how to deal with early rampaging monsters

[ksasaki]

I play with the box checked that I believe effectively doubles the rampaging monster strength, and I am having trouble dealing with an early 9 stack rampaging monsters attacking my newly formed cities.  Anyone have any tips, or am I too masochistic to enable that button    Or do you just take the losses, and rebuild later. the problem is they put ruins on top of the optimal square...

[prokolyo]

Sounds masochistic, yup
I haven't played with that on yet, but 9-stacks in the very beginning sounds rough...

Sent from my Pixel 3 using Tapatalk

[massone]

To defend against them you'd need to have very strong early military full of ranged troops. Some races just won't work. It's really hard to survive them without losing at least 1 settlement/city at some point on difficulties Expert or higher. But the Monsters Gone Wild also affects the AI...I've played with it on and seen it destroy a Wizard's Fortress when they had the highest military and power on the plane at turn 70 or so. I think it actually more than doubles their strength. Contrary to the in-game tooltip, in my experience it has caused more higher tier monsters to appear, on top of being in 9-stacks.

[JustOneMoreTurn]

To avoid the problem of such powerful stacks in the beginning, just hold off turning it on until later. At least I assume it can be turned on and off after a game has begun.

[ksasaki]

I find it makes the game more challenging, because although the AI is smarter they also in general seems less xenophobic than before, so will mostly leave you alone for awhile (unless they are chaotic, which is the "Erratic" race of MOO in MOM).  It can be annoying, but it puts a limit on how rampant you can expand over your initial continent.  I turned on both revolting raiders and monsters gone wild, so I am extra hardcore.