Started a new game, love the New Game interface and all the options.
Takes way too long to build meat shields. There's got to be a better way to balance late game troop building than making the early game a tedious slog as you wait 15 turns for a couple guys to make themselves some spears. Or maybe I just need to learn to play the game better and stop trying to play this like it's 0.95.
Well, I may be waiting for troops, but I am loving the environment! I'm surrounded by monsters, everywhere I turn there's a troll or an ogre or a bandit lair or a gasp slag! Nowhere is safe! The world is super dangerous! Finally, my troops arrive, I am able to brave the wilderness... and I find that my neighbor has expanded wildly. Foolish.
Wait. Why is that Slag chasing me and not the pioneers wandering without protection? Well, no worries, easy enough to escape. It's just a fluke of the random monster AI...
Strange to see an Ogre just wandering, oh, it's because some earlier pioneer put down an outpost and released him. Strange, the completely undefended outpost is still there. And here's another undefended outpost with roaming monsters all around it. Suspicious...
And then it happened. That same foolhardy AI Pioneer that the slag had ignored a few turns earlier walks into a forest infested with mites. Haha! Silly AI, now you're in for it. The pioneer steps closer, the mites move in for the kill... and they occupy the same space?!
A couple turns later, the AI's pioneer reaches a nice spot next to a river, with four monsters dens within a tile's distance and founds a city. Completely undefended. Maybe the monsters are just not attacking anything? I walk over to check it out, bang, I am attacked by a Troll and his wolf army.
That really sucks.
The whole AI unit and monster unit on the same tile thing sucks. The monsters only attacking my stuff sucks. The whole concept that a pioneer can wander undefended and plop down outposts or a city without fear of the monsters it passes or settles next to sucks. The world is supposed to be dangerous.