Back when I was a newb doing Play Now! games on Noble, I used to like the barbarians because it added an extra element of gameplay and required you to keep up a defense even if you didn't plan on going to war. Since then I have advanced to Prince and now I play Monarch using Custom Game, but I have turned some things off (Random Events, Barbarians, Goody Huts). I was just wondering how other players think of barbarians?

If I don't play with barbarians, I tend to go a little lighter on defense. So I usually don't, as a sort of defensive alarm clock.

It's awful irritating when you get a lot of them that just keep comming, though.

On, but not raging.
HandicapInfo.xml modified so that NO ONE gets any combat advantages against them (makes barbs an equal opportunity attacker), barb & barb city appearance increased to two difficulty levels beyond what I play, barb city garrisons increased to 3 (i.e., I play on Noble, barbs appear as if on Monarch).

i usually open world-builder and give them the techs of the era. i look at each civ, and give them what they need to be the "last place" techie, but still up there enough to pump out a mean challenge on raging barbarians. i also look for an isolated area and give them a base of 4 cities with all the buildings their techs allow, and a great general or 2. i like barbarians.

and no it isn't annoying - its a free great general that you don't have to go to war to get the points for.

Edit:

I always turn off those stupid goodie huts, i leave on random events.

and no it isn't annoying - its a free great general that you don't have to go to war to get the points for.


Barbarian battles give your units experience and promotions, but they will not add experience to your Great General bar. So you can't get a GG from barbarian fights, you have to go to war.

I played with em off at first but now I play with em on. It can help get my swordsmen up to CR3 without having to go to war first. Then when I pay someone else a visit their cities go down in a hurry!

aww, i stand corrected. thats ok, i will still keep them on. its just fun in the industrial era when barbarian frigrates come up, it feels like pirates! especially barbarian spies - now, those little terrorists are a pain!

I probably would play with them on if they started spawning a little later. Early game I don't have the resources to build patrols while out-teching and out-expanding the AI. The problem is they keep razing my food resources while hanging out of range of my units... When you suddenly lose 2 Farms and a Gold causing unhappiness, it really throws a wrench in your plans.

this is why i like to keep 2 units fortified on hills/forests at about 50% between my city and borders. it is amazing when you have raging barbs - and they see a warrior and archer fortified on a hill and just keep moving. lets look at it like this.

--111--
-11X11-
--111--

If your city is on X, and you expand one time to the culture borders, you can put a fortified unit on the upper and lower middle ones.

--11111--
-111X111-
--11111--

Now, you can place a stack on both the west and east ones in the middle somewhere.

This way wherever they come from, you have one responder minimum.

Truth is, i sucked bad at this game until i started playing with raging barbs - they forced me to keep a minimum army good enough to not be on the bottom score.

I usually play with them on. I don't usually use raging since that often leads to a civ or 2 being wiped out before I've met them making the later game less interesting.

I've played with them on in 99% of games. I'm starting to reconsider, although I don't hate them as much as random events.

I don't like unnecessary chance elements in the game - the biggest problem along those lines is random events (barb uprisings, untimely hurricanes, and slave revolts to name a few), however barbs are a close second.

While usually my fogbusting archers wtfpwn barbs like nothing, sometimes stupid stuff happens - archer loses at 90+% odds, or for some reason barbs break their usual tendency, and bypass the fogbust to pillage. These land barbs are an annoyance but nothing too severe usually.

Galleys, on the other hand, were raised in occurrence in 3.17. The problem is, unlike using archers on land there is no effective sea counter to barb galleys until MC, which isn't a typical early-game tech in many cases. This means you have a 60 something % chance of winning and getting ONE xp every time a barb galley attacks one of your galleys. Usually this isn't a big deal, but it puts civs at a DISADVANTAGE - those in isolation or lots of fog - even further back as the amount of galleys needed to stop the occasional 2-3 barb galley spawn consistently from multiple angles is prohibitive. Alternatively, you can chance using 1-3 galleys and risk your seafood --- not ideal either.

I often consider removing these chance elements from the game (huts also). I will probably disable random events in the future as they're pretty broken, but I'll probably wind up leaving barbs on - it feels kind of weak knowing they're off and running untouched settlers and workers around, especially because the AI won't do that. I can do without the chancy slave revolts and uprisings though (which, although they claimed was fixed in 3.17, still has some holes as I got an archer uprising pre-3k bc after the patch).

