Dealing with the massive barbarian uprising

[Scyphax]

When the second civ leaves the ancient era there is a massive barbarian uprising that almost always attacks one of my towns.

I have developed 2 stategies to cope with this:

1) build a wall and defend with a minimum of 3 spearmen
it doesn't matter how good the spearmen are as they will
successfully defend most of the time and rise to be elite.
They will also get more injured and eventually die if there are
not enough. I have often successfully defended a
city with 3 but never 2 spearmen.

2) Leave the city undefended.
Spend all your gold.
If then city has a lot of shields in the build queue then finish
something off.
The barbarians will pillage your city taking away a share
of your now tiny treasury. Whatever half built thing in the
build queue will be destroyed .
Then they will go home leaving your city intact.

 

[ProPain]

These 2 starts will help you deal with a barb uprising. If I have to deal with a barb uprising I usually go for the second one.

Sometimes using a lone unit to lure them to one of your neighbours will work too.

But why not try to prevent one entirely?

Barb camps don't pop up next to a military unit, so spreading some out in unpopulated areas helps. Also makes it easy to deal quickly with camps that do pop up. Get maps (buy or trade) from your ai neighbour every turn and you'll see where a new camp has popped up because the ai always seems to know. Send one of your units there and conquer it, makes nice cash too!

 

[Kemal]

You can also, if the city the barbarians threaten to attack is not a very useful one, gift it to an AI opponent and then watch as their whole treasury gets pillaged by the barbs.

 

[Yndy]

Here's my newly discovered barb uprising strategy:

Attack them with everything you got! Picture this:
-Playing on an Emperor map with raging barbs.
-Was razing villages as fast as I could when: barb uprising with one village something like 6 tiles away of one of my cities
-Moved every unit in the proximity towards the endangered city 4 units made it in time 2 spears and 2 warriors.
-Saw the 10 barb horsemen three tiles from the city (i had expanded borders)
-Moved the 4 units and attacked (I had road) 4 barbs died
-Barbs move by the town
-Move back into town and attack: 3 barbs die and one of my spears dies
-3 barbs attack and wound my troops, spear becomes elite but no casualties.

End of uprising.
Whay did I attack? The human has an attack bonus against the AI on all levels except deity - always attack barbs with everything you got!

PS: I admit that you sometimes get 20+ barbs and you don't have roads so you would probably lose some units but still you should attack the barbs when you have the opportunity

 

[ProPain]

Originally posted by Kemal
You can also, if the city the barbarians threaten to attack is not a very useful one, gift it to an AI opponent and then watch as their whole treasury gets pillaged by the barbs.

How could I forget this one, I've used it so many times! Great thing about this one is also that the ai will love you for donating the city! It doesn't realise you only did it to drain it's coffers.

 

[danwhit]

If your not militaristic and don't have many elite attacking units this can be a god-send. I usually send as many swordsman and spearman toward that city asap. I attack the stacks w/ the swordsman from the city and fortify the spearman. Then I use the new elites to bang out some leaders from a neighbor.

But then I keep barbarian camps around when I'm militaristic just to produce elites. I just fortify swordsman/horseman a few squares away and as soon as a barbarian comes out...wham! It's an amazing advantage having a war where almost every attack is from an elite...leaders everywhere.

 

[Djurre]

In my last game I had 2 cities 4 tiles from eachother and about 15 barb horsemen threatened to take one of them. I took my Num... mercenary defender out the other city (via a road) to kill off one of the horsemen , leaving the city it came from undefended. The next turn the barbs didn't attack but were heading for my undefended city instead. I moved my num.. mercenary back to defend the empty city. Then I moved my mercenary from the other city and killed another barb. I repeated this until they were all dead. I moved 2 archer to the spot to help.