Stop killing me!

[PotatoSamurai]

Every game I've started on RifE has ended the same way: barbarians. I'm producing only defenders, all in one city, and I can't do a damn thing to survive. That screen is my fourth try. And this is on Noble; I played Fall Further on Prince. During my third attempt I lasted long enough to found one city, and during the fifty or so turns both the Austrin and the Hippus were wiped off the map.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[CyberForte]

Are you running the base 1.31, or the SVN? If you aren't using the latter and don't want to, I found the best thing to do before I started using SVN (information here: urlremoved/rife/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=79 ) is to use the "No Savages" option. Otherwise it tends to get overwhelming fast, though it shouldn't be that bad on Noble. I got by okay a few times as long as I had a few warriors in my starting city, usually but not always on a hill, with palisade early. It really tends to hurt the AI too though, yeah, especially sheaim. But if you haven't looked into SVN, I suggest you do so. I'm running the latest public branch release and it's a lot more reasonable.

 

[PotatoSamurai]

These are the files I installed, in order:
RifE_1.30.exe
RifE 1.31.195.exe
2011_01_03_RifE_1.31.exe

The link you gave me doesn't work, but I think I know where you're directing me. Will look.

And here's number five:

 

[CyberForte]

That's quite strange. Bandit Vigils shouldn't be getting unleashed if you're using the latest hotfix in the download thread. Of the files you installed, what's the third one? I suspect you may have done the last two in the wrong order. Needs to be 1.30, 1.31, and then hotfix (1.31.195). If you got the order wrong, it's likely that the hotfix is overridden. I would suggest you just try reinstalling that one and see if it helps.

 

[BvBPL]

You need to fog-bust and aggressively explore lairs early on to reduce the barbarians. There shouldn’t be any lairs early on the game, and I don’t think lairs appear if you have line of sight to the area. Scouts work well for busting open lairs on flat terrain because they can move in and explore the lair in one turn. Later on, hawks carried by hunters can explore, which leaves the hunters’ movement to move away if you need to (although many civs’ hunters, including the Meakra’s, can’t carry hawks. You might want to use slaves for this as a Meakra). Early on, destroying the lairs is more important than taking out their leashed guardians and is often worth expending units on. The leashed guardians can sit around and do nothing for a while.

The barbarian system is really the fatal flaw of RifE. I’ve seen AIs with only one or two cities after 200 turns of play because they get their butts kicked by the barbarians. I’ve also seen civs just get eliminated by the barbarians.

 

[Morkonan]

Unless you install the hotfix for barbs, or run the SVN Public Beta Version (Which really should be cleaned up and released as a new Public Release, IMO.) you're going to run into a heck of a lot of barbs that shouldn't be there.

But, if you wish to keep playing this version, the only thing to do is clear out lairs as fast as you can and build up a strong defense. Scouts are also virtually worthless.. They will not survive two turns outside of your city. Build a couple, at first, to explore the nearest lairs and hopefully get a new unit out of it. Then, rush to Hunters. Hunters have a chance of surviving in the wild in that version. But, not much of one.

 

[Valkrionn]

As others have said, barbarians are FAR better in the SVN versions.

 

[BvBPL]

The SVN version still has problems though.

Is there any sort of scalling of barbarians and lairs based on map size?

 

[Valkrionn]

Somewhat. They require open terrain of sufficient size to spawn. This means larger maps will have more barbs.

I have zero interest in scaling based on mapsize, specifically, as nothing else does; We do not scale the size of cities, for example.

 

[PotatoSamurai]

That's quite strange. Bandit Vigils shouldn't be getting unleashed if you're using the latest hotfix in the download thread. Of the files you installed, what's the third one? I suspect you may have done the last two in the wrong order. Needs to be 1.30, 1.31, and then hotfix (1.31.195). If you got the order wrong, it's likely that the hotfix is overridden. I would suggest you just try reinstalling that one and see if it helps.

Whaddaya know! Seems to have worked so far. The peninsula might be working in my favor, but I think you were on to something.

Here's something I like about RifE: islands that actually make good settlements.

 

[CyberForte]

Glad I could help. The barbs can still be a bit much, and if you decide to look into the svn they're better yet there, but they're manageable, and not likely to spawn ridiculous stuff too early, sans from exploration. But you should be a lot better off--highwaymen are nasty even late, never mind as early as you had them before.

But indeed, the mapscripts that come with it are quite nice. Much as I like the default Erebus one, there are some definite perks to those, such as that. Very nice island indeed, and good luck with your game. ^^
-CF

 

[Worm4life]

I've been having similar problems with barbarians and I swear I applied the hotfix in the correct order.