I don't like annoyances.

I don't think i've ever had a game with barbs off.

Raging barbs on, but i also focus on getting the great wall to avoid them, and use them for harassing my neighbours and promoting my axemen :)

I play with them off. I hate them so much. If they started coming ~50 turns later when I'm a bit more setup it wouldn't be so bad, but I hate they way they just go around pillaging everything in sight if you don't have anything out there. I do play with tribal villages and random events on. I don't play with extra civs, just the standard amount for the size, though I may add a few extra in since I've started liking a rushing strategy.

Although, I'd rather have them off than have raging barbs on and beeline the great wall, which seems like a cheesy tactic to me.

I don't much like random chance in the game either, aside from the map generator of course. Random events are off for me (as they always are in Warlords ;). I'd never play with them if I had BtS though). I've not yet played a game without barbs or huts, but I'm starting to wonder whether they're actually good for the game.

Barbs rarely provide the right amount of challenge - depending on the map, they'll usually either get closed out before they have any impact, or come in numbers and really slow you down, and this almost always affects the balance of the game. The huts are just as inconsistent and also potentially make a huge difference. When these things work in your favor, they make the game so much easier, almost like cheating (as many have said before), and your victory feels hollow. When they go against you it is, like TMIT said, an annoyance, but more than that, the AI capitalises on your misfortune and you end up even worse off.

Honestly, I don't even like the idea of combat being governed by randomness. I have played the Age of Empires games (except 3) for a long time, and loved them. In those games, the better army wins, all other things being equal. Total War is much the same. Now, I can see why Civ doen't let you fight battles in real-time, but leaving it completely to chance just seems wrong, and sadly there doesn't seem to be a better way to go about it.

I'll think about this when I start new games in future.

[ ] No Barbarians
[ ] No Tribal Villages

:hmm:

i usually open world-builder and give them the techs of the era. i look at each civ, and give them what they need to be the "last place" techie, but still up there enough to pump out a mean challenge on raging barbarians. i also look for an isolated area and give them a base of 4 cities with all the buildings their techs allow, and a great general or 2. i like barbarians.

That's a really interesting idea.

I think I may give that a go, next game.

That's a really interesting idea.

I think I may give that a go, next game.

This is also what i do. I usually make the map before i play it as a custom game later on.

In the "new world" i have several barbarian cities, representing the "always hostile" natives. Together with them, i have the indian tribes (aztecs,inca,maya and so on), with no starting techs, but with a dedicated longbowman in their city defense. (if you put UNITAI_DEFENSE_AIR on the longobowman, they will never move out of the capital).

The barbs can have tremendous amounts of units ready for you when you land your first settlers in the new world, without any risk of wiping out the other civs on the continent. Gives the map a lil flavour.


Although, I'd rather have them off than have raging barbs on and beeline the great wall, which seems like a cheesy tactic to me.

Well i play on emperor, and the AI got enough advantages as it is, so beelining for a certain wonder to even the odds slightly is to be considered a perfectly normal strategy. :king: (atleast until i master the difficulty to a certain level that i might manage without it. Time makes perfect)

Yeah, I have several preset maps where the barbs start off with two or three cities, I like the way it affects gameplay, every game is even more different.

It's a good idea to have them a long way from AI start positions though, otherwise they just run through them.

Never seen a barbarian frigate!

I've always played with barbarians (sometimes raging) on Monarch level, and it just gives me something to do besides expanding. It really doesn't take much effort to build a couple of swordsmen, axemen, chariots, etc to defend against barbarians. In short, this actually also helps prepares your army incase your neighbour attacks you. Usually a lot of the time, I forget to build units and I get attacked by some aggresive civ (I still manage to beat them somehow =P). Really, I think the purpose of barbarians is to teach to not to focus entirely on economy and REX. Besides, barbarians gives you exp and gives you gold if you decide to raise their cities.

I picked the one for fun but don't really find them fun, but nor do the AI so its better on.

I wish Conan was the barbarian leader:lol:, but it is realistic not to be able to negotiate with them (and Conan's fictional)

In all seriousness, it is realistic with them on. Especially because I always start in the Ancient Era. Plus they always build a city for me, like Goth and Tartar. :)

Do barbs appear if you start in any of the late Eras? - that would not be realistic at all IMO.

