Barbarians are driving me crazy

[H0urg1ass]

Let me first say that Civ 5 is my first Civ game. Although I've read a lot about the series in magazines for years, it just never really caught my interest until recently.

I bought this game during the recent Steam sale and I've been playing it for two weeks now while on a business trip. First I played Vanilla because I wasn't sure if I was going to like the game enough to invest in all the DLC and G&K. Well I liked Vanilla a lot, so I bought G&K and all the other DLC packs a couple days ago.

I haven't had an enjoyable game since.

First off, they mega buffed the unholy hell out of Barbarians. Playing Prince in vanilla, there would be maybe two spawns near my camp and I could usually take those two camps out easily enough. In G&K, however, I am routinely surrounded by barbarians. I'm talking north, east, west and south unless I have my back up against mountains or water, and if it's water, then I usually get the barbarian ships coming at me too.

It's absurd. I can't expand, I can't build anything but warriors and archers for the first 30+ turns of the game, and if I go more than 4 hexes away from my city to take out one of the camps, then the other three camps swarm my base, capture my workers and pillage all my upgrades.

I zoom the map out, and the Goths and Japan have four cities each at this point. *rage quit*

How do people play like this? My most recent game I decided enough was enough so I played China and went full honor. I made two units of warriors, popped a general and went to the closest camp. I killed it then ran back to my city to kill the pillaging barbs. Then I went to the next closest camp to take it out, and while I was there THE FIRST CAMP RESPAWNED!!

Do I just have the worst barbarian luck ever or is this normal.. and how the hell am I ever supposed to settle a second city if I can barely keep my first one from being invaded by the AI?

Anyhow, I'm not trying to come off as confrontational with the community, I just want some help here and I'm wondering if maybe raging barbarians is somehow turned on for me even though it's not checked... or something. Who knows.

 

[Aldor]

I have had that too, but its rare to be swamped by barbs on prince. Usually happens if you are fairly isolated with a lot of room around you. But: this also means you probably have great opportunities for expansion, because there'll be less AI competition!

If barbs are bothering you too much, then go and turn them off in the (advanced) game settings.

Otherwise, what's happening to you? Are you losing settlers/workers to barbs? Then always guard them with a military unit. Or are barb camps spawning exactly in the place you want to build your new cities? Build a pair of military units and take the camps out. If its just a single barb running around your city, it should be no problem for the city to take it down.

Also don't send your starting warrior far off, once he's checked the surrounding area a bit, send him back to your capital for defense (you should have a scout by this time who can continue exploration). City + starting warrior should be able to defend your city against most barb attacks easily.

Good luck!

 

[RedFuneral]

This used to happen to me in Vanilla. It's actually one of the things that drove me away from the game in the first place. I only got back into it last month and I bought it on launch.

In order to get past it you're going to have to learn a few tricks. First of all, watch Misterciv5's tutorial videos on youtube. Where you place your armies greatly affects how far you can see, attack, and how well your attacks/defenses are going to work. The game really doesn't make that obvious(Civ5 was my first real strategy game). To stop barbarian camps from spawning you need units on nearby hills to keep the areas lit up. You also will want to scout out areas when placing new cities, and have guards nearby your workers.

It also helps to spend the first bit of the game barb hunting. It's a great way to get xp for your units and gold from the camps. That and a lot of civilizations get bonuses from it(like my current game with the aztecs, I spawn camp their camps to get the culture from killing enemy units)

Also send one good unit/a few lesser units when taking camps over. I can't tell you the number of times I've almost taken a camp only to have it spawn another unit on top of me and kill my unit. Rage quit indeed.

 

[H0urg1ass]

@Aldor, I actually did turn barbarians off for about three games in a row, and I had fun. I won one of them as Ramesses with a cultural victory and another as Alexander in domination. I only built one city, hoplites and companion cavalry, and then I didn't even bother with a second settlement, I just bum rushed China and took their city before they could build a big army.

The downside is that I feel a bit like I'm not learning the game right or playing it the way it was designed when I turn barbarians off, and if I can't handle them in single player, then I'll never be able to compete in MP one day... a long time after I learn some tactics.

