Hordes in Africa?

[Fiend777Fits]

Playing as Carthage and the first 50 or so turns were alright. Then around 2500 B.C. or so, the barbs started showing up. And with each passing year more and more of em started flooding in from the desert. It's around 1000 B.C. now and I have to station a small army along the "saharan front" so my improvements don't get destroyed. I'm not *****in or nothing cuz I can handle em (my economy says different), but I played as Dacia prior to this and didn't see half of this action. I just figured that northern Europe might be a little more hostile than Africa. On average, at this time, I see 4-5 barbs show up all along my borders every turn. Promotions are nice, but like I said before I don't have the dough to hold a fighting army. Also, a couple times they'd pop up within my city radius. Is this normal? Just wish there was ways to temporarily subdue groups of barbs. Like some kind of barbarian diplomacy. Of course, the barbarians themselves would then have to be organized into groups. Anyone else have thoughts on this?

[schlappi]

In my opinion, in the early game, when barbs pose a real threat, its fun and challenging - since carthage along with persia has a real position advantage, its only fair that you have to keep up a few units to fend off barbarian units.
I do not believe they even appear within visibility range, your perception is definitely wrong here, maybe you just missed it moving there.

As far as i remember, even with whole coastline settled the number of units needed never exceeded 15, since you have the fabulous nubian mercenarys (movement 2!). Just place them (best on hills) right outside your cultural borders, every tile you can "see" reduces the number of barbarians being spawn.

I agree that, in the mid - late game, the barbarians are just annoying, in my opinion they should either be upgraded (camel riders would be cool!) or removed. (imperial era?)

[Fiend777Fits]

i am not mistaken about them appearing in the city radius. i noticed about 3 squares east of the 2nd river in west africa (the one nearest the spanish coast) is a spawning point for them. i have a city there and they don't seem to care that its visible or even within the city radius. if i place a unit on this spawning point they just spawn beside it.

[moonraker65]

I have to agree with Fiend777 ... I was playing as Egypt and the Barbs were relentless. Founding new cities along the Nile was a real headache as they just kept on coming in off the Sinai Desert or on boats up the Red Sea. Unless you had enough units to Garrison from the start it was damned near impossible to get going. But an excellent mod none the less. Really enjoying it so far

[Fiend777Fits]

Really you had em unloading off of boats on the red sea? I never seen any barbs loaded up on boats. I guess the arabs were pretty barbaric back then, because they would be the only ones sailing up and down the red sea.

[Drtad]

Think of the hordes of Africa as Numidians.

[Fiend777Fits]

The Carthaginians would come to dominate these peoples and use them to fill their ranks. I don't know, would it be possible to be able to create a national wonder which would make it a possibility to recruit barbarians. Of course the barbarians would have to become much tougher to be any use. We would have to start seeing spearmen and archer barbs. Historically this was very realistic as many armies employed so called "barbarians" into their ranks. Realistically the iberians, gauls, germans, scythians, and brits were barbarian. With varying levels of aggression. But I understand wanting to include them as civs. Even though they were nowhere near civilized in this period.