I think playing without barbarians is lame. You can walk around with unescorted settlers and you don't need any military early, things that the AI doesn't consider and which are unrealistic.

Besides, barbarians are a balancing element in the game. If you have close neighbors (which is a disadvantage if you don't rush them) you will hardly encounter barbs because the land is quickly settled. But if you have plenty of land to expand (by which I don't mean you're isolated) then you have to expect barbs and prepare for it.

Seriously, normal barbs (not those from those silly random events) are never a real problem if you prepare for them, as you should. The crucial part is to have defenders ready BEFORE they appear. Then you easiliy kill them off one by one when they approach. This happens several tiles away from your cities, so if you should lose a fight you have time to react and send reinforcements.

Of course, if you only start to build defenders when they are already pillaging your land, then you will have a hard time not to be overrun.

Always on, but now after reading this thread I'm considering moving to raging. I like to play with larger than huge maps and ~30 Civs. Even then there is still a lot of open land early in the game and contact with other Civs can take a while. Barbs add more challenge to the early game.
With them on Stonehenge/The Great Wall make a great early wonder combo. I'm more than content to let hordes of barbarians gather outside of my secured borders as they act as somewhat of a buffer from any possible invading AI civs. Even without the Great Wall they still do not bother me much except for the galleys destroying my fishing boats. Nothing worse than having a size 10 city pumping out settlers start to starve do to lost seafood. One barb galley will easily tear through 3-4 worked seafood tiles before I can stop it, then I have to rebuild all those work boats along with another couple galleys to protect them.
However the biggest annoyance I've had with barbarians has actually been the result of AI civs, not the barbarians themselves. In three consecutive games now I've come across a barbarian city that would fit very nicely if not perfectly within my empire. Each time just as I'm about to take it one last axeman in the city will hold off my forces for one last turn, just enough for another AI civ to sneak in and take it with 1 lousy archer. In one game the city went on to grow rapidly, with tons of culture and started to strangle a neighboring city of mine. In my current game the now Korean city of Pheonician has both oil and uranium, with ocean access and sits on the oposite side of my borders as the rest of Korea. It is also very well defended and has connecting borders reaching across the sea to their strongest ally Germany. Before they had this city it was going to be very easy for me to invade them and force them to capitulate; it was just a matter of me picking the best time. Now I have to divide my army and fight 2 foes rather than 1.

I might try the warrior-on-hills idea to keep them out of my borders. But I certainly don't want to fight them in my borders when they ignore every single one of my units (even workers) and decide to pillage my improvements instead. Maybe I can modify them so they won't enter borders but still run around killing undefended workers and settlers... Kind of like Animals.

I just recently started playing with raging barbs on. I also add aggressive AI and add in a few extra AI's each game. I've found this to be really fun! YOu have a pretty big gap from the start of the game to when the barbs actually start coming at you. (I also avoid the GW, seems like cheating with raging on) Shortly after the barbs die down some Civ is on your doorstep starting a war.

Really keeps you on your toes. I seem to always lose my third city but then battle back and can keep it going.

Play on Lakes too so everyone can get to everyone else. Oh, and random civ and random personalities. Though I think if they are all aggresive civs then kinda easy to figure out, but never really understood how the relationship between traits and personalities worked.

Fun Stuff! YOu all should try it!

Probably 3 different threads with a poll on the barbarian subject in all 3 CIV forums (Vanilla, Warlord, BtS)

Used to turn them off. I keep them on now. Don't know why, they annoy the crap outta me and if I forget to build a couple more units to guard cities, they come with axemen. I end up editing in some tanks to eliminate them, then delete the tanks. I might as well turn them off lol

I have always turned barbarians on raging since 1. It's habit anymore. Back in 1 and 2 you got a score boost from doing so, now I just have gotten used to them being on raging. The barbarian threat is what makes the early game any fun for me. Without it I get bored easily. I even allowed access to almost every unit in the game to barbarians. I see barb chariots, horse archers, spears, etc. early on. But its a blast. :D

I'd rather start building up the infrastructure of my empire. Barbs are good for free cities and experience points, but I have the most fun when barbs are turned off. I also tend to do MUCH better.

I don't think raging barbs rage hard enough! I want barbs with tanks and . .. .. .. ., something that could really pose a threat to me; well not so much to me, but to the AIs. I think barbs should spawn several galleons loaded with troops every turn once all the land is taken. Call them terrorist. Spice up the game.

Since I usually play the smaller maps, Barbarians cease to be a concern after just a bit, so I've never had a problem with them. I guess one of these days I'll have to play on a large map and see.

currently i play with barbs off, since they annoyed me too many times.

i used to play with raging barbs though.
ever since i am at mon/emp lvl though my games suffer too much by the barbs.

ill probably turn them on again once i have adjusted to emp more.

it IS relaxing with no barbs at the start though :)

Right? I get to concentrate on how I will deal with the AI. All barbs seem to do for difficulty is force me to build military units early in the game. I would definitely turn them on if barbs took just a bit longer to become warriors (instead of animals). I know they give you something like a 1000 year head start, but that still requires me to build a few warriors. I could always just go for the Great Wall, but I might as well just turn them off.

or you could build some warriors anyway to keep your power level up so monty and shaka don't pick on you early?

I've never had an AI declare on me before they had some kind of effective unit to do it with. (IE axeman, spear, sword, quecha). I've never been warrior rushed. I was archer rushed once because I didn't have any units in my only city (capital). It was one of the first games I ever played :lol:

I don't think raging barbs rage hard enough! I want barbs with tanks and . .. .. .. ., something that could really pose a threat to me; well not so much to me, but to the AIs. I think barbs should spawn several galleons loaded with troops every turn once all the land is taken. Call them terrorist. Spice up the game.

This would be awesome. The problem is once the land is taken up, the barbs are no longer a threat. This is also why I have allowed them tanks, and ships past galleys. Raging barbs really arent that hard to control. (Even with me having given them access to all the units in the ancient age.)

As for a warrior rush, I have had Ghandi (of all people - with random personalities selected) warrior rush me with an old version of Blake's AI.

As has probably already been said, I keep them on to help keep my guard up. The XP doesn't hurt either.

On. Bar-barian Bar-bar-barian. They build cities for you.. Sometimes they're even in decent locations. :woohoo: WoooOOOoooOOOooo Free cities! I like barbs. Barbs are my friend.

I've accidentally turned barbarians off a few times by misclicking and I find out I miss them. I do swear at the barbarian galleys pillaging my fishing boats, but that's usually because I forgot to build triremes.

I've also discovered the joys of the great wall. I've been experimenting lately sending units out to get a few experience points from the barbarians then going back to defend my cities.

If I don't get the Great Wall then it's a quick search for resources. And I HATE barbarian swordspeople.

On. Bar-barian Bar-bar-barian. They build cities for you.. Sometimes they're even in decent locations. :woohoo: WoooOOOoooOOOooo Free cities! I like barbs. Barbs are my friend.

And sometimes they build them in useless spots 1 or 2 tiles from a great location. Then you have to raze the city and bring a settler.

I find barb axemen to be more annoying than swordsmen. Swordsmen can be effectively countered by axemen, but axes can't. If you don't have horses, you're likely to lose some units fighting off barb axemen until you get longbows or crossbows (or elephants).

Generally play with Raging set on. Lots of experience for my troops. Actually seems to hurt the AI as much of more.

Barbarians have always been one of my favourite things about the Civ series.

I play with raging barbarians on, because I find it to be more of a challenge.

I never beeline for the GW (that just feels like cheating), but if I happen to have Masonry, and one of my cities has nothing more pressing to do, I'll build it if it won't take too long.

-RdF

I always play with barbs on, most of the time raging. Not sure if it helps or hurts anyone more than the other, but it adds flavor to the game. Never use the Great Wall, though, as I find Barbarian archers and warriors useful prey to get my troops some xp while also getting a level 4 unit for Heroic Epic.

I also love setting up well developed barb cities on uninhabited islands and parts of continents no ones on. I give them the basics (granary, lighthouse, barracks) but also add in walls to make it more of a struggle for civilizations to actually take these cities.

Always barbs, seldom raging barbs.

Always on, it wouldn't be a game without barbs. I do beeline the Great Wall (I chop it as a priority if I don't get stone), but playing on Rise of Mankind where the GW only comes at Construction, not at Masonry, it took the game to another level and I don't by any means get the Wall in time to stop them - or at all - so...

Why play with goodie huts off though?

Why play with goodie huts off though?

