Oh where art the barbarians, the raging barbarians?

Can someone tell me how to get "FULL" raging barbarians back??
I have adjusted the numbers in the Barbarian folder and can't seem to get a good working combination. I had it set fairly well at one point, but during an update at some point I got into a hurry and miss placed the copy I updated. Now I can't remember what it was I changed to get somewhat back to where I would like the barbarians to be at.
Thanks for any help on this.

edit: A couple points I would like to fix.
1. A much higher camp spawn rate.
2. More barbs from camps.

What does the ingame "raging barbarians" option do, anyway? I've never tried it.

I reduced the spawn rate of barbarian camps after people said they were too overwhelming. I could raise it back up again slightly. Some people want more, others want less...

Raging barbarians mode increases the rate at which camps spawn units. Units spawn randomly but typically every 1-3 turns once you get to classical

Please do not increase the spawn rate of barbarians. I remember back when you had it higher and it was a nightmare unless you went honor and built a dozen units and gave up the opportunity to get early buildings in your cities, or had aztecs.

Coincidentally I just played a game as Aztecs with raging barbarians on and each camp spawned seemed to spawn a unit every 2 turns on average, which is great if you go honor build a dozen units early and get gold per kills. Maybe increase the camp spawn rate for after you've succesfully cleared a camp but please leave the unit spawn rate alone for non raging barbarians mode.

Raging barbarians is indeed the rate of units spawn from camps. Apparently the rate of camps spawning is unaffected by raging.

The barbarian experience probably depends on map size a lot. With more barbarians on larger maps. Further for some civs barbs are more of a resource than others (Huns!, Aztecs)

Communitas maps tend to be more fragmented (than at least Continents), which leads to more unclaimed corners of the world (total unclaimed land titles), which in turn leads to more barbarian camps. A handful of ship+soldier barbarian hunters in the mid game, when Honor shows all barbarian camps globally, seemed to show well the "whack-a-mole" nature of barbarian spawning: Keep killing camps, and more appear almost every other turn, usually on an unclaimed island. Leave the camps alone and soon no more spawns. (Though when I did this it was with raging barbarians, only way to keep my cargo ships safe)

I also saw the "whack-a-mole" nature of barbs in a recent game with Huns on a large map. Initially (ancient era) a lot of camps kept spawning, and I gained a veritable army of Brutes smacking them with the Horsie. I was in a corner of a continent and had a good deal of "uncivilized" land around me still. But into the classical era the barbs stopped coming. Presumably because enough camps had spawned in remote areas and islands around the world.

It seems like Barbs have basically been removed from the game under current settings. Once you clear the first set of camps respawn seems to be close to nonexistant. I send settlers out unescorted without any problems, and can even sendCaravans and Cargo Ships out without them getting plundered most of the time, despite making little or no effort to observe the route and prevent barb spawns.

I tried deleting the camp clearing code, and even then there were hardly any barbarians around after the first 50 turns.

As the OP said, even the raging barbarians option doesn't even bring us up to the base game's level of barbarians - if there aren't any camps, it doesn't really matter how fast they spawn troops.

The barbarian clearing code has already been disabled in 3.9. That has slightly increased the spawn rate for barbarians for the next build.

Just to clear up a misunderstanding about the spawn rate. @tlaurila made mention of it but it may have been missed.

The barbarian spawn rate ONLY affects the time interval between new barbarian units appearing at an EXISTING camp.
Once a camp has been cleared this setting has no effect on how long before a NEW camp appears. These are two separate things.

The chances of new camps appearing is defined by:
BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING
in the Global Defines table.

Curiously the vanilla value is 2 and the CEP value is 10, despite a comment in the code showing the initial value was 50.

So, has the vanilla code changed the formula, from when it was first released, and initially 50 was what is now defined as 2? They have done a similar thing with the hitpoints changing them from 0 - 10 to 0 - 100.
This would mean our code is 500% worse/better, depending on what the value does and how you want your barbarian camps!
Much of the mod code is legacy stuff from VEM/CivUP & GEM.

Does 10 mean more camps appear or less?

This got me thinking so I checked on some other values.

BARBARIAN_CITY_ATTACK_MODIFIER in the current vanilla setup is 0. It was initially set at -25 and we changed it to -10

Clearly there has been a change of vanilla formula here to make such a drastic value adjustment. What these values actually represent I am unsure, but our values are based off the first release, not the current game. I will reset these values to vanilla and see what happens.

BARBARIAN_CITY_ATTACK_MODIFIER is a modifier on the Barbarian vs City calculation. So -10 would be a 10% penalty for the barbarian against cities.

The source code suggests that a BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING value of 2 imparts a 50% chance while a value of 10 imparts a 90% chance of a spawning camp.

Hmmm...

Thal raised it in a later commit to 20 so does that make it twice as likely as the 10 rate?

If a value of 10 means a 90% chance how do we figure a 20 value? 180%? I'm not sure we have a handle on this just yet.

I just played a test with it set at 2 and camps popped up quite reasonably. Not too many and not too few. IMO.

I think the city attack modifier is right, though we could change it if wanted. A troubling thing I am seeing is the AI using too many ranged attacks against the cities and not sending a melee unit to actually take the city. In another post I mentioned a game where the Shoshone were massively out-numbering their opponents but couldn't take cities because they only used archers. But that is unrelated to this discussion.

