[vanilla] Dealing With Barbarians

grandad1982 · Jul 19, 2011, 03:18 PM

Dealing With Barbarians
keeping the hairy people from your door

Introduction

Whilst barbarians can present an annoying problem to a young empire, by using simple methods you can keep them under control with little trouble. In fact with a little planning you can turn the situation to your advantage.

If you want to know more then read on....

Key concepts
What are barbarians and what do they do?
Controlling barbarians
Using barbarians to your advantage

Key concepts

Fog of War – also simply know as fog, this is the shaded out tiles that are not in the line of sight of any unit or city.
Barbarian Encampment – a camp that acts as a base of operations for the barbarians and is the location where barbarians are spawned.
Spawning – the act of creating a new unit or barbarian camp.
Farming – not to be confused with irrigation, this is the act of gaining combat experience, gold, units and more from barbarians and encampments.

What are barbarians and what do they do?

Barbarians are a faction who are opposed to civilization and all of its trappings. In practise this means the spawning of camps and barbarian units that will try to disrupt civilizations and city states that they encounter.

Barbarian camps can appear in any part of the map as long as the tile in question is within the fog of war of all civilizations and city states. Barbarian camps can appear at any stage of the game as long as some fog still exists. These camps will spawn with a unit guarding them and will go on to spawn new units at regular intervals. These units can be as advanced as the most advanced player's most advanced units, however there are no barbarian units that use strategic resources (e.g. no barbarian Giant Death Robots).

The guard unit will stay on or near the camp (it will attack units within its movement range if the odds are favourable) whilst the newly spawned units will make their way towards nearby civilizations and city states. When they reach their destinations the barbarians will attempt to harass and hinder the development of the civilization in question.

They do this in a number of ways:

Capture/kill civilians
Barbarians will attempt to capture settlers and workers, or outright kill great people. A barbarian that successfully captures a civilian will then attempt to escort it directly to the nearest encampment.
Pillage tile improvements
Barbarians will target your improved tiles for pillaging, preferring to pillage luxury and strategic resources. Any time they end their turn on an improvement they may pillage the tile the following turn. They won't pillage the tile if a higher priority target is available (such as moving from a regular improved tile to a luxury, or capturing a worker).
Attacking military units
Barbarians by their very nature are aggressive and will attack military units. They may do this even if the odds are not in their favour.
Citizen tile denial
As with any regular opposing combatants, the tile a barbarian occupies at the start of a turn cannot be worked by a citizen. Naval barbarian units perform similarly, preventing all sea tiles in a 2 tile radius from the unit being worked and potentially blocking trade routes.
City Pillaging
If a city ends up surrounded by barbarians, they may choose to attack it. If they successfully bring it below 1 hp, instead of capturing it they will steal a chunk of gold and potentially destroy buildings and kill citizens.

Controlling barbarians

There are a variety of methods you can employ to deal with barbarians and the problems they pose and they can be summarised thus:

General Advice
Passive
Active
Game Settings

General advice

Before delving into the methods of dealing with barbarians it's important to have an understanding of various technology’s and the units and buildings they unlock, as well as social policies that can help you deal with barbarians.

There are some key early technology’s that can really help with barbarians.

The first and foremost is Archery and the archer unit that it unlocks. This provides you with a great city garrison unit and a way to deal with barbarian units from a distance, so you aren't risking the loss of a unit in melee combat – hopefully.
The next two technology’s worth mentioning are Masonry and Bronze Working. Masonry as it allows you to build city walls that increase the base strength of your city, and Bronze Working as it unlocks spear units which have a higher base strength that warriors (7 v 6).

On the social policy front the most obvious choice to help with barbarians is the opening policy from the Honour tree. This gives your units a 25% increase in strength against barbarians, for example a warrior will go from 6 to 7.5 strength. In addition to this combat boost you will earn

per barbarian killed. This culture is based on the base combat strength of the barbarian, for example, a brute will yield 6

and a spearman will yield 7

. Honour will also show you the location of any encampments in territory you have already explored. This can be useful as it will let you know where barbarians will be likely to come from as well as letting you know where to go to destroy said camps.
Discipline from the Honour tree, with its 10% combat strength bonus from having units in adjacent tiles, can also be useful but its probably not worth taking purely for use against barbarians.

From the Tradition tree the Oligarchy policy can be of some use. Garrisoned units cost no maintenance and cities with a garrison gain +100% ranged combat strength.

Passive

Passive barbarian control is achieved via the use of fog busting. Fog busting is the act of placing units so that they roll back the fog of war, removing an area from possible places that barbarians can spawn camps.

In the early game when you may not have the spare production to dedicate to building enough units to ring your entire territory, it is important to prioritise the areas that you are fog busting. One of the best use of your resources is to fog bust potential new city sites. This allows you to send in a settler with out worrying about it being picked off by a barbarian.

With units in place at strategically important locations you are not only preventing barbarian camps from appearing but you have a military force ready to respond to barbarians moving into that area from out side the fog busted area.

Which leads nicely on to the next section......

Active

Actively dealing with barbarians is simply using military might to kill their units and destroy their encampments.

As with any military action it is best to have one if not both of the following on your side when dealing with barbarians. Quantity or quality. Quality can come from having a technologically superior units or from having experienced, promoted units. Luckily one of the best ways to gain promotions in the early game is from killing barbarians!

