Raging barbarians and epic pace

[zxcvbob]

I haven't played the Mesopotamia map in a long time. I know from past experience that it generates lots of barbs. So I started a game in the ancient era, raging barbs, epic speed, king difficulty. Holy Moses! It's wall to wall barbarians. I clear a camp and another one pops up to replace it the very next turn, even in the industrial era.

I went full Honor, Patronage, and now Commerce. My whole economy is based on killing barbs. When I was warmongering, I had to leave most of my army behind to defend my cities and just take a few of my best units into battle, otherwise my cities would be overrun by barb horsemen.

I think I figured out what's happening; the barbarian spawn rate must not scale with the game pace. It takes me 10 turns to build a pike, it takes the barbs one turn to spawn a new horseman or sometimes 2 horsemen (also they don't need horses)

I was clearing camps all over the map for fun and profit, and I saw a Polish city at zero health (and they were not at war) So I left that camp alone to continue harassing Casimir, so I can easily put him out of his misery later. Another part of the map, I stumbled onto a large flock of barbarian missionaries. So the AI's are not coping well at all. Alex is hiding up in the NE corner of the map and I have barely heard anything from him the whole game. It's a lot of fun

 

[Equilin]

Maybe next time you get a religion and the barb-convert missionary Reformation lol? If there are that much barbs then it's gonna be great! Must try this myself too lol.

 

[claudiupb]

I think the barbarian spawn rate scales with the game pace, but what does not scale is the barbarian camp spawn rate. Barb camps spawn by a formula depending on the landmass available, and Mesopotamia has a lot of land compared to a normal map. Since most of it is not colonized then there will be barbarian camps all over the place. To test this you can kill the barbarians in the barb camp, but not destroy the barb camp. On standard speed, with raging barbarians on a new barb should spawn right away, but with epic/marathon speed it should take some time.

 

[Sarin]

Get "unlimited XP from barbarians" mod and enjoy.