Raging barbs in domination games

After some friendly advise I am considering the Germany DCL. Three salient features of this map (besides the leader) are raging barbs and


Although there is some tangential discussion of this in the thread, I would like to get some opinions about the consequences of raging barbs for the opening play in domination games. Particular questions:

1) Is it worth opening honor for the culture and combat bonus?
2) If you go honor -> liberty, the settler policy will be delayed and you will probably get a lot of units from snowballing barb camps, resulting in unit cap problems. Can/should this be avoided? Build/buy a settler before the policy?
3) I guess you need to insert archery and a couple archers early on to survive the barb onslaught. How does that affect turn times, e.g. for a CB rush on the friendly neighbour?
4) How does raging barbs affect AI progress?

1. I don't think so.
2. Not necessarily, you may get nothing.
3. I couldn't manage to CB rush the neighbor, he always had more units than me.
4. I don't think it does as much as one would expect tbqh

I won't pretend to be authoritative about this. I used raging barbs for a long while when I first started Deity because I thought it gave the human a significant advantage. I am not so sure about that nowadays! Yes, a human is much better at dealing w/ barbs than the AI. But the Deity AIs gets so many more units that it probably does not matter.

For Germany UA, you want more camps. Raging barbs increases the spawn rate from the camps, not the number of camps, nor how frequently camps spawn.

The net effect is that Raging barbs very much works against the German UA. More barbs => more time to clear camps => fewer camps respawning.

The only way it could help is if it causes the AI to leave more camps for the player -- but it does not seem like that could make up for there being fewer camps near the player.

1. No. Even with Raging barbs you never make up the extra SP cost.
2. You should be so lucky to have unit cap problems! But if you want to mix Honor with Liberty, do it after the free settler. Build/buy a settler before the policy is just sabotaging the value of that policy, and opening Honor or Tradition before Liberty does not change that.
3. Yes, you want archers early. Two scouts and your starting warrior should be enough to let you first build a shrine and monument though. I did that all the time with raging barbs, and I am not the strongest player! It does take some getting used to. I agree with ST412 that raging barbs would seem to interfere with CB rush.
4. I have sometimes witnessed an AI really struggling. I have never really been able to take advantage of that though. I commonly find workers in settlers in barb camps. So I still think raging barbs hurts the AI more the human player, but it is a modest effect.

I like raging barbs for my SP games as the extra easy xp for archers is a nice buff. If going full honor or a UA that buff barb kills (celts, Aztec) it is really nice.

Raging barbarians is only good(*) if you go Peity/Reformation/Heathen Conversion and then farm barbs with your missionary. In all other cases it(raging barbs) nerfs you more then it nerfs AI.


(*) - good luck founding religion on Deity, Peity is the weakest of starting social trees.

Let's look at the math for (1), and let's assume that we only care about reacing collective rule (i.e. that the benefits of +% against barbs and the long term benefits of the extra honor policy cancel out the long term cost of additional policies - probably only valid if we want to get honor later on anyway, which on this map sounds reasonable enough)

According to http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Mathematics_of_Civilization_V, the cost of the first three policies with a single city are: 25, 45, 90, 160 (I guess I should have know these by heart).

So, when opening liberty it will take (45+90)/3 = 45 turns to get to collective rule.

In 23 turns, after honor we can also open liberty, so in the remaining 22 turns we collect 22*3 = 66 culture towards the 250 needed to get collective rule. This means we need to get 184 culture from barbs. I can't find the formula for culture/barb, but I guess it is around 7-9 or so? So, we need to kill 20 barbs to get the culture, which will be quite tough in 45 turns

So I guess honor is not worth it for the culture. Assuming we want to get honor eventually, is it worth the detour to get the culture+barb bonus?

vanatteveldt said:

... I can't find the formula for culture/barb, but I guess it is around 7-9 or so? ..

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Combat strength = culture. Brute(warrior) is 8 for example.

Do they take max(combat, ranged)? I can't remember archers giving only 5 culture...?

I think you have answered your own question...

vanatteveldt said:

So, we need to kill 20 barbs to get the culture, which will be quite tough in 45 turns.

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It is not a question of killing 20 barbs or getting 160 culture total, it is the difficulty of getting the extra culture fast enough. And the gap only widens as the game progress.

Assuming we want to get honor eventually, is it worth the detour to get the culture+barb bonus?

Click to expand...

Even though I have not been able to make it work at Deity, I understand the main idea behind Liberty and early CB rush to kick off a dom run. But as ST412 points out, raging barbs nerfs that game plan pretty hard.

I don’t understand there to be much love for Liberty dom runs outside of the CB rush. Or am I just not looking in the right places? HCA is well regarded, so why not go full Honor?

