Barbarians

[IMBC2]

Hello, newbie here, sort of. Sort of, because I watched my friend play Civ2 about 8 years ago and watched him become pretty good at it. Only this week, I had started trying Civ2 out for myself and I am already hooked!

I have read a lot of the Civ2 section of CivFanatics.com and also browsed this forum and found many good reads I am currently on my third game on super easy level and it seems to me that every time I play, I utilize something new (ex: in my first game, I never used diplomats or caravans, in game 2, diplomats but no caravans, and now I'm finally getting into trading and loving it )

My questions for this post concerns Barbarians. I am playing as a "mad" expansionist on a large map against 6 civilizations with at least 25 cities by the year AD 400. I have had only slight contact with the Japanese. Right now, I am currently more worried about Barbarians and their pillaging my irrigated, railroaded lands of the future than about the Japanese or any AI civ. So here is what I need to know:

1) I am currently playing with Barbarian level of "Restless Hordes" (sic) (no score modifier). Once I discover Mobile Warfare to end Barbarian threats by sea, what determines how many barbarians show up and the frequency of Barbarian uprisings? Does game year have anything to do with it? Also, does city size (for "Barbarian uprising outside (city name). Citizens worried.") matter in determining the number of Barbarians generated?

2) Once Mobile Warfare is researched, how far away from your cities do Barbarian uprisings have to begin? Or can a Barbarian uprising start just one square outside a city limit?

 

[Nick Garai]

1) I am currently playing with Barbarian level of "Restless Hordes" (sic) (no score modifier). Once I discover Mobile Warfare to end Barbarian threats by sea, what determines how many barbarians show up and the frequency of Barbarian uprisings? Does game year have anything to do with it? Also, does city size (for "Barbarian uprising outside (city name). Citizens worried.") matter in determining the number of Barbarians generated?

On the very easy levels, the barbarian threats aren't as great as on the higher levels. The more you progress through the years, they will increase however onchieftan levels it isn't that much of a threat.

2) Once Mobile Warfare is researched, how far away from your cities do Barbarian uprisings have to begin? Or can a Barbarian uprising start just one square outside a city limit?

I have never found a barbarian uprising within a city limits and any hut within a city limits will not have barbarians in it.

 

[IMBC2]

Thanks for the speedy reply, but in my games, I've always noticed that the Barbarian uprisings started well away from my city's borders. However, if I had a city situated like this:


................LL......LL
............LL......LL......LL
........LL......LL......LL......LL
............LL......CC......LL
........LL......LL......LL......LL
............LL......LL......LL
................LL......LL......XX

CC = City Center
LL = Terrain square occupied by city
XX = a terrain square just one square outside the city limits



My question is: Could a Barbarian uprising start out in the square marked XX?

 

[ElephantU]

Here is one of the "definitive" papers on Barbs:

http://coc.apolyton.net/guides/barbarian_paper.shtml

I have not seen any definitive answer to the question of what determines the frequency or size of uprisings, but I've seen some decent speculation, mostly over at Apolyton. City size does not have anything to do with it; game turn and highest tech level of any civ seem to have the most influence. Note also that uprisings seem to be suppressed in any tile that has an improvement like Rd/RR/Irr/Mi/Fa/Fo/AB outside the city tiles.

 

[Ace]

As to worrying about barbs in the future, forget about it. When and if the barbs show up, that is when you worry about them. The easy way is to have a few mobile units spread around your core cities and maybe a dip or two. The two movers can use your road network to get to the barbs before they do much/any damage and if they are unstacked, sometimes you can just buy them! One of my favorite tricks is to buy the single barb ( early in the game they usually appear in threes, two combat units and a leader) and use it to attack the other combat unit and the leader.

If you have provided a little reserve, barbs are just a minor distraction, not a big problem. Late in the game when you have tanks and a railroad net, a single tank can cover an entire continent!!!

 

[IMBC2]

Note also that uprisings seem to be suppressed in any tile that has an improvement like Rd/RR/Irr/Mi/Fa/Fo/AB outside the city tiles.

In my current Test of Time game, an Extended Original, I have 222 colonists with 130 towns on Earth. The turn number is 337.

I have gotten to a point where the land inside my cities is fully optimized so I decided to make improvements on every square of every continent (in which I have at least one city) on Earth in light of ElephantU's statement above.

About three quarters of the way towards completely covering my lands with roads, I noticed that Barbarian uprisings initiated on a railroaded mountain and the Barbarian partisans that got generated there immediately starting pillaging! I experimented with my save during the previous turn and discovered that this was no accident. This time, Barbarians appeared on a fully roaded narrow strip of land 8 squares away from the nearest town!

On a side note, I have not (yet) witnessed a Barbarian uprising within my city limits. However, due to the ("stupid") 255-city limit "rule", I will not be able to fully suppress Barbarians by covering all my land with cities (I have already reached the city limit in my game and I love my Centaurus civilization too much to disband all 125 cities there )

So it seems as if and when the program "feels" that it is time for another Barbarian uprising, then Barbarians will certainly get generated regardless of land developments -- at least in Test of Time.

Has anyone ever witnessed a similar thing happening (Barbarians getting generated on tiles with land developments) with MGE?

 

[ElephantU]

Was EVERY tile of land covered with an improvement at the time? I read somewhere that might be an exception to the "rule" (if we can call it that without SlowThinker exhaustively testing it...).