@RedFuneral, Oddly I found the barbs in Vanilla to be easy to deal with and a great way to earn honor and XP for my first combat units. In G&K, however, it's like they made raging barbarians the default setting. I'd hate to even see what RB looks like in G&K!

But then again, I'm very new to strategy games so most of my problems are probably just from lack of knowledge about how things work.

Thanks for the advice, I'll try to get those videos from Misterciv5 to load on youtube, but the hotel internet on the edge of the Mohave desert is pretty terrible.

 

[Cicerosaurus]

I go the other way and have raging barbarians and the mod that enables me to gain experience from battling barbarians. Then take the first Honor path where you gain culture from killing Barbarians (plus a hefty bonus against them). It can assist greatly in getting early social policies.

Plus you get some veteran units for when the inevitable war starts.

 

[Jelster]

When I upgraded to G&K I found the same, but you sort of get used to it.

I tend to have a "Barb squad" consisting of an archer and a warrior/spearman. Use your archer to weaken the camp and your melee unit to take it. This is useful when another Barb spawns, or you run into barbs on your way to a camp.

Also, military buildings give you upgrades to your units as well, so a barracks is handy early on.

 

[Xiao Xiong]

Park a scout in a forest next to a barb camp and promote it up the survival path for faster healing and better defense. It will soak up the barbs and eventually kill the camp. You may need to send an archer over to help if a barb archer gets into a well defended position attacking the scout but this usually keeps the barbs under control.

Also get at least the honour opener to get a leg up on the barbs and to turn them into culture.

 

[Pook]

I go the other way and have raging barbarians and the mod that enables me to gain experience from battling barbarians. Then take the first Honor path where you gain culture from killing Barbarians (plus a hefty bonus against them). It can assist greatly in getting early social policies.

Plus you get some veteran units for when the inevitable war starts.

Yes, exactly. I do the same.

Once you get used to dealing with barbarians, you'll learn to not disperse their camps unless:
1) someone else is about to do the same, or
2) a city-state asks you to (the CS will give you a big friendship bonus for dispersing the camp)

Keep in mind that an individual unit can't get unlimited XP from battling barbs. I believe the limit is 30 XP for a unit. However, there's nothing to stop you from cycling your inexperienced troops into the fight, building their XP against barbarians while your veterans are off doing other tasks.

 

[joncnunn]

Reason #3 to disperse a camp:

You just founded a city 2 hexes away from it

 

[Cedbird]

For only playing for two weeks you have better forum vocab than I do . Study more on the gameplay than the forum vocab . . And where do you get time on a business trip to play video games . Great !
Barbs are fun . Just like real life . The unexpected always should be expected . The unplanned should always be planned for .

 

[Browd]

On barb strategies generally, check out the War Academy article, Dealing With Barbarians. It was written for vanilla, but is still a good guide to barb strategy (main changes post-G&K/fall patch are that barbs can pillage-heal and minor tweaks to the CS influence system).

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I just grab the Honor opener. It really helps in dealing with Barbs. And since barb camps yield money, it benefits your coffers as well.

 

[Matthew.]

Keep extra military camped a few tiles outside of your borders. Barbs can't spawn unless they are under fog of war, and any barb that meets the camped unit will just pace back and forth. Rarely will they move past one of your guys to get to your city. Note that once ~3 of them gather on one unit, they will finally attack, and all at once. If you are fortified you can usually survive the attacks though.

 

[fuzzatron717]

I don't build improvments or workers for the first 40 turns it makes the barbarians go to other civs to do there pillageing and then a bunch of city-state quests and it hurts the other civs. and if they don't go away I send setterlers endlessy and take land so they just stop spawning camps obviously the setterler are guarded. No need for Honour and maybe at most 1 Archer and my starting warrior is usaully enough.

 

[Crafty Bison]

Barbs are a blessing, and you cannot get off to nearly such a good start playing without barbs.

Build a couple archers and keep them with your warrior; hunt in packs. Milk units for experience (your ranged attacks also count towards your first GG) and culture if u went honour, beat other civs to the gold from the camps, and take out camps to get 50 (massive!) influence with a CS when they give a quest. Pledge to protect just before for up to 60 influence, then revoke upon clearing the camp. Killing a nearby barb gives only 12 influence and is a much weaker way of doing it, but can help a little.

