The Barbarian Challenge

[dirtyparrot]

I haven't played with raging barbs for a very long time. Obviously there are more barbs, but can some remind of the other changes. I remember something about them having no restrictions on entering your territory. Does that also mean that there's greater likelihood of barb cities? Do the barbs usually beeline towards your cities or will they engage units on fortified terrain as well? Do they have a higher attack courage than normal barbs.

Churchill and SB are probably the best to handle raging barbs.

 

[kossin]

Try it, you'll know soon enough

On Deity, regular barbs usually enter borders around t35~t40 so you can extrapolate a bit...

 

[DampRain]

i don't see whats wrong with the current victory condition of domination. Although I guess tediously farming every single tile would cause rage... so hmm yeah . Ah... that was very clever with the wine thing. I went SE, consequently needed 2 warriors initially.

Anyway, once the AI starts popping cities, it does become substantially easy, surviving till then is also very easy. The main issue is of course, teching fast enough early on to try and win asap .

 

[michmbk]

Ok, after a dud first time that lasted 30 turns, I'm at 1290 AD my second time through:

Spoiler :

I avoided the spoiler advice and settled 1E of the wine – thought 4 base hammers at size 1 plus the extra wine commerce would help. Went WB-Warrior-Archer while positioning my starting warrior on a forested hill to try to gain XP.

Tech path was hunting-archery-BW, and here was my first sign of a barb:

Umm, it got worse from there - obscene amounts of barbs. I finally was able to fogbust enough to settle to the east, over here:

And that pasture got pillaged about 8 times. Then, after what seemed like 100 turns of trying to get fogbusters out, I finally got to where I could start to settle some meaningful land, and I've gotten to here:

Uh, yeah, that was a lot of barbs.

Starting to recover the economy, but I have a ways to go - it was tough to get infrastructure down. Lib went in 570 AD, and it's all I can do to tech anything, so it'll be slow going. At least the barbs have settled down - i assume there are barb cities everywhere, as I haven't seen too many of them lately.

Edit - this is not fun anymore - I give up:

Spoiler :

Barb grenadiers are coming to pillage all my cottages. My defenses: Archers, axes, chariots. Can't stop it, and can't dig out of the tech hole. Meanwhile, I'm at 4-5 red faces in every city because of no emancipation. I guess since domination is the only victory condition enabled, i could slog my way through, since there's no chance an AI wins that way, but it's definitely not so fun.

Clearly, to win this game, you've got to get a couple cities out and laid down much earlier than I did. I'm also thinking you need to stop at about 6 cities or so, before maintenance gets too heavy, and develop the economy long enough to get some stronger defensive units. Tough to do though, because barbs go pillage all the nice cottages.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Barbs enter as soon as they are not animals on raging. Archery ASAP is an instant priority...this isn't a game setup where one uses warriors.

The combination of ridiculous #'s we're likely to see and the fact that the barbs aren't paying for these hammers leads me away from trying to dominate the fog much early. In fact, my early plan is "city walling", as in using front cities to protect stronger cities with all tile improvements to the back. Hill PRO archers are competent defenders for a long time. In fact, a CG III archer will beat a mace on average. CG III longbows on hills, once fortified, have consistently good odds against RIFLES, since barbs here won't have promotions. This is all before culture defenses or walls, too, where the defender is even a bit stronger.

In other words, tech is not terribly important...currency, CoL, monarchy, and feudalism are probably enough to dominate almost the entire landmass by oneself...and at first glance feudalism attracts me more than bureaucracy as a result. Settling hill cities and adequate #'s in border cities are the key IMO. Don't forget to make a medic in each city - with protective, you can do so with only a barracks and it will probably go a long way.

It would be fun to cut down barb cities with rifles or infantry using medieval troops, and given their #'s don't go too high in those cities and don't give war weariness, it would be doable lol.

 

[Halt]

Kossin: your Cantebury has more fish than the map I have does?

Spoiler :

Yours shows 4 food directly east, next to the city, my map shows coast with 1 food 2 with lighthouse... do I have an old map?

 

[DampRain]

Actually I have the same thing as Halt .

 

[Aldor]

Spoiler :

I normally play noble but with these interesting conditions, I thought I'd give it a try. After some failed tries I managed to time things right (and probably had a little luck too).

As others said, archery first is top priority. I worked the river plains while building a workboat, once it was done I switched to work the crab. By that time I had walked my warrior around the city and now returned him to survive against the first barbs. I think I got the first archer out on turn 16 or so, my warrior defended the city against 1 barb warrior. After the archer was out, I moved the warrior to the east and then south east, and parked him on the coast to fogbust the eastern area. One of the next archers I moved to the north west. So, after that the main attack line for barbs was from the south.

Meanwhile I built a worker and cottaged the two grass tiles north of London. This turned out a good thing, they were never attacked and pillaged.

However I failed to build one (or several) STRONG team of several archers and fortify them on the hills to the south. Only tried to build a single or two archers several times and send them, only to lose them quickly. Because of that, I could never build the pasture on the horses.

