I posted the barbarian sacking the city thing as a bug (to the V.21 bugs thread) because it is too stupid to be an intentional part of the game. It also does not seem to work correctly in the math category.
Cities and towns out to have access to a treasury that is propotionate to the income they generate for the treasury or something else of appropriate scale.
If you have 2000 gold in the bank and your empire is generating 300 gold per turn, then a crappy little corrupt frontier city cannot have 114, then 103, then 98, then 94 gold in its vaults when the horde sweeps in.
If they want to add code to let me pay the horde to go away thats different, but other than the ransom option the horde should get only 1/300th of the 2000 gold treasury. Subsequent horde members will have to look for something else to do other than suck gold out of the treasury that is on another continent ala Western Union extort-o-gram. If there is nothing, else to do let them burn the city to the ground at the cost of units and increased resistance in subsequent attacks on other cities.
Problem sure seems to be in the code and not a valid part of the game concept.
I also see way too many "horde turns" where every barb village spawns a hord in the same turn even though they are different tribes. In GOTMV (the Americans in crappy start position), I had two villages spawn a horde on the central south island and two villages on the spice island near Greece spawn hordes all on the same turn. In total it was like 64 horsemen. That's a bit excessive to deal with at four locations on the frontier simultaneously even if you have pikemen, musketmen, and cavalry. Are we to believe that the inuit, huns, saxons, and marcomani all have intercontinental smoke signals or super long range drum communications that let them coordinate multiple attacks on multiple fronts with their highly sophisticated barbarian system of government.
I think my opinion of this barb sacking problem would be different on higher barb levels, but on roaming, "come-on" something way off.
I should note that this really crippled Japan in my GOTMV because the japanese AI clearly seemed to loose two or three cities to the barbs as well as being sucked financially dry on at least two occasions. I got to watch it play out because of galleons or other ships sitting nearby off shore.
My vote is "BUG" or programmer stupidity masquerading as bug and not just bad luck and part of the game.
and Zouave (? or was it Zachriel?) came up with a solution similar to your idea! Something should be done about this soon, otherwise I`ll go on with sedentary.
