Hmm, didn't know you could do this, but it sounds like a bug.  I don't think it should be allowed on summons?

Just got leveled by an Umberdroth that the sneaky AI scouts activated near my capital.  Did even have a chance to build a second settlement.  On normal (default) settings getting repeatedly creamed by monsters.  AI empires seem to do okay, most of the time they are large in size than my own, when looking at population and number of settlements.  The strong monsters (Umberdroths, Fell Dragon yep saw Verga bite the dust challenging one of these early although  not permanently slain) need to be placed on the map far away from starting locations.

Notice the following if you cancel building a sawmll the forest is permanently destroyed so you cannot build again, did not play long enough to see if saw mill would be in que if forest appeared.

Custom sovereigns have same issue as E WoM were after quiting and starting new game appear as headless and shirtless.

Have given up on playing custom Soveriegn with Capitar (no longer supported/balanced) not sure if it is true but seems like pop growth really slow.  Will have to try Umber to see if same.  Granted this is observation only have not gone with hard data.  Granted I don't seem to be very good at this game right now.

I think the fact that you can summon both strategically AND tactically is overpowered. You effectively get two tactical battle units for every new summon creature spell you get. This can make the early game especially easy (assumeing you have enough mana to do it) when you get two shadow wargs per tactical battle right away with one leveling up to boot. Later if you get summon ice elemental, you get two ice elementals per tactical battle plus two wargs if you want em. And if you get summon earth elemental relatively early you are laughing. Those guys are tough (Although I admit I love having two of those suckers in a tactical battle if needed hehe).

Yeah, I agree, it does seem like you should have one or the other, a tactical summon or a strategical summon, not both.  I rampaged as well through a few opponents with the ability to have 2 fire elementals.

Yeah, this is really annoying, all their abilities seem to disappear too.

I played on normal and I thought the world was too aggressive. It is quite frustrating losing cities to crag armies and umber-beasts. It takes so long to research decent troops upgrades and to actually build the decent troops to protect cities that for most of the first hundreds of turns it is all sovereign and heroes who can't cover the distance between cities nearly fast enough. This period takes too long and is frustrating.

Slow leveling (why? this is the most fun), slow tech, slow movement. The pieces of a great fun game are there but I am not a fan of the pacing.

Hello, figured I would chime in a bit. It is late so apologies if this is a tad scattered.

The game's pacing and feedback are its most glaring issues. The pacing is incredibly stretched out, and yet the gameworld always fills up with outpost/city spam all too quickly anyway. In turn, you have this sense at the beginning that there is a big, scary environment out there, but a short while later it is painted in borderlands. Pioneers should be some of the most expensive early-game units, a la Civ's settlers/workers, instead they're some of the easiest to produce. It is a gameplay fault that affects the game literally from the beginning and infects it right to the end. There is no sense of exploration, of slow expansion. And the game tries to feel epic otherwise-because everything else can take ages to get going. Techs take a long time to be learned, and yet they don't produce much individually; the response/return on science-techs is always a trickle, a drip-drip into a bigger pool, if that makes sense. Buildings take ages to build as well, to go along with the science-rate... In turn, the player is often left middling about, which is bad. You never want a player to be wondering what to actually do, and that is often the case in this game.

Additional gameplay hang-ups:

- Non-huge monsters should not raze cities. Outposts should repel non-huge monsters at the border. There should be a sense of agency within your civilization; that there are people who live within it, not just inside the walls of your towns. You should feel safe inside your borders from the wilderness of the outside world, but not from the big-bads, if that makes sense. When you send pioneers out it should be as an expensive voyage into a dangerous, untamed world; not the lame, scurrying land grab it currently is thanks to the cheapness of expansion.

- Cities should be difficult to take. Invaders should start far away on the battlemap and face archers and maybe even guard towers.

- What's the point of the tech tree's structure as it currently stands? You can tech military and still spam cities. Someone should try playing around with a Civ-styled tech tree. The current one is not good, IMO. The science kind of plods along in chunks, and you never complete a tech and get a sense of return on it. Perhaps look into condensing the trees; putting techs together and increasing costs. The tech tree is chaotic and mindless right now. Civilization had the "ages" to help shape its tech-trees -- that gradual advance from, for example, "Classical Era" to "Medieval Era," wherein you could immediately see the changes and what was going on. Visible feedback. None of that gameplay sense exists in this game at the moment.

