Raging Barbarians setting: impact on AI Survivor

[Thrasybulos]

So, there was a discussion about how impactful the Raging Barbarians setting was in the wildcard games of AI Survivor.

I was of the opinion that it was a rather low impact setting which people over-emphasized: it would generate more outlier results, but the general outcome of the games would stay the same.
Another was of the more extreme opinion that this setting had no impact whatsoever.
But the wider consensus seems to be that it does have big enough of an impact to change the expected outcome of a game, in particular if an AI would otherwise be a favourite because its starting position featured a lot of land to expand into.
And last Friday's game where Asoka had a lot of available land and ended up a dwarf civ certainly favoured that assessment!

As I had some free computer time but no personnal free time, I went ahead and tested it out with autoplay.
I picked four games from Season 4 (I had the files handy and have run AH for those games) which featured a very strong favourite, turned Raging Barbarians on, and ran 12 AH for each.

Spoiler Game 1 :

The first game I picked was Season 4, Playoffs 3.
There's no official set of AH for that game, but I've run a partial set in past.

Only 8 runs, but the picture seems crystal-clear to me.
I started with this game because the main reason Darius is such a favourite on this map is because his starting position features a lot of empty land to expand into: the exact scenario which should be the most impacted.

Here's how it went:

The first games hinted at a very strong impact indeed, but then Darius won 5 games in a row!
Game 3 should have been a Darius win as well: he pulled the slider for a 100+ Culture attempt when he was 4 techs away from the end of the tree!
Game 7 featured what fans would love to see in a wildcard game: Roosevelt got completely wiped out by the barbs.

So... what can we take from that?
Darius does remain the favourite with Raging Barbs on, with more games going a different direction though.
So point for me here?
Well, not completely: the games not going for Darius don't go in all sorts of random directions. There's a strong (25%) secondary scenario emerging where JC takes advantage of Darius and Roosy's barb woes to take the game.

Spoiler Game 2 :

The second game I picked was Season 4, Playoffs 2.
Again, no official AH there, but here are mine:

This game is a Gilgamesh roflol stomp, with Gandhi thrown to the wolves.

Now, with RB on, Shaka, Stalin, and Gilgamesh should be hampered, with Toku somewhat spared.
In my AH, Mao was often very weak (such an awful start), especially so because there was a race with Toku for his Copper that he lost 2/3 of the time.
So if RB had an impact, I expected Toku to become the favourite, and Mao to rob Gandhi of the FTD title a few times.

Here's how it went:

Forget about Mao FTD: Gandhi's not letting that one go in this setup!
The first games hinted at a strong impact indeed, with Toku winning twice indeed.
Then Giggles was back with a vengeance.

So for this one, no real impact: Gilgamesh remains the heavy favourite. He loses a few more, that's all.
Well, except for one thing, though: look at those finish dates!
Except for the very last game, all those super early Domination wins were gone, with instead games dragging on and on.

Spoiler Game 3 :

The 3rd game was Season 4, Opening Round Game 7.
That one featured an ultra-dominant HC, thanks to a large swathe of land all his.
Raging Barbarians should have a thing or two to say about that "all his" part:

And indeed, here, RB seemed to completely alter the dynamics of the game, especially when the first game HC won was one where he'd built the Great Wall.
In the end, he wins enough to remain very slightly the favourite on this map (but well into the error margin).
But Raging Barbs here definitely sabotage his game: the Washington/Augustus duo is now more likely to win the game than him, and while in the AH he was at the head of super-dominant civ, here all his wins are by Culture. There was only one game in the lot where he might have won by Domination.

Spoiler Game 4 :

The last game I picked was Season 4, Opening Round Game 3.
This was a game utterly dominated by Julius Caesar, with De Gaulle performing well until his path crossed JC's, and with Suleiman completely hopeless.

How would Raging Barbs alter that picture?

Well, not at all, it would seem: JC is still the heavy favourite to win there. Sure, he's dropped from 85% to 75%, but the picture remains essentially the same.
Hold on a minute there.
There's no impact on Julius Caesar's performance... but where's De Gaulle? A single runner-up finish?
And Suleiman wins two games, gets 3 runner-up finishes? For only two FTD spots (one of which, btw, happened on turn 295, a result of him being the only Muslim in a Buddist world).
So Raging Barbs here had no impact on the favourite to win, but turned the worst performing AI in the AH into the second best performer!

So, what's the conclusion?
First, the obvious one: Raging Barbs does have an effect on the game.
Now, as to what effect... it's harder to qualify.
In three of those games out of four, the favourite to win without RB remained so with RB. And in the 4th game, that favourite also remained the favourite (by a sliver) although him winning was no longer the main scenario.
But essentially, those four games yield four different conclusions:
- No effect except make the games much longer (Gilgamesh)
- Primary scenario unaffected but made less likely with the emergence of a secondary scenario (Darius)
- No effect on the game favourite but other leaders heavily affected (Julius)
- Game favourite no longer dominant (HC)
So... it depends.

