Neither were a threat on challenging... just irritating by being everywhere and spawning a ridiculous amount of time-consuming weaklings. High-end monsters are too weak (and too close to the starting zones, too).

Monsters are weak to the point where I can beat roughly any monster with 2 leather-clad spearmen (3-men) units that have reach level 3 or 4, which is too easy to obtain. I'd have expected a Shrill Lord to at least require a strong army of mid-game units.

The AI is too concerned with building enormous amounts of pioneers and sending lone (and poorly equipped) heroes in a disorderly fashion, or hundreds of armorless spearmen (rarely grouped in a significant army) to be of any threat.

I was playing Gilden almost exclusively. I should add that playing Gilden exacerbates one of the biggest issues in the game: balance. Armor, for instance, is strong to the point of granting invulnerability; I can win by casting stoneskin on a full-leather clad group of 3 soldiers relatively early in the game. I've yet to see an AI player being able to deal with that. The +25% is too strong (and the weapons are too weak to fight armor anyway, even the spears).

Usually, beating the game comes down to identifying one of the balance or AI problems and exploiting it. Fireball/Blizzard with an Evoker I-II (hit points are too low to counter this), heavy armor.

I'll try to get a savegame after today's patch, but for now I've erased all my unmodded savegames .

Yeah, we really want to see what it looks like after 0.913.

Oh, sorry, I've read "beta 3", my bad.

dont turn the AI down just yet, give us a version where the AI goes nuts, will be playing abit more elemental to get you some saves then if that is what is needed, want it in this post/string or in a seperate thread? (Want me to movie-rize my sessions and send them per email or something, as to not fill up my dropbox instantly?)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I have made a great journey to the land of the mod and back. I think it is time to play some vanilla for awhile to help with balance. I will try and give saves, video of important battles, and some notes on difficulty in a separate post. 

I think i have a condo there.

Ohh, did you hide a secret dot somewhere in the game? 

There were some significant path finding fixes that allowed the AI units to actually get to where they had been targeted.

I apologize for my OCD, but its "too", Derek.  "TOO"!  arggggggggghhhhhh!

On a side note, I'll play .913 and give some proper feedback in this thread tomorrow

I loved how if you didn't kill the duck and managed to get yourself eaten, the game doesn't end, it just lets you struggle endlessly to try and find some way to stab the vile thing from within, but I never quite figured out how...

Select, A, Select, B, A, B, A. 

to = too

Some super quick feedback from just playing a few hours on a large map on hard with everything else normal.

1.  Monsters: Felt about right. (I probably didnt play long enough to really judge this)

2.  AI players:  In 0.912 I used to be able to run around and do whatever I wanted and build randomly in cities and still win. I couldnt this time. Computer players crushed me every time. Now I feel like I actually have to learn what different buildings do and think about what units to make. Im really happy.  

3. Difficulty: Hard

4. Sov: Custom. I feel like I have to choose traits more carefully, which is great.

5. Seems to be making better choices in tactical combat but I didnt play enough to really see that much action.

One cool thing I saw though was that before one attack on one of my cities the AI came with two stacks, from opposite directions, outside my city as if it was doing a troop build up before the attack. Might have been just coincidence but it really looked like it focused my city instead of sending many weak groups at different times like it did in 0.912.

Many buggs are still in the game but I dont have time to report them now.

Great old school reference!!!

I guess trying to find it would be an Adventure!

Nice will play a round asap and advise!