There are other issues, but I am too tired to list them out. I feel like these above are some of the biggest problems right now, though. Otherwise the game has a lot of promise and it is enjoyable to play in its current state, it just needs improvement and sharpening.

Have played the start of two games now in 0.913 and the AI is much stronger.  I've been at war with everyone all the time and that has been no cake walk to defend all edges of my kingdom.

The political relations seem set a bit too high though, it is always asking for massive amounts of gold for trade and tech packs which should be much lower you'd think so that both sides would enter into them for mutual benefits, or the economy needs to be boosted you can't ask for 400 gold and only be making 11 a turn same with lvl 7 & 9 champions recruit costs.  No one is recruiting them as they cost 800-1600 gold so you'd have to play for days to get one and by then the game would be mostly completed.  Can hero recruit be modified too to cost multiples with out the tech and the tech decreases the hiring cost maybe 2-4-8 or something then the 1600 gold champion would be 200ish?

The AI monsters are aggressive and impressive.  Umbroth are maybe a little too powerful, I had one spawn burn down 3 cities before I caught up with it.  If their map moves are limited to 1 square that would help this a little too as I don't see why they need to travel faster than your troops can, or don't benefit from roads?

One issue I have found is the Drake camps disappear now one defeat and the drakes can no longer be built.    unless this was a 0.913 change?

Version: The latest 913 (somthing) Downloaded this version on Sunday. Two days ago.

Played my Custom Soverign

Opponets - All the Soverigns

Map: Large

Difficulty Level: Challanging

AI for the neutral monsters a lot better. I actully fear for my nations life (good thing)

AI Other Soverigns - Better than before but still a push over and they are not aggressive enough.

Neuteral AI rarly attackes the AI Soverigns (which is bad)

Tactical Battles - Every tactical battle I have played in this version stops at one point during the battle and will not go pass that. I have to hit the Auto Resolve button to complete the battle. This has never happend in the other beta versions. Started 3 more games and had same issue.

1) I don't find monsters challenging once the early->mid game transition comes. Strong monsters should stay challenging in the late game, if the focus of the game is really about fighting the environment. As it is now, a sovereign and 3 leather clad, boarspear-armed, 5-soldiers units with traits will kill any monster save the wildland bosses with minimal to no losses.

The only thing monster achieve is to make expansion very difficult until I can reliably produce the aforementioned groups, which in itself is not a bad idea. Having to clear fertile lands to settle them, at great cost, is an interesting game mechanics. Unfortunately, the AI doesn't obey this rule, which forces the player to expand regardless of the presence of monsters. It's really frustrating. If the player needs to work on clearing new settlement areas before he can expand, so should the AI. 

Late game monsters need a major increase in power if they are to be a challenge past leather/chain and boarspears, (but shouldn't be 'everywhere' so that some early/mid-game expansion is possible).

2) On challenging, the AI player is way behind. It's really helped by not having to deal with monsters the way humans do, but even though it has more resources and cities, its army management, hero management and spell use are just not cutting it. It's easy to build an army the AI won't be able to kill.

The AI needs to start using 'combined arms' and a general, consistent research, hero leveling and army building strategy. It needs to use armors on some troops. If it goes for quantity over quality with masses of spearmen, it should research army size and group size better. And even then, sticking with early spears won't work forever - at the late chainmail era, cheap units should wear a bit of leather and wield boarspears. 

3)I played on challenging.

4)I played Gilden. By the way, either Gilden's powers are too strong, or other factions' are sometimes too weak. Probably a bit of both. +25% armor and "2 bandits escort the sovereign at the beginning" are not in the same zip code, or even on the same planet. 

5)I crushed the AI by using better army composition. Sure, I'm playing Gilden, they're somewhat overpowered when it comes to regular armies. But that's not the only point. I wasn't even building my armies that well; I was just doing the bare minimum: since the AI is coming at me with weak, unclad units and isn't massing them appropriately, all I need to do is protect my soldiers well so I can take the AI's armies one by one with minimal attrition. If the AI was better at unit choice and army composition, I might have to actually THINK about what soldiers I want to use.

I don't even have to build lots of cities. 2 are enough, as long as they produce a bit of money. Then I build some early armored troops, I cast stoneskin, and I win the game.

6)At work currently, no savegame .

