Insane Barbarians

New: Insane Barbarians for BTS (Alpha, playable)

File and Description:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8536
Direct link for download:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=8536&act=down

Old post follows:


This mod does a few things.

1> Roughly 4x the animals, 2.5x the land barbarians, 2x the barbarian cities, 2x the garrison in barbarian cities, 4x the water barbarians.

2> Player bonus's vs Animals and Barbarians are seriously pared down.

3> It reduces AI bonuses against barbarians to 10% vs animals and 10% vs barbarians. Just enough that they tend to win ties. This means that the AI is just as hampered by the barbarians as you are.

4> It makes barbarians, animals and barbarian cities show up earlier (about twice as early).

5> It lowers the chance that animals attack you significantly. Given the animal density, you do get attacked anyhow.

6> It adds in a whole host of addional animals, and tweaks the existing ones. Some of them are quite nasty.

7> It is intended for Blake's Better AI mod -- the handicap files are balanced assuming you are using it.

8> Scouts can attack, but are bad at attacking non-animals.

The Barbarian boost is in the handicap file.

Here is the mod, version II:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=4325
It is warlords 2.08 compatable. It is probably not vanilla compatable.

Here is the original mod, if you want to see what I did to boost the number of barbarians:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/downloads.php?do=file&id=4226
The original mod is warlords 2.08 compatable. It may be vanilla compatable, but I didn't check.

Here is the link to Blake's Better AI mod: (Feb 12 2007 no assert version included in the link)
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=178407
Tested using the Feb 12th version. Note that if you want AIs to go to war, other than when they will win, set Aggressive to ON.

Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw:
Predatory Animals are ridiculously common. They are good practice to get your units XPed up to 5 XP, which gives you a better chance against the earlier hordes. Scouts have to be careful, but they are better than Warriors at fighting Animals.

This quick mod was inspired by:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=208877
and I figured it was quicker/more amusing than doing more than 1 page of searching.

Animal tweaks: (above and beyond the exotic animals mod)
Many animals retreat. Some fast animals ignore terrain costs. Some animals gain terrain defensive bonuses. Cheetahs are really really annoying. Cave Bears eat your units for lunch.

Sample:
I did a of Insane Barbarians (Raging) on Prince, Earth 18 civ map.

Changes from a normal game:
First, being at the edge of civilization wasn't all that good for an empire. Second, explorers died -- you never saw an exploring chinese/indian/mongolian scout in Europe.

Two or Three civilizations got overrun by Barbarians -- the Mongols and Chinese prior to making contact with them (resulting in a huge massive barbarian state on the where they used to be), and the Egyptians at the dawn of Feudalism (all of darkest Africa was pouring barbarians at them).

The remaining "outer" civilizations (Indians, American, Aztec, Mali and Russian) spent most of history engaged in a fight to the death with the barbarians. They where saved by feudalism -- almost all of them had lost cities to the Barbarian advance, then started recovering post-feudalism. The Persians also had minor problems -- they regularly had a barbarian or three wandering in their territory, destroying improvements.

Being an "inner" civilization reduced the impact of the barbarian hordes. It still made it difficult to build parachute colonies.

The Cave Bears and Cave Lions where the longest living animals -- and I suspect the Siberian Tiger.

Japan was relatively isolated, but survived the hordes by staying on islands. Japan dares not set foot in Austrailia, but had colonies up and down polynesia by the discovery of Astronomy.

The 3 largest concentrations of barbarians by the discovery of liberalism are:
Brazil and Eastern South America.
South East Asia
Austrailia

All 3 of the above regions would require a full-scale war to colonize, as all of them contain multiple large barbarian cities. Southern Africa and parts of North America also contain a handful of Barbarian cities, but nowhere near an infestation. North East asia is currently being colonized by both Russia and Persia.

China contains barbarian cities with religion, left over from the conquest of the Chinese. I believe the holy city was burned -- or at least, my suicide explorers never found it, but did find more than one city ruins.