Also, remember that barbs annoy the AI just as much as you, but they don't abuse them like you.

Lastly, if you're into milking the game they usually now pillage luxury resources, so you can sell them, get them pillaged, repair and sell again (It's a bit cheesy though, especially to do it multiple times off 1 barb).

If you're stuggling with them, it might be a good idea to play a barb dependant civ (Germans, Songhai and, on water maps, Ottomans) and then use what you learned for other civs.

 

[Browd]

Crafty Bison's point about using Pledge to Protect deserves emphasis. When you get notice that a CS wants a barb camp eradicated, promptly hit Pledge to Protect (if you haven't done so already--if I see barb camps near a CS when I'm exploring, I'll often pledge immediately and then just wait for the eradication notices). Your influence will start creeping up to 10 while you dispatch your archers to kill the camp. By the time you get there and start on the camp, you might be at or close to 10 influence. Kill the camp when you are at 10. Since you will have been pledged for 10+ turns, you can revoke your pledge. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Biologist]

If you don't want barbs spawning on top of your city, the best defense is to place units at the borders of your territory to expand your line of sight, since barbs can't spawn in areas you (or any other major civ) have line of sight to.

Because you can heal while fortified and barbs can't, one unit can often whittle down several barbs. If the barb camp spawns in an archer or a flanking melee unit, simply pull back to more defensible terrain and heal up. When dispersing a barb camp, try to check whether any barbs spawned on the far side of the camp, and are waiting to ambush your wounded unit.

In the very early stages of the game, barbs can't really do anything to you because you have no civilians to lose and no improvements to pillage. Once you do get to that point, it should be possible to maintain one or two units for defense against barb raids. Never send a settler or worker a significant distance from your territory without an escort.

Generally the only time I find barbs a considerable distance is if they raid my territory from the opposite direction of an attacking AI army. In other circumstances they can be helpful. One time I had pushed the AI back from one of my cities (which I had to recapture) and was annoyed that one of his units escaped - until I saw it get picked off by barbs. The same AI also tried to send an undefended settler to my western border to found a city, and I couldn't manage to intercept him. When I ran my troops over there to conquer the expected city, I found that his settler had been captured by a barb warrior. Barbarians can be useful for spoiling AI troop movements and for exp farming.

 

[Heretiv]

and the mod that enables me to gain experience from battling barbarians

#huh? I thought you always got XP for fighting barbarins?

Since you will have been pledged for 10+ turns, you can revoke your pledge. Rinse and repeat.

~wow.. pledge micro management - yes, I guess it could be done for some free relations, but maybe I don't have quite enough time to devote to such things..

 

[Browd]

#huh? I thought you always got XP for fighting barbarins?

There are mods that allow you to get more than 30 XP from barb battles. Surf the Steam Workshop.

 

[H0urg1ass]

Lots of good advice so far. Another thing that I'm going to try tonight is playing with Aztecs. If I'm going to farm them for experience, then I might as well be farming them for culture too. Early policy adoption, from my limited experience, seems to be a game changer.

I also have the unlimited XP mod for barbarians. In fact, I use a lot of BlouBlu's mods on the steam workshop. I especially enjoy limiting games to different eras with his set of "era" mods, so that I can explore the full potential of different unit types instead of having an entire era end in just 30 turns.

Cedbird: I tend to study a game a bit before I start playing it, so I read up on what all the acronyms mean and I've read about 20 strat guides now, unfortunately most of them are outdated and for vanilla. Also, I'm a system administrator for the DoD, so most of my job is sitting around waiting for a phone to ring, which gives me plenty of time to play games until it rings. lol

@fuzzatron717; Forty turns? Granted, I'm a true beginner to this game, but that seems excessively long to be without a worker improving those luxury tiles in order to get that first settler down the road. Are you just building military only and planning to kidnap workers from the first city you attack or something like that? I can see that probably working.

@Biologist; Again... why wouldn't I have any civilians or improvements? I typically go in this order Scout->Worker->Warrior->Archer. I generally have my first tile improvement finished by 25-28 turns in. Am I doing this wrong? I can change my build order if I am, but I thought that I would typically want to start getting those hammers and luxuries right away.