Good feedback. I agree. Stardock games tend to feature a slower start than other 4X games. It does take tons of time to get a credible group of units together. This wouldn't be a problem if all the initial nearby monsters were weak, but as you said, you will quickly come up against Major nasties. I think this is best fixed by moving high level monsters to the widlands or very rare locations. Replace them with enemies that can be handled by an early game army / sov / magic. Allow these nasties to develop if left alone. This will make the wildlands even more deadly and special, which is fitting. The remaining early nasties will be strong enough to slow early expansion and exploration without choking it off.

I think the situation could be helped with better early techs. The initial military techs are kinda lame and don't do much...a whole tech just to get a wooden shield? That's it? It would be nice to have some more early options. For armor, it might be nice to have an earlier armor level, padded or hide or something. 

Overall though I think most of the problems are balance related and can be improved with further development.

If you have a problem with pacing, trying playing on "fast", it helps a bit. I do think it is a bit slow overall and could use some tweaks, but the option is there, so why not use it?

I play on fast pace to get the game going. Otherwise the pacing is far too slow. I would cut the tier one and two techs costs in half so that normal pace is more tenable. 

If you max prestige at the start through sovereign leveling and civics techs research goes much faster.

I don't have any problem with monsters, they seem easy on hard to me.

I had a start where I was in the northeast corner of a continent, with woods south, mountains (impassable) southwest, and woods west - so only two directions to explore. Within 10-30ish tiles of my home base were FOUR juggernaughts.  The whole 'monsters have strengths and weaknesses' thing didn't apply, those things have no god damn weaknesses and are absolute terrors early game. Also nearby, an earth elemental and a fire elemental with their armies. About turn 80 when they all woke up, wandered around (I had nothing within 3 tiles of their original positions) and crushed a few of my cities. Gave up, restarted.

Gaeb that is a great example. A game like that simply should not happen except on the highest difficulty levels of special scenarios. Some people may see games like that often, some rarely. It is a major balance issue. I again argue that high level monsters outside the wildlands should be very very rare. A player that invests in troops, magic, and/or champions should be able to expand, with difficulty, but shouldn't be completely blocked off by multiple high level threats from the start of the game.

Or you can choose Master Scouts for your Civ and monsters will never attack you, except in Wildlands.

Have played several games and not had this issue goon. Perhaps they aren't playing the game right. I use a lot of magic and that works for me.

I tried playing the game on fast pace. The only thing that appears to have changed is the research time. I would like to also have the option to increase production and or leveling. This way If i wanted to play a "Dark age" game, I could have high production and slow research.

The only good games I have had were on medium maps. This is because more of the map is land based. When i play a large map, they all seem to be a archipelago, which limits my exploration options. Another suggestion would be to have a world type (Islands, continents etc) and to give water a purpose beyond blocking terrain.

As long as I have the +mana for the upkeep, I always keep "Inspiration" cast on all my cities, and absolutely, positively, cast it immediately on first city at start of game, it knocks the research time way down in the early game.

I agree.  Research times and building production times are too slow in the early game.  It leads to too much end turn click spam for my liking.  I'd also be in favor of giving all the sovereigns scouting or some type of pathfinding.  Either that or give a starting scout unit in addition to the sovereign so we have more to do at the start.

I love the startup phase the most. That is one of the reasons that I would easily restart a game if its getting boring

I strongly disagree with the OP.

If the pacing were 'sped up' that would leave little time for exploring and conquering the shattered remains of civilization. 

The early phase is currently my favorite part of the game.  By the time you reach mid-game, the content and AI start to become a little lack-luster.