Are there too few places to settle?

Agreed with too few places to settle, and no matter how hard I try, AI on hard will always get there first, I at most get to build 2 cities, due to being blocked by monsters >_<

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

If you send out your sovereign on a little trip he will find a place to settle. I have never had much problems with this. The good thing about this game is that a 3 city empire can compete with a 5 city empire, due to the growth mechanism and the importance of the sovereign/champs.

True but sometimes you can't even find a spot for a 2nd city, which really messes you up because of a lack of total food.

I think the best solution would be a spell that allows you to spread existing fertile ground another tile. This way you still couldn't build wherever you wanted but if you had a bad starting spot you could do something about it. It would have fairly high opportunity costs such as require a early magic tech and a lot of mana.

I play with the world on temperate, so I never have this problem... it's actually quite the opposite. It's just that all the nice spot are guarded by monsters you don't want to mess with early on.

I like the difficulties to find a good place for the second city. And as josoze mentioned you don't need lots of  cities to compete against the other factions.

There was problem with city spaming earlier. I think the recent mechanism solved them.

In the middle game I always have enough cities to deal. Closer cities would be a hadache after a while if you want to build an empire.

Normaly its fine with 2-3 decent cities but about 33% of the time I seem to get either a 3/3 empty stretch of coast or no expansion. What we need are guaranteed expansions and decent start locations.

While you can restart the game, there are X number of crippled AI players every game you cannot see. Probably one reason AI get so many invisible bonuses.

There are some spells in the late game that allow you to spread fertile land growth... 'Bloom of Spring' and 'Bloom of Fall' I think.

They are only available under certain conditions.  I think it has to do with how you set yourself up (character or nation).  It's a nice perk when you do have it, but it's so late in the magic tree that it doesn't help much early on.  Maybe it should be allowed earlier in the game, and not be quite so hard to get set up.

My biggest problem, however, is honestly finding areas without strong monsters blocking me.

Yup. I think that the inbalance we testers see actually arises from the AI not dealing with monsters effectively and vice versa - monsters not dealing with the AI effectively. Once this gets worked out, I think that the current world building options will look just fine.

And the AI settles cities around them without any problem, whereas if our sovereigns do so, they're turned into pate.

I am well into a game 0.914, and I am having no problems with places to settle.  I have 6 towns linked by outposts, and have only explored about 1/8 of the map.

I am quite happy with this as I don't want to play the game of city micromanagement.  Besides it adds strategy to building your empire, and I love having to search for a good spot, you find some of them in the most unlikely of places.

Bigger problem is it's too inconsistent game to game.  My last game I had carved out probably a quarter of the map to myself very quickly with mostly fertile terrain while the AI was all boxed in by opponents and surroundings.  Other games I'm the one boxed in.

I agree. I don't mind at all that there aren't too many places where you can settle. A nice mechanism to stop city spamming along with prestige. Thing is that on the random maps it seems a little inconsistent, meaning that sometimes you're just out of luck. 

My problem is not enough heroes.  I have only found one and I am now at season 450.

If you're slow on grabbing those heroes at the start, the AI will either grab it, or kill them.