Strategy Guide: The Early Game

[schlappi]

Am I the only one who feels like the barbarians are constantly swarming me?

There are roughly 5-6 tribal warriors on any turn attacking me. I have to field a force of roughly 110-12 javileneers just to protect my borders. This gets very expensive early on and inhibits any growth. I eventually triumph, but I feel like I'm playing against the barbarians and not the other civs. By then I have a huge experienced military and I roll over everyone else.

I do play on the huge maps. Once as Persia, once as Carthage, and now as the Hittites.

Any ideas?

If you are annoyed by so many barbarians you should go to the mod folder, open up \assets\xml\gameinfo and choose the civ4handicapinfo.xml file, (editing it with wordpad).
Then scroll down to the handicap level you are playing usually and switch the value within the line
<iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit>40</iUnownedTilesPerBarbarianUnit>
(this is the example value for monarch level)
increasing the value causes less barbarian units to appear, it does not however decrease the production of barbarian cities. Double the value and you will notice significantly less barbarian units to be spawn. Just experiment a little with that number and make sure you make a backup of this file first.

Ah, and you will need to start a new game for this change to be effective.

EDIT: I just noticed that this topic does not really belong into this thread, i suggest we move the discussion to the "version 1.97 posted" thread instead.