I guess that might well be the better option, and just turtle/barb hunt until XBs. This would be especially interesting because of
partly offsetting the slower honor start.

My Germany plan was to aim at industrial combat, I was afraid that going full honor but not immediately trying for domination would not give enough benefit, but I guess it's worth the try, and some low intensity combat to keep troops training should also keep some gold coming in.

What would be a good edu->machinery turn be in a raging barb setting? T90?

On the map in question, you either want to take out E neighbour ASAP (before he gets to Metal Casting ca. T70) or keep him at war with the other civs until you have midgame units.

On this map I went full Honor and flourished. The best thing about Germany is you can crush the camp whenever you like. There are so many of them about. You can even choose the unit you want. Clue: you want Archers. I think I wrote enough about it in the thread at the time. All the naysaying in this thread has mostly come from people that aren't that experienced with conquest.

My advice: before you start playing, watch Peddroelm's DCL #2 video, which has a superb demonstration of full-Honor Industrial warfare.

consentient said:

All the naysaying in this thread has mostly come from people that aren't that experienced with conquest.

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The naysaying was about opening honor before filling out Liberty -- per the context of OP. I think everyone agrees that honor is a fine tree standing on its own.

Liberty is basically a lot a free hammers at the early-mid game and 1 free person. So the longer it is delayed the worse it gets imo. If you dont use liberty hammers to conquer a few other cities at CB or XB then I dont quite see the point in it.

I dont think you'll ever make the culture back by opening honour even with raging barbs - possibly if you want to go thru honour later, but I'm a firm believer in expanding fast and early so delaying free settler is a nonononono for me.

On the map in question, there is a workable ED, so hardly any need to worry about culture or expansion, is there?

I opened Honor and cleared the map T188.

I've opened the map twice now, but haven't been able to claim the site you mention. Maybe I should resist the temptation to grab the E worker and just use the gold to buy a settler asap. Anyway, we're getting quite map-specific now (so I should probably hop over to that thread), but to summarize I think the general consensus is that

- raging barbs makes full honor quite attractive
- opening honor -> liberty (as per peddroelm's LP of that map) is probably a bad idea.
- liberty should probably work as well but the early expansion might be difficult to combine with debarbing

and

- AI is bad at barbs, but with so many troops at his disposal that doesn't really influence the deity AI

In that particular map, I started with honor opener, then full tradition and continued to honor left side. One aspect for the honor finisher is that Statue of Zeus requires honor opener even when conquered (or at least this is how I remember it), so if you want to use it you need the opener anyway. In my game the angry E neighbor conveniently finished SoZ and then "let" me have it for the late game.

But even with raging barbs, opening honor just for the barb culture is not worth it. I remember it didn't really make any difference, tradition finisher was delayed, and I don't think I got a decent amount of culture out of it to justify delaying that.

I also did Honor opener, then full liberty, then full honor. The El D and the 500g basically guarantees that spot provided you dow the E neighbor to harass him. The culture setback is negligible. Liberty helps to get the expos out quickly to do some damage to that neighbor.

I did not use the German DLC nor did I finish Honor. I did try a series of Pangaea with Honor as an opener and finished in tradition. The results were mixed out of about 5-6 genuine tries. (I might get paid back on the social policy over the very long long game) as I set the game to Epic and there was plenty of time with raging barbs to get upgrades and culture payback(one site spawned probably 5-7 times) some of my early ranged units were Logistics/Range +1 but inevitably I got a little greedy toward the mid game and didn't finish Portugal off. Though I defeated Attila's early rush and I think did well enough. Epic Salt Start though

Also The AI sometimes smashes Barbs(depends on how it builds) and other times I've collected up 4-5 workers for free and watch it slow their progress...

and to boot I may have benefited more greatly for exploring Honor further(I may have destroyed my chances?)

P.S. Germany's unique Barb stealing capability has something that could be used on the right random run to run the game. If used right(I slept on that particular game but should have won) Honor Alone though?

vanatteveldt said:

After some friendly advise I am considering the Germany DCL. Three salient features of this map (besides the leader) are raging barbs and

Spoiler :

a lot of empty land W and S, and a mad berserker E.

Although there is some tangential discussion of this in the thread, I would like to get some opinions about the consequences of raging barbs for the opening play in domination games. Particular questions:

1) Is it worth opening honor for the culture and combat bonus?
2) If you go honor -> liberty, the settler policy will be delayed and you will probably get a lot of units from snowballing barb camps, resulting in unit cap problems. Can/should this be avoided? Build/buy a settler before the policy?
3) I guess you need to insert archery and a couple archers early on to survive the barb onslaught. How does that affect turn times, e.g. for a CB rush on the friendly neighbour?
4) How does raging barbs affect AI progress?

Click to expand...