Worked for me fine.  Noticing a lot less small-time mobs and a lot more large mobs I'm having to avoid in .10... not all that far in, so will continue for now.

There is less monster clutter. You should be able to find some killable units, but they spawn from lairs with powerful guardians. 

Interesting, that makes lairs something you have to control until you are strong enough to wipe the boss, cant wait to try it.

Ahh, that makes sense then.  Was getting used to having to fight my way through to lairs early, can't really do that now.

Well, in about 3 maps with different settings near my spawn point its just 570hp stack crag spawns and crow demons and nasty stuff like that, so far the only thing i can do with my sovereign is stay in the starting city lol.

yeah i dont think this mod is one bit balanced. ridiculous. i had a game where i was forced to say in my city for 50 turns till i could get a decent army to tackle these mobs. but by then a orgre horde was marching towards my city...

What are your settings?  This mod is designed around Sparse Monsters as default.

There is a hang bug when attacking the city in the attached save.  When the second group of defender mages attacks, the battle hangs, even when the game is loaded up straight after the computer boots into Windows (7, 64 bit).  I think I might have been able to win the battle if I could fight it out, but auto-resolve gives me no chance.  Is this a vanilla bug, or related to having mage defenders (which aren't in vanilla)?

not really, sparse monsters is closer to vanilla but one of the selling points of the mod is a more dangerous world with default settings. but he raises a valid point, the mod should be CHALLENGING but still fun to play on default settings. if you can't do anything but sit in your capital then something is wrong.

We're still tweaking the monsters. It's very hard.

Monsters are always hard to balance. We are trying to have weaker roaming armies, but more difficult bosses on top of lairs. This version we didn't manage to reduce the boss movement to 0. So you will see some rough stuff roaming in the bush. If you are still at a point in your skill level where you get stuck at home, switch the game pace to Fast.

Sean - question: i have problem with the difficulty settings... This "Chuck Norris" difficulty shows up for me between hard and expert. What is it? I also realize that description of difficulties do not fit, so hard shows a tool tip saying "expert difficulty is ... ". Another question: how can i check what world difficulty i am playing with? 

Since i am playing dense monsters i find hard/expert difficulty for world/AI's is my comfort zone, but i am not sure b/c of what i wrote above ...

World Difficulty is the setting you see on the main setting screen with monsters, shards, etc. This setting primarily affects how soon lairs will upgrade, how much of the map monsters can see, and the Hp bonus to monsters. Anything above Challenging will have faster lair upgrades and is designed for players that have full mastery over power leveling a Sov. The difficulties go Hard, Harder, Chuck Norris, Expert, Insane, Ridiculous. I stick to Normal since the balance is still being perfected. Going lower than that will make the early game much more manageable. 

These settings have another function for faction AI. In the next screen you see the same series of difficulties for the faction AI. These settings are generally what decide AI intelligence, economic bonuses, revealed FoW, Sov bonus Hp, unit bonus Hp. Harder and Chuck Norris are set up to give no bonus to Hp for normal units. Harder is a basic revealed FoW for AI, +30% economic bonus, longer AI thinking time. The Sov in Chuck Norris gets +30% Sov Hp and +40% economic bonus. Those two are my personal settings for what I think is fair for the AI. I don't like giving them extra Hp for normal units. I like long turns where the AI checks its pathing each turn to avoid danger and create it. I may have also increased the AI intelligence on Chuck Norris.

Difficulty settings are probably the most personal settings. I suggest everyone make their own. I included mine to give people an idea of how I play.

In today's release (or soon if the bugs prove too much for me to handle) we should have:

-Better lair balance.

-Lair Guardians that don't move (They have 0 move on the Strategic map).

However, you have to find a way to kill the guardians around you quickly, because they upgrade relatively fast... and to powerful stuff. You've been warned.

The roaming groups 'should' always be manageable. Tough, but not so tough that you'd lose lots of resources fighting one. But enough that you won't always be able to keep all your good troops alive.

Sean:

- 200 gold per person for unit's upgrade (from 3 soldiers to 4) is too much. If i want to upgrade spider or wolf to 4 it costs 600 gold .... 100 gold per person would be ok, though i think perfect is 50 gold per extra troop (game, after all, encourages big armies, if i have like 10-15 groups to upgrade it just costs way too much)

- regarding difficulty: i played, by mistake, hard/hard settings. AI has big problem to develop at all at 'dense' monsters. I have ranking 100 at the moment (100+ turns into game), 3 races are out by wildlings, and the best in ranking is only 43 PR ... I think if set insane world, and hard AI i will win just by surviving longest

-  a guardian statue that you can get to defend city is very expensive and its stats suck, after all, they are available only in late mid game, and then they got beaten by any troops ...

- regarding difficulties: thanks for explanation; it still will be nice to fix tool-tips for those difficulties, I was not sure whether i should trust option or tool tip. Again: is there a way to check world difficulty once a game started?

Yes, you can always check difficulty by looking at the tooltip of your saves in the saved game menu. If enemy factions are sucking on higher difficulties, I might give them a stronger economic boost or more Hp. I encourage you to take some time in the XML file and see what you like best. There is no right way to let the AI cheat. The blood can't only be on my hands. Though, it does go well with my pallor...

When I look at the tooltip in my saves it only shows me AI level of difficulty, it does not show me the world's difficulty. 

When i got a moment i will look into xml files, i have no modding experience, but i worked in the past as computer programmer, so i hope i can decipher them

Sean, did you decipher what was happening in the save in reply 484?

Ya, sorry, that appears to be a vanilla bug. Just one of those animation bugs.

Sean - something is buggy (at least in .002 version I'm playing) with Darkling Shamans. In this shot, he is invisible... he cast something right out of the gate, disappeared, and I can't attack him and he can't attack me. Kind of a buzzkill, he was a level 18 shaman in a fully army stack defending his lair. This was the climactic battle to free all the area around Curgens!   This final stack was 9 units, had 5K+ hit points. Epic.

Another vanilla bug. Some units play the death animation right away and do that. I have seen it in both versions. You are still playing .002?

Yeah... didn't want to abandon this game yet, too fun.

Version 1.0.011 us up. Link to mod library page added. Download link is again Mediafire.

This update eases the pain of the early game. Workshop gives +3 PPM. Base PPM is now 8 instead of 6. That will mean more production early on and a more difficult choice about when to get Mining. Command Post is cheaper to construct. Early game monster balance is much better. Any players that are having a problem with a specific monster, let me know and I'll add it to the list. The AI will produce more units now. Wages have been reduced. There are many minor changes geared to balance out the general difficulty in the early game. Not just pushing it farther away from the start, but altering how soon it exists. Lair bosses now have 0 moves thanks to some genius tinkering. This means much harder bosses will keep lairs in play until at least the midgame in most cases. The reduction in wages will mean many more armies can be produced to defend against this. A proper changelog should be up soon.

[Edit] Changelog updated.

Yay! off to try new version, i was playing 9 in while waiting

I don't understand the reasoning behind Mana Blast.  100 mana is a huge amount for a starting spell (could easily be ALL your mana).  Especially when you can start with Flame Dart which is arguably better.  I suggest switching Mana Blast with Arcane Bolt, which would make a much more useful level 1 spell.  Mid-game Mana Blast could be viable when spending 100 mana to nuke a boss mob is worth doing (but may require balance tweaks).

Edit: I've also noticed it has a tendency to HEAL its target...?