Just to make sure I'm not going nuts... did they drastically change the AI in PTW?
I just got it and patched to 1.21F, and now the Barbarians seem like they come more often, running around like chickens with their heads cut off (unless they see an undefended city/worker/settler

).
Also, the general level of aggression seems to have gone up. I had a bad start as Persia on a Monarch game, and 3 civs, in a row, demanded tribute. I told them all to get lost, and they all declared war on me. They were so far away I didn't even know where their territories were (and it took like 20 turns for one of them to reach me). But along the way, they signed a military alliance with everyone else in the game (except my neighbor Korea, who just demanded tribute but didn't bother to declare war). All of this by 500 BC! When I could finally asked one for peace, Hamurabi wanted to totally jack me of all my gold, income, some science, so there was basically no way out of that. I hadn't even started to harass anyone with Immortals, so it's highly unlikely that I'd have a reputation problem.
Is this experience typical of PTW? That seems like a gigantic ramp in difficulty from vanilla Civ 3.
If it is, does one incur a score penalty by turning off barbarians? They're just too bloody annoying to deal with now. In one game, they were producing faster than I could build units to deal with them, and this was on Roaming, which I always used to do on the original game...