How does the AI for barbatos work?

[Levgre]

I settled 4 tiles away from Barbatos, thinking it would just defend it's building. On turn 33, maybe more, my workers started dying from wraiths. I reloaded and kept the worker more than 3 tiles away, and it seemed safe. I built a warrior to start build up an attack force (soon to be assisted by golems), but as soon as I built a warrior a wraith destroyed my city.

I reloaded a bit further, built a warrior, moved it away to not aggravate the wraiths, and then had two warriors in my city, who were both immediately killed in a turn by wraiths, a blitzing one, or 2 different ones, I don't know.

I don't even see a wraith unit in the civilopedia so i don't know what was attacking me. Barbatos didn't move at all, so I really have no idea what was going on with my worker and warriors.

How far away from Barbatos would I have had to move away to be safe? What were the wraiths, were they Barbatos or summoned by Barbatos?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Barbatos is an immobile unit (0 movement, not domain_immobile. This means that he can eventually get mobility 1 and start moving around, but only if the Barbarians get the horseback riding tech. I've seen this happen, mostly in classical age starts.) that starts with Channeling 1-3, Death 1, Earth 1, Staff of Souls (a piece of equipment you get as a reward for capturing him, this grants death affinity), Sentry1-2, Undead, and Twincast (which causes him to summon twice as many units)


Wraith are the Death III summon. Barbatos takes a while to get the free xp from his channeling promotions in order to purchase death 2 and 3, and he might pick some other promotions instead. He can summon skeletons from turn 1 though, and has Specters available when he gets death 2. I'm not sure, but I think that he won't summon any units to use against you unless he can see your units (+1 visibility from sentry and +2 from sentry 2 means he can see anything within a 4 tile range--which sounds very unfortunate for you in this case), or at least unless your units are visible to some barbarian unit.

 

[WCH]

Next time, if you start right next to Barbatos, just quit and start over. Trust me, you'll save yourself a lot of grief.

 

[Levgre]

haha, at least it ended at turn 33. That city site was really nice though, some flood plains, pig, rice, and two wines, which are really nice early on when starting with crafting and financial, doubles research...