When dealing with barbarian encampments it is wise to remember two things. Firstly the unit guarding the camp will more than likely have a fortification bonus to their strength ( up to 50%) meaning they can be a tough nut to crack with a like for like unit. Secondly the camp may spawn another barbarian unit when your unit is in a vulnerable position. The best way to deal with this is to take at least two units to the fight. If you have an archer then this can be a good use for them, bombarding the fortified barbarian whilst a melee unit stands between the two.

Dealing with barbarian naval units can be more difficult than land units due to the likelihood of not having a large naval force available to you early on. Luckily in the early game the threat from naval units is minimal and can be countered with the cities ranged attack and archer units. However if you do have a lot of sea based resources or are playing a water heavy map type it is advisable to have naval units of your own to protect improvements and watch over civilian units you may be moving around on the high seas.

Game settings

You can influence your experiences with barbarians in the game before you even hit play by the choices you make during the set up process.

The two most obvious choices, found in the advanced set up screen, are Raging Barbarians and No Barbarians. Raging Barbarians increases the frequency with which barbarians are spawned, and No Barbarians does exactly what it says, it turns off barbarians.

The difficulty level you're playing on will also impact upon a number of different factors with regards to barbarians. For Prince and above, you'll receive 25

Gold for clearing an encampment, but this is higher on lower levels. Also for Prince and above, barbarians will be able to enter your territory immediately after they start spawning at the beginning of the game, whereas on lower difficulties this is not the case (and on Settler, barbarians will never enter your territory). On Settler you'll receive a 75% combat bonus against barbarians, but this will peter out with each difficulty increase, to the point where no bonus is given on Deity. The AI's bonus against barbarians works the opposite way, although it flattens out at 60% and stays constant after Prince. Barbarians only start spawning after 10 turns, but this is modified below Prince, ballooning out to 18 turns on Settler. The final effect of difficulty is seen in the range within which barbarians will identify a target. For all difficulties this is more for sea units than it is for land units, but it increases for each difficulty level, from a land range of 2 tiles on Settler to 8 tiles on Deity.

This is the XML data summarising the effects of difficulty on barbarians:

Spoiler:

Map type, map size and civilization density can all play a role in how you experience barbarians in the course of a game. In general the higher the land to civilization ratio the more barbarians there will be as there will be more locations for camps to spawn.

A couple of map types deserve a special mention.

First of all archipelago type maps. On these maps you generally won't have to worry to much about land based barbarians to start with, as your starting location will tend to be small and quickly filled with cities or easily fog busted. However, due to the necessity of moving units around via embarkation, naval barbarians are much more of a threat than on say, a pangea type map. Also, due to the fragmented nature of the land masses, you will likely encounter barbarians later into the game than on other map types as there are lots of little areas that aren't being fog busted by you or the AIs.

The second map type is Terra style maps that have a large second continent that is liable to be left unsettled until the late renaissance era. This gives the barbarians time to spawn lots of units on the second continent, including naval units. So if you are heading out to pastures new remember to take the necessary military to deal with the threat and allow you to safely colonise the new world.

The final decision you can make whilst setting up your game that can massively affect your experience of barbarians is which civilization you choose to play as. Since barbarians are more of a threat in the early part of the game, using a civilization that has an early unique unit or a combat focused unique ability can be a major help in dealing with barbarians. For example, Greece and their Hoplites (a strength 9 rather than strength 7 spearman) or Japan and their unique ability which allows wounded units to fight as if they are at full strength will help in controlling barbarians by making your combat solutions more effective. An example of a civilization that is good to use to passively deal with barbarians is American, whose unique ability gives them +1 range for their line of sight.

Using barbarians to your advantage

Barbarians aren't all bad news. In fact they can prove to be a truly valuable resource that can provide a significant bonus, especially in the in the earlier stages of the game. The method by which these bonuses are gained is called farming.

You can farm barbarians for a variety of different things. These are:

Experience
Gold
City state influence
Units
Culture
Diplomatic improvements

Experience

Every time you engage a barbarian unit, either defensively or aggressively, you will earn experience points for the unit up to a maximum of 30. This equals two promotions. It is important to keep this cap in mind when dealing with barbarians because you could be wasting potential experience on units that can gain no more benefit at the expense of unprompted units.

Using barbarians in this way is a great way of improving your early units so that you have an advantage in early wars. This is especially true if you plan attacking a nearby enemy with swordsmen and plan to upgrade your warriors upon acquiring iron.

To get the most from this kind of farming it is a good idea to leave at least one barbarian camp intact so that it keeps spawning units.

Gold

Destroying a barbarian encampment results in 25

on standard speed and difficulty. This is modified by the standard 67%, 150% and 300% modifiers for quick, epic and marathon speeds, and increased to 50, 40 and 30 gold at Settler, Chieftain and Warlord difficulties. Destroying a camp is as simple as moving any unit on to the tile, which generally involves first killing the fortified barbarian within. Some civilizations receive different benefits from destroying an encampment, specified below. Additionally, if the entire honor branch is filled out the finisher which provides gold for each unit killed applies to barbarians as well.

City state influence

You can gain city state influence in several ways.

City states can issue you missions that request your assistance in dealing with barbarians and their encampments. The rewards for these missions are influence points with the city state that has issued the mission.

If a city state tells you it is plagued by barbarians then it is your cue to send some units over to kill barbarian units. Killing those units will earn you 12 influence points per kill, as long as the kill takes place within or adjacent to the city states territory. Even if this mission is not active you can still earn the 12 influence points from killing the barbarians in or adjacent to a city states territory, in this respect you can treat this mission as a signpost to draw your attention to a chance to earn influence points.

