How Are You Liking The Barbarians Game Mode?

These are all very valuable observations. Perhaps you can create a small mode to slow down conversion pace. 50+ turns represented by 120 points is way too fast. Also terrain must play some role too. Those tundra barbs should stay savage longer...

 

I've been reading in the forum for awhile now but only decided to make an account tonight. Anyways I was VERY excited when I heard that this new game mode was released but I feel like it's still quite buggy and lacks some polish. I'm currently playing as Rome on a huge map at Deity difficulty without mods. I noticed that the barb camps turn into city states way too fast for my liking in very remote places (Islands, Snow regions) where I doubt that they had any influence from civilizations. I also noticed 2 obvious bugs, although I'm still only on the renaissance era and maybe they will show some change later. The new city states created from barbs don't seem to be progressing at all technologically and culturally, and I can freely enter their territory even if I'm not their suzerain, it's like as it they don't even have the culture to enforce their borders, with the way that the AI targets city states then they are all just sitting ducks, their warriors and galleys and city strength of 20 is now supposed to go up against Deity AI civs with Frigates, field cannons, and cavalry ? It's just a joke, at least if they had remained barbarians then they would have good enough units to resist for more than 1 turn. This needs to be fixed ASAP!

 

This maybe a bug.

The AI disperse camps like when not in Barb mode. But I got this to work at least once.

 

To verify this with an extreme case:

Spoiler :

Here there are 43 barb camps and there are a total of 42 barb clan names. So it is not due to running out of clan names, because then only 1 and not more camps should be empty. The empty camps start occuring when there are a total of ~30 camps on the map from my observation.


Other things I noticed during playtesting:

• Barbarian horseman cannot be upgraded (intended or oversight?)
• Camps CS progress bar resets after the maximum amount of CS has emerged (start with 1 from a pool of 4):
  
  Spoiler :

  
  Turn 85
  
  
  Turn 86
  
  
  I think this is intended. I don't know however if one or more of the CS's are razed/captured new ones can emerge or not.
• Camps still spawn even after the maximum amount of CS has emerged. So possibly the lack of camps in later part of the game is not related to maximum possible CS having emerged.
  
  Spoiler :

  
  Turn 87 from the same game as above. Notifications shows two barb camps have been spawned, 1 from previous turn and 1 from this turn.
  
  

As it is now this mode feels unfinished, though I probably will have this mode on in my games.

 

It seems fun so far. I was quite surprised to see barbarian Missile Cruisers on turn 60 though. I'm hoping it is just some weird bug. My Caravel from Hanno the Navigator got squished in a couple of shots.

 

What you said made sense to me, therefore I checked the same game but I had a savefile from 18 turns later. I should add that I was using 2 mods, 1 to reveal the map and a 2nd for increased number of camps. From that savefile (turn 64)= there were 50 camps, 23 of those were empty. No camps were converted to CS yet. 4 Clans had all names on the map. The rover clan had only 3, while the jungle and chariot clan had no camps present. So yes I think you are right about the number per type clan part.
But I don't know why 2 of the clans had no camps present. I am going to playtest some more to see if it will occur again, that some clans have no camps on the map.

 

Another thing...

I bought a Phoenician Bireme (Galley replacement) from a Barb Camp, then built a Galley, but I didn't get the Eureka for having 2 Galleys. It would seem that units purchased from Barb Camps don't count towards Eurekas.

 

I got one (oops sorry, golden age moment) for being my first boat.

 

I agree, that this is a rather exceptional bug. Stamford Raffles comes late (modern era), and has only 1 charge, which means You can only absorb one City-State into Your empire using him. (and was introduced with Babylon pack so not log ago)

The reason I mentioned it, is because Firaxis sold us white border barbarian evolved city-states as feature (technically they only said they liked it), which is clearly a bug (and not just a UI one, and I'm sure they are fully aware of it), and using Stamford on that particulate kind of city-state clearly shows it. I respectfully disagree with this kid of practice, whether or not additional content is free. Unfortunately, when I play along, I see (and reading posts on this forum shows not only me) building up issues with this mode.

Good idea, poor execution.

 

I just hired another eagle warrior and received inspiration for mercenaries (have 8 land units). Maybe the game only checks whether you have two galleys or two biremes and not 1 galley and 1 bireme?

 

In my game, the period where barbarians are a thing that exists was really short. They were barely around long enough to interact with before they turned into city-states in my game. Which also meant there were a bajillion city-states, of course.

I generally use a mod or two that are aimed at stopping the AI from steamrolling over city-states super-early in the game. I think it's perhaps better to NOT use such mods with this game mode?

On the whole, I don't think I like this mode much. It might be more fun if they turned into Free Cities instead of City-States.

 

Like most new features it needs a bug fix and balance pass and then it should be great

 

They said that it was originally a bug, but they evidently didn't even polish it - if you save and then reload (as I do multiple times in a game), the white border disappears. I'm torn as to whether that's an additional bug or of they just couldn't be bothered/didn't know how to fix it and tried to BS us.

I guess the danger is that the AI then goes the other way and wipes them out. I don't really have an issue with it in y games for some reason - in my current game of a standard map, they've razed one CS and another has been captured (and recently liberated by myself), from what I can tell. That of course is more than countered by the numerous new CSs that have sprung up.

 

The world being devoid of barbarians by the medieval era makes this mode worthless to me. I can get basically the same thing by cranking the city state bar to max. At least then half of them won’t be actic research stations

 

I have enjoyed it. I think the early gold purchases of warriors/eagles etc present some pretty fun choices for how to create an early army.

I thought the clans would be a little more fearsome though. It usually is pretty easy for two units to clear a camp, raid it, and then disperse it.

Sometimes if the money is right it’s fun to hire a unit right before you disperse, just to have a horseman or Eagle in the army.

But that hinders my domestic development and forces me to hard build builders/traders when I’d otherwise be putting down early districts, which is of course not optimal. The trade off component is fun.

I have noticed though that AI seem to do better battling the clans than they used to. It was fun watching Basil or Genghis with a military score 100+ over mine struggle to clear a single camp. Haven’t noticed that in this mode.

 

Here's a question: suppose there was a message from Firaxis saying, "We intended to have the barbarians mode for you in February, but playtesting shows it has several problems, so we are holding it back to April". What would your reaction be? Would you rather have the buggy version now or the polished version after a two-month wait?

 

If content is bugged, and after initial game I won't be using it anyway, how is that update in any use of mine?

Polished product should always be a priority. Unfortunately stonks are.
If dev team need a larger number of test subjects to acquire more various statistics of tendencies in behavior of additional mechanics (and additionally get to know what needs to be better balanced/fixed), why not launch opendev?

 

I used to think the Georgian UU was kind of crappy, but in barbarian hands, it was actually kind of scary. Normally 2 troops can handle a camp and keep raiding every time the cooldown comes up, but not when the Georgian UU spawns. It was kind of nasty.