I recently reinstalled Wizardry 8 and these two speed mods:

WizFast: http://www.gog.com/forum/wizardry_series/slow_moving_enemies_long_battles_fix
Speedmod: http://www.gog.com/forum/wizardry_series/wizadry_8_speed_mod

The game seemed unusually easy. Not at all like I remembered it.

Throughout the monastery and Arnika Road, random encounters were rare. Almost every encounter was a preset. I could retrace my steps without being harassed. Even on Arnika Road, I only ran into one or two random encounters.

My suspicions were cemented once I arrived in Arnika. I have fond memories of Arnika as a dangerous town. Bandits wandered the harbour and savant troopers constantly invaded from the tower. Enemies congregated around the crash site. You used to have to look both ways before leaving a building, and wandering the streets was fraught with risk.

Not in this Arnika. I completed all of the Arnika quests and cleared out all the loot. In all that time, there may have been one random encounter. Everything else was a preset encounter.

Even resting for a full day at a time was not guaranteed to generate a random encounter. Running through the wilderness to Trynton, I encountered no more than two or three groups of enemies.

I thought maybe it was the difficulty setting. I had been playing on normal difficulty as I refamiliarised myself. Upping the difficulty to expert seemed to increase the frequency of enemies a little bit, but it was hardly noticeable. Two random encounters from resting eight times became maybe three random encounters.

I tried disabling the mods. I deleted the speedmod files and restored my original files. I set the monster movement speed using the in-game options.

I tried reinstalling the game and playing without the mods. I loaded my old save files in Arnika.

The next thing I will try is reinstalling and simply starting a fresh game. I will try camping on the starting beach and see if I am interrupted by respawning crabs. Then I will reinstall the mods one at a time to determine which one is causing the issue.

Has anyone else experienced this? Are you able to play with both mods without affecting the game?

If the problem is one of the mods, what other speed mods would you recommend? I only want the combat to be faster and am not interested in rebalancing or other changes yet.

The spawn rates will depend somewhat on your character levels. Arnika Road, in particular, becomes much busier as your level climbs past 5th.

On a second+ playthrough you're also liable to see fewer spawns simply because you know where to go and what to do and won't be taking as long to get those things done.

I've played on with the original saves and it seems you are right. The spawn rates have improved.

Is there a limit on the number of monster groups? The spawn rate in Arnika still seems a bit low, and I think it's because there are three Higardi patrols while in my last game there had only been one or two patrols spawned at a time.