Adding the Fun

You don't need a seriously leveled sov to take down Ophidians, I do it often with some magic and some spearmen backing up my sov. But sounds like you just got dealt a bad hand by the RMG

this is easily fixable, i just made lair guardians much stronger but lair wandering stuff much weaker (early game)

so even if you happen to find early a strong lair you have some time to build and grow around it with not too much disturbance, but lair with grow too eventually so you ll have to find  a countermeasure et voila' all perfect

if devs want they could make lair not get destroyed on influence but i dont think its right after all, maybe just for dragons, after all dragons shouldnt feel very disturbed by a bunch of humans!

I am not sure what type of Sov.  the OP has. As mentioned even a caster/warlock type can get by with some spearmen type early units.  Just heal or enchant up if you are not a melee type.  I said before the random number generator is a merciless god.  Sometimes it can be good to you and other times it can deal you crap repeatedly. 

I have played a few games with the new world generation at startup.  Balanced world with moderate settings.  Sometimes you can get stuck between another empire/kingdom and a wildland, or you can endup in a fertile spot, settle and see another fertile place just 8 or 9 tiles in a cardinal direction away from your first spot.  It's all random. If it says 4 or 6 on medium.  I play 4 if I want time to build/ settle. I play 6 if I don't. 

Ophidians are immune to magic.  Also, they eat spearman for lunch.  I had a level 6 champion, 2 sand golems, and a level 6 sovereign get crushed by an army of 3 Orphidians.  Any RNG is adjustable.  

Also, to say that the RNG is merciless is a cop out.  This isn't a roguelike.  It's a TBS.  People expect some level of fair play, and have since Civ I.  If you make a game that it takes you an hour or two to figure out that you were guaranteed to lose from the beginning...  Well, that's a pretty badly designed game.  You can make the monsters that guard lairs of secondary expansions weaker.  They just haven't done that.  Probably because it's more complicated that just scattering random monsters everywhere.

Map generation is important.  You want to know what sort of reviews FE is going to get?  Watch what happens when your reviewer, who's got other stuff to do gets dealt a totally crap game.  And how often does that happen?  Because I must have seen it in like 60% of my playthroughs.  Deadly monsters guarding secondaries.  Almost peninsula capitals with *nowhere* to go.  Stuck between two empires.   

I'm not fiddling with options.  I'm default everything.

You give up far too easily. Play with the hand you are dealt. This is not like the game is lost, you are just too lazy to work around it if I may be blunt.

Strange they aren't immune to attack magic, wonder if it's a bug

They are not immune to magic, but they succeed on every spell resistance check. That is the reason why they take half damage from attack magic.

No creature is "Immune to Magic" they just have +100 spell resistance so usually just take half damage from magical damage spells, also you can at some late-point, with a super levelled hero, brute force your way through immune to magic with enough spell mastery.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I wish the description were a bit more accurate then.  Because the description says that they are "Immune to Magic".  :-/  Didn't even bother to shoot them with fireballs.  Not that I think it would have helped in this particular instance.

Don't get me wrong, I like games with hard aspects to them.  I just don't think that a player should ever be prevented from founding a second city in a game that revolves around founding cities.  I get that there are things I can still do.  I know I can beat those monsters with enough grinding and spewing out spearmen.  More strong monsters: I'm for it!  Strong monsters sitting on your only secondary expansions is simply not a fair hand to be dealt.  That's all.

I agree, I want a 2nd place for a city too, I usually quit when I can't get it cause I know I will be spanked... Unless I focus on an all out mage hero... or is playing a kingdom faction...

UMBER must be EMPIRE! (its more like a warcry ;))

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I think you're right with the naming convention. Much better name would be "Resilient to Magic" or some such, hell even, "Super-resistant to Magic." Anything that does not make you think, don't even bother trying.

Agreed Ophids are tough.

And I also prefer to take them on only midgame, as early game requires a serious change in research (spears and not civ like mining) as well as production priority.

I must admit that I generally go the 'suicide' route, of racing a pioneer to spot and found the city. Most of the time the Ophids will simply wander out of your territory without attacking ur city. And yes thats without masterscout option. Its borked, but the way it is atm. I really do hope it will be changed. Best way to change it would be an area around lair, where no outpost/city could be settled imo.

Last game I planted two outposts next to 2 strong ogre troll lairs. Both simply wandered off and left my hero with the loot, I really hope this will be changed into ogres making a try on the outpost before returning to lair at least.....will update once i have found the screenshot

 edit: inserted screenshot

This sentiment shows up a lot on this forum.  I think it reflects how homogenous gaming has become.  There's one universal right way to play.  If your game doesn't comport to that way of playing then your game is broken.

FE is a game where players should anticipate that the world itself is a hostile opponent.  If you view the map as a neutral canvas on which the players paint (ala Civ or Starcraft), you'll never be happy with FE. 

A hostile world is part of the lore.  And it's actually my hope that Stardock is designing the campaign to make clear to players just how dangerous the world is.  (it's also my hope that the AI is improved to the point where it can handle a more dynamic world and more interesting monster behavior).

Do monsters even attack outposts? I've never seen it

All lairs treated as "mini-wildlands" to some degree: an interesting notion.

If your 4X game doesn't allow you to expand half the time, then yes, your 4X game is broken.  It's the first X.  This shouldn't be such a controversial line of thought.  

You want to stick Strong/Deadly monsters on secondaries on High difficulties?  Go for it.  On default settings?  Why would you do that?  It kills player progress, which is key to any game design.  Here's the worst idea for a game ever.  It's called: "You Sometimes Can't Reach Level 2."  (By the way, the same argument applies to the way the food mechanic works in this game... max food winds up killing your sense of city progress way too early.)

I also wasn't under the impression that FE was going to be the Dark Souls of TBSes.  I like FE because I liked Master of Magic.  Not because it's stupidly difficult at easy difficulties.  I know it's awesome to Ironman everything, but some people don't ascribe to that method of playing.  There's a line between randomness being an enjoyable aspect of a game and randomness being a useless waste of everyone's time.

They attack mine all the time.    Also anything close to wildland border will get visitors unless/until the wildland is dealt with usually.  It's also worth noting that the monsters are supposed to attack enemy outposts just as frequent as the human player. 

I dunno, my sovereign usually have whacked all the monsters for me to notice anything.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej