L. Vern
Chieftain
If you have ever had games where you feel like there just aren't any barbarians spawning, especially on higher difficulties, it isn't just you!
I've had several games in a row with just no barbarians so I decided to investigate by seeing the spawn distribution via visualizations, color coded as follows:
In this example, the upper-left continent and most of the top half of the right-most continent have seen almost no barbarian activity, and there are similarly large areas with little to no barbarian activity in most of the games recorded.
After some discussion on the discord and analysis of the turn 100 maps, I've come to the following 2 conclusions:
My second approach tackled problem #2 instead: the game by default when deciding which tiles camps can spawn on excluded islands of size 1. Increasing this value to 7 forces those spawns off of small islands and onto continents instead, increasing the probability they will spawn closer to a player. It's definitely not perfect and when the map rolls with few islands not much changes from the default behavior, but I think it's a step in the right direction. Cherry picking my favorite result from the new run:
I think shows a very nice distribution with all areas of the map having about equal access to barbs. The full set of results can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/ShGFp8w , and while again it's not perfect there are far fewer areas with no barb activity than the first run.
I'm on my second game now with islandSize>7 and it feels like barbarian spawns are very consistent up until turn ~150, been having a lot more fun personally with the authority start!
I've also made it configurable via config file, any other sizes you would like to see results from? Anyone think it's worth a congress proposal to bump the value from 1->7? Thoughts in general?
I've had several games in a row with just no barbarians so I decided to investigate by seeing the spawn distribution via visualizations, color coded as follows:
- White: Major Civ Territory
- Grey: City State Territory
- Red: Active Barb Camp
- Orange: Previously Destroyed Barb Camp
In this example, the upper-left continent and most of the top half of the right-most continent have seen almost no barbarian activity, and there are similarly large areas with little to no barbarian activity in most of the games recorded.
After some discussion on the discord and analysis of the turn 100 maps, I've come to the following 2 conclusions:
- Due to barbarian camps not spawning in vision of players, on lvl7+8 the somewhat recent change to increase vision of units at these difficulties leaves less room for camps to spawn near player territory. This is also compounded by having extra starting units.
- Many camps spawn on islands the player will never be able to find/kill until astronomy, so due to there being a cap on camps on the map this vastly reduces the amount of camps in circulation that can spawn on player continents.
My second approach tackled problem #2 instead: the game by default when deciding which tiles camps can spawn on excluded islands of size 1. Increasing this value to 7 forces those spawns off of small islands and onto continents instead, increasing the probability they will spawn closer to a player. It's definitely not perfect and when the map rolls with few islands not much changes from the default behavior, but I think it's a step in the right direction. Cherry picking my favorite result from the new run:
I think shows a very nice distribution with all areas of the map having about equal access to barbs. The full set of results can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/ShGFp8w , and while again it's not perfect there are far fewer areas with no barb activity than the first run.
I'm on my second game now with islandSize>7 and it feels like barbarian spawns are very consistent up until turn ~150, been having a lot more fun personally with the authority start!
I've also made it configurable via config file, any other sizes you would like to see results from? Anyone think it's worth a congress proposal to bump the value from 1->7? Thoughts in general?