[suggestion] Tone down the quantity of wandering monsters / random spawns

As far as I'm aware, monsters are not allowed to spawn within your influence. I think there's a setting when creating a game that has something to do with monster spawns, too.

Reducing the world difficulty should make for fewer/weaker creeps.

I don't want to make the game easier, just reduce the amount of creatures spawning. I suppose it's an xml config value somewhere, so it should be easy to change.

That option doesn't impact the AI difficulty, just the neutral creeps and such.

Perhaps changing Difficulty to Savagery or something similar to denote the difference.

Traditionally in 4x games the "Difficulty" is the AI strength/cheating level not the creep strenth(like in RTS or RPG games).

This would avoid having 2 different difficulty options on two different pages with different meaning.

It used to be called "World Difficulty", which had a bit more context to it..

I admit, I put my game on "Easy" difficulty and was seeing HUGE groups of Bandits and Spiders... wasn't very easy, imo. Maybe a slight re balancing of the spawning would be appropriate. I wouldn't mind the same number of smaller groups of creeps.

Ah, that's good to know.  Thanks!

Ah ... ok ... if it doesn't effect AI difficulty, then where DO I change AI difficulty?

And personally I like all the monsters. Especially the elemental lords. Can I have one as a pet?

Srsly though, it'd be nice to try and dominate/charm those rare/nice monsters.

Same here.  I'm going to try to figure out a way to mod the game to remove the creeps, since even on "Easy" there are vast numbers of Spiders, Wolves, and Bandits.

i'd like to see this as well. Or at least some sort of option to create scouts/patrols to take care of the random critters mucking about.

Where is the "World" Difficulty defined? I can't find it in .XML and it's not CoreDifficulty.xml.

I had a problem with the # of spawns in the last BETA- but in this one it seems fine, ESPECIALLy since its a good way to level people/yourself up.

I'm liking this option too you can turn off the goodie huts and quests why not the monsters? BUT I don't want to turn off the monsters just tone them down. Maybe a slider in the options? Or making them spawn from locations on the map periodically and you take your party over there to take it out? The second option give the player the choice to end the annoyance or leave them there to "Farm" xp off them.

I must say im always in favor of giving the player options.  Though how you would level up your early enchanter...but hey, whatever floats ur boat!

Yea, I prefer the way the monster spawn is currently handled. Its nice to see the occasional creature armies being formed (I suppose the leaders are creature-champions?)

and btw, is there any significant difference between champions and "creature-champions"? Personally I'd rather just have each faction have X number of champions that only they can recruit (hostile to everyone else) and have the rest be split into Neutral (everyone can recruit)

and with some champions being normally hostile (so-called creature-champs), but able to be recruited under certain circumstances.

The creature spawns did seem a bit ridiculous.  At one point I was surrounded by creatures and couldn't go more than a square or two without having to fight creatures.  Almost made me want to stay in my palace, hire a court jester, and eat turkey legs all day.

Monsters don't spawn inside area controlled by nations.

Monsters spawn in forests.

Monsters spawns are triggered by advances in the Adventuring tree.

Keep these things in mind when you place cities and when you are thinking about researching Adventuring.  If you race up the adventuring tree before your area controlled surrounds the near by forests you get swamped by monsters.  If you race up the adventuring tree after your area controlled surrounds the near by forests you can slow down the AI by making the area between your nations very scary.

Sammual

I was wondering about this if the monster levels/population are determined by the highest adventure level across all kingdoms/empires.  So in a MP game you could really screw with someone by focusing completely on adventuring.  Granted you have to deal with all those monsters as well but seems like it would be one option to keep everyone at home.

When you are selecting the other factions there is a difficulty button when you click each of them under "Strengths and Weaknesses".