Next goal:
Maybe tweak the XP caps up a bit (it is really really brutal as it stands -- maybe double it). Implement a mini-caravan that you gain when you kill an animal (instant bonus food when consumed in your city). Maybe (gasp) create herds of migrating herbavores! (so you too can nearly wipe out wild species for food)

That will certainly make things interesting early on.

Thanks

I especially like the water barbarians thing!

I'm tempted to pump the number of animals up even more, and reduce the chance they attack even more.

The feel of seeing animals all over the place, and not knowing if they will pounce on your units or not, is rather neat.

You really have to build a defensive army to deal with the barbarian hordes. Every non-military tech you learn gives the barbarians another chance to get a leg up on you...

And, once you have that huge military to hold off the hordes, it sure is tempting to use it in war against a neighbour.

This matches a neat hypothesis behind why settled people started with warfare. Once you settle down, you have resources you can't pick up and carry away, so you need to build up a defensive force. That is a sunk cost, and using that "defensive" force to attack weaker neighbours doesn't increase your costs all that much, and is rather profitable.

If you play with it some, do let me know if the water barbarians can be ratcheted up more. I find that raging barbarians on island maps tends to get pretty tame, because you can often "cover" your entire island with scouts and prevent any barbarians from spawning...

But if the barbarians came from offshore boats, you would always have to deal with the possibility of barbarian invasion.

OMG this is awesome, I always loved TheLopez's barbarion mods and this fits in with them. This is entirely in an XML file which means I can change stuff as well. I like the animals idea how you're completely surrounded but unsure if they will eat you or not. Try this with TheLopez's pirate mod so they actually attack from the sea (impossible with vanilla) Nice work yakky.

I'm just waiting for TheLopex to compile the Great General dll and the Pirate dll together to make an ultimate barb mod with this xml.

This would also go well with TheLopez's unique barbarion mod (xml only) and Zuul's exotic animal mod.

Change the xp cap while you are at it .

Bah -- Barbarians and Animals are something I want players to try and stop, not something to try to farm.

Unlimited XP barbarian mods tend to encourage "build a barbarian farm, bottle them up with a ridiculously high defence position, and roll in the XP!"

I do feel for the poor scouts. *sniff* They might deserve a strength boost to 2.

Good idea but is it an option like the raging barbs and one city challenge etc.

heres mods which you add with it
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=157031
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?p=4366676

Hmmm.... Interesting mod... as for other barbarian mods I think I might have a new one coming out and yes I know I am a tease.

The extra animals one looks great.

To use this mod, you simply load the mod. Now any game you start has the multipliers listed.

You can have insane barbs with or without raging barbs on. I'm not quite sure what the raging barbs does, but I did test it enough to make sure I has the insane number of animals and a somewhat high number of barbarians.

I'm very cautious about any mod that increases the benefits of fighting barbarians. Players should seek to stamp out barbarians so they stop annoying the empire, not farming them. The Barbarian AI is very primitive -- "find nearest city or unit and kill, pillage and destroy!" -- on purpose.

Ideally, I would change it so that it adds an "Insane Barbs" check to the custom loader -- but I currently lack the knowledge of how to read those checkmarks from within python.

With my downloaded version of Yakk's mod I just put all of the altered difficulties as new handicaps so that you can choose whether to play on Insane Barbarians. This is the next best thing to having "Insane Barbarians" as a custom option like "require complete kills" "lock modified assets" and "Raging Barbarians"

The normal difficulties are:

Settler
Chieftan
Warlord
Noble
Prince
Monarch
Emperor
Immortal
Diety

The updated list of difficulties is

Settler
Chieftan
Insane Chieftan(Chieftan w/ insane barbs)
Warlord
Insane Warlord (Warlord w/ insane barbs)
Noble
Insane Noble (Noble w/ insane barbs)
Prince
Insane Prince (Prince w/ insane barbs)
Monarch
Insane Monarch (Monarch w/ insane barbs)
Emperor
Insane Emperor (Emperor w/ insane barbs)
Immortal
Insane Immortal (Immortal w/ insane barbs)
Diety

Here's the altered version of the mod if anyone wants it :
Insane_Barbs.zip

TheLopez said:

Hmmm.... Interesting mod... as for other barbarian mods I think I might have a new one coming out and yes I know I am a tease.

