Peace with the Barbarians

Been playing Civ for more than twenty years - starting with I, moving on to II, sort of skipping III, moving on to IV, returning to II. I have literally played thousands hours of Civ during my lifetime... and I've been reading about the games for a long time, too, from Rome on 640k a Day to Starlifter and Kobayashi and Catfish, and all the other brilliant players and scenario designers and code crawlers at Civfanatics. I'm even attempting my hand at modding now, creating a 'Nextwar' type game extension mod for Civ II.

Now here's why I'm posting - I think I've discovered something new. Or at least, I could not find it anywhere on the forums.

A couple of days, for the first time in a Civ game (Civ II that is), I made peace with the barbarians. What?

This is what happened:

- Barbarians showed up on my doorstep
- I tried to preemptively attack one of the offending barbarian units with my horsemen
- The game then prompted me: "Shall we declare war on the Barbarians?"
(see attached screenshot)
- if I chose not to attack them, on the next turn, they attacked me instead, apparently breaking our peace treaty, as the game called it a 'sneak attack'
(see other attached screenshot)

Is this a known occurence? Has anyone else 'been at peace' with the Barbarians before? It would seem like more of a glitch than anything you could actually play off of as the peace obviously was not very durable, but as something potentially new about Civ II I thought it was worth breaking my lifelong lurking here with a first post





View attachment he_b475.sav

For those who care to reproduce this, I've attached the .sav as well. For those who would want to try to reproduce this in their games, I haven't tried yet, but here's some details that may be relevant:

- I am playing MGE with the anti hostile AI patch
- I popped a lot of mercenaries during the early phase of the game
- I did not make peace with the first AI player when encountering them, and in fact attacked them with my mercenaries before agreeing to a peace treaty later
- The Barbarians wiped out the Americans early in the game, apparently capturing the city of Washington
- A few turns back, I went into the Barbarian city of Washington with a diplomat (based on a trireme) to see if I could bribe it, but since I could not yet afford to, I backed out of the menu and had the diplomat sail away again

- A few turns back, I went into the Barbarian city of Washington with a diplomat (based on a trireme) to see if I could bribe it, but since I could not yet afford to, I backed out of the menu and had the diplomat sail away again

Click to expand...

That is probably it. You "established contact" with the barbarians by with the diplomat. To verify if this interpretation is correct, you can try the same thing with a diplomat from a ship on a civ you haven't met yet. Check the foreign affairs window afterwards, if the civ now apears, then you've "made contact."

Thanks for the response Prof. Garfield. Yes indeed, I tested it, and it had the same effect, which established that <ESC>ing out of the menu when visiting a city of a Civ you hadn't met does not prevent contact from being initiated. But I had never seen this with Barbarians; probably some other players have but it must be pretty rare.

My conclusions:

1) Unfortunately, we weren't at peace - that's another message, about breaking a treaty; I should have remembered. We had had 'contact'.

2) 'Contact' between the player and the Barbarian AI is normally initiated when meeting a Barbarian unit for the first time, whether land or sea or goody hut, and it will either ignore you for a while (this happened to my diplomat) or simply attack you, thus declaring war. No message is then shown.

3) If however you have a diplomat enter a Barbarian city before they have had the chance to attack you, you 'make contact' in the same way as you would have with a regular AI. Even if you <ESC> out. (This doesn't have to be off a boat, I tried it and it works over land as well).

That making contact with the Barbarian AI is the real glitch, I guess. I already knew you could establish a (meaningless) embassy with Atilla, but I have always done so after we were already at war. I just assumed the Barbarian AI started out 'at war' with all players, but no - in this regard, it works the same as the other players, even though the game does not readily show it.

Welcome Woodkid.

I too have been playing Civ2 for nearly 20 years (shortly after it came out for Macintosh) and have played many games. But I have never seen this phenomenon. It is possible that I have never established contact by visiting a barbarian city first, but contact with computer players is established when your unit meets theirs somewhere on land.

I too am curious to know if anyone else has seen this.

Woodkid,
Do you know about our Game of the Month? We start from the same initial save, play, and compare notes as we play. I think you will enjoy joining us. Check out the GOTM forum. GOTM 156 is well on its way, 157 is fresh, and 158 will be posted in early August.

Interesting observation. I think it is quite unusual to encouter a barbarian city before encountering a barbarian unit. I cannot remember anything like that in one of my games.

However, regarding strange barbarian behaviour, I do have something that happened during GOTM#146, while my spaceship was on its way to Alpha Centauri: Barbs develop Bronze-Working!
(Next interturn of the attached file)