Dealing with Barbarians

[devincutler]

I need a little help here. I play at Noble level on a Huge Map using Epic.

But I keep getting creamed by barbarians. The problem? After a phase of easy to beat animals, the human barbarians start coming in droves. And no, I don't have the rampaging barbarians option clicked.

I can handle the warrior barbs. And even the archer barbs I can deal with. But when I am being assaulted every turn by 3-4 axemen barbarians, there is no way I can establish a civ before they start taking all my cities.

Any suggestions?

Does the number of barbs have to do with my playing on a Huge map? Maybe there is too much open space to spawn the suckers?

How do barbs generate in Civ IV anyways?

Devin

[LordShiva]

Re: Dealing with Barbarians

Originally posted by devincutler
How do barbs generate in Civ IV anyways?

I'll let someone else take this one

[serenya]

Think of the barbarians as another civ, with whom you are always at war. The goodie huts will eventually spawn a warrior; then build a city; which can expand into a barbarian state. And they reinforce it, build units to send after you, and even build wonders if left alone long enough.... On the plus side, you can take over a barb city instead of razing it if you want.

[inca911]

Any tiles under the map fog have a chance to generate barbs. To prevent them, you need to reveal the terrain and keep it revealed through patrolling. I've taken to staking missionaries on hills to keep the fog rolled back. Once I grow my civ enough and get open borders with the AI, the fog will be gone and the missionaries can go do their thing.

[Proteus_MST]

And of course, these barabarian axemen are a good reason, to research bronze working very early within the game (and build a city, mine and road to be able to mine the copper).

[marvinkosh]

Axemen are tough because of their 50% bonus against melee opponents, not to mention the hefty strength those units pack. In the early game, your best offense against this threat may be mounted units, which are fairly mobile on open terrain. If the barbarians are coming at you through the jungle, you may be better off training some units with the woodsman promotion, especially axemen of your own.

[Josquius]

Civ 4 is very different, having one warrior defending your cities is not enough these days.
The best way I've found to handle barbarians is a fire brigade- chariots dotted around your civ ready to dash off and hurt barbarians before they destroy your improvements or attack your cities.
You should be able to level them up early on to beat axemen easily enough too.

[evizaer]

I usually have an archer and a warrior in each of my cities. In the ones closest to known barb spawn spam points, i'll put axemen in the cities as well. Build walls around those cities too, and viola, no more barb problems for a bit.

Also, try to build a defensive archer first and send him to a tile where you will later deploy a settler so you already have defenses in a new city that might be swarmed by barbs.

[Blake]

Axemen are extremely effective against all barb units. Get axes with combat 1, cover, then more combat upgrades, they'll totally destroy anything the barbs throw at you, it's generally best to defend in a forest vs barb axes, but you can kill them in the open too with enough combat promotions.

The advantage of axemen is they are so damn cheap and effective, you want to beeline bronze working anyway, and if you luck out with a copper desposit you can completely ignore archers and just build axes for defense. On the other hand with no copper you either need to risk forging ahead to Iron working and hoping for iron, or head to archers.

Once the barb threat is supressed the axes make great AI killers. They are truly great investments.

[Arrian]

Yeah, the solution seems to be building your own axemen or using horsearchers. I could imagine chariots w/the retreat promotion might work ok too, but you'd need more of them.

A major part of your problem is the map type you're playing, I think. I'm playing on Normal maps at Prince level and having very little problems with barbs. It's fairly easy to position a few warriors on hills to push back the fog, and between me & the AI civs' units we end up limiting the barb spawning. Axemen are, in my experience, rare.

-Arrian

[WuphonsReach]

For the first 30-40 turns, the game gives you a basically free pass with regards to barbarian rushes. After that, you'd best be prepared.

An archer on a wooded hill (+75%) with the hill defense promotion (+20%?) and entrenched (+25%) can hold off most axemen (80-90% chance of winning over time). So I station archers along my borders in good, defendable terrain in a manner that pushes back the fog. If I'm getting a lot of activity at a particular spot, I'll add my own axemen/swordsmen to the hilltop to help defend the archers.

