Barbs ignoring strong pickets?

[Cort Haus]

A popular way to defend against barb invaders is to picket Warriors / Archers on hills & forests outside the borders, preferably with Woodsman / Guerilla promos, and let the barbs break themselves against these defenders.

I was doing this with some Mali skirmishers, with 2 promos in some cases, and barb archers were just walking past them, presumably in favour of something easier to attack, like my economy.

Are these barbs not reading their script? They're supposed to be fearless fighters, are they not? What's all this with ducking out of a scrap because the odds aren't too good?

Is it the extra strength of the Mali UU putting them off? More discerning barbarians in 1.52, or an effect of 1.52 combat odds? Streaky dice?

Raging barb players - you might know a lot about the marauders' behaviour - is this normal?

[GeoModder]

Do you attack when you just know it's suicide?
Why going to the beyond when there is that juicy plot to plunder just over the horizon?

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by GeoModder
Do you attack when you just know it's suicide?

Oh yes, all the time. And I frequently disband brand new units too, because I like pressing the skull button.



Seriously though, its just that many-a-post says "oh, to defend against the barbs just fortify strong pickets on hills outside blah blah", but they tend not to go on to say "and the barbs will completely ignore your pickets and you'll need another bunch of units inside your borders to keep them off the strawberries".

My point is that in the past, barb archers have tended to waste themselves on pickets, but they didn't in this game. I wasn't crying about it, but asking if this was a 1.52 thing, a Skirmisher thing, a 2x Guerilla thing, etc etc (see OP).

[GeoModder]

It's better to put those pickets on your resource spots. No way the barbs won't suicide there.

Can't tell if this is an 1.09 or 1.52 thing, haven't played long enough on 1.52 to see. But I'm happy to see (in my current Terra game) that the barb AI defends it's continent quite vigilantly against my explorers.

[Jaybe]

Firaxis SAID they had spruced up the AI a bit (though it isn't explicit in the 1.52 readme).

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by Jaybe
Firaxis SAID they had spruced up the AI a bit (though it isn't explicit in the 1.52 readme).

Yeah, and I heard that the AI reads these forums too...

[GeoModder]

I for one welcome our new Barb Overlords!

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by GeoModder
I for one welcome our new Barb Overlords!

Well there was somebody in the Civ 3 days going around demanding equal rights for Barbarians because the human got an attack bonus at most levels. And that was before C3C barbs - born with sticky feet and would only attack to the NW or SE.

[Arrian]

Cort,

It has been my experience in 1.09 games that the barbs would often bypass a unit fortified on a forest hill if a nearby (adjacent?) tile was a resource - like a pasture, for instance - so they could pillage.

The pickets were mainly useful for pushing back the fog, although they would occasionally get hit even in strong defensive positions.

-Arrian

[Jaybe]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Well there was somebody in the Civ 3 days going around demanding equal rights for Barbarians because the human got an attack bonus at most levels.

Oh scrap, that was ME again!
Now what I intend to do is give equal rights to the player by equalizing the player & AI combat handicaps vs. barbs!

I am playing noble epics, and still feel the AI is getting unfair advantage with barbs much preferring to pick on the player because of the 40% AI handicap. I am thinking of making them just 5% more than mine.

[Blake]

Indeed. It seems if your units get too strong the barbs are far more inclined to ignore them.

I've long since ceased using Woodsman axemen, there is rarely anything of value to defend in forests, and the barbs will rarely attack the axemen when they are in the forest. So I give my Axemen Combat/Heal/March or Combat/Heal/Shock or Heal/March/Shock for Aggressive.

The main thing is that the much higher healing rate (especially with march) allows my axemen to fight much more often. A smaller effect seems to be that barbs will be slightly more inclined to attack the heal/march axemen due to having better odds. In nearly every case March will allow an Axeman to respond to more threats than Woodsman will, because there is no need to ever stop and heal (however a March axeman does lack offensive punch vs hostile axemen, so I only REALLY like march axemen with aggressive, in any case the offensive punch is still as good as Woodsman)

I give my exploring/picket axemen heal/march or heal/shock too, this is because in neutral territory heal rate is only 10%, in hostile territory it's only 5%. If you camp a woodsman axeman next to a barb city, he can only take a maximum average damage of 5% a turn, or he'll die of "attrition". A heal Axeman otoh can take 15% damage a turn, he can actually fight three times as often.

Archers on the other hand need to have Guerilla or City Defender promotions to stand a chance against Axe and Swordmen, they often get stacked with one of my healaxes to get the heal benefit. In any case the base strength of archers is low enough that barbs wont really ever be detered from attacking them (this doesn't mean they wont find more attractive things to attack or pillage).

[Mujadaddy]

I had two warbands in a row pass a hill-forest Archer to run for a resource patch last night... so this is typical behavior, in my experience.

[wardhali]

i havnt had too much touble w/ barbs but it sounds interesting that they will make you come out of heavy fortification to attack you.

[Crossfire]

Yeah, pickets are good for rolling back the fog but rarely are attacked.

[Badtz Maru]

The chance a barbarian will attack is based on a percentage in the difficulty setting XML and by the relative strength of the units. This is why the barbarians seem to ignore the AI in favor of attacking the player - the AI gets big bonuses against barbarians on all difficulty levels (the same as the player gets on Settler) and the barbarians know this. This is because the AI is often ineffective at defending against barbarian attacks early in the game and most people don't want to play a game where some of the opponents are wiped out in the first few turns.

I modded a difficulty level that removed all the AI bonuses and the barbarians did attack the AIs more, but I didn't run into any problems with AI civilizations being wiped out by them. It really slowed down civilizations that had continents to themselves, usually they are at the top of the scoreboard in my unmodded games, but with "Fair Barbarians" they seemed to lag behind.