Barbarians keep plundering my cargo ships

gremlins0

Chieftain
Joined
Apr 19, 2003
Messages
72
I usually play with barbarians off, but since I was playing Shaka I decided to leave them on. Now they keep plundering my cargo ships. Any good way to prevent this besides the time consuming matter of hunting down all of their continuously spawning camps and killing their ships?
 
you could always turn that into your advantage , for example by taking the honor policy opener --> thats culture for you, plus you can get up to the two first promotions on each military unit from barbarians ... keep in mind that the AI has to do the same so its not a waste of time...just adds into the complexity of the game !!
 
put your units every two tiles :)
 
Well, short of just killing the camps off outright or building a military to protect them, you could try keeping your continent as "civilized" as possible.

The more of the world within culture borders of anyone, the less space there is for barb camps to spawn. Of course you shouldn't settle a city JUST to keep the barbarians out, but it is an option i guess...

Still, by far the easiest way is to build units to defend yourself. I often gauge my early military strength by how easily I can defend against incoming barbarians. A larger military never hurts.
 
Just wait until they pillage every one of your incense or wine. Three horsemen and two swordsmen, all at ONCE.

Turn 165 and I have wasted my entire night killing barbs and fixing my damn resources.
 
Just wait until they pillage every one of your incense or wine. Three horsemen and two swordsmen, all at ONCE.

Turn 165 and I have wasted my entire night killing barbs and fixing my damn resources.
 
Its honestly not that bad. Keep in mind the path that the ships have to travel and where barbs may pop up. Then I usually just put one ship there to reduce the fog of war. Barbs only appear in the fog of war.

I also found that honor was great for this. After I had cleared the barbs from a route, honor would tell me whenever a new camp appeared and I could go clean it up quickly before I had any troubles.
 
Playing some civs, you can turn Barbarian Raiders to your advantage:

Songhai just LOVE Barb camps - 90 gold each which is even more important in BNW when most civs are scraping for cash early in the game.

Ottomans can turn the Cargo Ships into 'honey traps' - precede the cargo ship with a trireme, attack and convert the barb galleys, and before you're out of the Medieval Era you've got one humongous navy of converted triremes ready to upgrade...

Shoshone are death on Barb camps. The Shoshone Pathfinder upgrades to a Composite Bowman, not an Archer, and he moves like a scout: before you get your first Cargo Ship built, you can have speedy Barb-hunting missile troops scouring the land trade routes or the coastal tiles where the galleys spawn - and getting 30 Gold per camp and promotions for your troops, to boot.
 
Unless you're playing a map meant to have more Civs, it should be manageable. Again, a lot of it is under player control. Are barbs raging? Playing too few civs on a large map? (some people like that)

That said my experience with barbs plundering my trade routes gave me a nice kick in the butt to 'project' force. It certainly makes that early trireme worthwhile.

Also, you don't need to have a unit spaced evenly to stop pillaging. You just need a unit nearby that can respond to a threat. At worst it gets pillaged once and the threat is known and you can eventually knock out the offending camp, but yea, projecting power is required.

Also early routes are quite limited by distance; unlikely to have cargo ships and the harbour distance boost, caravansaries may not yet be built so it's going to be by land to a nearby CS.

If you can't protect that, then there are other issues.

Again, some people play custom map types where barbs are everywhere even far into the game. I can't speak to that obviously as it's not the standard game.
 
Just wait until they pillage every one of your incense or wine. Three horsemen and two swordsmen, all at ONCE.

Turn 165 and I have wasted my entire night killing barbs and fixing my damn resources.

Barbarian Horsemen are a nigthmare... Once a single unit pillaged all the tiles of two CS, I only had one warrior to stop him. Run, pillage, hit by city, pillage for healing, run, pillage, etc. I couldn't imagine this happening in my empire.
 
I generally create two triremes to scout in both directions before I create my first cargo ship. Early game (I'm assuming this is early game, otherwise I hope the AI has cleared out most barb camps for you), barbarian galleys can only go in the shallow waters. If you can station triremes on both sides of your early trade routes and kill off the barbarian camps in between the two, the trade route should be perfectly safe.

Also, you're playing as Shaka. Go out and get that honor opener and kill off all the barb camps anyway! These things are nice sources of gold, culture, and early exp for units, and you should be creating a small military anyway at this point!
 
Barbarians are good for the honor opener. Who knows, getting an extra +60-70 culture for killing barbarians that want to walk into your land could be a free early social policy.
 
In the early game you just need to keep the trade routes as close as you can to home, possibly internal, to minimize the stupid Galleys. Once you get a Trireme or two out they're not that big a deal as long as you patrol the cargo ship's route and are diligent with clearing camps along it, but they can definitely be a pain in the butt if you send the Cargo Ships out too far.
 
Make a trireme before the cargo ship and then scout the route that the cargo ship will pass through. Trading with nearby cities makes cargo ships easier to keep from plundering by barbarians.
 
Grab the honor opener, then you will have general idea of where the barbarians will be coming at you. And then you will start to enjoy the culture for killing them....

then you fill out the honor tree to get gold for each enemy unit killed and then you will be actively hunting down barbarians because it's making you richer. xD

If you don't have honor at all, then barbarians become annoying and hassle unless you're a warmonger like me and enjoy having battles and hunts them down for fun.
 
This usally happens if you have a trade route that walks across the coast. Usally barbarian camps spawn near the coast and the ship will stay near the coast

To prevent this put some ships on the coast to see line of sight so barbs don't spawn there.

Going straight over seas is less risky.

If you send a cargo ship make sure barbs can't spawn near the coast
 
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