Got something interesting that wasn't posted here that I read....
Playing a multiplayer game, just 2 civ's against each other, Game was fine from the begining, but once I hit gunpowder the barbarians started building thier cities, rather anoying as they were producing 2-3 units from the city PER TURN, got in cleaned them out and withen a turn new cities were built, this went on and one repeating itself keeping me from attacking the other human player then something interesting happened, the barbarians went from archers guarding thier city to rifleman, the other player is still rather new to the game and not to good with CIV in general so I was taking it easy on him, but the barbarians actually got AHEAD of him in technology and started sacking him, using infiltry and artilery (and later fighters) took out the citys and again they came up withen a turn or two, cleared the entire contenent so they are just appearing out of nowhere producing size 6-8 cities from the get go, each defended with 4 riflemen (And later grenadiers) what's next? barbarians in tanks?
Personally I always liked barbarians in CIV, but this is overkill, to stop them you have to have every single area in your borders, and with the new city maintaince policy that's very inefficient, But what really gets to me is thier insane... nay impossable production rate, one city I was attacking had the usual 4 defenders, I can manage to take out 3 in a turn, and the very next turn it's back up to 3 or 4 defenders, I would hate to see what It's like on rampage, they are already a horde.
Never before in ANY (I started on the old DOS version) Civ game have I had barbarians that: (A) Got ahead of human players in tech (B) Re-Spawned so quickly (C) Produced so quickly (On Noble level) (D) Produced ELITE (Level 3) units
In closing as I said I rather like barbarians but not in thier current level of overkill, when they can produce multiple units a turn (though thankfully not each turn (yet)), without fighters it's rather difficualt to unseat barbarian riflemen with over +150% to bonuses....Every barbarian city is built on a hill it seems, every unit they use to defend thier city seems to have lvl 2 or lvl 3 in city defence (seen several with 70% from unit ability) (and they are BUILT with that bonus (newly created) and fortification bonuses on top of that....
Only real defence is to cover every single piece of land in a border, which really affects playing style in 1v1 games, expectially on pangea maps.
Corellon
P.S - In a interesting twist of Irony.... I was playing China, the other human was german, and the barbarians..... AMERICAN!!