If you get a popup message, you have a free pass one turn. Else, you need to reload quick, or hope you can move before they attack you (very unlikely )

this!

If you can build roads, you can often work your way through bad critters one square at a time utilizing the road's ability to let you move faater; move in, build road, move back; next turn build the next square and run away on road, 'till you've got a road built through the danger zone and can zip past the meanies.  

Which is a bit of a catch-22 because the AI doesn't follow the same 'rules'.

You're stuck with losing a city location to the AI's sub-optimal choice to which the monsters are released and they ignore the AI and come at you....OR you build the city so that the AI cannot to which the monsters are released and they come at you anyways.

I know I know....apparently the monsters aren't programmed to pick on the player.....but in my recent game with Gilden, when the AI Alter player builds a city RIGHT beside 3 DEADLY encounters.... 1 Storm Dragon and 2 Shirll Lords ... that ALL 3 ignore the Alter city and head STRAIGHT for mine 10 squares away....I really REALLY begin to wonder....

Interesting how different people get different outcomes.

In my experience, expanding your borders over the monster's habitat does cause them to attack my cities, eventually.  I have left both weak and epic monsters alive within my borders and usually they start roaming around and in about 20-50 turns they attack the local city.

If you play on difficulties higher than challenging then the monsters will attack your cities more than the AI, as was told to us a while back, since that adds the extra challenge to the game.

Having epics running around sure can destroy your expansion plans, especially when they park it next to one of your newest cities and all you can field is a stack of weak STRONGS.  Lost 2 stacks and 1 city to a rampaging epic last game.  In the case of the city, it was a 12 turn standoff before the epic 9 stack decided my city should die.

That's interesting, I'm a fairly short way into my first Ridiculous 1.2 game (just had a couple of AIs declare war on me). It's hard to be certain but the difficulty level does seem a little higher, the AI seems to be a little further ahead of me than I expected bearing in mind I had a good starting position with good city sites early. That may just reflect a slightly tricky strategic position, my two closest neighbours are aggressive and it's a two front war. But their armies are definitely a bit scarier than I was expecting at this stage, so perhaps there has been a bump up in the AI. Even just building units in fortresses could be affecting the strength of their armies. It's certainly not feeling like a walkover at this stage! That Insane challenge might have to wait.

Well I didn't have a choice, it was either just sit there on the peninsula with my one city or try to sneak by the epic to found my second.  Sure enough, after a few passes the epic started waking around smashing stuff.  I find you often get put in that box.

Also I've seen green stacks of wandering monsters that cannot be defeated until mid game sometimes they like to camp out by your city and attack if you leave.

In my most recent game, I built a city right next to that giant worm guy. Eventually, the city grew so much that it overtook him. So now I have this huge worm thing in my castle haha and I can't attack him b/c my units just go into the city when I click on him. For some reason he just won't attack. Maybe he just likes his new home?

Hopefully with that bug Frogboy fixed, when the monsters Target a city, they actually Will Attack it, instead of getting stuck by a pathfinding bug like they do currently.  I know on the higher difficulty levels the monsters target AI cities (and probably units) less than human player's cities, it would still be nice on a higher difficulty if an AI player city occasionally gets stomped.