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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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...

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.

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 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...

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.

Agreed!