The other city state mission that can earn you influence points is when they request your aid to deal with a specific barbarian encampment. The encampment will be highlighted by the city state mission notification. If you haven't discovered the encampment before the mission is offered then the mission will reveal the encampment for you. When you destroy the encampment you earn 30 influence points. It is always a good idea to leave encampments that are located near city states as it is quite likely they will eventually become targets for city state missions.

The final way to gain city state influence via barbarians is returning workers that have been stolen from city states. You recapture workers by walking a military unit onto the same hex as the worker. This will prompt a dialogue box that gives you the option of keeping the worker or returning it to the city state. Returning the worker will yield you 30 influence points. Stolen workers will make their way directly to the encampment that spawned the barbarian that stole the worker.

Units

You can get free workers from barbarians if they have captured city state or full civilization units and you recapture them. Note that if the unit was initially a settler, upon capture it is converted into a worker. You are given a choice of either returning them or keeping them for yourself. This can be a good source of free workers in the early part of the game without causing the diplomatic problems associated with worker stealing.

Culture

You can earn

Culture from barbarians by adopting the opening policy from the Honour policy tree. After adopting this policy killing a barbarian unit earns you

Culture points equivalent to the base strength of the unit killed, e.g. if you kill a barbarian brute (base strength 6) you will receive 6

. If you play as the Aztecs your unique ability – Sacrificial Captives – effectively doubles this bonus.

Diplomatic improvements

If you recapture a civilian unit that belonged to a civilization but was stolen by a barbarian then you are given the choice of returning the unit to the parent civilization. If you chose to do so then you will have a positive diplomatic modifier with the parent civilization that will last for the rest of the game.

Civilizations with barbarian specific unique traits

Germany
Furor Teutonicus: Upon defeating a Barbarian unit inside an encampment, there is a 50% chance you earn 25 Gold and they join your side. Pay 25% less for land unit maintenance.
Instead of capturing a camp and earning the appropriate amount of gold, 50% of the time you will gain a newly spawned unit of the same type that originally occupied the camp and a flat 25 gold (unaffected by speed/difficulty settings).
Songhai
River Warlord: Receive triple Gold from Barbarian encampments and pillaging Cities. Embarked units can defend themselves.
This triple gold is affected by standard speed and difficulty settings, making it extremely profitable on marathon speed for 225 gold per camp at prince or higher difficulty, or up to 450 gold at settler difficulty.
The Ottomans
Barbary Corsairs: 50% Chance of converting a Barbarian naval unit to your side and earning 25 Gold. Pay only one-third the usual cost for naval unit maintenance.
A barbarian naval unit is converted by moving a different naval unit into an adjacent tile. If successful, the barbarian ship in its current condition is automatically turned over to the control of the Ottomans and a flat 25 gold (unaffected by speed) is given to the Ottoman empire. If moving into an adjacent tile does not convert the unit, that barbarian can never be converted.

Patch version of this article: 1.0.1.383

bostich · Sep 21, 2011, 09:41 AM

Does anybody know the formula for the spawn rate of barb camps?

I dont think that every tile under fog has an independent chance of spawning a camp.
In some games on settler,huge,great plains i have seen barb camps spawn almost every turn while on other games on the same map the rate seemed far less. i have never seen 2 barb camps spawn at the same time.

Does the chance of a barb camp spawning at all on a given turn depend on the number of tiles under fog?

weregamer · Sep 23, 2011, 05:17 PM

I can't say for certain but since I've been doing some conscious barb farming the last few games I can share my impressions. It's particularly interesting to observe by using a Tiny map but cutting down to just one AI and a couple CSes, on an easier difficulty than you are used to. This gives you plenty of room to observe. I've only done that once, and the goal was more a relaxed game during a turbulent time IRL, but it was accidentally informative.

I also have not gone hunting in the XML files, but there doesn't seem to be a clue in what the OP showed from them.

The chance of spawning a camp *seems *to be independent of the amount of fog present. I've had situations more than once where there are only a couple or a handful of foggy locations on the map, and on a roughly regular interval I'll get the Honor notification of a new camp in one of them. Reducing the number of fog zones from a handful to only a couple doesn't seem to change the interval much, though you have to be careful about whether an AI has busted the fog. There also seems to be some sort of minimum amount of fog in an area to get a camp - I don't think I've ever seen one spawn in a solitary fog hex, but I think I have seen one on the only fogged hex on a coastline where there were fogged sea hexes around it.

If there are camps on the map, it seems to be more likely that you'll get a new unit at an existing camp than a new camp, but I don't have a feel for how much more.

RedRover57 · Sep 24, 2011, 01:48 AM

Nice article.

Two things that you may want to add for the sake of completeness:

1. Barbarians never heal. This allows you to potentially wear down an encampment with an equal or lower strength unit by healing in between attacks.

2. Newly spawned barbarian units do not act on the first turn. So if you see a brand new barbarian unit spawn next to a camp you will potentially have 2 turns to act (the current turn plus next turn) before that barbarian unit acts. This could allow you to clear the encampment and retreat before the new barbarian unit has a chance to attack.

RonMar · Sep 24, 2011, 12:38 PM

Clouds and the "fog of war" refer to two different things. Camps tend to spawn in the darkened areas of the map which have been explored but are not currently visible by any units (AI or human units) nor visible from (or maybe just not in) any city's cultural borders. These darkened areas are fog. Clouds are the hexes which you have not explored.

