Barbarians & Animals

Do you USUALLY play FFh with Raging Barbarians selected?

  • Yes

    Votes: 57 49.1%
  • No

    Votes: 59 50.9%

  • Total voters
    116

Sarisin

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NJ
Just trying out a thread with two of my favorite subjects in FFh - Barbarians and Animals.

I usually have two games of FFh going at the same time, both on a huge map, at Noble setting, at Marathon.

One is a long drawn-out affair where I can learn all the techs, buildings, units, religions, etc.

The other is always with raging barbs and often will last only a few hundred turns.

The first one lacks all the action of the raging barbs, but is still great fun.

Why or why not do you choose the raging barb selection?
 
I was going to post a second poll, but couldn't figure out how to do it in this same thread.

Anyway, I was wondering how many players prefer exploring in the early game and dealing with the animals, skeletons, hill giants, etc. vs staying at home.

I have always been an explorer as I like the risk of getting eaten by a bear compared to the possible goodie hut riches.

However,

I think as you go up in difficulty, the animals are tougher and the rewards in the goodie huts are less.

I play at only Noble (after Chalid's AI tweaking drove me down a notch :( ) and I have never found a settler or worker in a goodie hut. In fact, my last game I tracked the goodie huts I popped before the barbs appeared and sent me scurrying back to my city. Here's what I got:

Map
29 Gold
Map
Experience
Hostile villagers
44 Gold
Map
Technology - Fishing
Hostile Villagers
Scout
Map
Experience
Experience
Warrior
Experience

I'm not sure if the adventuring is worth the risk when you see what you are getting here.

Also, the addition of the Giant Spiders has made exploring even tougher IMO as they seem to pop up out of nowhere and easily kill exploring scouts and warriors.

So, what do you think? Explore, or stay at home?

PS. If you play a civ with the BAR trait, the answer is obvious.:)
 
i like to explore early and capture any animal i can my first two upgrades for the explorer are always strength 1 then animal handling. then i go looking for animals specifically lions are like free warriors and panthers are quicker warriors after my second strength promotion i go after tigers if i find them.
 
I have played raging barbs exactly twice I think. Can be fun. Instead, I like to play Terra Maps, then I can take on barbarians in their homeland.:evil: Animals are great for culture and happiness, and great spiders are very cool to find, and make great scouts if you can catch them, though the sight of them drives my wife from the room.
I'd rather have a slightly smaller more crowded map then a bigger emptier one.
 
I'm pretty much at the mercy of the wilds until I can expand.

Something interesting that has happened in the 3 games I have started is worth noting, however. After I get about 3 cities down (and with a fair bit of exploring), the orcish hordes come. The first two games, I fought tooth and nail, even loosing cities as I drove them slowly back (with warriors and eventually archers), in my third game I went for a perimeter defense and did a good job at holding them out, but when they first start coming in 4s or 5s... it is rather frightening.

I wish that would last for the entire game! :)
 
I play at only Noble (after Chalid's AI tweaking drove me down a notch :( )

I've only tweaked Heroes and athe Mages a bit... the big things are still to come..

and I have never found a settler or worker in a goodie hut. In fact, my last game I tracked the goodie huts I popped before the barbs appeared and sent me scurrying back to my city.

You cannot get Settlers in Difficulty above Warlords. Its defined in the Handicap.xml. Not sure about workers but i think you cant get workers on prince and above.
 
i usually play on emperor when soloing and immortal when engaging in multiplayer with my girlfirend.
usually on gigantic map, epic speed, pangaea, 18civs, raging barbarians.
epic speed chosen, as orthus was unstoppable on marathon, and you were nearly doomed when he spawned near you, but thankfully this is fixed to adjust to gamespeed.

gigantic terra maps would be a nive flavour, but that's beyond our hardware capabilities.

i usually run around the wild a lot, carfully (SLOWLY) exploring until i get to tracking, which greatly increases the survival odds, as does speed, as it allows you to enter a forest/hill and back out again, if it was a BAD idea (like moving next to a giant). also really like the animal handling promotion, though in marathon (and partially on epic) you would get so many animals that, even if you were to set science to 0% you would be running a deficit. as carnivals come late, i often suicide some of them to take down bears/spiders as they are more valuable per upkeep.

even on the high difficult levels i oft get techs, which is well worth the risk imho.
 
