Epic = Barb Cities up the Rear

[evizaer]

I'm playing my first ever Epic game on Noble difficulty level. I have noticed barbs putting up cities near me before in normal games, but i've never seen it in the sheer magnitude that it's happening now. I've taken about 5 barb cities already, and i'm only the medieval era.

Anyone else notice the barbs ramping up in Epic games?

[anhalibut]

What size map are you playing?

[Jaybe]

Have you perhaps selected RAGING Barbarians? You can confirm it on your F9 (Settings tab).

[Egress1]

Re: Epic = Barb Cities up the Rear

Originally posted by evizaer
I'm playing my first ever Epic game on Noble difficulty level. I have noticed barbs putting up cities near me before in normal games, but i've never seen it in the sheer magnitude that it's happening now. I've taken about 5 barb cities already, and i'm only the medieval era.

Anyone else notice the barbs ramping up in Epic games?

I too started my first Epic game on a Huge Map with max Civs a couple of days ago, and yes the Barbs were a royal pain in the behind. Not only were they in cities all around me but they kept launching waves of raiding parties at me which made getting started much more of a challenge. I had to build archers every other build in my cities to fight them off.

Workers kept having to hide which slowed development down significantly. Kept me at the bottom of the rankings for quite a long time. Finally got tired of it and decided on a large military build up and researched military techs and went out and kicked a little barbarian ass :-) just in time to be jumped by my Chinese brothers to the west. I wreckon they figured I was a nice soft target.... ooops their mistake

[Handel]

Barbs are yummy
Look it at this way: the experience points are coming to your threshold.

[Aileron]

Haven't tried Epic yet, and larger than Standard map is too big for my computer to handle, but I've noticed numerous threads in the same vein as this one: complaints about too many barbarians. What's the deal with all these barbarians? And why are they founding cities? Barb civilizations, come on, I thought they're supposed to be uncivilized, nomadic, rapists and pillagers.

[khumak]

Yeah I think barbarians are a bit out of control even without "raging barbarians" selected. I'm playing a game now that I had to restart because as soon as I discovered Iron Working (litterally the next turn) wave after wave of axemen started descending on me before I even had a chance to build any. This was a "Play Now" game at Noble/continent/epic/huge so raging barbarians should not be on.

The only way I've found around it is when I started over I cranked out a ton of warriors and stationed them on mountain peaks all over the place so there was nowhere for any barbs to spawn.

If I had to guess, I'd say the problem is that on a huge map there's too much area that isn't settled yet by the time barbarians start spawning so you basically wind up with raging barbarians unless you have them turned off completely. I think they need to tweak down the chance for barbs to spawn on the bigger maps at least for the first few thousand years.

[Handel]

It may be silly, but I cannot find the barbarians option. Could someone tell me where it is, please?

As for the barbarians - having many and strong barbarian invaders is very historic true. Everyone knows abouit the Rome Empire, but it is the same will all the ancient empires. Take a Chine for example - I recently googled a little about the Chine history and was surprised to understand the thousands years China Empire actually most of the time wasn't neither China, nor an Empire at all. Most of the time the empire was conquered and ruled by mongols and other mongol like barbarians. And hundred of years it wasn't a whole empire at all, but 2, 3 or even more then 10 different states. And this is an empire which had more then 100.000.000 citizens. And nevertheless they were conquered more then once.

[khumak]

Originally posted by Handel
It may be silly, but I cannot find the barbarians option. Could someone tell me where it is, please?

You have to play a custom game. It's not an option in "Play Now".

[evizaer]

Oh.. i'm sorry i didn't provide more details about the game i was playing.

Standard Map size
5 total enemy civs
no raging barbs

almost half my empire now consists of barb cities that i've captured. I've developed a crack team of 2 catapults, 4 swordsman, and 2 axemen who have city raiding bonuses and collateral damage bonuses. They simply rape anything that isn't protected by more than 4 units with experience.

[QuestGAV]

I like the barbarians. It forces you to consider defense earlier than you would otherwise without making the early enemy Civ AI hyperaggressive. So you have to incorporate unit building but don't have to focus on it entirely. Plus, if you do have a little team set up like Eviz you can avoid having to spend time and hinder your growth while producing settlers.

[joncnunn]

The nicest thing about barbs in Civ IV is they build cities. So your own force in and capture their towns and add them to your empire.

[evizaer]

My standard defense is an archer or two and, perhaps, as axeman (to handle swordsmen).

Build city walls int he most frequently attacked cities.

You win.

[Handel]

Originally posted by evizaer
They simply rape anything that isn't protected by more than 4 units with experience.

And the barb cities are always protected by exactly 2 units. When they produce a third unit, they immediately send it wandering.