The Honor opener might show you camps spawning in the clouds.

bostich · Sep 24, 2011, 04:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RonMar

Camps tend to spawn in the darkened areas of the map which have been explored but are not currently visible by any units (AI or human units) nor visible from (or maybe just not in) any city's cultural borders.

in my experience barb camps spawn in both fog and clouds (to use your terms)

Quote:

Originally Posted by RonMar

The Honor opener might show you camps spawning in the clouds.

that is definetly not true. the honor opener shows you spawning camps in the fog of war, not in the "clouds"

to my knowledge there are 2 methods how camps in the clouds are revealed:

- the reveal nearby barb camps hut
- quest to kill barb camp from a CS

vexing · Sep 24, 2011, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bostich

Does anybody know the formula for the spawn rate of barb camps?...
Does the chance of a barb camp spawning at all on a given turn depend on the number of tiles under fog?

there are a few things in global defines relating to barb camps:

"BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING","2"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","4"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_ANOTHER_CAMP" ,"7"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_COASTAL_SPAWN_ROLL","6"
"BARBARIAN_EXTRA_RAGING_UNIT_SPAWN_CHANCE","10 "
"BARBARIAN_NAVAL_UNIT_START_TURN_SPAWN","30"
"MAX_BARBARIANS_FROM_CAMP_NEARBY","2"
"MAX_BARBARIANS_FROM_CAMP_NEARBY_RANGE","4"

deciphering what all those mean is a different story, the only two i know for sure are the minimum distances: camps can only spawn 5 tiles from a capital or 8 tiles from another camp.

i loaded up a nearly empty huge great plains map, which is i think 72 by 57, with about a 30x20 area covered in water. on the first turn about 27 camps spawned, and then they spawned about every other turn until i believe the map was full; that is there were no spots open that satisfied the 7 min hexes from another camp. then i reloaded the same map and gained visibility for about 5/6ths of tiles, and only 6 camps spawned initially, and a lot less total camps spawned over the next few turns.

so percent of area visible has a strong impact

bostich · Sep 25, 2011, 01:55 AM

i did a little bit of testing on a duel great plains map

I used a mod to reveal the full map at the start, get honor and get gunships as needed.

I played the first 20 turns 3 times on the same map:

- i minimized the number of camps(killeld almost all the same turn they spawned) and maximized the fog of war. the resulting spawnrate was about 1/2

- minimize the number of camps and minimize the fog of war while leaving enough of it that camps can spawn. the resulting spawnrate was about 1/3

- maximize the number of camps(didn't kill them at all) and maximizing the fog of war. resulting spawnrate was about 1/5 (if we adjust for the fact that in the last turns there was no place to spawn a camp: about 1/4

I realize that the sample size is small but this suggest that the spawn rate depends on the number of possible locations rather than only on the tiles under fow.

On a dual map the effect is much stronger than on bigger maps: a few camps coupled with the sight of the CS and players deny almost all spawn locations.

There is obviously a hard limit of 1 barb camp per turn. The best possible spawn rates (killing the camps as soon as possible while leaving a big fog of war) seems to be in the range of 0.5 (dual) - 0.9 (huge).

P.S.: is there an easier way to test this stuff than with "cheat" mods?

vexing · Sep 25, 2011, 04:57 AM

download the civilization sdk and use firetuner

civaddict1973 · Jun 27, 2012, 10:36 AM

technology's is possessive, not plural.
but thanks for the otherwise well written and informative post

weregamer · Jun 27, 2012, 06:23 PM

Needs some updating for G&K in the civ-specific stuff and the discussion of naval barbs. Still mostly accurate.

Since the earliest naval unit is now a melee unit, early barb naval units are much less annoying - they can't attack your land units. And since the barb AI doesn't ever seem to pillage water improvements (which in my mind is a good thing - defending them would be hellish) you can practically ignore them early on unless you are on an archipelago.

In the richer CS diplomacy model with its decrease in the importance of gold gifts, the influence gained from CS barb quests and barb hunting near CSes is a bit more relatively important than it was, but the mechanics are unchanged.

Wuddel · Jul 10, 2012, 06:06 AM

Is the positive diplomatic modifier still everlasting in G&K?

n00bxqb · Jul 13, 2012, 08:18 AM

Anyone else find that Barbarians encampments rarely pop up in G&K? Once the abundance in the beginning are wiped out, they very seldom seem to pop up.

Alphons Rodulfo · Dec 11, 2012, 10:11 AM

"Every time you engage a barbarian unit, either defensively or aggressively, you will earn experience points for the unit up to a maximum of 30. This equals two promotions. It is important to keep this cap in mind when dealing with barbarians because you could be wasting potential experience on units that can gain no more benefit at the expense of unprompted units."

Thanks for this bit of information. I noticed that some units did not earn experience from engaging barbarians, but I did not know why. Is there a way to tell how much barbarian experience a unit has earned, to avoid reaching the cap?

Browd · Dec 11, 2012, 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alphons Rodulfo

Thanks for this bit of information. I noticed that some units did not earn experience from engaging barbarians, but I did not know why. Is there a way to tell how much barbarian experience a unit has earned, to avoid reaching the cap?

It's not so much that barbarian experience is capped at 30 (two promotions), as barbarian battles cannot earn you XP that takes you above 30 XP total. So, for example, if you have a barracks in the city you use to produce a new unit, that unit starts with 15 XP and one promotion. If you then have a run-in with an AI (non-barbarian) unit that earns you 5 XP, you're at 20 XP. If your next encounter is with some barbarians, all you can earn is 10 more XP from your tangle with the barbarians.

