Ok, these are kinda 2 separate thoughts.  The first one I saw in another thread a little while ago, and I like it, a LOT, so I'll repost it here;  have monsters be willing to stray a bit farther, and be more aggressive towards cities, but, when the DO win in a city, have them reduce it's population some, and destroy a few buildings, without completely destroying the city. (unless it was a smaller city or bigger monster, of course, if you found a city right next to a 20 foot golem or something, well, be prepared to say goodbye if you don't have defenders)

This would make loosing to monsters not as game breaking, and would encourage people to actually have to build a little bit of defenses. (that, of course, then ties into the cost of wages, etc, etc... but that's a post I'll wait until the next major patch to comment on, everything has an effect on everything in this sort of game).

Somewhat related, and even more pressing, is my concern with the spawn rate of monsters.  I recently had a game where three of the starting monsters camps around me were identical (the black spiders).  I cleared out one, but left it, to see how the respawning works.  then, on turn 56, HOLY COW!  All three of the camps JUMPED in power, immensely, even the empty one.  I understand that the monsters need to get stronger over time, but I had BARELY won the previous fight to clear one of the camps.  I proceed to build up a few more stacks of troops and BARELY win another fight, and then just to experiment I decided to wait and see how the camps reacted.

So about 100 turns passed (maybe only about 80, but a lot) and the camp which I had cleared out again never respawned.  Maybe it's just me, but that's a little annoying.  (In all fairness, this camp was now withing my cultural borders, because my capital had grown, could that be the reason?).  The other two never got any stronger either, they sat at the same strength they jumped up to on turn 56, even thought it was now about 100 turns later. 

Someone, please, please tell me that this will be fixed?  The sudden big jump in power was pretty annoying, but manageable, but it's really boring that the monsters don't re-spawn (or do it so infrequently that it's almost irrelevant).  Also, it would be nice if they spawned more of those extra little groups that like to be sent out.  Anyone know if anything is going to be done about balancing this and adjusting the rate?

(For the record I was playing on the standard difficulty setting and standard monster amount setting)