So am I nuts or what?

[kulade]

Well, I had a strange event happen to me nine or so years ago when I purchased Civilization III, and only in retrospect did I realize that it was indeed strange, and even later have I finally been wondering about what happened enough to make me post a thread about it.

So anyway, after installing Civilization III for the first time, I decided to "feel the water" and get the basic gist of the game by playing my first game without AI players so I could develop a good understanding of the new tech trees and buildings and such. I selected NONE for all of my AI opponents, or so I think, and started the game. However, several turns into said game did I realize that I was not in fact alone in the world, but I ran into a city of another Civilization; it was not Rome or Greece or China, but A Barabarian Chiefdom. The Barbarian civilization had white cities and created units just as any other AI player could and in fact, I ran eventually into 6 other Barbarian civs, all with the white player color and all of which with blank black leaderheads and leader icons.

Now sooner or later I ended the game not thinking that this occurrence was in anyway unique, and I assumed that Barbarian civs were a way of making it so a human player couldn't play the game alone or something like that. Eventually I realized that this was something that was out of the ordinary, but didn't think much of it, so now I wonder if anyone else has has experienced this.

So have you? Or was it a one time glitch? Or is there something so obvious that I'm overlooking? Or am I nuts or what?

 

[vmxa]

I seem to remember Civ2 had barb cities as does civ4. In Civ3 you do not get barb cities and I cannot remember how it was in civ1.

 

[Lanzelot]

I'm quite sure that back in Civ1 the barbarians also could have cities. They didn't build any of their own, but they could capture yours (and you could recapture them from them).

In Civ3, however, I have never seen them. But then, I never tried a game with all civs set to NONE.

Lanzelot

 

[vmxa]

I think I do recall fighting barb cities in Civ1, but I may be confusing it with civ2. Not played either in a lot of years. I still have both though.

 

[timerover51]

I have played a fair number of games of Civ3 with the AI set to none, but I have never encountered that. I played them on a Mac, using the MacSoft port, so I do not know if anything in the port might have affected that.

 

[Quintillus]

I managed to get a "barbarian" civ to have cities back in April by switching the player values on the LEAD section of a BIQ file so that my civilization was the "barbarian" civilization. Thus, my civilization, "A Barbarian Chiefdom" in the lower-right, was the white civ, had several cities, had no leaderhead, and was doing no research. Oddly, several of the city graphics were replaced by a picture of a modern-age Smoke Jaguar. If I lost any unit in battle, the game crashed. But just having a barbarian player with cities did not in itself cause the game to horribly blow up upon loading the game. Note that this is with Conquests 1.22. I still have that save file.

Without intentionally trying to modify the BIQ binary file to produce these results, though, I've never seen any situation where any barbarians had actual cities, let alone multiple barbarian civilizations.

It is possible that the initial release of Vanilla (1.00) had such a bug. By the time I bought the game, the discs were already shipping with version 1.07, which would explain why I never saw such a bug if it existed. Then again, I don't know if I ever played with no other civs in vanilla. I tried it a few years back with the idea of just settling the whole world, but I'm pretty sure that was Conquests (it may have been one of my rare PTW games). Eventually I found it boring to just settle the whole world with no competition, and gave up with the northern half of Africa, the Middle East, and part of India fully colonized.

 

[Civinator]

There exists a patch by Skyer2, enabling barbarians to hold cities:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=4828934&postcount=1

I tried it, but as far as I remember, there were strange side-effects.