Barb Management: Build to coast

[Puppeteer]

I play Conquests with NoAIPatrol=0, so my barbs roam around. Barbs annoy me; I don't go looking for them, and it's a nuisance to keep enough military to defend against them with slow units while trying to expand and build a road network.

In my last game I noticed something that should have been obvious from the start. I started near jungle, which usually is a start I hate, but this game I aggressively settled the jungle and--by accident more than by plan--settled from coast to coast very early and had a single front line to the rest of the continent.

The barb angle to this is that the barbs couldn't pop up behind me; they popped up between me and the other civs, and the AI civs went and slaughtered them before they could come and bug me. Also, I didn't have (Emperor-level) AI troops meandering through my empire to pop a barb camp while the barbs harass my workers and paper-thin early-AA defenses.

So next game I am going to look to try to settle so that I don't have a dark flank barb camps can spawn in, so I have a single united front against the AI and any barbs that find me before the AI finds them.

The first problem I can think of is where there is tundra at the coast. Tundra is just not a good place to waste a settler in the first 80-100 turns.

 

[RickFGS]

Try playing seafaring civs, although a not so popular trait as agricultural, the seafaring will cause you to start near the coast and be able to exploit the sea better in the general, while at the same time providing you with that strategic advantage you seak...

 

[Fiddlin Nero]

Border integrity, border integrity, border integrity. Eliminating shaded tiles is part of it, I can't imagine a well developed strategy without it. Rushing your early expansion to a choke point to minimize the size of your border with a nearby AI shares the priority with securing coasts after my core is built. Filling in the shaded areas is a more casual long term goal for me.