Constructive whining ;)
The speed of parties on the worldmap scales with their size, both for the player and the AI. Smaller AI parties will thus be able to catch up with you in time, but you can also run away from larger AI parties in the beginning.
Wind magic and such doesn’t fit the setting, but we’ve reduced the price of fast travel by ship to half for the next update for it to become a better alternative to going by foot. Travel speed in general is something we may still adjust as development continues.
Finally, we’ll also be looking into ways to make retreating from battle a bit less tedious.