Raiders

[Seravy]

Do rampaging monsters attack enemy cities? There were two stacks of them on my continent but they were cut off by a line of ruins. They never moved (that I saw) and never attacked despite having a clear line to a computer city. I'm red, CP is yellow. I even ended my magic spirit's turn next to both of them, hoping for an attack, but none came.

Yes they do, but player targets have a higher priority if hard or above. Otherwise it depends on garrison size and distance only.
However, no AI player, including neutrals, ever checks if the destination is reachable, it assumes everything on the same continent is always an available destination. So if an unreachable target is chosen, they'll stick to it unless there is a big change in garrison sizes nearby. In the original game, it wasn't possible to have dungeons close to each other so blocked way was less common (but it still happened where the land was only 1 cell wide). Also, Neutrals can only attack cities, not units. (and since bumping into enemies by accident is currently disabled, that won't happen, not that it could in this case, when they are unable to move anyway)

I think Revolting Raiders and Monsters Gone Wild were good ideas to make the game more challenging. Kyrub properly put them as options. They can be expanded upon or changed, but keep them as options

Agreed, but my primary concern with raiders is that the option does not actually do anything, unless there is an enemy fortress or you are on the myrror plane. If I do change anything, it will be to offset the change in the difficulty level options (that should have been done anyway but wasn't, so now Normal has "Easy" raiders and hard has "Normal" etc), and improve the option to add more. The Monsters option does double the monster pool which is perfect, but the raider option does not, it only disables the "half on myrror, 2/3 if enemy fort" parts in the code. I do believe it also should either add + 1 to units and/or make them spawn more frequently.
The only "modlike" change I'm considering is a turn based multiplier for the early game. I've had raiders kill one of the wizards on turn 15 in my current CoM game, don't think that should happen, especially not to the human player. Although, it isn't that hard to start a new game I guess if it does happen, and the original game neutral towns are a bit less likely to do that (but not impossible still)

[Tiltowait]

OK, change Revolting Raiders from whatever it means currently to your idea of a more challenging experience. I think that's a fine change. Monsters Gone Wild too.

Rampaging monsters aren't supposed to appear until at least turn 50, I think a similar limitation on raiders would be reasonable and not too much of a mod. It fixes a problem, being defeated by too-strong forces before you could reasonably build any defense.

[Seravy]

Rampaging monsters aren't supposed to appear until at least turn 50, I think a similar limitation on raiders would be reasonable and not too much of a mod. It fixes a problem, being defeated by too-strong forces before you could reasonably build any defense.

The CoM solution, which is probably the easiest to copy over (leaving out the unneeded parts), is scaling the amount down linearly prior to turn 80 instead of adding a hard limit. So turn 10 = 1/8*, turn 2 = 2/8*, turn 3 = 3/8* and so on, no change after turn 80.
This still allows for early raiders for additional chaos and fun, but the amount will always be manageable, usually stacks of 1 only.

[jhsidi]

I've noticed that raiders and monsters seem extremely tilted toward attacking only the human settlements. Two instances I've noticed in my recent games:

• Hard game: Gargoyles generate at a chaos node, directly adjacent to enemy outpost with 1 swordsman. Proceeds to pathfind past 2 other closer enemy cities to my fortress, where they die a pointless and fast death against vastly superior forces.
  
• Extreme game: Fire giant generates in early game, 1 tile away from an enemy city with fairly good defences, 2 tiles from an outpost with a swordsman. Proceeds to pathfind ~10 tiles to my city with 5 war bears and a swordsman.
  

Also during my current game, there's an orc city generating raiders every 3-4 turns. Every stack pathfinds to my city, even when I have very strong defenses. Have seen plenty of other events like these as well.

I know that raiders do attack the NPC player, but this seems to only occur when there is no possible path to any settlement of mine. So: what gives? On extreme, I've got my cities fairly well protected so it's not an issue, per se, just feels like the NPC wizards get an arbitrary cheat that, IMO, reduces the possibility for cool / interesting things to happen (e.g. all players having trouble settling near a strong neutral city, or having the city of a wizard I'm not at war with taken by neutrals, initiating a mad dash to take it over).

Also, a quick question: what would be the way to generate the game with a very high number of neutral cities? I really enjoy this particular aspect, almost as much as I dislike the grind of slowly setting up outposts on any Large / Huge size map. I've got IDA and was able to play around and modify stuff like unit stats, but didn't locate the world generation protocol, which I'm assuming must be in magic.exe. 

On a side note, since it's my first time ever posting.. thank you SO much for your work, Seravy. I've lost a month of my life to CoM, and it felt great 

[Seravy]

I've noticed that raiders and monsters seem extremely tilted toward attacking only the human settlements. Two instances I've noticed in my recent games:

• Hard game: Gargoyles generate at a chaos node, directly adjacent to enemy outpost with 1 swordsman. Proceeds to pathfind past 2 other closer enemy cities to my fortress, where they die a pointless and fast death against vastly superior forces.
  
• Extreme game: Fire giant generates in early game, 1 tile away from an enemy city with fairly good defences, 2 tiles from an outpost with a swordsman. Proceeds to pathfind ~10 tiles to my city with 5 war bears and a swordsman.
  

Also during my current game, there's an orc city generating raiders every 3-4 turns. Every stack pathfinds to my city, even when I have very strong defenses. Have seen plenty of other events like these as well.

I know that raiders do attack the NPC player, but this seems to only occur when there is no possible path to any settlement of mine. So: what gives? On extreme, I've got my cities fairly well protected so it's not an issue, per se, just feels like the NPC wizards get an arbitrary cheat that, IMO, reduces the possibility for cool / interesting things to happen (e.g. all players having trouble settling near a strong neutral city, or having the city of a wizard I'm not at war with taken by neutrals, initiating a mad dash to take it over).

Also, a quick question: what would be the way to generate the game with a very high number of neutral cities? I really enjoy this particular aspect, almost as much as I dislike the grind of slowly setting up outposts on any Large / Huge size map. I've got IDA and was able to play around and modify stuff like unit stats, but didn't locate the world generation protocol, which I'm assuming must be in magic.exe. 

On a side note, since it's my first time ever posting.. thank you SO much for your work, Seravy. I've lost a month of my life to CoM, and it felt great 

Simply put, poor weighting - human settlements got an extra 14 or something priority where 1 distance was worth 1 priority. It was already fixed in CoM (there is still some extra priority but a more reasonable amount), and if it was compatible it probably is in 1.51 RC5 as well.

Neutral cities have the best chance to appear on Huge maps because they have to be placed at a specific distance from lairs and there is less gap between those on smaller maps.