Dealing with Barbarians

[DeepO]

Oh, one more thing (TM):

You've got to decide, based on your map, how to best deal with barbs in stage 3 and 4.
- Either you open your borders so you're going to have some AIs scouting the FoW
- Or you put some obsolete units on sentry at hills to see below the FoW (workers are also one of my favourites for this: if they wait for a tech before they can work again, I'm using them as sentries).
- Or you pull back, build up some defenses, and use the barbs as training material.

Not patrolling the neighbourhood while also not building your defenses doesn't work. But you don't need a lot of military power per se, low-strength patrolling might get you far.

DeepO

[Firecrak]

Unfortunatly you can't go above level 3 on killing barbs, while they can theoreticly overlevel you badly if you screw up too much.

[Drachasor]

I always build 4-6 warriors (total) in my first two cities to spread out on the edge of my territory. I place them on forested hills if I can, otherwise on hills. Then I have them fortify. This means barbarains appear fairly far away, and also that they won't take up my next expansion points (place them, as best you can, as far out as you can without leaving any fog).

The other advantage to this is that barbarians will attack such fortified warriors first. This means they won't pillage your improvements and won't attack your cities. Since your defensive units should be getting upgrades and a good defense bonus from their terrain they should almost always win.

I've yet to find a more effective way to handle barbarians. I've had very, very few barbarian problems.

-Drachasor

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Firecrak
Unfortunatly you can't go above level 3 on killing barbs, while they can theoreticly overlevel you badly if you screw up too much.

Yeah, but you can try to adjust your play so that no barbs appear in the first place. Lots of early warriors, outside of your cities might be the best protection you've got available until all the land is settled.

DeepO

[DeepO]

Originally posted by Drachasor
I've yet to find a more effective way to handle barbarians. I've had very, very few barbarian problems.

Something you don't mention, but is at least so important is to hide behind rivers. Crossing a river will give as much penalty to the warrior as attacking on a hill would. As such, I prefer forest hills, than river hills, river forests, and only then normal hills. Normal forests are last, however in some situations you can use these better than hills: they give more defense, so by placing an archer on a forest in the path of barbs you won't have too much trouble finding them.

DeepO