Pirates...oh my

noto2

Emperor
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Jul 11, 2008
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So I made an earlier thread about the barbs in this game... I was shocked when I saw armies of 4-5 barbarians attacking my cities at turn 30 and pillaging improvements because in Civ4 you have a lot longer than 30 turns before that stuff happens on that massive a scale.

Anyway, I managed to deal with it and adjust. I built triremes to protect my fish, etc, in the classic age and dealt with the barbarian galleys, which was comparable to Civ4.

But now I'm in the industrial era, it's the 19th century, I have ironclads...and still...the damn pirates...wow!!! I have trade routes with another continent and they keep getting plundered, there is so much fog of war because it's the entire friggin ocean we're talking about. Every turn I send frigates around and sink barbarian pirate ships and caravels, and yet every turn more spawn and interfere with my trade routes.

I even just simply started trading with my own coastal cities to avoid that problem, and yet the barbs still manage to spawn in the fog, sail to my coast, and wreck my trade routes before I have time to move a frigate to deal with it.

How the hell does anyone maintain sea trade routes in this game?? Do you spend 4 minutes every turn doing search and destroy missions with a fleet of a dozen frigates? Is that the only way to do it? Because if that's so, I'm really not looking forward to that. I don't want to spend 50% of my game time blowing up pirate ships.

Is there something I'm missing? Why are there so many barbarian pirate ship spawns, even in the 19th century?

I'm not complaining that my ships can defeat them, I'm complaining about the time consumption of micro-managing search and destroy missions every damn turn to deal with the ridiculous amount of ship spawning, like 2-3 per turn.
 
It depends on the level you play. If you play on Deity, the barbarians are much less troublesome because the other civilisations will clear them out pretty effectively because they build cities earlier and have more troops. If you play on the low levels, barbarians are much more of a problem because they have more space to plant camps and there are fewer AI units killing them. You take your pick! Either you have to compete with the other civilisations, or the barbarians! Personally, I prefer trying to compete with the other civilisations, even if I fail most of the time.

I suppose it might also depend on the size of the map. I believe that more unoccupied space means more opportunity for barbarians to plant camps.
 
clear the barbarian camps (the first honour sp lets you notice any respawned camp on your known map)
or park 2 triremes near a camp or choke point to deal with any new threat
I think barbarians cannot pillage fishing boats. :)
 
If I remember correctly, when you remove all the barbarian camps, they stop spawning. When I used to play on Chieftain or Warlord or whatever, there would come a time when they stop spawning. I THINK.
 
The issue I think, is that you're removing the camps, and not maintaining vision (i.e. sight upgraded caravel, random scouts along the island chains) to prevent re-spawns.
 
do you have raging barbarian enabled? you will be swamped with barbs until the industrial age.

as for keeping sea trade route protected, you really do need to have a trireme or other sea unit protect the route, at least until the renaissance era. It depends a lot on geography and who you nearest AI are.

pay attention to where the cargo ship stops between turns. They will probably always stop in the same tiles each time they pass by. Park a trireme there and guard.

Patrolling to known barb camp locations to prevent re-spawn is also helpful.

Sometimes, you just end up in a barbarian rich area and all of them will focus on you, this is rare and just bad luck. build a few units. I have only seen 5+ barbs by turn 30 once or twice.

As other have mentioned, the AI will aggressively hunt barbs, especially on Deity. Even City States help quite a bit if they have ships.
While it was not always the case, it does seem that the barbs dont pillage sea resource much anymore, its still a good idea to have one sea unit around to protect them.
 
pay attention to where the cargo ship stops between turns. They will probably always stop in the same tiles each time they pass by. Park a trireme there and guard.

The issue I think, is that you're removing the camps, and not maintaining vision (i.e. sight upgraded caravel, random scouts along the island chains) to prevent re-spawns.

Ah, thank you both
 
What map type/size and difficulty do you play? Sometimes that is a problem but much less than you describe. At least on pangaea and continents and Emperor-Deity level.

In any case send it to closer cities and make sure the land is occupied near routes. And if it is not occupied send your military ships to non occupied areas/islands.

BTW, it is a good idea to send food to your capital, at least 2 cargo ships if not more.
 
Ah, thank you both

FYI : the same logic applies to AI trade routes so, many times you can park a submarine or other sea unit over their stop positions and pillage the route at a convenient time. In fact it will auto-pillage during war if war was declared.
 
I was playing on King, standard size, hemispheres. What happened was there was an island chain between the two continents, with like 5 barb camps on it, and only reachable through astronomy. I was the first to astronomy so the other AI's couldn't deal with those barbs, so those camps just kept pumping out caravels that were giving me all kinds of headaches. My own caravels, of course, couldn't actually kill the camps, only the ships they spawned, but I eventually just sent frigates to kill them.

When I made the post, I had 8 barb caravels on my coastline and only 1 frigate and 3 of my own caravels, it was an annoying game of whackamole.
 
^^Frigates will kill the barbs in the camp, but not the camp itself. New barbs will spawn. You need to send in ground troops to take out the camp completely.
 
I know this is off topic, but I REALLY wish melee naval units could capture coastal barb camps like they can cities.
 
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