Are these barbarians for real?

[NFIH]

I've started to try games on the Noble setting (epic speed) with barbarians turned on (but NOT to "raging"). The relentless stream of barbs I'm getting hit with is unbelievable. It starts soon after I get my second city up and never stops.

In fact, I have no breathing room to do anything BUT build archers to try and defend. But that only works for a brief period because the barbs soon come with axemen and massed archers one after another that simply wear down my archers before they can recover.

I'm completely unable to build and hold any improvements because of the attacks. I feel that the key is getting iron/copper so I can build axemen, but it's impossible to get a mine down and hold it long enough to build even a single axeman. The barbs tear up the roads and the mine.

Meanwhile, the AI civs are catching up to and then passing me.

Am I really going to have to turn off barbs completely? I really am finding this to be tedious and unplayable at this point.

Is there a particularly good strategy to deal with this? (And yes, I've read many threads here on the barbs.) I know, for example, about building sentries to push back the FoW. But the sheer number of units I'd need to do this would be insane as the barbs come from all sides and angles. I would be unable to build a single other thing if I had to do this.

Could the problem be that I'm playing on huge worlds with only five other AIs? I could up the number of AIs but I want room to grow and the AI starts all the civs right on top of each other anyway (another frustration) so I'm hesitant to try that. Moreover, I read in another thread that the game is programmed to have the barbs attack the AI civs much less than the player and that the barb attacks against the AI civs are crippled. And apparently, modding the game to make the barbs attack the AI civs just as frequently only results in the AI civs dying very quick deaths.

Ideas for a newbie, anyone?

[sprudl]

6 civs for such a big map leaves a lot of room for barbs indeed. I usually add 2-4 civs to the default setting for a huge map. I like to have a bit of options when picking the next victim With that many civs there still is some barb activity but it's manageable. Although in the replay, I often see AI civs get (nearly) wiped out by them.

Also keep in mind that even without barbs maintenance costs will kill you if you keep expanding to take all that land.

A few more civs wouldn't hurt. And if you run out of room you can always conquer your neighbour

Perhaps you can look into other map scripts and/or settings so you get a bit more land and less water.

[Shivan]

I would suggest either turning barbs off (and hey, barbs pretty much are unnecessary to the fun of gameplay unless you have something about being attacked by waves of enemies that spawn wherever you can't see the land... or if you really need your units to gain experience without being at war with a civ...), or sticking to island maps that you can easily and quickly cover all the FoW...

Besides, barbarians in this game don't make any contextual sense at all anyway. In history, there no random single groups of axeman without a homeland or any cares in the world... even the Huns were a group of people and such... Plus, barbarians should be fighting each other too, since barbarians aren't all the same group of people, the same tribe, etc... bah. I just turn them off, most of the time.

But then again, if I wanted the game to be that realistic, there'd be much more important changes than that lol

(for instance, food and population growth: cities should be able to import/export food with each other, so you don't have cities starving, and there should be caps on how much pop growth is gained from extra food, and the food taken in beyond that cap should be able to be exported to other cities or other civs. Also, I think production would be changed too, since when in history has a city ever worked on one thing only... at least I would make it so that you could be building one item of military importance and one item of civilian importance... but I suppose we can wait for these things in Civ 5 lol)

[Urban Ranger]

What worked for me:

1. Get archery. It's very important.
2. Place archers on hills, forests and forested hills to defend.
3. Place archers in such a way to max out vision coverage.
4. Put an archer or two on top of your copper/iron mine to defend it.
5. Don't bother about improvements until you can defend them.
6. Build cities on hills. This is not an overriding condition but should be one of the important criteria.
7. The Stonehenge is a good wonder to grab since it improves the cultural radius of your cities, thus driving back the FoW.
8. Once you get axemen you can make a small mobile defense stack or two. However don't spend excessively on the military.
9. As Jaybe pointed out, modify the XML so nobody gets any bonuses against barbs.

If you can't handle the barbarians on Noble play a game one level down to get a feeling of things.

I play "raging barbarians" myself

Don't forget that the severity of barbarians is dependent on the map. I'd say try a large, continent map on for size first.

