What do you think of barbarians?

[Yosho]

Yeah. Barbs are never a non-issue. If you're on pangea, and surronded by other civs, then they can be mostly irrelvent, but if there's a lot of empty space around me, they pretty much prevent me from doing any intersting early-game builder stratagies at all, which is rather annoying.

[JackRudd]

When barbs are around, I tend to do an early-game builder strategy that involves using Axemen as de facto Settlers.

[Bobtoad]

Barbarians...

I think barbarians are something that could use tweaking. As a builder I find that it's usually not a case of neglecting defensive technologies - I love Bronze Working and have no qualms about grabbing Archery if I must - but rather, the way barbarians are now I find my frustrations come from the feeling of perpetual war. Building garrisons, escorts, and maintaining a mobile force to handle a foolish invader are sound advice to even the most peaceful of players. But my mood is dampened when I have to devote an entire army nearly every game to rid the evil scum from the face of the planet or face a constant delay of petty skirmishes. Even if I'm steadily growing and successfully expanding vertically, a lot of times the whole ancient age just has a feeling of being tied down to mundane warmonging with the barbarians. They can't do much damage to me. I don't really care about them or their land yet. But we dance on the battlefield every turn anyway.

Some of the ideas about focusing the barbarians more on city attacks and giving them a sense of worth (not dying needlessly) and strategy are intriguing. And for them to coordinate and amass truly devastating armies could be very entertaining. Under these guidelines they could wreak havoc on the unprepared without nagging an ancient powerhouse with foolish annoyances. And this seems to me their best use: educate the weak on survival by exploiting their folly, keep the strong honest through threat and growing power, and allow every player to find the sentiment and feeling of gameplay they seek in the game.

[Older than Dirt]

Barbarians, even on normal setting, make early aquisition of bronze crucial. The barbarians won't send axemen until a few turns after some civ develops bronze working, but you have to have the resource and connect it to a city to build the axement. Having iron doesn't help much because the barbarian axemen can whup up on them. I have not seen streams of barbarians going for the AI cities as they do to the human player when I have entered World Builder to see what they are doing. Am I correct in this, that the barbarians favor attacking the human civ, or is this only on the raging setting?

[LDiCesare]

I don't think the barbs favor the human, but the ai gets insane bonuses against barbs at all levels, so any barb nearing an ai unit, even axeman vs archer, will get killed.