Eventually I built the first city to the east, and another to the west (on the sheep hill to capture the copper after border pop). I had also been researching Monarchy for a long time, somewhat useless because I had hooked up the fur resources. My science was down to 20% or so, building another city would've been possible I guess but then? That was the situation around 200AD. I think I need to improve my gaming more before I can really handle deity maintenance

Lessons learned for another try: build multiple teams of archers early and send them out as soon as possible, so the horse pasture can be build safely.

 

[DampRain]

Started again using Kossins settle on wine idea.

Also, I reckon mansa could do better, simply because +1 FS chance and +1 str is stronger than protective and financial works well with non pillageable coast tiles .

Small question. OP says crab will be safe. Is this either due to galley wont go 7 tiles, or galleys dont touch coast or something I don't even know about?

Spoiler :

Fail gold the mids. So had OCC for a while until I had sailing + bronzeworking +writing. Thats when I settled the coastal city to East.
I basically tried a non improvement game until barb cities started popping and barbs weren't too overwhelming to prevent them pillaging. The barbs no longer were rampaging a few turns after feudalism. So just normal rex.

A different start I'd like to try is going for horse archers, clearing the forests and using them to protect your improvements as obviously archers don't cut it, but with nearby horses you could probably manage it.

 

[kossin]

@Halt
Yes it's a different version. I changed my mind and fixed it early as you can see the OP is edited with 'Wrong Save'.

There's not much different however beside that... other than disabling TGW for good measure

 

[Gamma]

1st try:

Spoiler :

lost on turn 22

mostly because I started working on a barracks, and switched back to an archer too late.

 

[Etheric]

Hmm first time I crashed my economy with too many units. I do wonder if wang kon might help, but I play too much financial . 2nd time got overrun as I got a bit complacent.

3rd time I got lucky and got hindoism. That should help the economy a bit .

Man you realise how much you need tech trading when you have to reaserch everything yourself lol

 

[cabert]

I tried a bit.
It's 680AD and I have 2 cities

 

[VoiceOfUnreason]

It's an education, no doubt about that.

Wish this game had been set up with Random Seed on Reload - it's hard not to start anticipating the movements of the enemy troops.

From my perspective, it sure does seem like some of you have more time than I do. My warrior definitely has to defend before I can get an archer out (5 turns after archery). So I've been looking at workboat - warrior - archer, not so much because I need the second warrior as I need to be able to overflow into the archer: I get an attacker coming over the plains hill when I really don't need it.

I tried a couple experiments without the second warrior, but half of a barracks doesn't seem important then - after all, we're not hurting for XP.

I had forgotten about the three XP cap - I'm not convinced we're getting full value for that trait. Oh well.

One experiment I've been playing with is the use of Cover/Shock as a third promotion for the archers - the idea being to distribute the defensive load. But even matched pairs of archers get stomped when I try to put them on those southern hills.

 

[Mikehendi]

About drill promotions:

Spoiler :

This would be a good time for drill IV CG I archers. You only need 2 Drill IV archers per city. They will barely take a scratch, even if faced with multiple attackers, even Axemen. Put a medic I unit in the city(ies) under most pressure.

When you have a 6-8 strength archer (hill/city/CG 1/culture) with drill IV, vs a barb strength 3 archer, I think they are below 0.1% odds to defeat you.

You cannot lose the first 4-7 battle rounds, and have very high odds of winning each battle round, so it usually takes 4-6 battle rounds to kill the enemy. Should the enemy win a battle round, and damage you, then the damage done to you is ignored because of the drill promotions.

By the time Horse archers appear (who ignore first strikes!) you'd better have CG3 promoted archers or axe/swords around!


By using the drill IV promo early in the game, you can tech faster (thus expand faster), by saving on your militairy units payments.

Nice challenge Kossin, I've created such a scenario myself once (for private use only, although I've thought about putting it up), almost exactly alike. I started on marble plains hill though, with ocean fish, and used tokugawa (agg instead of cha, since you can't exceed 10XP cha is less usefull, though 2 extra happy is nice in such a scenario), and I hadn't thought of putting up a mountains barrier. I'm defenitely going to try this soon, see if I have learned something from my toku game.

 

[Mikehendi]

Could someone create a WB-save from this? Civ crashes as I try to open this save file. Thanks and sorry for my bad english :S

 

[kossin]

Could someone create a WB-save from this? Civ crashes as I try to open this save file. Thanks and sorry for my bad english :S

Sure, but remember to add these techs to barbarians:

Hunting, Archery, The Wheel, Agriculture

If you don't you won't experience the full 'enjoyment'.

I'll edit the OP with the WB save in a few minutes.

 

[TCMIV]

I lost the first time at around turn 18-19 I think, 2 barb archers and warrior killed me before my first archer got out (2 warriors defending).

 

[Manco Capac]

It's odd that the barbarians stopped abruptly to rush at my cities at some point. Nonetheless, they have around 1300 AD longbowmen and macemen, but they roam without doing anything. Is that normal? Then, after hooking copper around 1400 AD, few turns later, they began rushing at me again!! WTH? Is that an exploit? I mean if you don't hook up (improvement plus a road) copper/iron, after the swordmen rush, the raid seems to cease for once.

 

[kossin]

I don't know the mechanics but from playing it is clear they stop attacking at some point... now as to when/why that exactly is, I have no clue.