[Jaybe]

I second sprudl's post: You are using too few civs. For a huge continents/fractal map I use 14-15 civs total (Noble difficulty, Marathon speed).

AI civs are having an easier time vs. barbarians becuase they have dramatic combat handicaps against them. The barbs, probably appreciating this, see you as an easier target -- so if they have a choice, they will prefer to target you rather than an AI.

Here's my quote that Urban Ranger was probably referring to:

I have mentioned it elsewhere before, but what I do is give the player and the AI equal advantages against barbarians. That way the barbs will target the AI as much as you, and the AI will not have such an easy time wiping them out.

It is done in HandicapInfo.xml in the GameInfo folder. You would want to put the modified file into your CustomAssets folder, of course.
Personally, I set all of them to zero: iAnimalBonus (at Noble normally -40), iBarbarianBonus (-10), iAIAnimalBonus (-70) & iAIBarbarianBonus (-40). I also set iFreeWinsVsBarbs (2) to zero. By zeroing these out, you are putting barbs on an equal footing with other civs, and also getting "proper" experience when you are successfull in killing them.

[Robert]

Archers are good defenders against barbarians. They gain promotions while defending against barbarian archers, promote them up to city defense 3.
Archers already have a standard 50% city defense bonus. I think you have about 130% vs swordmen / axemen because of these promotions/bonusses.
Build the city on a hill and add another 50% defense promotion.

If there are 2 or 3 archers in each city, that should be enough to defend these cities for a long time.

Place 2 or 3 archers on strategical hills outside of your territory, and give these the hill-promotions. Preferable of course on forest-hills.

Barbarians are good for promoting your forces anyway!

[MikeH]

If you are on a nice crowded bit of land, with lots of other civs you'll get far fewer barbarians because not only can the barbarians not spawn anywhere you can see, they can't spawn anywhere the AI can see either.

This means it's a little tougher to expand, but you should still be able to get enough spance and you can always grab cities from the other civs if you don't get enough space.

[NFIH]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
What worked for me:

1. Get archery. It's very important.
2. Place archers on hills, forests and forested hills to defend.
3. Place archers in such a way to max out vision coverage.
4. Put an archer or two on top of your copper/iron mine to defend it.

Yes, as I mentioned I'm aware of the archer strategy. My issue has been actually carrying it out. I need a lot of archers to defend even small parcels of land. One per tile won't cut it, that's for sure. It's enough to fend off the first few attacks but then what happens is the barbs attack in small stacks where one barb damages you enough to allow the next one in the same stack (or the next turn's attack) to take out my archer. If the barbs are axemen death comes even more quickly. All this means I have to build many archers per city solely for defence. Not at all viable given the fact I'm in competition with other civs.

5. Don't bother about improvements until you can defend them.

Again, I'll need at least three units per improvement for any lasting defence. But that's not even the worst problem. I've been able to put up a mine. But then I need a road to connect the mine to my city so I can actually get the resource. The barbs simply destroy the road. This means I need archers on every tile of road. Completely untenable, I'm afraid. On top of that I need gold income and hammers to increase/maintain income and production so it all becomes a vicious circle.

7. The Stonehenge is a good wonder to grab since it improves the cultural radius of your cities, thus driving back the FoW.

Not practical for me at this level because each city has to be churning out archers and walls for max defence. See "vicious circle" above. LOL!

8. Once you get axemen you can make a small mobile defense stack or two. However don't spend excessively on the military.

Hmm, but this doesn't square either with what you've said above or my own described experience. The sheer severity of the barb attacks forces me to "spend excessively" on defence.

9. As Jaybe pointed out, modify the XML so nobody gets any bonuses against barbs.

I'm always extremely reluctant to mod files. I think I'm going to take another poster's suggestion here and simply turn them off entirely. I suppose I won't miss them THAT much.

EDIT: Changed my mind. I'd like to change the game so the barbs attack the AI equally. How do I do this?

Don't forget that the severity of barbarians is dependent on the map. I'd say try a large, continent map on for size first.

