vanatteveldt
Emperor
I started playing a couple games on epic/immortal/small pangea with the raging barbarians option on, and I am completely surprised at how much impact that has.
For example, my last game I built worker -> archer -> archer, sent my warrior off to explore and kept both archers for defending my city. Since I had mined a gold mine with my worker I placed an archer on the gold mine. I lost the game in 2900BC because a barb archer got lucky. I had already killed a warrior and an archer and another warrior was already approaching my BFC
I think raging barbs on higher levels has a couple very important implications for early game:
- if you don't research archery, you have to defend your capital with warriors against archers, which is 2 + 25% + 20% = 2.9 vs 3, so you are not safe unless you have a sizable force of warriors. I think in raging barbs an attack comes every other turn, so if each attack kills and/or severely wounds a warrior, you need to build a lot of warriors until promotions turn the odds to your favour.
- if you start with a worker, you can only use it for chopping or improving flatland resources next to the capital until you have 3 archers: you cannot afford to position an archer on a hill resource or two squares off if you only leave one archer in your capital, as that leaves a non-trivial chance of losing the first attack of an archer. Building indefensible improvements in the early game is an enormous risk of worker turns.
- you can only think of expanding after building something like 4 archers, assuming no losses: 2 to defend the capital, 2 to defend the new city. This assumes no archers are needed to defend resource squares.
- I've tried not researching archery and hoping to connect a horse or copper for defense, but the barbs creamed me during the wait, and/or made it impossible to defend my capital with warriors and spare enough warriors to defend the worker hooking up the resource (esp on flatlands)
After a while, AI expansion fills a lot of the empty land an barbarian pressure becomes less, but if you wait for this to happen before expanding you are left with very little land.
In sum: the way I play raging barbs I need to make bronze working and archery priorities and build worker -> archer -> archer -> archer -> archer -> settler.
How do you guys handle raging barbs?
-- Wouter
For example, my last game I built worker -> archer -> archer, sent my warrior off to explore and kept both archers for defending my city. Since I had mined a gold mine with my worker I placed an archer on the gold mine. I lost the game in 2900BC because a barb archer got lucky. I had already killed a warrior and an archer and another warrior was already approaching my BFC
I think raging barbs on higher levels has a couple very important implications for early game:
- if you don't research archery, you have to defend your capital with warriors against archers, which is 2 + 25% + 20% = 2.9 vs 3, so you are not safe unless you have a sizable force of warriors. I think in raging barbs an attack comes every other turn, so if each attack kills and/or severely wounds a warrior, you need to build a lot of warriors until promotions turn the odds to your favour.
- if you start with a worker, you can only use it for chopping or improving flatland resources next to the capital until you have 3 archers: you cannot afford to position an archer on a hill resource or two squares off if you only leave one archer in your capital, as that leaves a non-trivial chance of losing the first attack of an archer. Building indefensible improvements in the early game is an enormous risk of worker turns.
- you can only think of expanding after building something like 4 archers, assuming no losses: 2 to defend the capital, 2 to defend the new city. This assumes no archers are needed to defend resource squares.
- I've tried not researching archery and hoping to connect a horse or copper for defense, but the barbs creamed me during the wait, and/or made it impossible to defend my capital with warriors and spare enough warriors to defend the worker hooking up the resource (esp on flatlands)
After a while, AI expansion fills a lot of the empty land an barbarian pressure becomes less, but if you wait for this to happen before expanding you are left with very little land.
In sum: the way I play raging barbs I need to make bronze working and archery priorities and build worker -> archer -> archer -> archer -> archer -> settler.
How do you guys handle raging barbs?
-- Wouter
. But I find emperor is a bit too easy, although the raging barbs probably increases difficulty due to the free AI units...
but on emperor i would never research that.