IDK, they are awesome. Also the race vs. the other AI's to get them is fun, along with exporing territory in the meantime.



Q: With 'Raging Barbs' turned on, does it effect the chances of a goody hut unleashing evil hordes? (recon units not included ofc)

Below monarch I use them but above that they tend to draw too many resources from what I need to beat the AI.

Galleys, on the other hand, were raised in occurrence in 3.17. The problem is, unlike using archers on land there is no effective sea counter to barb galleys until MC, which isn't a typical early-game tech in many cases. This means you have a 60 something % chance of winning and getting ONE xp every time a barb galley attacks one of your galleys. Usually this isn't a big deal, but it puts civs at a DISADVANTAGE - those in isolation or lots of fog - even further back as the amount of galleys needed to stop the occasional 2-3 barb galley spawn consistently from multiple angles is prohibitive. Alternatively, you can chance using 1-3 galleys and risk your seafood --- not ideal either.


Another annoyance with galleys is that they are not stopped by the Great Wall (at least in 3.17).

It is a true annoyance when you have gotten the wonder, and should be immune to barbs, to learn that you are still vulnerable at sea. :(

Another annoyance with galleys is that they are not stopped by the Great Wall (at least in 3.17).

It is a true annoyance when you have gotten the wonder, and should be immune to barbs, to learn that you are still vulnerable at sea. :(

Because, you know, the great wall extends into the ocean...

this just seems like a complaint of "I'm not vigilant enough to build at least 4 galleys in the game, so the wonder I always build should have this extra ability to negate a minor annoyance."

I play with raging barbarians on. It seems to really retard the teching of the game to the point where the in game time line matches pretty closely with history.

Because, you know, the great wall extends into the ocean...

this just seems like a complaint of "I'm not vigilant enough to build at least 4 galleys in the game, so the wonder I always build should have this extra ability to negate a minor annoyance."

I play with raging barbarians on. It seems to really retard the teching of the game to the point where the in game time line matches pretty closely with history.

It's actually a complaint of "I'm not vigilant enough to pursue a suboptimal tech path or build at least 6 galleys". If you make 4 and split them into areas the barb galleys can come in isolation, you still stand an excellent chance of losing 2 stationed together and getting seafood pillaged - in fact the chances of that are higher than a fortified fog bust archer losing to an axe, spear, or chariot, and significantly so. Compare those hammers real quick - it's not hard math.

/balance in 3.17. Fireaxis made a big mistake with this patch. Isolated civs already suffer being unable to trade. In theory you could just turn tech brokering or trading off instead, but IMO that's a much bigger benefit to the human than turning barbs off.

Galleys and animals are excessively annoying and have no business in civ with the #'s they currently appear in (in both of my recent LHC games I got 3 galleys attacking at one point along the coast). These things are really chancey even if the human plays optimally and can easily swing the game ----> discovering an AI or important resource location can make or break the game, and my 1000 clubmen didn't realize it because they lost to...a panther (given a weapon I can beat a panther 100% of the time, and I'm no trained warrior)?! That's MUCH more epic than spear beats tank.

Picking on isolated civs just seems wrong, too. They're already disadvantaged. It's not like you can't win, but it's a step in the wrong direction for balance.

Seriously, if you're playing emperor+ 4 galleys is taking a BIG risk. I've made 7 and lost seafood before, although 6 is at least reasonable...you have a decent chance of only losing like 2-3 then before the fogbusting is taken care of.

Alternatively, you can ignore super key techs like monarchy or currency and go early MC, which kind of ruins an isolated opening regardless but hey, at least you won't lose 3 seafood tiles :/.

I have never really understood why barbarians have such different settings on higher difficulty levels. Playing a Huge/Diety/Raging barbs game is a setting that is rediculously unbalanced. It is actually mandatory for you to pick a civ that starts with hunting (So you can beeline archers) and have a tile with at least 2 hammers on it so you can actually get one built before the barbarian axes are already on you. Because in the time it takes you to research archery and build 1-2 archers, most AI's have BW and thus barbs have axemen.

