AI Survivor Switchheroo

[Genghis the Barbarian]

@Keler You played around with barb settings right? Did you find they had any noticeable impact (i.e. helping leaders with good barb defense UUs, longer games, more randomness due to barb city captures etc)

 

[Thrasybulos]

The experiment I refered to (https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ther-ai-survivor-spinoff.691131/post-16811568) does suggest that enabling barbs adds more randomness, since in the one case I had forgotten to disable them for roughly half the runs, the map's unbalance became more stark once they got disabled.
That's also something I seem to be observing in my new experiment (Horatius League): I mentioned a map where a start had a 28/30 win rate, which you never get to see with barbs on.
Another suggestion to that effect would come from the other end of the spectrum, when I tried to asses the impact of the Raging Barbarians settings.

But so far, it's not "evidence", just a pointer.
What I have not observed is a difference between the AIs in the way they handle barbarians. I also expected that turning them off would give an edge to Imperialistic leaders (barb cities fill the spot they could expand into), and that failed to materialize.
Barbs create randomness through purely random events (AI gets an unlucky roll and loses an early city or settler, barb city spawns early in a bad spot for the AI), but mainly through the randomness of the barb city captures (creates border tensions where there should be none, war with unreachable city scenario, etc.).

I intend to run my League 2.0 with barbs off as well, then we'll have a dataset we can truly compare to Keler's.

 

[Keler]

@Keler You played around with barb settings right? Did you find they had any noticeable impact (i.e. helping leaders with good barb defense UUs, longer games, more randomness due to barb city captures etc)

While I never watched my games, the only thing I realised based on my Ai ranking, between warrior barbarians vs archer barbarians were that high pw leaders who like wonders had a more difficult time dealing with archer units.
Overall giving archery tech to barbarians extended game lenght 2 turns only.
warrior barbs usually made a map fairer than archery barbs but this depends on the map, and Thrasybulos's raging barbarians experiment pretty much says the same thing.

 

[Genghis the Barbarian]

Maybe the raging barbs WC games being longer is more a reflection of the leaders (i.e. jack of all trades types who cannot win quickly in any particular manner whether it be econ, culture, or military) than the barbs themselves.

I have definitely learned (especially from S8WC2 AHs) that barb safety is not the be all end all.

Spoiler S8WC2 spoilers :

As DG struggled with barbs but was still successful but Cyrus was completely immune to barbs yet was terrible