A+ombomb
Actuary
The way I see it, early barbs are a huge pain, but you can manipulate them to attack workers without fail. So I weigh these options: Is it better to lose 1 or 2 workers, baiting barbs to go where you want and easily taking them out from there, or losing the research time from two techs? Thinking about the worker costs in terms of beakers, I am going with losing workers > losing techs. I'll give some better examples of how this works in the spoiler thread .