Barbarian Balancing

[LordByron]

I am a veteran civilization player... i have all civ games (even revolution and even the boardgame).

So i thought it was a good idea starting at lower difficulty (the 2nd should be really easy).

And then Bam 8 barbarians joint attack on turn 30 (epic) with an army that no leader could ever build so fast.

3 chivalries, 2 horse mounted archers and so on (not even scouts)

Quite disappointed at usual lack of testing and balancing at launch....

 

[SupremacyKing2]

In civ6, the barbarians will only send a large attack force after a barbarian scout has found your city and returned to the barbarian camp. So the idea is that the player needs to aggressively kill barbarian scouts to stop barbarian invasions. But I do agree that the barbarians might need to be toned down just a tad.

 

[isau]

I think the Barbarian Scout unit needs to be nerfed actually, and reduced to 1 move point. That would make them a more interesting unit.

I also think Scouts should not be able to take trade routes. Lost tons of trade routes to scouts I couldn't catch and kill in 1 hit. Their move points make them hard to finish off in time.

On the funny side, I did discover Scouts are an ideal unit for destroying enemy Missionaries. Greece tried to convert my whole civ with a huge army of religious units, but a war dec + fast moving scouts ended up cleaning Protestantism off the continent for good.

 

[tobapuw]

Yet another "balance this and balance that" thread. I think barbarians are a real threat now and I would not want to see this trend to diminish. Perhaps, it should depend on a level of difficulty but coming back to old CiV system would be a step back IMO.

 

[isau]

Yet another "balance this and balance that" thread. I think barbarians are a real threat now and I would not want to see this trend to diminish. Perhaps, it should depend on a level of difficulty but coming back to old CiV system would be a step back IMO.

They aren't a real threat. They are just very persistent and very annoying after a while.

 

[Ryika]

So i thought it was a good idea starting at lower difficulty (the 2nd should be really easy).

And then Bam 8 barbarians joint attack on turn 30 (epic) with an army that no leader could ever build so fast.

3 chivalries, 2 horse mounted archers and so on (not even scouts)

If those details are true then that's indeed pretty ridiculous.
Haven't experienced anything like that myself though.

 

[Magil]

The cavalry camps appear to be disproportionally strong compared to the "normal" camps. I was attacked by a horde of warriors and slingers early on in one game, which isn't a big deal with the +5 versus barbarian policy card. A horsemen horde would be a different story.

 

[Larsenex]

Can you attack religious units with military ones? I thought I saw on Quills video he could not kill Tomrya's apostles with his Frigates. I may be wrong but that is what it looked like.

 

[Browd]

You have to be at war, but you can kill them. For embarked religious units, you can't bombard them to kill them -- just run your frigate over them in the water.

 

[haphazard1]

The barbs are defiitely persistent. For vets of Civ IV, just think of it as having Raging Barbarians on. Feels pretty similar level of threat to me as that. The horse/mounted barbs do seem a bit overpowered compared to the others, though.

 

[redwings1340]

I feel like the horse camps should be nerfed a little bit because players that deal with an early horse camp are going to be set behind right now no matter how well they prepare. However, I like the general direction of these barbarians, I'm having to build more of a military than I had before, and I'm having reasons to use them in peace time, which is nice.

 

[Biz_]

so the barbarian camps can spawn 1 unit per turn regardless of game speed

if you play on the fastest speed, you can kind of keep up with them in production
if you play on epic/marathon, they will be much more of a nuisance

 

[Zenstrive]

I have seen barbarian horsemen units SPAWNED in a visible tile, without barbarian outposts anywhere, and it's a horseman in early turn (less than 20)
This is just silly. I quit that game and make new one. Only to have barbarian horsemen on turn 7. I quit again.

 

[Staler87]

In my experience they are about right, right now.

 

[LordByron]

Just to be clear i am an old player from civilization...
Thus i expected scouts to report back or even worse (old barbarians in civ5 liked to suicide in order to steal your workers and destroy your buildings).

But scouts are fast and you can't kill them unless you surround them or the AI goes full ******.

Now i cleaned a huge area near my capital... but seems at the begnning barbarians gets upgraded unit really fast and if you happen to have 3 camps even really far.. they will just gang up.

When they get horses they can really get to you from other side of the continent...as other players noticed, this game is set like civ5 raging barbarians.....they can simply destroy any civ early turns by raw numbers and bing technologically ahead.


It depends also on the random element of positions of city states since they do a good job in containing barbarians but too many barbarians don t have a straight line between you and a city state prepare to face the most ridiculous army at the beginning of the game (auto loss unless you just went full on producing military units AND exploit the bad AI)

 

[greygamer]

Maybe if the couldn't spawn until 5-10 turns in, it's quite possible to be hit by a barbarian horde around turn 6-8. Otherwise it encourages building a robust military (warriors & slingers are fine early on). If you lack horses/Iron then a Spearman/Archer combination is enough for defence most times.

 

[LordByron]

Maybe if the couldn't spawn until 5-10 turns in, it's quite possible to be hit by a barbarian horde around turn 6-8. Otherwise it encourages building a robust military (warriors & slingers are fine early on). If you lack horses/Iron then a Spearman/Archer combination is enough for defence most times.

Well as i said i played at slower speed so when they attacked i could not for sure build more than a single spearman even if i went full military.

Browsing the forum i saw that not only other players had the same issue but some AI also could not keep up with barbarians Attacks.

 

[Plus Ultra]

I love it, I'm having trouble deciding what to build in the early game due to the potential barbarian threat.

 

[DocRock]

I like the new barbs, but I'd love a change to the movement and ZOC system. Right now, you can catch a Scout only because the AI plays completely braindead. I'm sure they will not implement the Civ 5 movement system (which was way superior imo), but at least let us attack a unit on a mountain, forest etc even if you do not have enough movement points to enter it.

 

[JosephC]

I might be alone here but I like the way Barbarians are now.

The only thing I would change with them is how their camps spawn. Something like, they can't spawn camps anywhere from 4 hexes + 1 hex per era away from any major civs's cities. And the any spawn location needs at least 1 hex radius that isn't visible.