Raging barbarians

[snublefot]

Spent way too many hours on the following settings:
Huge, terran, 2 civs (including me), and --- raging barbarians.

Its --- interesting. And a bit frustrating. The barbarians come from everywhere. At once. Drawn to my cities like sharks to a drop of blood. Improving land became near impossible. The barbarians would slip past any cities and go straigth for the bronze mine.

So what did I learn?
Archers and bronze. Priority 1.
Place a city on the bronze OR one tile from it. And defend that mine like its gold.
A long river is the win. They let you share the bronze. If city 1 and city 2 is on the same river the game is much easier.

The cost of units to defend cities where huge. In most cases an archer and an axemen would be enough. 1 unit for defence where a safe way to lose a city.
Workers traveled in stacks. Again with an archer and an axeman as support. Settlers had the same protection, but I actually lost a few even with that protection.

My next game I will expand even slower. Trying to place axemen and archers around the city to protect the fat cross. In theory this should alow my workers to move without protection inside the cross and actually let me improve the land this time. In my two first tries I was unable to keep my land improved for any length. If the barbarians take the bate and attack my guards, good. I do however have a feeling they'll just ignore my sentries and just head into the cross anyway. Completely surrounding the cross will be too expensive (again, havent tried yet, but my two previous games had me at 0% science and in the red around monarchy).

So anyone have experience with this type of game?

[Blake]

Hahahah awesome idea. I'm going to try it on great plains or highlands or something. What difficult you played on?

[snublefot]

warlord (the one below noble) I think.

Part of the challenge is the large map. You cant just expand to throw the barbarians into the see. It also create very few chokepoints for you.

One more thing, placing cities on hills really help. The extra production is one thing, the extra defence is very apreciated. Normally the barbarians will gain tech faster then you. And once YOU get a tech, they'll get the tech too. In my second game I actually put of researching horse archers and iron...

[vmxa1]

One of the early games I played was Always War with raging barbs on Noble. I had std map with std civs minus one.

I had some space on my right so lots of barbs. They can be a real pain. I got horse archers and parked them out on my out skirts to prevent barbs from springing on me.

I lost even horse archers to axemen until I could finally get all the fog removed. Then all I had to do was deal with never having peace.

I have not had the nerve to use raging as I move up the ladder, maybe later.

[Diadem]

Around what time do the barbs start attacking?

And do they attack the AI in the same manor?

[vmxa1]

I never really noticed, but I would guess it is around 2100BC. I cannot say, but I suspect it is not a big problem for them.

I am playing std maps, at Prince and Monarch so far and the AI probably does better at filling in the the land.

The AWN game I had a fair chunk of space on one side of me and that took awhile to get sentries out and finally to fill.

[Fried-Psitalon]

The barbs do go after the AI, but the AI tends to build more garrison/defensive units than the average player (in my experience) so they will generally weather the storm a bit better.

Barb units - so far as I've noticed - aren't very discriminating about the intelligence of their attacks. If you put a unit on a forested hill along a common line of barb entry, they'll often throw themselves at it, even though the odds of success are extremely poor.

I even labeled a hill "Training Camp" in a game once out of whimsy for that very reason.

[Blake]

I played a Monarch game, on a standard Great Plains map, with 1 other civ. Raging barbs, naturally. As catherine because I wanted creative.

The swarms of warriors and archers were absolutely awesome, often coming in with stacks of 5 against my capital, they'd also pillage everything. After losing the first game (I used to lose Monarch games to raging barbs a lot... this is my first barb-loss in a while) I changed my strategy. Minimal terrain improvement, only what I can defend (a deer camp in forest). My cities got stacked high with archers, the brunt of the barb attacks focused on Moscow where I had 5 archers. I had built my cities on Plains Hills to get the +1 hammers (extremely important with no terrain improvements) and huge defensive bonuses. I cycled my archers in and out of the city to upgrade them all to Guerilla2 and Drill, the reason for Guerilla2 rather than Garrison being that I could send them off ahead to secure the next hill.

For resources during this period my workers were scattered out revealing the corner behind my cities and chopping like mad (I was on the area of plains with lots of grassland, LOTS of forest, isolated hills). Barbs seek and destroy any terrain improvement, even those they can't rightfully see (sure, sure, no cheating ), but workers are fairly safe.

