Dealing with barbarians early game

[GenocideBringer]

I got a question. I was playing a LAN game with my dad, and early game, I was attacked by an archer barbarian. Luckily, I protected my city with my warrior (which was down to .2 strength). My dad, however, got hit with 3 archer barbarians.

How do you stop this? The only way I can think of would be to piss away your population with Slavery to get archers of your own defending all your cities. It's not feasible to get archers earlier, since that slows down your growth a lot. Any hints?

 

[crazybeard]

Set your barbarians to at least one notch below what you are used to with Civ3. Civ4 barbs are numerous and intelligent.

 

[gunnergoz]

Build walls, research bronze and iron, build barracks and make lots of axemen...

 

[OGGleep]

You need to get Axemen and swordsmen asap. Cats aren't really nessisary like they are when dealing with an AI civ, but those two are really important. Archers can be blown through by relentless Barbarian attack.

The problem with Barbarians is you can blow right past them, even with scouts and not know the city was there. Scouts do help for increased movement.

Take note of what direction the barbarians are coming from. If they ran into you it seems you can draw a line pretty much from where the 2nd one showed up in the opposite direction and you'll hit their city. They keep popping up though, so your work will never be done. Other AI Civs seem to take barbarian bashing seriously. By the time I had enough troops to mount an offensive (I was just killing them as they came near my borders), the AI had taken the immidiate ones out. Its 1700 AD in my game and I just recently noticed they weren't coming anymore, so they can be problematic for a long long time if your not aggresive.

 

[HounddogLGS]

Barbarians are quite a bit more serious in Civ4. I found out that if you leave them alone for awhile their cities can be fairly difficult to take out.

 

[phungus420]

You guys should try aggressive barbarians. It's rad. It forces all players to focus on defense, and cuts out any booming. Which in turn slows down the tech race, alot. If you try it you'll be amazed, you'll think your doing horribly, but when you look at the score, you'll still be on top.

 

[jaydarkson]

Set your barbarians to at least one notch below what you are used to with Civ3. Civ4 barbs are numerous and intelligent.

Agreed, I've noticed sometimes Civ4 barbarians will cut off your strategic resources (horses, iron, etc) first before attacking your cities.

 

[Jorunkun]

As noted elsewhere, barbarian activity varies greatly from one game to the next, even if you leave difficulty and barb settings unchanged.

I believe this is to do with the size of the landmass surrounding your starting location and the speed at which you explore and survey it. Basically, barbs generate only on land and only "while no one is looking". So if you have a lot of unexplored / not actively surveyed land around you, the likelihood of barbarian attacks inreases.

Counter strategy would be to build lots of warriors early on, explore your immediate surroundings as quickly as possible and station as many warriors as you can spare on hilltops, so they survey as big a portion of land as possible.

Downside to this is a) you will wind up with lots of Warriors (weak and costly), and b) you won´t get explore the land further away and miss out on contacts to other civs.

 

[Dairuka]

Note that you need to research Bronze Working and Iron Working the moment you've founded a religion, and got all the required Worker techs. {For Road Building/Farming.}

This way your expansion is based towards gaining a Copper, or Iron resource the moment it's available on your screen if it's not already in your sphere of influence. When you get these resources, defending and defeating barbarians is cake. You'll also notice that neighbouring civilizations tend to be nicer to you; when you have a more modern army than they do. =D

Also remember not to over-expand. Three cities is good enough to start with in the ancient age, with the only exception being the need to blockade other civilization's, or to grab a valuable resource. Otherwise you may find your cities very unprotected and very unproductive.

Take it slow until you've got a good idea of how to expand during each era. I myself have a groove that I like to follow with each game - which certainly helps me to get a good lead even on the harder difficulties.

 

[baboon]

In my games so far I have hardly seen any Barbs. Sometimes a warrior lurking at the borders. I did see some towns but they weren't close. Probably luck.

