Overrun?

Has anyone else noticed in "out of the box" version 4 that huge stack of bandits start  appearing very early?

By turn ~20 or so my Sov starts coming across stacks of 7 bandits roaming around out in the wild, needless to say, he is no match for them. There are no other critters to fight and they jump me so i cannot go past them. I've started 2 games so far with the same results, I played the first until the hordes started razing my cities. Meanwjhile one of the NPCs is methodically building all of the unique buildings in the game. Most of which i don't even have the tech for.