Your work ethic never ceases to amaze me! 

The game is beyond my wildest expectations so far... Hoping to get to Tactical Combat soon and see how it is done.

The idea of animals and monsters spawning, joining each other, fighting each other... Truly amazing features...

Really, really eager to put my hands on 3A...

Keep the good work Stardock, you guys are really changing the way TBS is done...

How about some kind of tiles (e.g., spiders nest) that spawns rampaging monsters (E.g., spiders) periodically until it is invaded and conquered. It would be a challenging battle, but players have an incentive so as to secure their territory...

Are there random events in this game like galciv, master of orion, etc? Those where always fun, especially the epic ones. Would be cool to force the kingdoms to band together to fight a titan off or something.

Awesome!   I just can't wait to see how all of this is going to come together.    Thanks for the updates, they are great.

Beautiful. This spurred me to post a spell over in the request thread. Basically you create a rift/portal between two squares you control anywhere on the map, and every turn there is a cumulative chance the rifts spawn a random monster, something sufficiently powerful that you should think twice before keeping it running for an extended period of time. It is here if anyone is interested.

It would be nice if there were more spider drone sized monsters at the beginning for new NPC's to get their teeth into before they start hitting larger creatures/monsters. Maybe some rats or something for them to fight

Monsters having different actions/plans based on Intelligence = WIN

Different types of Monsters attacking each other = WIN

Flavorful spawning locations = WIN

Different Monsters being able to "team up" as a hoard/ army = WIN

all that is left, I feel, is some way for spawning locations to randomly generate (be added) as others are destroyed, so as to not initiate boredom. AKA no way to simply kill off all monsters and spawning locations.

I rather like the idea that each creature has a cycle of reproduction. Small creatures produce several offspring (spiders, etc.) medium size produce less (wolves, etc.) and large ones even less (ogres, etc.)

Once the young grow up and overwhelm the local area/tile, they wander and can settle in the right terrain and make new "homes" and repeat the process.

Mostly I am thinking of the old orcs, goblins, etc. of many a story. Alone they are a piece of cake, let them grow to massive communities and next thing you know you have a big PIA.

having competing monsters in a ecosystem would be great. Balancing it to where you don't wind up with bone ogres and dragons only when all is said and done might not be as easy as one thinks.

Of course, the idea of a dragon going around the world looking for a mate and killing everything around it in frustration could make like interesting!

Hey Brad,

You've really hit upon the head what needs to happen to increase the "Fun" of the game. 

One thing I've kept thinking about through this beta so far as is that, "Where Are the Random Monsters"?

And the idea to have them spawning from areas out there like the forests or swamps, or coast lines, is just great. Genuinely. And I'm liking the fact you want to make them dynamic, having them group up at times.

Wouldn't it be cool though if after a certain number of rounds, as a monster party, maybe they'll more likely also get a big bad boss monster to come join them, to take control of the mobs.

This way if you don't keep your lands clear of monsters (Constantly) and the areas near them, they'll become a dangerous haven, for monsters. What could be cool is if we also got villagers reports about these roaming monsters.

And the idea of dungeons restocking with monsters is a great idea.. just cause you cleared a ruin or two out doesn't mean that something else doesn't move in... and then you may have to defeat a certain number of them to essentially quell the darkness for a while.

That's what I was thinking would be neat.

Good idea, in other case the world would be a bit empty after the "cleaning" made by the differences factions heroes, killing stuff to level up.

Indeed!

Monsters attacking each other? Sounds awesome, but isn't this "way too RPGish" for a strategy game? Personally I would like to see little -yet fun!- features like this, but maybe I am in the minority.

*edit* Now that I think about it...what would be the point in neutral monsters attacking eachother from a gameplay perspective?

Looks cool.

The only problem I see is this is being done via c++ code.  Which implies if a modder wanted to change the placement algorithm or monster selection process they'd be SOL?  Or does the code get translated into a scripting language version when moved out of the prototype tree?