monsters should attack settlements.

I do think the game is missing an early game threat.  It would make an early peasant militia more useful!

Right now, I only drop into war research when it's time to go kill the AIs.  An early game threat of some sort would be a definite plus!

Yes, we need something like Barbarians in Civ games.

Agreed... Mindful of the occasions where and early monster attacks wipes out all my work. It would really make that choice of first city location important.. I can see it now.. Exploration exposes sweet spot with fertile land, iron, crystal and a beach.. too bad that combat rating 2k rat is sitting on it.... 

yeah, because monsters tend to attack people.  you would think that a group of trolls might want to attack a settlement and run off with some people to have for dinner every now and then.  after all, if the world has gone to hell in a hand basket then food should be scarce for them as well.  they should get desperate and attack settlements.

this would go along way towards reducing the population of the settlements.  so that you need to protect them from roving bands of monsters to keep your population up.  every now and then they also destroy an improvement as well.

it seems to me that in beta 2 they have gotten rid of the monster lairs.  i don't know if in beta 1 the monsters spawned from there or not.  i have seen some monster type locations, but i think a single monster guards it.

creatures should have their own faction AI controlling them as well. they could have 3 types of AI.

Passive: monster tries to keep to itself for the most part. this would be similar to mundane animals.

Defensive: monster  attacks if units, settlements or other threat comes within their territory.

Offensive: these creatures seek out targets and attack, they are predatory, or conquerers.

double post.  forum death.

triple post lol! forum rezed then died again i guess.

ACK! quadruple post wtf!?! is this even possible?

... fivetuple post or whatever.  this is getting ridiculous.

lol Stmorpheus.... Somewhere in some strange land the forum Gods are laughing their asses off.

and agreed.

i don't like that idea so much. At least, not all monsters should attack settlements. Barbarians/orc hordes or whatever should definitely show up later in the game, but it would be really frustrating if that sand golem a a few ticks away from my town prevented me from doing anything for a good 20 turns (I mean it's bad enough he kills my sovereign every time I try to sneak past). 

On topic, along with a monster threat, how's about some wandering unaligned champions occasionally deciding to raid&loot,or even take over, a town?

I liked the idea TW had. Have warriors stationed to avoid riots. ANd im kind of for have a happy gauge. Churches and entertainment to stop rebellions and avoid destruction of your own town

I wouldnt mind a few Independent cities to take over as well. MoM had rebel cities and random monsters attacking in small groups to keep you on your toes. I enjoyed taking over cities without making a big deal taking on other wizards.

The technical term is Quintuple - and yeah, forum boom is always hilarious/annoying.

It shouldn't be too tough, in the early going, that a small peasant force couldn't hold off.  The idea is to give you a reason to at least make some sort of minimal effort to defend your early settlements.  After all, protection is one of the primary motivators for people to congregate and form towns and settlements.

In any event, Civ always had a "Raging Barbarians" option which could be selected or deselected to make the early threat more or less challenging.

Yep, a pack of wolves feeding on your farm's animals or some low level bandits snatching your gold reserves or goblins who abduct townsfolk should be sufficient at the beginning. But like in MoM the bands of raiding parties or rampaging monster mobs should definitely scale to your units' overall strength to a certain degree. Otherwise it would be no threat at all later in the game.

As the amount of reclaimed land increases there should be a bigger reaction to it from the "barbarians."  The reason for this is as the wasteland recedes, and more land is claimed by actual nations, the small groups of barbarians are gradually forced into smaller lands, and forced to survive on fewer resources.  As they are compressed, they begin to organize on a greater scale, and you the players are forced to deal with massive hordes of barbarians coming out of the wastes and/or mountains.

lwarmonger that is good explanation for a game mechanic. I'd like to see something similar implemented. Xtropy I love to use the Raging Barbarians check on civ occasionally as it can completely change the way a game is played depending on how your situated and the resources available.

To make the wandering monsters or barbarians more like reality they could come and raze a building or two and eat/enslave a chunk of the population which doesn't manage to escape to the hills or helm's deep:)

Or you could go the vikings route and simply an army could come to your borders and threaten for gold. If you pay them off they are then likely to come back with a suitably larger army because of their success making it a harder decision to decide whether it is more cost effective to simply keep paying them off...maybe they could become mercs and you could do a roman on them and use them to fight another mutual enemy. It would be a way to make the diplomacy techs more effective even though I have no idea what they plan for them.

Hopefully means barbarians.

From here.

If you could "federate" barbarians on your borders (set them up as little vassal states that act as minor powers but are always set to warlike AI) to defeat the other barbarians, that would be fantastic.  But watch it to make sure they don't all turn on you!

i am hoping we could at the very least mod some of this stuff in if its not in the game already.  i want the standard RPG sterotypical necromancer that makes an army of the undead and tried to take over my cities.

i also want to be raided by giants. maybe the tile editor will allow you to create your own monster lairs and assign them an AI type.  that would be good.

agreed!

Man i told these devs, hey once you start this beta, there will be lots of great opinions to make this game better. They were like NAWWW we are pretty much done with the game mechanics.

Not even close man. This game is missing a few minor details to being super awesome.

Keep in mind though that we are still only seeing very partial betas.  And a lot of the things we discuss aren't actually that hard to change from a game mechanic perspective.  I mean really, what we describe here isn't that difficult, and even my questionable modding skills with python should be adequate to bring a lot of this into the game.

yeah, a monster AI faction shouldn't be to hard to create.  they would be very rudimentary. Considering that they would only have respawn rate, target acquisition, maybe a couple other parameters involved.  i am hoping the devs let us hook up our own AI to their existing code.

Hmm, maybe it would even be possible to permanently rally them to your cause and make them part of your army. Be it through influence, promising them some portion of a newly conquered part of the world or because you act like a barbarian yourself through reckless warfare, intimidation or such...