In your case, what about reducing all pace settings to "slow/non-existant"? Then building/researching anything would take ages, and you'd be able to just explore/find loot to your heart's content.

That and setting the difficulty to easy (or lower if it exists).

Then just pick civ traits that help for your defense (like Defender and Unending Horde), and pick Sov traits that maximise attack against spammy troops (such as Fire 2, Impulsive, and Atunement/Meditation).

Then, pick Fire3 when you are able, maybe get a second champ to get Air 4 so you can teleport late-game should you come under a surprise attack ...

and, yanno, just play the game how you want to (aka exploring and killing monsters)

Hopefully they have dealt with the city spam issue in beta 3. 

I stopped playing beta 2 because of the insta-expansion, whack a mole ai.

It was not difficult to beat but boring as (insert expletive here) anything.

I don't agree with you on the research pace though - for me, like expansion, it should be a lot slower, then it will mean something...

Well the AI in MoM as I remember it, were alot better at creating better units, especially like archers etc. Also because the span from rubbish units to great units were... less visible.

With games like MoM you gotta pay close attention to the spells you create, since they EASILY go and take control of them game, I have been gruing for the spells of mass destruction in the vids, because it seems at some point in the game everything is going to be controlled by the amount of mana each side has, and seemingly as I can see on the mana costs you are supposed to have thousands of backup mana easily available.

I would hope at some point that mana will be less fluctuating between having a MASS of mana, and struggling with having enough mana.
Same with spells, I am not in favor of strengthening the current benefits of having mages as heroes, as long as you have mana available, since it favors the player which have been the most lucky with the random placement of mana nodes.

Npc swarm ATM is not a problem to me, except I miss the AI players doing something properly with they're stacks of heroes and peons, Usually seeing them wander aimlessly around, a few time getting to the point of attacking, where rushing 1-2 defender units to my otherwise empty skeleton-crew cities is enough to kill 2-3 stacks of pointless peons thrown at them (And settler units for some reason, which kind of insane general sends settlers to invade enemy cities? ).

But I think it is as it is because Frog need to polish the AI, so thumbs up for posting, and ATM I only want a "Workshop" So I can design some lategame units for the AI, instead of having to play each faction in major games and going for specific unit strategies.

Also am excited to the next patch as there should be more (Less pointless) Traits to units in the design screen, either that or they just polished them

Sincerely
~ Kongdej