Building Barbarian Cities

[Dogfax]

Had another good idea (thats 2 this year!).....

Why not allow the Civs that are barbarian friendly have a special sort of settler unit that allows them to build barbarian cites??? This would add a whole new dimension to them and allow a sort of covert war. Find some prime land near an enemy and build a barbarian city that would harry you opposition. Being at pice with them would also allow you to defend it in the begining to allow it to grow.

Would the coding be too diff? or could it be done as a normal build that switches to barbarian control straight away?

These could be limited (like Kruio cities) to say 5 on a huge map, or make them very expensive to produce, or need a later technology..

What do people think???

 

[Demus]

unless you build the city early enough for archeron to spawn there, there's really no reason to want to build a barbarian city. The barbarians themselves hardly ever defend the cities well enough (3 warriors are easily enough dispatched). Personally, i smile whenever i see a barbarian city, since it saves me the hassle of building a settler myself.
For your own units to defend the city, it would require you to be at war with the civ you're building the town next to, creating yet a further penalty.
A much better idea would be to fund the barbarians with additional weapons and/or cash, increasing the barbarian spawn rate for a while.

 

[Dogfax]

but not if you set this city up a long way from yourself.... if you had to build your own city then you would have to pay alot of upkeep, by having the barbarians run it they can harrass the enemy without you having to pay for it.

You could also make it that the city started with a few pts of population and/or two units to help??

 

[snarko]

Problem is the barbarian city won't harrass the enemy. More likely the enemy will just take it, meaning they gained a new city and some experience - at your expense.

You make it sound like it's a choice between building your own city far away or building a barb city there... why can't you just do neither? Both are a bad idea.

 

[avalonnn]

It would be nice to place barb cities on islands, or in other areas near the enemy that the enemy may find it difficult to reach. For example, say you're allied with Jonas and Jonas isn't building a city where he should, and you're also Barbarian trait, you drop a city in an area protected by Jonas' borders and the barbs it creates don't harrass him, they harrass your enemy that's on the other side of his borders.

This option might not be useful often, but it would add an interesting new dimension to strategy, and make the Barbarian trait more useful, which I think would be good.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I see no point in creating a separate settler unit for this. A spell or cheap ritual that gives one of your cities to the barbarian state would make more sense, and be easier than touching the settling code.

 

[Keeper_GFA]

Add the ability to give your units to the barbarians with that spell too, and you've got a hit. "For the Horde" gave you too many units -- give some back!

 

[MagisterCultuum]

That could work too. I wish there was a PrereqTrait tag in CIV4SpellInfos.xml though, so we wouldn't need so much python.

It should probably require that you only gift them in Barbarian territory, since turning your units barb in rival cities would be a huge exploit. It might be ok if you could use it in your territory too.


Simply re-enabling unit gifting in general might be better. That is only a 1 line change, but unfortunately that line in in the SDK and would require recompiling the DLL. It doesn't seem worth it by itself.

 

[Gilg]

Why not let workers build barb forts with an archer or two in it? It would off course be costly but it wouldn't be a free city to your rival. Spamming them and placing them in river bends on forested hills would be "dangerous" if ever the barbs should declare war.

 

[Imuratep]

That's right the forts are by far more annoying than barbarian cities, which are basicly free cities. Nevertheless I assist the idea of donating cities to the barbarians. I also think there should be some way to give your barbarian friends some techniques, so that they don't just attack with warriors or at best with axeman, but instead with ogres and champions...