Alphons Rodulfo · Dec 11, 2012, 11:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Browd

It's not so much that barbarian experience is capped at 30 (two promotions), as barbarian battles cannot earn you XP that takes you above 30 XP total. So, for example, if you have a barracks in the city you use to produce a new unit, that unit starts with 15 XP and one promotion. If you then have a run-in with an AI (non-barbarian) unit that earns you 5 XP, you're at 20 XP. If your next encounter is with some barbarians, all you can earn is 10 more XP from your tangle with the barbarians.

Thanks! That makes it clear. I will keep this in mind the next time I play.

Jul 19, 2011, 03:18 PM	#1
grandad1982 Deity Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 2,264	Dealing With Barbarians Dealing With Barbarians keeping the hairy people from your door Introduction Whilst barbarians can present an annoying problem to a young empire, by using simple methods you can keep them under control with little trouble. In fact with a little planning you can turn the situation to your advantage. If you want to know more then read on.... Key concepts What are barbarians and what do they do? Controlling barbarians General Advice Passive Active Game Settings Using barbarians to your advantage Experience Gold City state influence Units Culture Diplomatic improvements Civilizations with barbarian specific unique traits Key concepts Fog of War – also simply know as fog, this is the shaded out tiles that are not in the line of sight of any unit or city. Barbarian Encampment – a camp that acts as a base of operations for the barbarians and is the location where barbarians are spawned. Spawning – the act of creating a new unit or barbarian camp. Farming – not to be confused with irrigation, this is the act of gaining combat experience, gold, units and more from barbarians and encampments. What are barbarians and what do they do? Barbarians are a faction who are opposed to civilization and all of its trappings. In practise this means the spawning of camps and barbarian units that will try to disrupt civilizations and city states that they encounter. Barbarian camps can appear in any part of the map as long as the tile in question is within the fog of war of all civilizations and city states. Barbarian camps can appear at any stage of the game as long as some fog still exists. These camps will spawn with a unit guarding them and will go on to spawn new units at regular intervals. These units can be as advanced as the most advanced player's most advanced units, however there are no barbarian units that use strategic resources (e.g. no barbarian Giant Death Robots). The guard unit will stay on or near the camp (it will attack units within its movement range if the odds are favourable) whilst the newly spawned units will make their way towards nearby civilizations and city states. When they reach their destinations the barbarians will attempt to harass and hinder the development of the civilization in question. They do this in a number of ways: Capture/kill civilians Barbarians will attempt to capture settlers and workers, or outright kill great people. A barbarian that successfully captures a civilian will then attempt to escort it directly to the nearest encampment. Pillage tile improvements Barbarians will target your improved tiles for pillaging, preferring to pillage luxury and strategic resources. Any time they end their turn on an improvement they may pillage the tile the following turn. They won't pillage the tile if a higher priority target is available (such as moving from a regular improved tile to a luxury, or capturing a worker). Attacking military units Barbarians by their very nature are aggressive and will attack military units. They may do this even if the odds are not in their favour. Citizen tile denial As with any regular opposing combatants, the tile a barbarian occupies at the start of a turn cannot be worked by a citizen. Naval barbarian units perform similarly, preventing all sea tiles in a 2 tile radius from the unit being worked and potentially blocking trade routes. City Pillaging If a city ends up surrounded by barbarians, they may choose to attack it. If they successfully bring it below 1 hp, instead of capturing it they will steal a chunk of gold and potentially destroy buildings and kill citizens. Controlling barbarians There are a variety of methods you can employ to deal with barbarians and the problems they pose and they can be summarised thus: General Advice Passive Active Game Settings General advice Before delving into the methods of dealing with barbarians it's important to have an understanding of various technology’s and the units and buildings they unlock, as well as social policies that can help you deal with barbarians. There are some key early technology’s that can really help with barbarians. The first and foremost is Archery and the archer unit that it unlocks. This provides you with a great city garrison unit and a way to deal with barbarian units from a distance, so you aren't risking the loss of a unit in melee combat – hopefully. The next two technology’s worth mentioning are Masonry and Bronze Working. Masonry as it allows you to build city walls that increase the base strength of your city, and Bronze Working as it unlocks spear units which have a higher base strength that warriors (7 v 6). On the social policy front the most obvious choice to help with barbarians is the opening policy from the Honour tree. This gives your units a 25% increase in strength against barbarians, for example a warrior will go from 6 to 7.5 strength. In addition to this combat boost you will earn per barbarian killed. This culture is based on the base combat strength of the barbarian, for example, a brute will yield 6 and a spearman will yield 7 . Honour will also show you the location of any encampments in territory you have already explored. This can be useful as it will let you know where barbarians will be likely to come from as well as letting you know where to go to destroy said camps. Discipline from the Honour tree, with its 10% combat strength bonus from having units in adjacent tiles, can also be useful but its probably not worth taking purely for use against barbarians. From the Tradition tree the Oligarchy policy can be of some use. Garrisoned units cost no maintenance and cities with a garrison gain +100% ranged combat strength. Passive Passive barbarian control is achieved via the use of fog busting. Fog busting is the act of placing units so that they roll back the fog of war, removing an area from possible places that barbarians can spawn camps. In the early game when you may not have the spare production to dedicate to building enough units to ring your entire territory, it is important to prioritise the areas that you are fog busting. One of the best use of your resources is to fog bust potential new city sites. This allows you to send in a settler with out worrying about it being picked off by a barbarian. With units in place at strategically important locations you are not only preventing barbarian camps from appearing but you have a military force ready to respond to barbarians moving into that area from out side the fog busted area. Which leads nicely on to the next section...... Active Actively dealing with barbarians is simply using military might to kill their units and destroy their