I usually explore slowly and carefully, but I explore MUCH. I build a few scouts when the game starts, before actually beginning to expand my civ, and try hard to upgrade them to hunters fast (hunters are rather cheap, and provide correct attack/defense capabilities for a while... even Orthus isn't that bad when you can put a few hill-forest-fortified hunters under his nose, and I remember having had a great game in FfH 1 when a ended up with a ~100XP Assassin litterally chopping down infanteries thanks to the axe... +125% vs Melee + 25% Axe + 100% Combat + Blitz + First Strike really made it a Melee Nightmare thing :D). I don't promote all my scouts to Subdue Animals, usually only one or two of them, while giving the other one terrain or mobility promotions, the former for the extended lifespan if gives them, the latter to make hut-grabbing easier and allow potential retreat after landing on a forest or hill tile.
 
I play Prince difficulty, raging barbs, 17 or 18 civs, huge map, - anything but cold. I hate tundra. I love the extra fighting and especially the extra animals from raging barbarians. Although with the latest release the giant spiders have really taken a toll on my scouts and warriors. I hate it when you've explored an area and then later a spider spawns unbeknownst to you and eats up a settler and escort moving through. I also like how raging barbs occupies most AI civs for awhile and slows down nearly everybody's expansion. The civs it doesn't slow down make for good enemies anyway.

xumio - i'm in awe of your ability to play FfH on emperor+ difficulty with huge map and raging barbs. I'll have to try your plan of running for Tracking to get the visibility to extend the lives of my scouts. The problem is by the time i have the tech and experience for it the benefit to exploration (animals and goody huts) are nearing exhaustion.

- feydras
 
I play on Emporer, which is a bit hard. You cannot get settlers or workers from the goody huts.
I alsway build a scout 1st thing, while sendng my other scout & warrior to explore the land. When my 2nd scout is built, the warrior comes back home & both scouts go & explore.
I normaly move the scouts so they finish move in a forest or on a hill, but if I can't, then they don't move full rate, as I can't risk it.
Love them against the animals, I always seem to win (well, a 1 scout with +150% vs a 1 wolf will win, and would do well against a lion) any battles i'm in, but I also do a lot of running away from any of the stronger animals.

After a few turns, when the Orcs turn up, I also have 2 go home. The fact that I can have about 6 units attacking me in a turn (in only a 4 city empire) means that I would not even think about how hard it would be if I had the raging barbarians
 
Hi everybody,

Most of my games are : Pangea or Balanced Map, at least Prince level , always Epic Speed and always raging barb.
I never build a scout. I use my first one the more i can until either he dies either he has discovered most of the land around my capital city. Why ? Because on Prince+ level ai civs began with 2 scouts and grabed most of the goody huts. So why losing time building a scout ?
I prefer expanding quickly to 4 cities, building troops (3 warriors/city at least) and waiting for the first barb rush to improve my army. My goal is to have most of my warriors reaching at least 26 xp if not 37 xp. I try to make my civ a bunker impossible to attack.
My wish is to have a Raging+++ barb. I like playing with them. They put a real pressure on all civs. When you look at our human history, you can see that from the 2nd century to the 14th, waves of barbs attacked all civs/countries sometimes with success. (Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Fall of some Chinese Dynasties, Destruction of some Muslims Empires in Iran/irak,...).

The Frog.
 
Hian the Frog said:
Hi everybody,

When you look at our human history, you can see that from the 2nd century to the 14th, waves of barbs attacked all civs/countries sometimes with success. (Fall of the Western Roman Empire, Fall of some Chinese Dynasties, Destruction of some Muslims Empires in Iran/irak,...).

The Frog.