I pulled off the CS slingshot without a hitch and got Pyramids in my 2nd city as well. It took an insanely long time to build it, but clearly neither the AI nor the barbs went for it. (the barbs did get a bunch of early wonders).

Finally, the Barb storm ended, as they set down roots and started building up giant cities. I back and forward-filled with cities, securing the border with Longbowmen, as the barb cities were pumping out maces.

My map-mate happened to be Isabella and she happened to be a royal pain, the thing that enraged me most was how she built a ZILLION horse archers and MASS PILLAGED the BARBARIAN CITIES! These giant beutifully terraformed cities ripe for the taking, mass pillaged because th AI has a pillage fetish!!!. Stupid AI, the sooner pillaging is fixed the better (for bonus stupid points, try to jusify THIS kind of mass pillaging, You Can't).

Anyway I managed to get about 4 sweet barb cities before finding the masspillagewhore at work, and I also captured some cities that she had pillaged as they had sweet resources. During the barb-crushing phase she declared war on me, horses vs rifles isn't effective and this allowed me to save SOME tiles, unfortunately I stupidly declared peace with her before taking the barb city and she moved her units under my units and finished the pillaging. STOP ****ING PILLAGING.

The conclusion of the game wasn't particullary interesting as Isabella is an extremely weak AI. She would just send in giant stacks of DOOOM(ed) that would get promptly demolished by my cannons, tanks and later bombers.

I think I'm going to try a game like this again, with a builder AI (probably American), with always war on. Actually probably 2 AI's, always war, no tech trading.

[Diadem]

The barbs stop attacking after a while? That's weird, they never stopped in the old civ's.

God I loved civ2 on raging barbarians. Always nice to take a coffee break while the barbs throwing 30 howitzers at once against my fortified mech infs in a fortress on a mountain. And sometimes they got through. I remember using nukes on barbs because all my other units were gone

[Blake]

There is kind of an intial barb swarm, when they spawn spontaneously in fog. The swarm ends after a while, and the attacks start coming from the barb cities rather than the ether.

[snublefot]

Dont know what triggers the barbarian swarm. It might be masonry. Dont think its a particular date. It do attack the AI. I started a game with two opponents and the japaneese where killed fast.

Did another game last night. Starting location was with the sea in my back so only 3 fronts to defend. Also had some luck with my huts, and had 4 workers happy at work around Moskow. Bronze was out of the question this time. The only resource where half a continent away. So it was archers vs axemen for thousand years. Playing epic btw.

This time I concentrated on 1 city and moved archers in stacks of two to hills around my city. The barbarians mostly attack even if I space the defenders, but would occationally slip by the defence. I really really miss the originals "cant move on adjacent tiles". Thats one feature I would really like back. Stayed in 100% research for a long time, but started expanding too late and got way behind the tech race.

This time I did manage to keep the city tiles worked except for the first few hundreds years.

[Diadem]

What if you play tiny islands? There won't be much fog to attack from. Do they come with boats as well? Like in the old civs.

And late game they come from the cities. Hm.. What if you kill the cities? The barbs just disappear then?

[Blake]

I've finally confirmed my observation that the Barbarians actually hammer the AI as hard or even harder than the humans. I played a team game with an AI and watched amused as barbarians ripped up every single tile improvement, I loaded the world editor and confirmed the other AI's had been pillage-raped. Granted the AI's can still expand because they do the settler escort thing, but barbs sure as heck slow them down. I've yet to see a civ get wiped out by barbs, but I have seen them lose cities.

[snublefot]

Diadem. Havent tried the island thing. My guess is it would be easier to defend that way.

Its the start and middle game thats the challenge here. Once you build up and get the numbers to challenge the barbarian cities they aint a challenge. That part of the game will be againts the other Civ. Set the game to "no time limit" and only conquest and play catch up with the AI. And pray you where lucky on the resource draw. In my game the only oil resource where barbarian controlled in a hard to defend spot.

The fog spawn seem to come from villages. The cities dont seem to be too aggressive. The villages seem to spawn a stack of units at random. In my last game I razed a barb city, and had the barbarians rebuild a few turns later in the exact same spot.