I just lost on Cheiftain

I recently got my first Noble win; I'd been playing on Warlord, but I've been beginning to find it too easy. Normally I play a cottage economy and I wanted to try my hand at a specialist economy, so I figured I'd use Gandhi on chieftain and see how it goes. I had just stolen Kublai Kahn's worker and sent him back to my capital to help chop out the Pyramids when I get the Barb Archer rush from hell. There was a stack of four of them heading straight for my capital and all I could do is watch as my brave little warrior held off the first three before succumbing to his ultimate demise. It was 2175 BC. I had just finished alphabet. I am one pathetic loser I guess next time I'll chop out the Great Wall first.

chopping the great wall isn't a solution my friend you need to get more experience thats all. You need to to some fog busting, meaning creating some units and put them on hills outside your cultural range in order to "remove" fog areas to make the barbarians more managable. In addition, you need to learn not to be build-o-holic, meaning don't build everything you can in your cities, make sure you create enough army for basic protection, and hell, maybe enough to conquer someone

That's the ironic part I guess; usually I'm all about the Axe/Early UU rush, but I've always used a CE and wanted to try something new. As far as fog busting goes, I would almost prefer to let the early barbs in just to build a little extra XP for my stack. As far as being a build-holic, it's something I'm working on I read in one of the forums about wonder addiction and it's cold turkey, zero wonders cure. That was actually how I got my first Noble win that I mentioned: early Immortal rush to kill Raggy then I vassalized monty to keep him off my @$$ while I built my infrastructure.

Happens to the best of us.

it is more likley an event. Which is bugged. See this thread

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=253982

so it's not you who are doing things wrong, just try again and you will succeed ^^

Lol. Chance things happen. I've done plenty of embarassing things, and i've only been playing civ4 for one month. Yes, i've been essentially screwed by barbs also, although i've never lost my capital to them. I might as well have though, the damage was so bad I had to give up.

I've been in an online game where one of my oponents had the barbarian event early on and got ransacked by like 5 horse archers, around the time he was just getting bronze working. I thought it was pretty funny.