Yeah, that's an idea as well. I really wanted to play terra though for that semi-realistic feeling. Decisions, decisions, decisions.

Thanks for your input!

[MikeH]

Terra should be better, because all the AIs start on the same landmass as you. If you only have 4 or 5 opponents, there'll be plenty of space on a Normal sized map. That'd make a huge difference. Playing continents on a normal sized map with 7 other Civs the barbs are little more than an annoyance on Prince.

I actually think it's harder with that few AIs, you have fewer to make alliances with, less people to trade with and because they have fewer rivals they are more likely to target you for invasion.

[lemur866]

The big problem is that barbarians spawn in unwatched areas of the map. They can't spawn in areas you can see, or in areas the computer players can see. So when you crank down the number of AI civs you leave a lot more open space for the barbarians to spawn.

So your idea of cranking down the number of AI civs to give yourself plenty of empty room to expand into won't work with default settings, because after the first few turns there's no such thing as "empy room" anymore. Any empty area of the map becomes a barbarian spawning ground.

If you left the default number of AI civs then they'd fill up more of the empty space and leave less room for barbarians. Or you could turn off barbarians.

[marvinkosh]

You can also try building a city smack bang on top of copper. It's not ideal but it means that first of all, you will always have that one city which can produce copper-based units. This means that as long as you can hold onto it, your workers only need to keep it connected to the rest of the empire for the other cities to produce Axemen.

When you have time, try and make a second route which leads to a coastal city. This means that, should your first and most direct land route fail, you can still get your copper to other coastal cities in your empire and hence to any city connected to coastal cities.

When you have Axemen, station them just inside your borders at strategic points so that they can assist any sentries you may have outside your borders. This trick will save you a little gold because the majority of your units are still within cultural borders.

[Willem]

Originally posted by NFIH
Again, I'll need at least three units per improvement for any lasting defence. But that's not even the worst problem. I've been able to put up a mine. But then I need a road to connect the mine to my city so I can actually get the resource. The barbs simply destroy the road. This means I need archers on every tile of road. Completely untenable, I'm afraid. On top of that I need gold income and hammers to increase/maintain income and production so it all becomes a vicious circle.

It sounds to me like your not placing your Archers properly. They should be on Hills just outside your cultural borders, not within your empire itself. I play on Noble as well and all I usually need is about half a dozen well placed Archers to keep my territory clear. The Barbs will attack the sentries, and invariably die, long before they ever reach my improvements. Even Swordsman will go down if your Archer is on a forested Hill. Sometimes an Axeman gets lucky but not very often. And Barb Archers always bite the bullet against my fortified Archers. The key is not to attack with them, but let the Barbs try and take you out.

[Yosho]

Originally posted by Shivan
Besides, barbarians in this game don't make any contextual sense at all anyway. In history, there no random single groups of axeman without a homeland or any cares in the world... even the Huns were a group of people and such... Plus, barbarians should be fighting each other too, since barbarians aren't all the same group of people, the same tribe, etc... bah. I just turn them off, most of the time.

Well, historically, whever you had a settled, agracultural people start to form a civilization, they would soon be raided and attacked by nomadic people, and that's pretty universal in history.

Besides, why would they fight each other? You're the one with all the cool stuff worth stealing and cities worth sacking.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by NFIH
Yes, as I mentioned I'm aware of the archer strategy. My issue has been actually carrying it out. I need a lot of archers to defend even small parcels of land. One per tile won't cut it, that's for sure. It's enough to fend off the first few attacks but then what happens is the barbs attack in small stacks where one barb damages you enough to allow the next one in the same stack (or the next turn's attack) to take out my archer.

I am not sure how you place your archers but it doesn't sound right. What you need to do, as pointed out above, is to place archers just outside your cultural border on hills, in forests, or (best) on forested hills. Place them so that they max out the vision coverage. BTW, consider building archers from cities where you have barracks.

Originally posted by NFIH
EDIT: Changed my mind. I'd like to change the game so the barbs attack the AI equally. How do I do this?

See Jaybe's post above.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by marvinkosh
You can also try building a city smack bang on top of copper.

Or right next to a copper/iron.