What is a "correct" barbarian situation supposed to look like? I'm finding it nearly unplayable without the "no savages" option. By turn 70 I have strength 5 move 2 centaurs roaming the land making expansion and exploration impossible, strength 8 leashed ranged bandits that pepper passing units with arrows making early military rushes impossible, and my latest aborted game saw three strength 6 diseased corpses pop up adjacent to a city on turn 110, wiping it out and crippling me.

I used to think it was lame how FFH threw strength 4 move 2 lizardment at you by turn 50, but that was a walk in the park compared to this. I'd really like to see a "toned down barbs" option without completely removing the savages since the civ leaders with barbarian trait rely on that advantage.

 

[A Moon]

A problem that, like many others, is fixed in the SVN revision, but I couldn't know that because none of the sticky titles mention it.

urlremoved/rife/forum/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=79

 

[PotatoSamurai]

Everything you detailed in your post seemed normal to me when I started a new game to compare. The point is to prevent early warfare; the civs without Barbarian, that is. Those civs then get more money out of their Leader Trait. Besides, would the Bannor noblemen really sanction a fight against a city with homemade weapons and leather armor, instead of keeping the home?

 

[Worm4life]

Everything you detailed in your post seemed normal to me when I started a new game to compare. The point is to prevent early warfare; the civs without Barbarian, that is. Those civs then get more money out of their Leader Trait. Besides, would the Bannor noblemen really sanction a fight against a city with homemade weapons and leather armor, instead of keeping the home?

I guess?

Seems a little extreme though. Even the usual "keep warriors outside borders to extend sight" anti-barb strategy doesn't work too much since mobs keep spawning that overwhelm lone warriors.

On turn 130 I get a hero goblin barb archer spawn at my border, strength 3/8 with a 2 range attack and 2-5 first strikes. There was no way I could ever kill him and he just parked on a hill 2 spaces from my capital to bombard anything that dared leave it. I couldn't even imagine trying to beat him until at least horsemen. Is that the intent? To delay warfare up until the horsemen/champion era?

I tried a civ with the barbarian leader trait and good lord it was fish in a barrel. The AI seems completely unable to expand or invade in the face of the increased barb activity. They can defend existing cities but in over a dozen games I've never seen them have anything but their capital and maybe one dinky expansion city. The barbarian trait has become by far the best in the game (surpassing even financial).


I really love the much needed balance changes RfE brought to the civics (and looking forward to the magic changes next version), but I haven't been able to find any happy medium with the barbarians (turning them off completely makes the barb trait worthless). Unless I'm blind and there's a reduced barbarian option I missed?

 

[Valkrionn]

I would HIGHLY recommend trying the Public SVN build, as there has been quite a bit of barb balance done since the last patch.

Also: Fog busting does NOT function in RifE, by design. Barbs spawn in unowned territory, whether you can see it or not; This was done to prevent lone hawks from pacifying entire continents.

 

[BvBPL]

Even with an updated SVN I regularly see AIs knocked out by barbarians. In a recent game, three AIs fell to barbarians, one couldn’t expand beyond one city because of them, another lost their capital but were still able to expand a little, and the last was the Donviello. When half of the AIs are crippled or destroyed by barbarians, I’d say that’s a problem.

The barbarian system also makes initially placement too important. A civ that ends up on a peninsula has a huge advantage over other civs, far bigger than a civ with a similar placement in a vanilla or FFH2 game.

Then there’s the killer stack of six highwaymen that shows up from time to time. Or the barbarian Aeron’s Chosen (which, thankfully, I haven’t seen since updating via SVN). Either one of those can wipe out multiple civs.

I wonder if playing on barbarian world would help this out at all. I’m far more scared of lairs than I am of barbarian cities (which is counter-intuitive).

 

[A Moon]

Even with an updated SVN I regularly see AIs knocked out by barbarians. In a recent game, three AIs fell to barbarians, one couldn’t expand beyond one city because of them, another lost their capital but were still able to expand a little, and the last was the Donviello. When half of the AIs are crippled or destroyed by barbarians, I’d say that’s a problem.

The barbarian system also makes initially placement too important. A civ that ends up on a peninsula has a huge advantage over other civs, far bigger than a civ with a similar placement in a vanilla or FFH2 game.

Then there’s the killer stack of six highwaymen that shows up from time to time. Or the barbarian Aeron’s Chosen (which, thankfully, I haven’t seen since updating via SVN). Either one of those can wipe out multiple civs.

I wonder if playing on barbarian world would help this out at all. I’m far more scared of lairs than I am of barbarian cities (which is counter-intuitive).

Is that the public SVN or the development SVN?

 

[BvBPL]

Public.

 

[A Moon]

Public.

Yeah, I've been trying to bug people to move some of the fixes that would in public from the dev branch, but meh. Try the dev branch, revision 266. Not 276, though, because that'll just give you a bunch of XML errors.