Has anyone tried herding barbarians to AI's

I recently started to play with raging barbarians on and AI's are rather incompetent when it comes to dealing with them. I noticed that barbs sometimes love to follow / try encircle my scout. Would it be possible, after the land is scouted and scout has limited usefulness, to lead hordes of barbs from camps next to your cities to AI cities or likely routes of his settlers? Or barbs when following get tunnel vision and just come after your scout.

I think you have watched the Walking Dead a bit to much....


But yeah, it should be possible, I guess.

I don't think you can herd barbs. They seemed pretty hardwired to go after the closest unit or nearest city. They will retreat from a strong unit, but if your units are strong enough to intimidate the barbs this way, your units would be better employed to go after the AI!

That said, when I didn't want to DoW, I have had pretty good success steering AI units towards barb camps...

This seems like a lot of effort with little reward. The barbs are just too random for this to work. They might follow your scout for a turn or two but then a worker or CS might come into closer proximity and they will turn their attentions to that instead.

I can imagine you leading one barb to an AI, but not large groups because you'd likely use your unit.

Not your technique, but the same outcome as it gets other civs attacked by barbs: later on in the game when caravans can be built in 1-2 turns, send them through a barb camp near an enemy city to spawn extra ones. It's particularly funny in multiplayer, though I haven't tested it vs AIs yet. Wasted production aside, the drawback is that it requires particularly placed cities with a barb camp near theirs.

Note that the AI has a higher bonus against the AI than the human does and that the Barb AI is aware of this bonus. This actually results in early game of the AI (by accident) herding Barbs towards the human.

Barb Ais could harm both human and AI. Its difficult to tell who the barb will attack.

joncnunn said:

Note that the AI has a higher bonus against the AI than the human does and that the Barb AI is aware of this bonus. This actually results in early game of the AI (by accident) herding Barbs towards the human.

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Is this on Prince? I thought that Prince is the difficulty where no one gets any bonuses.

I tried my herding strategy last night and its a lot of work for no visible gain. Initially I got 2 warriors following my scout, but one wondered off at some point. The AI's capital had 2 barbs running over it already so I doubt adding one more made it much worse, tho admittedly I broke contact to stop herding and don't know what went down there. Hopefully it at least delayed settler coming out for extra turn or two - they had one sitting in city.

The other thing is that, unlike IV (and maybe III, I don't recall), you cannot loose cities to barbs. It has happened to me, and I have watched it happen to the AI, but even when the city is at zero health it does fall. You loose some gold as the barb warrior or horseman disappears. The end-assault does not last very long -- since the city attack wears down the range units pretty quickly and melee attackers vaporize. Amusing, but a disappointment really. Barb cities are a feature I miss from IV.

Having barbs pillage AI lands and steal workers and settlers is great, but if they are too successful (or harassing a new expo) it is pointless.

DubiousSquirrel said:

Is this on Prince? I thought that Prince is the difficulty where no one gets any bonuses.

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Rule #1: The manual lies.

Every version of Civ from Civ 1 to Civ 5 features the AI with a larger handicap against the barbs than a human on Prince.

There are more much noticeable handicaps than that though. (The AI really is 33% worse at fighting the barbs than a Prince level human player is.)