encampments. As with any military action it is best to have one if not both of the following on your side when dealing with barbarians. Quantity or quality. Quality can come from having a technologically superior units or from having experienced, promoted units. Luckily one of the best ways to gain promotions in the early game is from killing barbarians! When dealing with barbarian encampments it is wise to remember two things. Firstly the unit guarding the camp will more than likely have a fortification bonus to their strength ( up to 50%) meaning they can be a tough nut to crack with a like for like unit. Secondly the camp may spawn another barbarian unit when your unit is in a vulnerable position. The best way to deal with this is to take at least two units to the fight. If you have an archer then this can be a good use for them, bombarding the fortified barbarian whilst a melee unit stands between the two. Dealing with barbarian naval units can be more difficult than land units due to the likelihood of not having a large naval force available to you early on. Luckily in the early game the threat from naval units is minimal and can be countered with the cities ranged attack and archer units. However if you do have a lot of sea based resources or are playing a water heavy map type it is advisable to have naval units of your own to protect improvements and watch over civilian units you may be moving around on the high seas. Game settings You can influence your experiences with barbarians in the game before you even hit play by the choices you make during the set up process. The two most obvious choices, found in the advanced set up screen, are Raging Barbarians and No Barbarians. Raging Barbarians increases the frequency with which barbarians are spawned, and No Barbarians does exactly what it says, it turns off barbarians. The difficulty level you're playing on will also impact upon a number of different factors with regards to barbarians. For Prince and above, you'll receive 25 Gold for clearing an encampment, but this is higher on lower levels. Also for Prince and above, barbarians will be able to enter your territory immediately after they start spawning at the beginning of the game, whereas on lower difficulties this is not the case (and on Settler, barbarians will never enter your territory). On Settler you'll receive a 75% combat bonus against barbarians, but this will peter out with each difficulty increase, to the point where no bonus is given on Deity. The AI's bonus against barbarians works the opposite way, although it flattens out at 60% and stays constant after Prince. Barbarians only start spawning after 10 turns, but this is modified below Prince, ballooning out to 18 turns on Settler. The final effect of difficulty is seen in the range within which barbarians will identify a target. For all difficulties this is more for sea units than it is for land units, but it increases for each difficulty level, from a land range of 2 tiles on Settler to 8 tiles on Deity. This is the XML data summarising the effects of difficulty on barbarians: Spoiler: Settler <BarbCampGold>50</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>8</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>75</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>45</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>10000</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>2</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>4</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Chieftain <BarbCampGold>40</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>5</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>50</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>50</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>60</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>3</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>6</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Warlord <BarbCampGold>30</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>3</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>40</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>55</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>20</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>4</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>8</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Prince <BarbCampGold>25</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>0</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>33</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>60</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>0</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>5</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>10</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> King <BarbCampGold>25</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>0</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>25</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>60</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>0</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>5</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>12</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Emperor <BarbCampGold>25</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>0</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>20</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>60</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>0</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>6</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>15</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Immortal <BarbCampGold>25</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>0</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>10</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>60</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>0</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>7</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>18</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Deity <BarbCampGold>25</BarbCampGold> <BarbSpawnMod>0</BarbSpawnMod> <BarbarianBonus>0</BarbarianBonus> <AIBarbarianBonus>60</AIBarbarianBonus> <EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn>0</EarliestBarbarianReleaseTurn> <BarbarianLandTargetRange>8</BarbarianLandTargetRange> <BarbarianSeaTargetRange>20</BarbarianSeaTargetRange> Map type, map size and civilization density can all play a role in how you experience barbarians in the course of a game. In general the higher the land to civilization ratio the more barbarians there will be as there will be more locations for camps to spawn. A couple of map types deserve a special mention. First of all archipelago type maps. On these maps you generally won't have to worry to much about land based barbarians to start with, as your starting location will tend to be small and quickly filled with cities or easily fog busted. However, due to the necessity of moving units around via embarkation, naval barbarians are much more of a threat than on say, a pangea type map. Also, due to the fragmented nature of the land masses, you will likely encounter barbarians later into the game than on other map types as there are lots of little areas that aren't being fog busted by you or the AIs. The second map type is Terra style maps that have a large second continent that is liable to be left unsettled