I'm a long way from winning my first game on 0.913, challenging, large map (well, my second, but the first had a horrible setup and the monsters finished me early on), but answering what I can:

1. The monsters are a definite threat to me, strangling my expansion. They're less of a threat to the AI players - sometimes attacking but otherwise not. Altaria managed to establish a town in a place I had previously lost one to some Knights of Asok, and another next to a spider mob, both of which ignored them. They're continuing to be legitimately tough into what I guess is my mid-game. A Shrill Lord has been harassing one of my cities by sending out small shrill mobs, but thankfully hasn't become active itself.

2. Several AI are playing well. Kraxis is playing very aggressively (including breaking a non-aggression pact established after our first war, which I didn't know was possible). I am gradually winning, having swiftly beaten their much less threatening Resoln allies. Altaria are the most successful, spamming cities in a way that I haven't been able to - in part because of being invisible to the monsters. Someone has gobbled up all the low-level Kingdom heroes, I don't know if it's other Kingdoms hiring them or Empires killing them. I don't know about other factions but Kraxis is building tough troops to launch their major attacks while using lone heroes to harass my outposts. I'm playing Gilden so my own troops are faily hard, thankfully, given my lack of heroes. All 8 main factions are playing, I have yet to meet Yithril and haven't had much to do with Magnar or Tarth yet but all the others seem to be doing pretty well - even Resoln, who could stand the loss of three of their cities as they were spamming settlements and had places to fall back to after we signed our peace treaty. It's going to be a long, involved game for a while yet

3. Challenging.

4. Gilden, with default leader. I'm trying out all the different races to see which fits best. My best game on the previous version was as Umber (hint, hint).

5. No success as yet. I'm wearing Kraxis down by targeting their cities while they battle me, Altaria and Tarth, but Karavox is landing plenty of solid hits on me. There's also a cheese-war taking place - the AI has access to various movement cheats (early access to Tireless March and early escape from Tremor immobilization) which I'm countering with save scumming when he does something that should

Well, I've given up on 0.913 for now: it's just a bit too tedious, even on 'Normal' difficulty. My complaints have all be cited above (slow leveling, monsters wandering a significant distance to attack my outpost and cities, etc.). I play for enjoyment, and this version isn't terribly fun (IMHO).

I'll repeat what I've said in another thread elsewhere in the FE forum a while ago, and what someone has already said in this thread: be careful not to mistake beta testers for end users. I see a bit of an arms race going on here: the beta testers find 'exploits' (e.g., specific trait/tech/strategy combinations that are highly effective), and the developers try to make them harder to achieve or less useful. To a certain extent, that's necessary -- you don't want a 'Monty Haul' campaign as the default -- but I've found the last few beta releases to be less fun and more tedious...and I go all the way back to EWOM, so I'm hardly a novice to this particular game.

I'll note that something similar happened with Fall From Heaven II. There was a version released in which the wandering barbarians stopped attacking your cities and instead would just wander through your territory destroying improvements. It was much more difficult and costly to kill them out 'in the field' than when defending your city, which meant you suddenly had to spend a lot more time building up your armies, replacing killed units, rebuilding destroyed improvements, etc., and the game got very tedious as a result. (I was playing the game to build empires, not to skirmish unendingly over farms, roads, and horses.) I rolled back to the previous release and never upgraded after that. This version has something of that flavor, and the game is losing its appeal to me as a result. YMMV.  ..bruce..

Just aborted a game where basically started in such a position that there was no room to grow.  Not sure what I am doing wrong, AI Tarth and Altar each jumpted out to three and four settlements respectively and I was more or less boxed in.  There were no areas on the map, even with the toggle to show fertile areas to build cities.  Needless to say, start locations need to be seriously addressed with random maps, the seeding is horrid.  Yet again there was an Umberdorth lair nearby, not sure how, but one of the AIs either killed it our set it off on a rampage.

Pioneer/Outpost/City spam are seriously taking away from the game.   Don't even think I played this for twenty minutes until I realized it was lost cause, you cannot come back from exponential growth, except for AI being, well the AI.  As rule I don't wage war on Kingdoms playing as a Kingdom, call it personal, or role playing preference.

Game is still light years ahead of E WoM.  Of course if you are trying to get casual gamers then the game is going to need some work.  Folks are not going to want to play a game that as bfwebster indicated is tedious. 

True, especialy because the AI is so bad at it.

Taking resources it doesn't need, even in the middle of peoples bases and building cities in terrible spots.