I personally am happy that alot of the modifications I am making to my game have now made me have to step back down to Noble/Prince from Prince/Monarch. If I can help it, I will try to never have to play above Monarch for a good challenging game as I find the settings I enjoy the most are typically big no-nos for playing higher difficulty levels. (Gigantic, Marathon, Raging Barbarians, Hemispheres)

It's actually a complaint of "I'm not vigilant enough to pursue a suboptimal tech path or build at least 6 galleys". If you make 4 and split them into areas the barb galleys can come in isolation, you still stand an excellent chance of losing 2 stationed together and getting seafood pillaged - in fact the chances of that are higher than a fortified fog bust archer losing to an axe, spear, or chariot, and significantly so. Compare those hammers real quick - it's not hard math.

/balance in 3.17. Fireaxis made a big mistake with this patch. Isolated civs already suffer being unable to trade. In theory you could just turn tech brokering or trading off instead, but IMO that's a much bigger benefit to the human than turning barbs off.

Galleys and animals are excessively annoying and have no business in civ with the #'s they currently appear in (in both of my recent LHC games I got 3 galleys attacking at one point along the coast). These things are really chancey even if the human plays optimally and can easily swing the game ----> discovering an AI or important resource location can make or break the game, and my 1000 clubmen didn't realize it because they lost to...a panther (given a weapon I can beat a panther 100% of the time, and I'm no trained warrior)?! That's MUCH more epic than spear beats tank.

Picking on isolated civs just seems wrong, too. They're already disadvantaged. It's not like you can't win, but it's a step in the wrong direction for balance.

Seriously, if you're playing emperor+ 4 galleys is taking a BIG risk. I've made 7 and lost seafood before, although 6 is at least reasonable...you have a decent chance of only losing like 2-3 then before the fogbusting is taken care of.

Alternatively, you can ignore super key techs like monarchy or currency and go early MC, which kind of ruins an isolated opening regardless but hey, at least you won't lose 3 seafood tiles :/.

If the answer is that the Great Wall should be allowed to affect sea tiles, then the problem isn't the great wall, it is the way barbarians are manifested.

If the answer is that the Great Wall should be allowed to affect sea tiles, then the problem isn't the great wall, it is the way barbarians are manifested.

I don't think you saw anything about the GW in my posts ;).

TheMeInTeam, I don't quite understand your problems with barbarians, especially knowing you are a good player. As I said, normal barbs (never played raging) are usually not a big problem if you prepare a little. As for barb galleys: I never build more than two galleys myself, often I do not build any until the first barb galley appears. Even if a fishing boat or two are pillaged... it's no big deal, work boats are cheap. By the time barb ships appear the loss of one fishing boat won't wreck your empire. (I played only one complete game with 3.17 so far, but it was sea-heavy (Immortal), so I can safely say that barb ships were not that more frequent.)

It's actually a complaint of "I'm not vigilant enough to pursue a suboptimal tech path or build at least 6 galleys".
You could as well say that you think the presence of AI civs is annoying because they force you to pursue the suboptimal tech path to archery or iron working, so you play without AIs ;)

You mentioned that you hate barbs and goodie huts because they add randomness... so I gather you only play donut maps with balanced resources? Because the biggest random factor in any normal civ game is the map itself: starting position, distribution of resources and AIs, AI leaders etc. Barbs and goodie huts have very little randomness in them compared to those factors.

I leave them on... but man I remember losing a early city because I got a random event where a horde of barbarians came over the hills. I can't remember the exact year, but I'm pretty sure it was before 2500. I was screwed.

TheMeInTeam, I don't quite understand your problems with barbarians, especially knowing you are a good player. As I said, normal barbs (never played raging) are usually not a big problem if you prepare a little. As for barb galleys: I never build more than two galleys myself, often I do not build any until the first barb galley appears. Even if a fishing boat or two are pillaged... it's no big deal, work boats are cheap. By the time barb ships appear the loss of one fishing boat won't wreck your empire. (I played only one complete game with 3.17 so far, but it was sea-heavy (Immortal), so I can safely say that barb ships were not that more frequent.)


You could as well say that you think the presence of AI civs is annoying because they force you to pursue the suboptimal tech path to archery or iron working, so you play without AIs ;)

You mentioned that you hate barbs and goodie huts because they add randomness... so I gather you only play donut maps with balanced resources? Because the biggest random factor in any normal civ game is the map itself: starting position, distribution of resources and AIs, AI leaders etc. Barbs and goodie huts have very little randomness in them compared to those factors.

:(. It looks like I'm pretty good at not being clear. I can certainly see why I'm getting this response now that I reread my earlier posts.

