I'm really enjoying the lates version. However, I am currently having a great dweal of difficulty getting into the middle stage of the game due to the wandering monsters.

The monsters just leave the ai alone. The ai occasionally gets attacked, but i swear, the ai is bribg the monsters somehow. There is no way that you should not be attacked by the monsters if you put an outpost down right beside them. Why is the ai getting away with this? i have a wide variety of spiders and lizards running out of the domains of ai players and wandering into mine. Sometimes they attack me right away, sometimes they wander back and forth if i have a garrison only to eventually attack me. Is the ai actually using a garrison force to drive these monsters away? if they are then i don't know how they cross the wildlands to declare war on me, stand right outside my vision and then appear right beside my capital city to take it. The capital city was lightly defended because i was dealing with the monsters at the other end of my kingdom.

so to summarize:

1) Monsters not attacking ai the way they would attack me. I could not bring my army across the world the way the ai does. Tarth is the way of the gladiator ninja (uh a ninja that kills in a display of showmanship .... moving on lol) right now every ai feels like tarth. They aren't but they FEEL like it.

Solution: place an icon on monsters indicating how they react and how far they roam. Zone of control should not push monsters away but should send them into a frothing rage like swarming locusts directed towards the owner of the zone. It should be a reaction from the zone, not based on what tiles they can "see"

2) Vision. Vision simply isnt big enough. Either you are supposed to build outposts to grant you cities warning that an enemy is approching, in which case ai's need to handle oupost building differently along with a mechanism change of a pioneer unit being used up to build an outpost, or each faction needs anability to "scout" in a manner that doesn't cost too much resources, either gold or mana depending on the faction. I laughed when i saw someone in a video playthrough place slave units all over the place so noone could sneak up on him. given enough time you could make the "great wall of slaves".  I miss the eagle spell for vision. i really do. There should also be an "eye in the skye" spell for magical factions.

3) Garrisons. Why do we have them? This is unclear to me. They were thrown in at an earlier point in the beta because monsters were destroying settlements too easily. They served as a safety valve, we didnt need to make army units until our tech kicked in. This was ok because the ai hadn't learned to attack very well and hero units were very powerful. Well, at this point of the beta, monsters seem very well balanced if they don't go all wonky from zone of control strangeness. The current garrissons can fight off any unit with no armour fairly easily. As soon as armour enters the picture, or group damage spells, and they may as well not exist. There are several suggestions as to how to improve this, but before there is any change made to them, you should have a clear view of how you want an attacking army to take a city, or a clear view on how we should defend our cities - take in mind #1 the current build which has a premium on build queue time (i've had to train myself to only research civ tech when i actually have the time to bulid things - world wonder build queue bugs notwithstanding) and #2 the wage cost of our troops with the lower amount of gold i'm making, why am i spending on troops defending my cities when they are already supposed to be defended by the militia?

Why can't any race make crude bows? why doesn't even tarth start with the ability to make crude bows off the start?

oh well on the bows. (can i at least throw my spear and use a club? please ? no ohhh...)