Click to expand...

Sounds exciting You've got so many good mods coming out... can't wait

Yakk said:

I'm very cautious about any mod that increases the benefits of fighting barbarians. Players should seek to stamp out barbarians so they stop annoying the empire, not farming them. The Barbarian AI is very primitive -- "find nearest city or unit and kill, pillage and destroy!" -- on purpose.

Click to expand...

Only if you choose to abuse this, and personally I would love to see Barbarian GG's running around (thank you TheLopez). When I play I usually don't start building armies until I am forced to, by the other AI civs attacking me, and usually during the early game I barely have any defenders in my cities, so the increased barb activity should make me change these habits.

BTW I'm not sure if you can stamp out the barbarians? unless you kill them all and leave units everywhere to clear the fog but that sounds like too much work They would respawn too fast I think.

As soon as you start "farming" the barbs all the fun goes away, so it's your choice. I think the GG's and Pirates will make it more challenging rather than easier and beneficial.

I agree with Chugginator. It's the player's choice whether to farm barbs or not, and I also think farming them takes the fun out of it.

So,if you are going to remove the xp cap, just make them stronger! If they're really strong, they will be too dangerous to "farm", as they still can pose a significant threat to your empire.

Another thing that would help would be to make the spawning rather unpredictable. In the original game, the barbs are much too predictable; attacking pretty much at a constant rate, maybe increasing or decreasing gradually, but in no sudden invasions. Perhaps it would help to make them more random, so there could occasionally be intense, damaging onslaughts. This would make the barbs too formidable to just farm, as they would be much harder to keep in check, and would possibly even be able to capture lightly guarded inner cities!

Earlier I posted how I put all of the altered difficulties as new handicaps so that it's optional whether or not you will play on Insane Barbarians. In the zip I provided, I forgot to update settler and diety difficulties. Here's a zip with the necessary corrections, if anyone is interested.

Insane_Barbs.zip

P.S. Yakk, do you like?

Yes. If I can't figure out how to make [ ] Insane Barbarians a checkbox, I'll roll that into mine.

Ideally I'd want a barbarian insanity meter... I'd really like to know what raging barbarians actually does, so I can fit that into the insanity meter.

...

I rather like the idea of barbarian outbreaks, instead of a steady stream of barbarians. Anything from "when a barbarian unit would normally spawn, instead you get 3 units" to "a chaotic, localized wave function that describes local barbarian activity".

...

So let's see, simple changes to make this more interesting:
1> Steal the Exotic Animals mod. (snarf!)
2> Lower the chance that animals attack, boost the animal density. At the highest difficulty, animals should attack half of the time.
3> Animals shouldn't naturally despawn. They should be wiped out by civilization. (kael has a change for this)
4> Killing an animal should grant food at the nearest city (+1 food, ideally configureable in ini files for both duration and amount).
5> Boost scouts vs animals somewhat (2 combat strength, +50% vs animals, -25% city defence, -25% archer/gun, -50% mounted/melee).
6> Make the mod more friendly, by making the insane barbarians optional.

Then worry about making barbarians pulsey, allowing scouts to kill animals, and other stuffs like that.

Yeah. A barb intensity meter is something I've wanted for ages
If you want, here is a copy of Insane Barbarians merged with Exotic Animals!
This copy also has a much higher Animal density in each difficulty level below Immortal and above Settler!

Insane Barbarians.zip

I have added this to my MOD, great work guys!!

btw, i used this and it took about 200 turns before any Barbarians appeared??? is that normal, alot of animals but no barbarians??

Hmm... That's weird. That hasn't happened to me when I play on it...
Try using a quicker gamespeed?

Which version of the mod -- Quaetam's or the one in the top post?

What difficulty level?

There could be a typo somewhere, and that would delay barbarians showing up.

I used the one in post # 16.

EDIT: I was using the insane settler on this, but this time i used Insane Warlords and everything was fine, they must keep away for a LONG time when on lower settings?