I've started about a half-dozen games as of the new patch, and while the visuals are better than ever, I'm finding it impossible to actually play a game beyond a few dozen turns before I'm stymied by unbeatable monsters. After having my ass handed to me repeatedly on Easy, I swallowed my pride and dropped the setting down to Beginner; this seemed to work well until I founded my third city (around turn 30 or 40), at which point a small army of Shrills and an Ignys made a beeline PAST my first city to my second one and destroyed it. At that point, I had been focusing on making my economy not a joke so I could afford to actually fight things like this; to see them come out unprovoked and make a beeline towards my most undefended city, on the second-easiest difficulty setting, was so demoralizing that I doubt I'll be bothering with this beta again until the monsters are put in check.
I'm finding myself unwilling to explore the map for fear of having my champions incapacitated or losing my only army. I have no idea what the aggro radius is for that River Slag or Hoarder Spider army guarding the most promising (or worse, only) direction of exploration, and no way to discover that information without risking the loss of possibly my entire kingdom. If I were in any position to actually defend myself against such an onslaught, or if I weren't so bottlenecked by a poor RNG resource placement, this would be a compelling and interesting choice. However, watching helplessly as a drake lays waste to your only city at turn 35 is not only infuriating, it's something you warn your friends about when telling them to not purchase a game.
What the hell? I know most of the posters here have been clamoring for obscenely tough monsters, and while that's all fine and dandy for the more challenging difficulty levels, if I'm going all the way down to the Beginner setting I'm clearly not looking for a challenge. I EXPECT to be able to handle the mobs within the first 6-8 tiles of my starting location without requiring a massive army; having to sit around in my starting city for the first 50-60 turns just to be able to explore the countryside is the worst way to extend the time frame of a game. Now, if I felt like sitting around in my first city and making it as mighty as possible was a viable option, I wouldn't mind; in fact, I'd probably be happy. But as it is, my economy is total crap until I have at least 2 cities with normal taxes (I've yet to get a third city in any of my playthroughs, either because there are simply too many dangerous mobs lying around or because the AI snatches up all the good spots with nigh-impunity) to be able to even afford a single troop of spearmen.
From what I can gather, this game is coming along rather nicely for the hardcore 4X gamers. That's great, as long as their challenging games don't mean that I can't play because even the moron settings are too hard.
