Barbarian spawning

[Tekamthi]

The current implementation of barbarians are more farmable than ever. They've always been this way tbh but in recent games I've been able to exploit this consistently with trivial effort: at the extreme (playing as Polynesia), I can set things up to clear a camp every other turn, sometimes more often, for all of classical era and beyond. With other civs its maybe not as pronounced, but it's still possible to make these barbarian farms rather easily.

I usually enjoy playing raging barbarians, in the hopes that barbarians pose some interesting threats at times, and sometimes they do, but for the most part raging barbarians means raging gold rewards.

It's not a huge exploit necessarily but it's a lot of unintended income that is just too easy to acquire IMO. I don't have much in the way of concrete ideas to fix, but my general wish here is that barbarian spawning weren't so "dumb". Clear a camp and within a few turns there's another in it's place, maybe a tile or two over, all just as easy fodder as the previous...

 

[rkkn]

how you make barbarian farms? I have some authority start games where my progress is way slower than normal cuz no barbarians spawn anywhere near me

 

[Tekamthi]

You need to be able to cut off opponents from reaching as large an area of unowned territory as possible, there are various ways to accomplish this by settling & razing. For most civs I prefer to create ring structures with large barbarian preserves in the middle. If it's big enough to allow for 2 simultaneous barbarian camps, you're all set. I suppose it's arguable whether you're better off just settling that inner area sooner but as long as I get a good number of cities elsewhere then this inner farm funds everything else they need, and they can all help build up the inner cities later. On raging barbs with big enough area for 2 camps, the camps really pop up quick, usually you get 1, then the other, heal up, and the first is back again.

On polynesia you just use all the inaccessible islands for this purpose, with a 2-unit anti barbarian team assigned to each. I had like 5 or 6 of these going at once for a full era last game. Poly muc becomes even sillier, you only need 1 unit per island farm, but it's still there even without koa

My only thought to mitigate this is to have some kind of "hunting pressure" applied to local areas -- ie every time a camp is cleared, or a unit killed, plot and adjacent increment some barbarian data value. If this counter gets too high, barbarian spawn chance reduces in that plot, such that these farms eventually become very sparse areas for barbarians, or completely devoid for extended periods. Every so often the plot barbarian counters decrement so that over time barbarians move back in.

 

[rkkn]

I guess this is mostly just a polynesia thing. cuz barbarians don't spawn very often inland. they love spawning on islands and coastlines, but even huge areas of uninhabited land don't see many spawns

 

[Tekamthi]

I guess this is mostly just a polynesia thing. cuz barbarians don't spawn very often inland. they love spawning on islands and coastlines, but even huge areas of uninhabited land don't see many spawns

You might be right, often my preserves include coast lines and islands and I just shoo poly away if they show up

It really becomes most obscene with playing as Polynesia though, on larger map

 

[looorg]

I guess this is mostly just a polynesia thing. cuz barbarians don't spawn very often inland. they love spawning on islands and coastlines, but even huge areas of uninhabited land don't see many spawns

Not sure about that. You tend to get a good amount in the north and south "pole" of the map. Normal ai rivals rarely go there. Easy setup for some barb farms.

 

[CppMaster]

It's not a huge exploit necessarily but it's a lot of unintended income that is just too easy to acquire IMO. I don't have much in the way of concrete ideas to fix

An easy fix would be to reduce account of gold from barb camp clearing when playing with raging barbarians, because they are more prevalent anyway.

 

[AndreyK]

An easy fix would be to reduce account of gold from barb camp clearing when playing with raging barbarians, because they are more prevalent anyway.

Gold is much less issue then culture and science.

 

[CppMaster]

Gold is much less issue then culture and science.

Yeah, I thought about it too, yet you also get them from other units. Wouldn't hurt to reduce them too from barbarians on raging setting, though.

 

[Tekamthi]

i still make these farms without authority, the camp gold alone makes it worthwhile.

 

[ma_kuh]

I'd be interested in seeing what a reduced overall spawn rate, but spawning in larger clusters would play like.

I don't know how good the AI is with them either, but if they could produce siege units (supported by a larger cluster), and actually threaten a city, that would be fun.

 

[Tekamthi]

one possibility for raging barbarians is to keep the camp spawn rate the same as normal but increase the unit spawn from camps, this might be fun. Also maybe raging could have an extra defense bonus to the camps. This doesn't solve the authority farms but at least the general camp farming will be tougher

 

[msw1]

It used to be the case that barbarians couldn't spawn in territory that you have vision of right? Maybe it's time to go back to that?

I don't know what the rationale for changing that was, but if it was that people felt like they never saw barbarians again after the mid game, maybe the solution would be to scale up the barbarians spawned by unhappiness. Like make them start appearing once unhappiness drops below 50%, or make unhappy civilizations generate encampments outside their borders.

 

[Tekamthi]

if it was that people felt like they never saw barbarians again after the mid game

iirc it was something like this, perhaps with some more specific or additional concerns for particular civs that depend on barbarians

It's one thing BE did better than vanilla imo, the depth they added to the barbarian faction. If nothing else we could probably come up with a more intelligent spawning system