until the late renaissance era. This gives the barbarians time to spawn lots of units on the second continent, including naval units. So if you are heading out to pastures new remember to take the necessary military to deal with the threat and allow you to safely colonise the new world. The final decision you can make whilst setting up your game that can massively affect your experience of barbarians is which civilization you choose to play as. Since barbarians are more of a threat in the early part of the game, using a civilization that has an early unique unit or a combat focused unique ability can be a major help in dealing with barbarians. For example, Greece and their Hoplites (a strength 9 rather than strength 7 spearman) or Japan and their unique ability which allows wounded units to fight as if they are at full strength will help in controlling barbarians by making your combat solutions more effective. An example of a civilization that is good to use to passively deal with barbarians is American, whose unique ability gives them +1 range for their line of sight. Using barbarians to your advantage Barbarians aren't all bad news. In fact they can prove to be a truly valuable resource that can provide a significant bonus, especially in the in the earlier stages of the game. The method by which these bonuses are gained is called farming. You can farm barbarians for a variety of different things. These are: Experience Gold City state influence Units Culture Diplomatic improvements Experience Every time you engage a barbarian unit, either defensively or aggressively, you will earn experience points for the unit up to a maximum of 30. This equals two promotions. It is important to keep this cap in mind when dealing with barbarians because you could be wasting potential experience on units that can gain no more benefit at the expense of unprompted units. Using barbarians in this way is a great way of improving your early units so that you have an advantage in early wars. This is especially true if you plan attacking a nearby enemy with swordsmen and plan to upgrade your warriors upon acquiring iron. To get the most from this kind of farming it is a good idea to leave at least one barbarian camp intact so that it keeps spawning units. Gold Destroying a barbarian encampment results in 25 on standard speed and difficulty. This is modified by the standard 67%, 150% and 300% modifiers for quick, epic and marathon speeds, and increased to 50, 40 and 30 gold at Settler, Chieftain and Warlord difficulties. Destroying a camp is as simple as moving any unit on to the tile, which generally involves first killing the fortified barbarian within. Some civilizations receive different benefits from destroying an encampment, specified below. Additionally, if the entire honor branch is filled out the finisher which provides gold for each unit killed applies to barbarians as well. City state influence You can gain city state influence in several ways. City states can issue you missions that request your assistance in dealing with barbarians and their encampments. The rewards for these missions are influence points with the city state that has issued the mission. If a city state tells you it is plagued by barbarians then it is your cue to send some units over to kill barbarian units. Killing those units will earn you 12 influence points per kill, as long as the kill takes place within or adjacent to the city states territory. Even if this mission is not active you can still earn the 12 influence points from killing the barbarians in or adjacent to a city states territory, in this respect you can treat this mission as a signpost to draw your attention to a chance to earn influence points. The other city state mission that can earn you influence points is when they request your aid to deal with a specific barbarian encampment. The encampment will be highlighted by the city state mission notification. If you haven't discovered the encampment before the mission is offered then the mission will reveal the encampment for you. When you destroy the encampment you earn 30 influence points. It is always a good idea to leave encampments that are located near city states as it is quite likely they will eventually become targets for city state missions. The final way to gain city state influence via barbarians is returning workers that have been stolen from city states. You recapture workers by walking a military unit onto the same hex as the worker. This will prompt a dialogue box that gives you the option of keeping the worker or returning it to the city state. Returning the worker will yield you 30 influence points. Stolen workers will make their way directly to the encampment that spawned the barbarian that stole the worker. Units You can get free workers from barbarians if they have captured city state or full civilization units and you recapture them. Note that if the unit was initially a settler, upon capture it is converted into a worker. You are given a choice of either returning them or keeping them for yourself. This can be a good source of free workers in the early part of the game without causing the diplomatic problems associated with worker stealing. Culture You can earn Culture from barbarians by adopting the opening policy from the Honour policy tree. After adopting this policy killing a barbarian unit earns you Culture points equivalent to the base strength of the unit killed, e.g. if you kill a barbarian brute (base strength 6) you will receive 6. If you play as the Aztecs your unique ability – Sacrificial Captives – effectively doubles this bonus. Diplomatic improvements If you recapture a civilian unit that belonged to a civilization but was stolen by a barbarian then you are given the choice of returning the unit to the parent civilization. If you chose to do so then you will have a positive diplomatic modifier with the parent civilization that will last for the rest of the game. Civilizations with barbarian specific unique traits Germany Furor Teutonicus: Upon defeating a Barbarian unit inside an encampment, there is a 50% chance you earn 25 Gold and they join your side. Pay 25% less for land unit maintenance. Instead of capturing a camp and earning the appropriate amount of gold, 50% of the time you will gain a newly spawned unit of the same type that originally occupied the camp and a flat 25 gold (unaffected by speed/difficulty settings). Songhai River Warlord: Receive triple Gold from Barbarian encampments and pillaging Cities. Embarked units can defend themselves. This triple gold is affected by standard speed and difficulty settings, making it extremely profitable on marathon speed for 225 gold per camp at prince or higher difficulty, or up to 450 gold at settler difficulty. The Ottomans Barbary Corsairs: 50% Chance of converting a Barbarian naval unit to your side and earning 25 Gold. Pay only one-third the usual cost for naval unit maintenance. A barbarian naval unit is converted by moving a different naval unit into an adjacent tile. If successful, the barbarian ship in its current condition is automatically turned over to the control of the Ottomans and a flat 25 gold (unaffected by speed) is given to the Ottoman empire. If moving into an adjacent tile does not convert the unit, that barbarian can never be converted. Patch version of this article: 1.0.1.383 Last edited by The_J; Nov 19, 2011 at 05:23 PM.