I have no problem with land barbs at all (losing a warrior to an animal aside). Actually, land barbs, if they're even an issue (on higher levels as I'm sure you're aware quite often you get boxed in quickly enough that you'll see very little in terms of barbs), are really easy to stop with archers. A fortified archer on anything but flatlands will pretty much beat all barbs but swordsmen and horse archers at high odds (and with a halfway decent promotion will be favored there too). The hammers required to stop land barbs with just archers (a worst case scenario on land) are quite small and efficient. In fact, once the player is used to it land barbs are rarely meaningful unless he or she is VERY unlucky and loses a couple times at >90% odds. It happens, but obviously not often. The AI is probably worse at coping with them actually.

This is not true for galleys, and galleys are my major gripe (post 3.17, before that they were a joke). The reason for this is that barb galleys are very rarely an issue unless the player is isolated or it's an unusual map. Almost all of my problems with them have come in the LHC (lonely hears club) series - which the player is always isolated in. The hammers or beakers required to be invested just to stop seafood from getting pillaged is somewhat prohibitive...but having to replace work boats multiple times is also pretty prohibitive. Maybe that's the wrong word - but it slows the player down considerably in a scenario which I feel the player shouldn't be.

My problem with them is therefore twofold: One, they don't trouble anybody except civs that are, in theory, least deserving of further handicaps and two, they have no counter-unit that can win above odds in the 60's until you tech metal casting, which takes a long time. Isolated civs rarely have the freedom to tech metal casting before say monarchy and Currency (or maybe CoL), but the galleys show long before then.

Again, it's not something that's the end of the world, it was just an annoying/unnecessary change.

As for maps I'll play, I play a wide range of stuff and rarely bother regenerating so I guess I'm perhaps illogically more tolerant of some things rather than others :p. Goody huts and barbs are mostly left off for me in multiplayer (throwing unescorted workers/settlers around feels too odd in SP), because they can easily turn a game. I turn random events off in both - I originally turned random events off in MP with my friend on LAN because it was causing us to de-sync, but realized how much I prefer not having them. So many less pop-ups, and no chancy slave revolts and other stupid crap like mountains destroying mature cottages! That was right around the time when events single-handedly lost AND won me games (slave revolt plus building destructing, and castle +3 diplo diplo win respectively).

I WOULD like to leave as much up to the skill of the player as possible, so I don't like seeing things that greatly alter game balance away from that or add more chance than is already necessary. This matters much less in SP than MP because of course the AI is cheating anyway on high levels ;).



Or, if that wall of text was too much for everyone, I hate events because pop-ups are annoying and they can de-sync my MP games, barb galleys because they're really annoying, and barb animals because they're ridiculous as they are right now. Oh, and puppies. I definitely hate puppies.

If I could turn one thing off, it would be animals. Then maybe toning down galleys - much as I !@#$ I do think they should be in the game, unlike animals (unless animals get re-worked). Losing legit military to animals just doesn't sit well with me - IMO they're unreasonably strong. A large group of warriors can take and hold a city, and yet a (ONE) bear is stronger? Or does that represent an army of bears? Few are the times history has recorded an army of bears strong enough to capture cities!

I usually play with them off......it seems that they only attack me, not the computer.

Not to mention they seem to only pop up when my settlers or workers are hard at work and defenseless.

I noticed there's a barbarian spawning date after which they begin to appear everywhere. What about animals? Do those pesky wolves, always seeing my workers even without line of sight, have such specific point in time as well? Or can they spawn in ie. 4000 BC?


EDIT: Ok, 6th turn :)

Always on in SP, though some AIs can form scary armies thanks to raging barbarians; always miss them in MP games, as most are set to "off" - while sometimes indeed unbalancing, they at least tend to reduce or cripple rushes (at least when rusher is actually thinking about anything else than to pwn a neighbour ;))

Generally all but a few of my rivals are "Barbarian States" with Raging Barbs on:goodjob:

One thing, does the comp cheat with it's spawns? It seems so, if you move a settler unprotected the computer will spawn barbarians or animals to kill it. I remember I moved my settler one space out of line of sight, the next turn he was surrounded by 4 animals. I mean come on now.

I think the barb's FoW is the opposite of nations. They can see everything not in a cultural border. (Although, this is entirely speculation.)