Barbarian bug or feature

[Diktaattori]

I have noticed that barbarian ships never pillage my fishing boats but they gladly pillage my sea trade routes.

Is this behavior partly feature and partly a bug or how?

 

[Tiberiu]

I think in older versions they might have been able to pillage improvements but apparently it was later decided that it is better to not let them do that (maybe because it was seen as another negative on the coastal luxury start compared to inland, in the sense that sailing is less important early game and fishing boats are quite expensive in ancient era).
A pillage of a sea improvement is worse than a normal tile normally so they put a limit to that. (also ships block a lot of tiles from being workable compated to land barbs.)
Possibly a better fix would have been to allow them to pillage but also allow cities to repair pillaged sea improvements without the need of a boat, with adding a "Repair" project at 1/3 or 1/4 of the cost, for example.

 

[vadalaz]

It's working as intended. Here's the relevant bit of code from CvUnit that features a nice comment from the devs:

    // Barbarian boats not allowed to pillage, as they're too annoying :)
   if (isBarbarian() && getDomainType() == DOMAIN_SEA)
   {
       return false;
   }