If I'm sending out a new settler, it's along a corridor that already has archers parked on every 5th hilltop. And there's probably already an axeman/swordsman waiting at the chosen location to form the basis of the city's garrison.

[khumak]

Re: Dealing with Barbarians

Originally posted by devincutler
I need a little help here. I play at Noble level on a Huge Map using Epic.

But I keep getting creamed by barbarians. The problem? After a phase of easy to beat animals, the human barbarians start coming in droves. And no, I don't have the rampaging barbarians option clicked.

As others have mentioned, any tile covered by fog of war can spawn a barbarian so the larger the map you're playing on, the more land area is available to spawn barbarians. I don't know whether the quality of barbarian troops is depended on average tech level or time based but it seems like as soon as I discover Bronze Working I start seeing archers and the axemen start coming either just before or after I get Iron Working.

There's basically 3 ways to deal with this:

1. If you have access to copper or iron you can build your own axemen. (for some reason I never seem to get either)
2. If you don't have copper or iron but you do have horses then you can build horse archers.
3. If you don't have any of those or don't want to research the dead end tech path to horse archers then the only other thing you can do station warriors all over the place to eliminate fog of war on every available land square. If there's no fog of war then there's no barbarians. Widely spaced hills are ideal for this.

[toolboxnj]

Find the Barb city on your continent and sack it You won't have Barn problems after that (at least from that settlement).

[Blake]

Highlands maps are absolutely wicked in terms of barbs. Especially if you make them big and with relatively few players. There will be so much unexplored space and really no hope of having it all revealed.

[DeepO]

Originally posted by toolboxnj
Find the Barb city on your continent and sack it You won't have Barn problems after that (at least from that settlement).

Yes, this is most likely the problem.

the flow goes something like this:

1. at first, only animals roam the land. Huts are not protected. Scouts are ideal in this stage of the game, and you need no protection inside your borders: you can send out settlers without escort: as the animals and initial barb warriors will keep clear of your borders, settling a city makes it safe (even if it's empty)

2. Second stage: you see barb warriors appearing. At first no problem, but you might want to consider building up military. This indicates the barb-free gap is closing: the first warriors won't enter your borders, later ones will.

3. then, it all depends on how much you scout and partol your land. Barbs appear where there is FoW: less FoW, less barbs. If you are on a small pangaea, the AI will scout for you, and you won't see a lot of barb archers. This stage typically spawns a couple of archers. On defense, warriors can take them, but you need to consider some military units asap.

4. Barb cities appear. The more FoW, the more chance you've got. These will spawn barb units at a pretty consistent rate. Best approach to them now, is to get an archer on a forested hill inside the barb borders, or in between the barb city and your empire. These archer defense grounds are excellent for 2 things: to choke the barbs (otherwise their cities will grow too fast, becoming a major problem), and to train your archers. Without barracks, you can train an archer for every city in your empire just coking the city.

This is also the stage of the game where huts start to get a barb escort. It looks to me like these were mostly 'free' barbs, meaning they spawned on their own in the FoW, and where not built in barb cities. Huts don't lead to barb cities for all I can tell.

You could also be going to raze or take a couple of barb cities, but most of the times this means you have beelined to axes or swords. Great training grounds for them as well, and the barb cities don't have culture yet so can be relatively easy to take.

5. Last stage, is when barb axemen start to appear. From now on, it all goes down hill. You need to have a working barb strategy or you're going to get hurt. This is mostly around the time when the first barb cities start to become productive: workers, some buildings, culture for defense. They have to be dealt with if they are close: barb cities can generate a continuous stream of units. You can set up training grounds from them as well, but you're going to lose units this way... taking them out will be best.

If you don't do that, or you can't reach the barb cities (e.g. on terra maps), the barbs will only evolve. You're going to see longbows, knights, rifles and even infantry. They can be a continous drain on economy

Also, once you reach this stage, you can't use scouts for huts anymore: all huts will be covered by at least an archer. You're scout won't beat that. Sometimes, a caravel with scout/explorer can still find some unprotected huts on islands, but they are becoming the exception.

DeepO