[BTS] Never seen barbarians attacking over water...

...but I have to give them "A" for effort !!

 

Very rare, but as you see, possible. The barb city had to build the rifle and galley (vs. random spawn).

 

It is indeed rare, but i recall getting an island city sniped from a nearby barb island amphibious assault. Ha..just wasn't paying attention. Like I should have done, you should have probably taken that out long ago.

 

After a certain point in the game, the Barbs must actually start making their own stuff instead of popping out of thin air and act like minor civs. Usually due to the AI's excessive settling tendencies and also their cities being taken over they rarely get a chance to do anything. Not to mention they don't have much ability to tech or build to begin with.

However, usually on larger maps you get these barbs that are unperturbed long enough and they are able to do stuff like this. But since a lot of islands generally can't access continents via galley, it can't happen. But every now and then you have a strait like this.

 

Give the Barbs enough Techs, Units and Time and they will start many attacks over sea. In one of our current Pitboss games they destroyed at least 5 cities with direct attacks oversea. (With the default Civ4:BTS AI)

 

Although they were on an isolated continent, in my current game I found a barb civ on it's own continent, with 6 cities, all connected by roads, with well developed towns, farms, and mines, along with many buildings in each city. I was the first to Astro, so none of the AI civs had found the continent yet. They did get a "leg up" early in the game however. Early on there was a message "The Russian Civilization has been destroyed". Apparently the Russians ignored their barb neighbors a bit too long. Of the six cities, two were originally Russian, judging by their names, but the barbs built and developed the other four on their own. This is on a Huge Marathon Big and Small map. They also had plenty of longbows and maces, which I had to overcome with the same era troops of my own.

 

In my first BTS game (huge/marathon/monarch with me playing Monty), the Babylonians spawned on their own island. After founding their capitol, they built the Oracle, took CoL to found Confucianism, built the shrine when the GP popped, and then got overrun by barbs. The barbs on that island were mostly Confucian.

 

My current experience is similar. The barb continent was all Hindu. Reviewing the city names there, I have decided that the Russians never built a second city. The only former Russian city was Moscow which founded Hinduism and built the shrine. So the other five cities were all barb built and Hindu.

 

It's not unknown for Barbs to overrun a civ with a holy city, especially if they are isolated and lack military resources and PRO and events are on (the horsemen stack Spawn event can be brutal), but given that they can't generate GPP it's very rare for them to have a Shrine! I've certainly never seen that happen! I love that it can occur, though - Civ 5's barbs never progressing beyond banditry was a big disappointment.

 

Indeed, I'm usually very defensive about barbs that aren't on my continent, so they increasingly try to land a few units with galleys until you hunt down their cities.