Just to let you know here, that the use of the word Barbarian, by the Romans, meant..... not of Rome.
Some of the Barbarian tribes they fought (& the ones that destroyed Rome) Were highly civilised and advanced. They called the ancient Egyptions babrbarians, even if they had manged to build a working steam engine in about 500bc. The Clets were a more highly moral civ and the Hun's who destroyed them..... did it with the smallest amount of bloodshed ever.
 
chocmushroom said:
Just to let you know here, that the use of the word Barbarian, by the Romans, meant..... not of Rome.
Some of the Barbarian tribes they fought (& the ones that destroyed Rome) Were highly civilised and advanced. They called the ancient Egyptions babrbarians, even if they had manged to build a working steam engine in about 500bc. The Clets were a more highly moral civ and the Hun's who destroyed them..... did it with the smallest amount of bloodshed ever.

1) the word "barbarian" was not Roman but Greek.
2) I'm French and i can tell you that some "barb" tribes were trully bloody. Most of the cities of the east and north of my country were sacked, burned to the ground, the inhabitants either killed or enslaved,... The word "Vandalism" come the barb tribes of "The Vandals". Coming from Danemark, they first go to the south-east. They reach the Danube River and destroy most of the countryside of what is today Bosnia/Hungary/Croatia/Slovakia. Then, they go to the West in southern Germany, cross the Rhin River, divided in 3 great groups that destroyed most of the cities that resisted. They cross the Pyrénée Mountain Range and reach Spain, wich was also sacked. There, they learn from the "Romano-Spanish" the built of boats. They built a strong navy and all the Tribe goes to North Africa. There they finally settle, only after the destruction of Carthage......All this travel was made by 3 kings in nearly 80 years. This Tribe was one of the most feared. Its name survived with this word: vandalism.
3) To conclude, i don't want to fight with anybody about word, ideas,.... My goal was ONLY to say that i like Raging Barb games and i will be happy with an option Raging+++ Barb. That's all.

The Frog.
 
I play using Prince difficulty, Huge size, Balanced or Continents (2 or 3), and marathon settings. I have usually focused on exploring, I have never gotten a settler or worker from a hut, maybe a scout or warrior, mainly gold, rarely a tech. I usually end up trying in vain to take down Orhus with a level 6 or so (defensive promotion heavy) hunter and a few lions. While typically an archer or two is left in each city to try and defend against the barbarians. I always end up with some badass archers and hunters with or without defeating Orhus. One that did manage to get the axe eventually was promoted to Beastmaster just for grins...he was unstoppable and looked very good while doing it.

I haven't tried the raging barbarians, but it does sound like fun. Hian the Frog's strategy sounds like it would be a good time, maybe a little less painful if one were playing the Grigori with a couple of heroes to help out.
 
I usually play Prince or Noble with raging barbarians (in both vanilla and FfH). For FfH, I wish there were more potent animals/monsters instead of hordes of orcs, and the spider is an excellent step in the right direction.

I've considered tweaking the CIV4HandicapInfo.xml files in my games to make goody huts more valuable, then ramping up the barbarian threat even more... more risk, more gain! =) On that note, and I haven't looked yet - I just thought of it, is there an easy way to tweak how the LOW_GOLD, HEALING, etc are defined? Or add goody hut categories?
 
Playing on Prince+ level would NEVER gives you both settler and worker. It's impossible. You should earn some money, sometimes a tech, usually a (useless) map and often 2/3 barbs if the goody hut was "visited" by a non scout unit.
Playing with raging barb if somewhat stressing. They come from everywhere, sometimes by packs of 2 to 6. Fun. You must have a strong defense made of fast moving units. That's why i always give +1 move speed to my warriors. If he's wounded, he goes to the closest city to heal and an other one take his comes to the front line. With such a system, most of my unit reach at least 17 xp, even if i wish 26+ xp for all of them. That's how i build a good army. In fact, i use a tactic of WW1: during the Battle of Verdun (february-november 1916), the French Army made a strong turnover to stop the German offensive and to destroy the best units (Prussian Guards, Bavarian Mountain Corp,...)
If somebody try this tactic, tell me what you think of it ?

The Frog
 
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