 

[dh_epic]

I haven't been so unlucky to deal with barbs that tough unless I turn on aggressive barbarians.

My advice is to get archery or bronzeworking early on, and have enough units that you can leave a few in cities AND still have a few ready to meet the enemy at your borders.

They're very handleable -- you just have to assume the barbs are coming.

 

[Dragoul]

if i do like epic says my science will slow down a lot i might need to drop to 60 or even 50%. Because of the upkeep of my military.

 

[Paddrino]

I just finished a game last night where there were 5 (yes 5) barbarian cities that had sprung up around my capital within the first 4 or 5 turns. What happened was 2 overzealous neighboring civs put towns all over the place and the barbs took them over. At one point i had over 5 barbarian something (archers and warriors) attacking my 2 only existing cities within like 50 turns or so, and of course they pillaged every city enhancement made by workers on the way to the town. I only found all the cities after I followed the freaken roads a barb worker was building between them all. Needless to say that put me so far back that I lost the game, but it was a challenge.

 

[eewallace]

In my first game, I wasted a lot of low-level military units trying to search out and destroy barbarians. In the second game I took a different approach. There were 2 barbarian cities near my core group of cities. I reinforced the defenses in those cities to fight off the onslaughts of barbarians, then built cities as close as possible to the barbarian cities. (Needed to send out military with settlers to protect them as they go to the cite, though.) Then I worked on culture in those cities and pretty soon the barbarian cities flipped and joined my civ.

 

[defjam]

played 2 games last night and Barbarians whooped my butt both times. Granted I'm not an uber Civ gamer, but this was really freaking me out. I guess my first starting location was crap parked right next to Tundra at the bottom of the map (sheesh). only lasted till like 1200 B.C. Before teh barbarians destroyed my cities. 2nd game i fared a little better but still had barbarian problems. i'm gonna try w/o Barbarian till i find a good enough strategy and just be able to deal with 2-3 other civies i'm playing against.

 

[dh_epic]

It sounds to me like you guys are haven't a lot of trouble getting your economies off the ground.

This is either because you have too many small cities that cost a LOT in maintainance... or because you don't have enough infrastructure -- with roads, cottages, farms, and resources all hooked up. Maybe both.

 

[southafrica]

One thing i haven't seen mentioned as of yet, but is remarkable effective is finding some hills on your borders to place some archers and upgrade them with hill defense, this will allow your workers to do their job and is also a good defense from the AI.

 

[59 ChiSox]

yep, they are numerous and desructive. have you seen the barb galleys ransacking your fishing nets yet? BRUTAL!!!

 

[Si_Lurker]

I think finding early religion is not such a priority.

On normal and higher difficulties you won't be able to found all of them anyway.

Instead it's better to focus on worker techs and go bronze working->metal casing->forges:

= better city improvement production (you can't rush unless you adopt slavery or build piramids or discover democracy early)

with cities up early (markets, libraries, culture, corthouses) you will also research quicker and have better economy

= better wonder building if you are into it

= better military building, then you can just conquer the holy city of choice or spread your late religion in a crusade

 

[Alphidius]

I did encounter barbs early on in the two games I played. The way to deal with barbs are in 3 ways that I can see....

1) Defending your cities
Initially, all I could do was to fend them off and hope none of my cities get captured. If they are spotted on one side of my borders, I'll pull troops over to the threatened area to up the defenses.

2) Defending your borders
The tide will turn when your cities grow and as you churn out more units. I brought the battle to the borders where their cities are. Big improvement but still the small army was not enough to take the city. So I stationed them there and pulled more troops in, all the while intercepting their new units sent out, no doubt to pillage my borders.

3) Take out their cities
Eventually, my units fought at the outskirts of their city and bombard it to reduce their defenses. Only if I feel that my units are enough to take their city in the current turn, will I lauch a full scale assualt on the city. The result? 3 or 4 unit promotions, eliminating of their threat and a free city (which I raze btw since I need to build up the city's culture from scratch)

My 2 cents