The formula is basically 1 - 1/N. So a value of 20 would yield a 95% chance.

Thanks stackpointer.

Should have trusted you had the answer.

I'm mostly playing with raging barbs (I like barbs), so take this observation with that grain of salt.

It seems from my "whack-a-mole" barb camp experience that spawning new barbarian camps is controlled much more by camps in existence. So the variable
BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING
would determine the odds of spawning a camp when favorable conditions exist for a camp. Having this close to 100% and setting the total number of camps on the map to constant would lead to perfect whack-a-mole camps. Whenever one is killed another spawns somewhere the next turn.

The limiting of barbarian camps in existence could come in a number of ways. Maybe there's # of camps per "uncivilized" terrain, no spawning another camp closer than D tiles from an existing camp, camps per total terrain, or some such. I'd hunt for a variable like this to control barbarians.

The view is further supported by camp spawning apparently not being sensitive to BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING. It doesn't matter wheter we spawn a new camp with 50% or 100% probability each turn, it anyway happens almost immediately when favorable conditions for a camp exist. The key is when favorable conditions for a camp exist, and what variable controls it.

EDIT:
Found here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=432029

vexing said:

there are a few things in global defines relating to barb camps:
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING","2"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","4"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_ANOTHER_CAMP","7"
"BARBARIAN_CAMP_COASTAL_SPAWN_ROLL","6"
"BARBARIAN_EXTRA_RAGING_UNIT_SPAWN_CHANCE","10"
"BARBARIAN_NAVAL_UNIT_START_TURN_SPAWN","30"
"MAX_BARBARIANS_FROM_CAMP_NEARBY","2"
"MAX_BARBARIANS_FROM_CAMP_NEARBY_RANGE","4"

Click to expand...

And based on his explanation in that thread BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING is the odds of spawning one camp this turn if a valid spawn location is available, and in vanilla this was about 50%. Based on my (limited) gaming with Communitas, I see no reason to assume this has drastically changed. Increasing BARBARIAN_CAMP_ODDS_OF_NEW_CAMP_SPAWNING should have little effect, but decreasing the spawn probability to something very small should practically remove barb camp spawning.

To really change the number of camps, BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_ANOTHER_CAMP needs to be decreased.

This also suggests that any small fog-of-war area should rather quickly spawn one barbarian camp. But two camps need a rather large fog area. It also suggests that no global limit of camps exist, camps are essentially being limited by how many separate "uncivilized corners of the world" there are. And on Communitas maps, the ample islands off continents are usual suspects.

How easy would it be to include, wherever they check for "BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","4" to include a "BARBARIAN_CAMP_MAXIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","30", which would prevent the other continent to keep spawning barbarians until the end of the game?

Anastase Alex said:

How easy would it be to include, wherever they check for "BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","4" to include a "BARBARIAN_CAMP_MAXIMUM_DISTANCE_CAPITAL","30", which would prevent the other continent to keep spawning barbarians until the end of the game?

Click to expand...

It probably wouldn't be easy at all. As far as I know, modifying the barbarian spawn mechanics would require a DLL mod.

tlaurila said:

To really change the number of camps, BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_ANOTHER_CAMP needs to be decreased.

This also suggests that any small fog-of-war area should rather quickly spawn one barbarian camp. But two camps need a rather large fog area. It also suggests that no global limit of camps exist, camps are essentially being limited by how many separate "uncivilized corners of the world" there are. And on Communitas maps, the ample islands off continents are usual suspects.

Click to expand...

tlaurila, you hit the barbarian on the head with that one. Thal has already decreased the BARBARIAN_CAMP_MINIMUM_DISTANCE_ANOTHER_CAMP here: https://github.com/Thalassicus/cep-...2fdc597#diff-b8ccf31b8c01e10b50309035200267af

@Anastase Alex

If the code is anything like the city founding code that Firaxis uses then it would have no bearing at all.

Their code operates on a 'landmass basis' so that even if you set the 'found new cities within X tiles' to something, if there is a new landmass inside that radius, a city may still be founded.
So I would assume the locations of new camps on one continent mean nothing to the camps on another.

As always, I am probably wrong on this, just thinking out loud.

I'm in a game right now and can definitely confirm an increase in barbarians. It feels like both an increase in camps and spawn rate, but I'm not sure. I'm getting swarmed, even without the raging option checked. I think it was over tuned.

I have 2 techs, 1 tile improvement, a scout and my starting warrior. There's 4 visible barbs on my capitals door step and many more in the fog. About 6-8 camps around my capital.

edit: I just lost my warrior and scout to barbarians in an abortive effort to keep them from blasting my capital.
edit 2: I chopped out another warrior and an archer and just lost them both trying to defend my city from the same barb camp that's puking units all over me. There's two more camps ~6 tiles from me in fog and another 3 just beyond them that I am not dealing with right now. There's enough barbs on the map to wipe out every civ, though.

I recently started a King/Epic/StandardSize game with 3.10. I'm still in the ancient era, but no sight of overrunning by barbarians.

Because of the quite high fragmentary landmass nature of Communitas maps, there could be a big difference in barbarians between continent/map sizes. You could be totally surrounded by barbs if you have a landmass that is larger than a circle of R>6. I.e. there could be a quantum leap in barbarians when the thinnest dimension of your continents become larger than the minimum barb camp distance.

So what map are you on?

Barbarian camps are greatly increased on my latest game.