I made the Barb God angry?

[Amickiew]

I still recall the frustration in Civ3 with barbarian uprisings. Sometimes I'd have shoestring budgets for military while I focused on research and improvements, then here come stacks upon stacks of barbs that lay waste to everything.

[Saurus]

The problem with barbs is that they are waaaay too unpredictable. Sure they normaly spawn in "unseen" areas. But this seem to be heavily at random. Sometimes they do this alot, sometimes not at all.

There can easily be games where there is alot of unclaimed and un-scouted land around my cities and still no barbs show up. I remember one particular game when barbarians finally even built cities and thus occupied all land to west, south and east leaving my 4 cities almost compleatly encircled. However, only rarely during that game did they actually move into my territory and not more than 1 unit at a time. So even though the barbarians eventualy ended up had 5 cities bordering my cities, the barbarians did barely do anything.

Then again, during other games, seemlingly at random, barbs just pop up from everywhere, in what seem to be infinite numbers. Removing the fog only works if you actually manage to remove ALL fog of war near your land. In most cases this is impossible if land spawn out in front of you in several directions and does in any case not matter since if the barbarians have entered the "havoc"-mode they will come forth in such numbers they will easily kill whatever units guarding any given area.

I sometimes tend to note that the barbarians seems to go mad particulary during such games where I am having a particulary lucky starting location or doing very well early on. Maybe this is some kind of a programmed script in order to prevent a player from growing too powerful all too early?

[Jaybe]

Saurus, isn't unpredictability wonderful? I wish it applied to more parts of the game.

Actually, I am sure that your varying barb experience is due to environmental factors such as geography and location of other civs.

[rah]

Yep.
The MP game I played last week, I started on an 7 square land mass attatched to the main continent by a single wide 6 long land bridge. I would normally have really moaned about it except that I had 5 crabs and one fish in reach. It took a while to get going but Eventually it was just fine. No hills, just 6 forest squares that eventually became the GL. Everything else built was done by the lash.

ANYWay. My culture quickly covered the area and I placed a city at the point that it touched the mainland, (only to find another civ about 4 squares away) Since he had a better start, it took awhile before I could take him on. So I had to go to sea and settle any island I could find.

ANYWAY, No barbs entered my territory the ENTIRE GAME. That had never happened to me in a game before. I was defending my cap with a single warrior the whole early part of the game. (until I saw a ship anyway)