Sep 24, 2011, 12:38 PM	#5
RonMar Warlord Join Date: Apr 2010 Posts: 133	Clouds and the "fog of war" refer to two different things. Camps tend to spawn in the darkened areas of the map which have been explored but are not currently visible by any units (AI or human units) nor visible from (or maybe just not in) any city's cultural borders. These darkened areas are fog. Clouds are the hexes which you have not explored. The Honor opener might show you camps spawning in the clouds. Last edited by RonMar; Sep 24, 2011 at 12:43 PM.

Jun 27, 2012, 10:36 AM	#10
civaddict1973 Chieftain Join Date: Jun 2012 Posts: 1	*technologies technology's is possessive, not plural. but thanks for the otherwise well written and informative post

Sep 21, 2011, 09:41 AM	#2
bostich Chieftain Join Date: Jul 2006 Posts: 90	Does anybody know the formula for the spawn rate of barb camps? I dont think that every tile under fog has an independent chance of spawning a camp. In some games on settler,huge,great plains i have seen barb camps spawn almost every turn while on other games on the same map the rate seemed far less. i have never seen 2 barb camps spawn at the same time. Does the chance of a barb camp spawning at all on a given turn depend on the number of tiles under fog?

Sep 23, 2011, 05:17 PM	#3
weregamer Gandhi of the Mongols Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 146	I can't say for certain but since I've been doing some conscious barb farming the last few games I can share my impressions. It's particularly interesting to observe by using a Tiny map but cutting down to just one AI and a couple CSes, on an easier difficulty than you are used to. This gives you plenty of room to observe. I've only done that once, and the goal was more a relaxed game during a turbulent time IRL, but it was accidentally informative. I also have not gone hunting in the XML files, but there doesn't seem to be a clue in what the OP showed from them. The chance of spawning a camp seems to be independent of the amount of fog present. I've had situations more than once where there are only a couple or a handful of foggy locations on the map, and on a roughly regular interval I'll get the Honor notification of a new camp in one of them. Reducing the number of fog zones from a handful to only a couple doesn't seem to change the interval much, though you have to be careful about whether an AI has busted the fog. There also seems to be some sort of minimum amount of fog in an area to get a camp - I don't think I've ever seen one spawn in a solitary fog hex, but I think I have seen one on the only fogged hex on a coastline where there were fogged sea hexes around it. If there are camps on the map, it seems to be more likely that you'll get a new unit at an existing camp than a new camp, but I don't have a feel for how much more.

Sep 24, 2011, 01:48 AM	#4
RedRover57 King Join Date: Nov 2010 Posts: 823	Nice article. Two things that you may want to add for the sake of completeness: 1. Barbarians never heal. This allows you to potentially wear down an encampment with an equal or lower strength unit by healing in between attacks. 2. Newly spawned barbarian units do not act on the first turn. So if you see a brand new barbarian unit spawn next to a camp you will potentially have 2 turns to act (the current turn plus next turn) before that barbarian unit acts. This could allow you to clear the encampment and retreat before the new barbarian unit has a chance to attack.

Sep 25, 2011, 01:55 AM	#8
bostich Chieftain Join Date: Jul 2006 Posts: 90	i did a little bit of testing on a duel great plains map I used a mod to reveal the full map at the start, get honor and get gunships as needed. I played the first 20 turns 3 times on the same map: - i minimized the number of camps(killeld almost all the same turn they spawned) and maximized the fog of war. the resulting spawnrate was about 1/2 - minimize the number of camps and minimize the fog of war while leaving enough of it that camps can spawn. the resulting spawnrate was about 1/3 - maximize the number of camps(didn't kill them at all) and maximizing the fog of war. resulting spawnrate was about 1/5 (if we adjust for the fact that in the last turns there was no place to spawn a camp: about 1/4 I realize that the sample size is small but this suggest that the spawn rate depends on the number of possible locations rather than only on the tiles under fow. On a dual map the effect is much stronger than on bigger maps: a few camps coupled with the sight of the CS and players deny almost all spawn locations. There is obviously a hard limit of 1 barb camp per turn. The best possible spawn rates (killing the camps as soon as possible while leaving a big fog of war) seems to be in the range of 0.5 (dual) - 0.9 (huge). P.S.: is there an easier way to test this stuff than with "cheat" mods?

Sep 25, 2011, 04:57 AM	#9
vexing knows Join Date: Dec 2010 Posts: 2,666 Images: 3	download the civilization sdk and use firetuner

Jun 27, 2012, 06:23 PM	#11
weregamer Gandhi of the Mongols Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: San Jose, CA Posts: 146	Needs some updating for G&K in the civ-specific stuff and the discussion of naval barbs. Still mostly accurate. Since the earliest naval unit is now a melee unit, early barb naval units are much less annoying - they can't attack your land units. And since the barb AI doesn't ever seem to pillage water improvements (which in my mind is a good thing - defending them would be hellish) you can practically ignore them early on unless you are on an archipelago. In the richer CS diplomacy model with its decrease in the importance of gold gifts, the influence gained from CS barb quests and barb hunting near CSes is a bit more relatively important than it was, but the mechanics are unchanged.

Jul 10, 2012, 06:06 AM	#12
Wuddel Warlord Join Date: Sep 2010 Location: Zürich, Switzerland Posts: 171	Is the positive diplomatic modifier still everlasting in G&K?

Jul 13, 2012, 08:18 AM	#13
n00bxqb Chieftain Join Date: Dec 2011 Posts: 93	Anyone else find that Barbarians encampments rarely pop up in G&K? Once the abundance in the beginning are wiped out, they very seldom seem to pop up.

Dec 11, 2012, 10:11 AM	#14
Alphons Rodulfo Warlord Join Date: Feb 2002 Location: A very huge map Posts: 126	"Every time you engage a barbarian unit, either defensively or aggressively, you will earn experience points for the unit up to a maximum of 30. This equals two promotions. It is important to keep this cap in mind when dealing with barbarians because you could be wasting potential experience on units that can gain no more benefit at the expense of unprompted units." Thanks for this bit of information. I noticed that some units did not earn experience from engaging barbarians, but I did not know why. Is there a way to tell how much barbarian experience a unit has earned, to avoid reaching the cap?

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