Also, bear in mind that I've covered one type of game only here: turning Raging Barbarians on in games where there was a heavy favourite without them.
To get a more exhaustive picture, we'd need to try it on games without a dominant scenario, and, conversely, try turning RB off in games where that option produced a main scenario.

But I'll leave exploring that to others.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

Good work! The explanation that immediately presents itself to my mind is that if the map dynamics heavily favor a leader, then yeah, raging barbs might cut back on that, but the map will still favor that leader. And then the more open games are where the scales might be tipped. But I could be wrong.

I may also have overestimated the effect of the Raging Barbs because where do they really ruin the game of leaders with open starts? The Wildcard, which usually is largely mediocre leaders! A poor econ leader like Toku is naturally going to be more likely to be completely dragged down than a stronger one like Darius or HC. Gilgamesh it's hard to say without looking at that map, and JC I know had a ridiculous start on that map so not much would change. But perhaps that's another thing to keep in mind.

 

[Keler]

The conclusion is starting positions that are terrorized by barbarian activity become weaker. Shocker. The attempt of this work is to find out which starting positions are under bigger threat of barbarians.

I mention time to time that I run autoplays without bothering to give barbarians archery tech, so opposite of the raging barbarians discussion
instead of even stronger barbarians, I end up making them weaker in my games.

So here is my test results for Season 7 Game 7, with apostolic palace and barbarians without archery or any tech at turn 0. Same logic, but other way experiment to compare effects of how my laziness give different results to exact settings of Sulla
Games become faster now.

If you remember the game, Elizabeth somewhat struggled to expand. Barbarians were around her capital. Clearly Elizabeth performs better here in comparison to 20 AH available in Sulla's website.
Overall barbarians effect strenght of starting positions which make it harder for us to predict. DUH! moment

 

[SittinDown]

I'm looking to see this week if the # of creative leaders changes the barb dynamics.

I suspect Great Wall is still pretty inconsequential on deity & pangaea.

 

[Eauxps I. Fourgott]

It does seem like in most cases, by the time the Wall is built, the main barb threat has passed anyway.

 

[ArchGhost]

just a personal observation about raging barbs from watching my own AI only stuff:

It seems to only really delay the expansion phase for the affected AIs. But then they explode and somewhat make up for it later so it doesn't have that much of an effect on these AIs.

Mostly from watching Earth18 games but occasionally just huge/Pangaeas and the like. Maps where even despite the max number of civs, there is a lot of "dead space" (unclaimed land) for them to expand into where barbs will spawn until they do.

With Raging Barbs, the spawn pressure delays them mostly by causing settler parties to abort over and over again, or by wrecking up tiles and eating the suicide units the AIs throw at them which they then wait to replace before trying to develop again...

There are caveats to this:
-The AIs will start to amass units (usually Archers)
-The AIs will have settlers prebuilt and ready to go
-The AIs will be under heavy economic pressure to expand (acquire more tiles, see some the war declaration stuff to know how the AI looks at itself economically) due to its expenses

This causes a large amount of buildup while they absorb barb pressure that overspills quickly once they start to get a handle on the barbs (such as keeping a metal or horse connected long enough to spam better units). They will then race out and rapidly settle multiple cities which are effectively fortified due to all the extra units, and deny spawns even further than just their borders/city vision by having their surplus units exploring and fogbusting. Just like that, the barb threats get massively cut and the AI just resumes like a normal game.

The overall effect is hardly any delay in their tech and only a small net delay to their expansion with more units to use on the back end. It would be too generous to think it set them back as much as 30 turns when looking at end-game victory dates, and in some cases, the barb pressure really does nothing to them (Monty on Earth18 spamming so many Jaguars really doesn't care at all) but they can take advantage of the shielding their neighbors give them to expand faster themselves -- Arabia and Germany do so, again on Earth18. This doesn't change the fact that China is the heavy favorite with the setting on or off and I still see him win 80% of the games on that map with any settings whatsoever.

Of course this only affects the AIs with exposure to dead space -- boxed in AIs like the ones in Western Europe on Earth18 feel almost nothing from Raging Barbs, while AIs with lots of virgin land around them like Russia, America, China, Egypt and Persia get set back early on. It does nothing to insular civs as well, though I don't really know if Barb Galleys are that much affected by Raging Barbs setting

 

[Noble Zarkon]

Raging Barbs are a lot less of an issue on Deity when every CIV has 2 cities on the map by T5.