on AI upgrades until they fine-tune the balance of the game and determine if tatical-tiles for battles will be added.

Once they know what they're working with, they'll look at AI...

Well I really hope so.  The AI in FE at the moment reminds me of the early GCII AI. It was so ridiculously predictable, if you were underpowered it would attack you, if you were overpowered it would give you money.  It never done anything spontaneous, random or unpredictable, and sadly never made a mistake.  It was utterly boring.

Make the AI NOT settle near the big monsters to trigger them then, or change the trigger. Dont stop wandering monsters. We are supposed to be in peril. This is not a game where the monsters are lined up and waiting for you to take them one at a time (I hope)

sry but this whole game is built around the (very good) idea of living in a wild world, rich of danger

if everything that you encounter COULD be defeated then what would be the purpose of the game?

think about it, if everything can die there is just no reason to play, you just cast the spells you need and win every fight, where is the fun in that?

but ofc the game is still  far from reaching a balance, there are still too many monsters too strong and others too weak, and the game need some better code to deal with early game, like letting dragons sleep for N turns etc etc

also consider this is a GAME, which means you may fail, and im pretty sure you did

in many games i started and got destroyed then i loaded many turns back, changed my plan and then its all fine, try to improve your game choice, while the stardock improve the game and fix its problems

Isn't being able to win kind of the point?  Where's the fun in having no chance of success?  

And then you agree, that there's too many monsters and they're too powerful and unbalanced..   That's the point I'm trying to make here, I'm just unconvinced that the wandering monster mechanic can be made to work.   

Age of wonders, HOMM, and MoM all had static monster lairs,  and it did not hurt the design and they clearly weren't 'lined up' but they also weren't random tornados of death and destruction.

If I get a message 'Magnar has loosed the great wyvern upon the land'  and then it shows up, that's a different story.. but from the player's perspective the rules that explain how and why things start rampaging are unknown, and IMHO unfun.

Sorry for the ramblings, I don't have many hours a week to play, house, toddler, teenager and career take care of that,  so when I sink my oh so precious spare time into a game and then it rewards me by random unavoidable failure,  I get grouchy  

I get your frustration but you may have to accept that this is a game where a few hours a week just aren't enough to really get into the mechanics and play it well...

I don't mean to sound arrogant, but some games are meant to be checkers and others are meant to be chess - for me, HOMM and AoW provided no challenge whatsoever, and this game is rapidly becoming easy to beat (after I've invested several man-days on it).

Sure, there are still maps where I find myself in near-impossible situations, and have to use every ounce of my gamesmanship and to exhaust all of my resources desperately using all my mana, rushing units and winning battles by the skin of my teeth in order to survive - but I get the most adrenaline rush out of those moments, and I've survived more than 50% of them and gone on to win the game (which is just the percentage I'm looking for).

I know that not everyone is a powerplayer, but making the game more static (or in your words "less random") and therefore easier and more predictable is NOT the way to go - for starters, you may want to switch the difficulty to "easy" in order to get it to the level of your playing involvement...

The game really isn't that difficult. I have had no real trouble with monsters. I am not complaining the game is easy as I play on normal settings, not challenging or ridiculous, but the monsters are hardly a problem and I find the enemy AI to be decent. They are putting up a good fight. There may be times when powerful monsters come rampaging, you got unlucky that time. This isn't something that always happens. You are playing random worlds, there are going to be times when you just get an unlucky situation. This is far better then everything being predictable and the same each time you play. If you want an easy game, put the settings on easy and lower the density of monsters, I doubt you will have trouble as I am not having trouble on normal. Perhaps you are playing the game wrong. Now this doesn't mean every once in a while there may be a situation where you just can't win, that seems fine to me. You shouldn't always be able to win. Try starting up a new map, I bet you won't have the same problem.

Oh I'm willing to play the game over months and months..  And I don't take it as arrogant, really.. i used to be you Then life happened.

And i don't need to put it on an easier difficulty, and yes winning battles or loosing battles and adapting your strategy on how things go and event in the game that's FUN. that's the joy of strategy games.. I absolutely agree.. 

BUT, when there's no option of success, no planning to prevent it, no recourse and no rhyme or reason as to why your town / army / outpost suddenly gets destroyed.. it's dis-empowering to the player and breaks the fantasy for me.

If I were sinking a couple million dollars into a project and one of the design bullepoints was .. "Sometimes the game is unwinnable."  I'd walk out the door.

And yes I'm already starting another game,   Because when the game flows and things work  it's really, really good.  

OK, I just went back and looked at your original post - I'm sorry to say, but if I were facing a stack of ogres (of any size) with a sovereign AND a champion that I had developed properly to level 6, a warg, a wolf and a squad of militia or other defenders, I would wipe the floor with them... once again I am not bragging, just stating a reality.

Also, losing an outpost and one out of three cities is par for the course, especially if you haven't been careful in your expansion strategy (e.g. putting cities close to mountains, defending passes with outposts, clearing out the area first etc.) - and you can still survive and make a comeback with your remaining two cities...

To expect a game where you never lose a city or an outpost or get attacked by a superior army may be a bit too much - I get that all three things happened at once, which is a very poor roll of the dice, but any decent D&D gamer will tell you that sometimes you get unlucky. AND STILL, under this incredible bad luck, your game is most definately not "unwinnable" and leaves a ton of options for successfully coming back - it may have just gotten harder, yes, but I for one would relish the challenge of salvaging that game, even with the odds against me...

I think one thing that might help the game is an easier easy setting. People may have forgotten, but the meaning of easy is to play with ease. Monsters should not be able to roam at this setting. It would solve so many problems for new players. New being relative, as some of use have been playing for two years already. I played a game in my sleep last night and apparently was narrating it to my bedfellow. 

I agree - do whatever you want with the easy setting to accomodate the casual or novice players, and make the hard settings almost impossible (AI cheating and everything) - but keep the normal setting challenging, random and unpredictable! I have played more than 30 games since Beta 3 came out, and I can safely say I can play a lot better and deal with seemingly unbeatable situations much more effectively now...

Well look at my post here and the save game that is in it and see how well you can do

In this thread, https://forums.elementalgame.com/429635, an interesting idea was presented that might be of interest to you.

Having more wildlands in the game with all the stronger monster in strong wildlands would take care of your problem in that you won't have to worry about the really strong monsters until you try take over a strong wildland.

No the problem here is that placing lairs under ZoC causes monsters to attack random things period. They should attack only the outpost or city that aggroed them, and anything that gets in their way. Then they should return to their lair. Problem solved. The whole idea of stupid actions across the map by a AI you never met getting your capital destroyed is stupid. The problem has always been those drakes and ogres that get randomly unleashed but they just keep nerfing all the already weak monsters. The problem isn't monsters are tough it is that super late game monsters routinely start attacking random things early game. That is just a bad idea.

Agreed!

Urist thinks losing is fun.