Suggestions for Barb Clan mode

[Thormodr]

Well, I agree that AI could improve and use the game systems better. I think just about everyone would agree with that.

Just leave the barbs as they are. I had a life and death fight with them playing as the Cree. Wow! Horse barbs galore, archers, the total package. Good thing Gran Colombia came and helped me out as well as a militaristic city state. Lol. Fantastic fun.

 

[aieeegrunt]

I have always felt that the 'challenging Barbarian set up" - which includes outrageously close Barbarian Camp placement and outrageously fast Barbarian Unit spawning - was required because the AI for the Civs themselves provides no opposition to spak of: it all has to come from the Barbarians.

It goes back to the inability to have an AI for the Civs that can actually handle the game's mechanics and victory conditions.

Again, the real problem is AI so pitiful it’s overwhelmed by guys wielding reindeer antlers.

A big part of the reason that barbs get so big is that the AI often can’t clear the camps. If the AI was competent it would be far more balanced

This unfortunately synergizes with the still unfixed 150% science focus typo that has the AI’s spam campus at the expense of among other things a military.

This has the effect of the barbs being super advanced on top of everything else

The way barbs work in this game I think is really good and would actually be balanced IF the AI wasn’t so useless

It makes the player a little more cautious early in the game, which is indeed a Good Thing. But then the menace from Barbarians quickly falls to insignificance as your Civ grows, and the AI and other Civs never take its place.
If they can't give us a competent AI (and they haven't after X years) then at least they should revive the old Barbarian Horde from previous iteration of Civ that would occasionally thunder out of the Fog of War onto one of your cities. That could realistically last until the Medieval Era, and so keep the game interesting a lot longer than it is now . . .

I forgot about that mechanic, it was pretty metal

 

[Dotsworthy]

The two easiest fixes to barb mode would be this:

Significantly slow down the rate of conversation, to the point where the player/AI should be incentivised to engage with them in order to speed up conversion.

Any barb camp on a snow tile cannot convert to a city state. Maybe even extend that to Tundra tiles too.

 

[Pirate Hamster]

I'm quite happy with barbarian clans as it is right now. The fact that they eventually turn into city states means there's no risk of them attacking forever, when they spawn in tundra they make better use of the space than being empty, there are solid ways to engage with them (big fan of the cheaper unit purchasing) and they give the game a bit of needed difficulty.

 

[Tuvok694]

I'm quite happy with barbarian clans as it is right now.

Clans mode is ok but the whole barbarians feature is still the biggest nuisance of the game. I still have to give up every third or fourth game due to massive barbarian invasions. They are just too many, too strong, too early. And very often they attack together with the first wave of AI enemies. If you disable barbarians, the AI will destroy you even faster. There should be at least two different "aggressiveness" settings for barbarians, like in previous Civ games. It is so obvious that the game would be better then.

 

[UWHabs]

Clans mode is ok but the whole barbarians feature is still the biggest nuisance of the game. I still have to give up every third or fourth game due to massive barbarian invasions. They are just too many, too strong, too early. And very often they attack together with the first wave of AI enemies. If you disable barbarians, the AI will destroy you even faster. There should be at least two different "aggressiveness" settings for barbarians, like in previous Civ games. It is so obvious that the game would be better then.

I think even if there was simply more delay between the barbs and scouts. Or if perhaps barb scouts only had like a movement of 2, so you could actually chase them down.

Like, to me, the flaw right now is that within 5 turns, so before I could ever build a unit, I have almost 100% seen a barb scout, and half the time they have probably already "seen" my city and are running back to their camp. So you really just can't handle it. And if a scout has seen you, my warriors or slingers simply can't chase them down, so the barb army has already started. And since the early game the map is so empty, sometimes you have barb camps in like 3 directions.

If things were just a little slower. So, for example, if a camp shows up, but then there was a 5 turn delay before they spawned a scout, that just gives you slightly more time to get ready for it. And if barb scouts only had 2 movement points (similarly to how barbarian horsemen are a weaker version of regular horsemen), then you have a chance to potentially chase them down before they can get back to camp.

 

[Dotsworthy]

Clans mode is ok but the whole barbarians feature is still the biggest nuisance of the game. I still have to give up every third or fourth game due to massive barbarian invasions. They are just too many, too strong, too early. And very often they attack together with the first wave of AI enemies. If you disable barbarians, the AI will destroy you even faster. There should be at least two different "aggressiveness" settings for barbarians, like in previous Civ games. It is so obvious that the game would be better then.

Generally I don't find barb's too bad, except that sometimes a camp will go buckwild and create a massive army that is a nightmare to deal with. In my last game pushing a barb camp it took nearly 20 turns to break the thing because for each of these turns it spawned a new horseman unit.

I rarely encounter them but they do cause absolute havoc, and I can imagine it completely derailing an AI from being able to build its empire correctly.

 

[aieeegrunt]

Step One: play the basic game
Step Two: double the amount of civs in the game
Step Three: realize that almost all of the broken annoying stuff is now gone and you actually enjoy the game again