barbarians???

[Caseus]

This is partly a request for help, partly a rant.

I'm no Civ guru, but I played Civ 1 to death on Emperor on my Amiga, Civ 2 mostly on King, and Civ 3 for a few weeks. I know the basics of a Civ-style game. From what I've read, some of the tried and true Civ techniques have been deliberately nerfed. Fair enough, I can learn new tricks.

So what the heck is up with the barbarians???

I've had the game for several weeks, and have played ONE successful game. In that game, I started in a corner and was able to expand quickly outward until I met other races. Barbarians were mostly a non-factor.

In the dozen other games I've started, barbarians have either obliterated me or stunted my entire growth for thousands of years while I desperately tried to deal with them. In my current game, barbarians are literally swarming my capital city, bypassing my perimeter cities. They are more technologically advanced than I am. This is on Warlord, by the way. In my previous game, my third city was getting hit with 1-2 barbarians every single turn.

With previous Civs I toned down the barbarian difficulty until I got a handle on the game, then gradually ramped it up. This seems to be impossible in Civ 4: the options are Raging or None.

My usual technique for dealing with barbarians is to explore every inch of my continent, then expanded quickly to make sure everything was civilized, thus minimizing barbarian uprisings. Because you cannot expand quickly in Civ 4, the barbarian threat seems to be unstoppable.

If I have to turn barbarians off to enjoy the game, I might as well give up now. In years and years of playing Civ games I've never needed to turn them off.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Master-Mike]

Your going to have throw away thoes strategies, they dont work to well in civ iv unless your lucky. Reason for this is civ iv was designed to stop ICS (infinite city sprawl). There is alot more to a civ them simply expanding and building cities.

I play on Noble level and mostly muliplayer since ive had the game. Barbians are strong as they should be. Barbian hordes did sack rome in our own history and were a huge problem for thousands of years and so it is in civ iv.

I really like, as no more sending a settler out into the wilderness by its lone some, it wont last long and then 30 turns down the tube. I normal send 1 good quality unit or two poorer units like warriors along with each settler. Sure this slow you growth down but your also well protected and you survie and thats the first rule of any civ, to live.

You dont need 30-40-50 cities to win in civ iv. You can win with 8 cities or even less. So try a slower approach, build you capital up with a few workers a few defensive units then build settlers, found a few cities then build a few more units to make sure there defended and so on. But remeber each city you build cos you more and more gold to maintaine the empire, it really hurts and stunts your growth by expanding to quickly. You find yourself quickly behind in research as you dont have to gold to spend on tech half of its going to maintain the empire.

So in short do a more gradual expansion, its no strategy to rush build settlers, any kid can do that.

[Caseus]

My post is about barbarians, NOT about ICS.

I love the fact that you can't spam settlers. I am a builder at heart, so having a small empire of carefully-placed cities is wonderful. So is culture and religion, for that matter.

Here's roughly how my last game went:
- build warriors to scout the land
- get worker from a hut (yay!)
- build settler at size 3, escort with warrior (no archers yet)
- city 2 builds archer, then worker at size 2 (growth was terrible)
- city 1 builds archer, Stonehenge, archer, settler
- escort settler with archer, fight off barbarians on the way
- city 2 fends off multiple barbarian attacks
- 3 barbarian axemen overrun my capital

Boy that was fun! I haven't had this much fun since Master of Orion 3.