Vile Barbarians, Destroyers and Usurpers of All That is Good and Fair in This World

[wodan11]

Originally posted by snoopy369
If you don't have archery or bronze, then what are you doing worrying about a canal city? And are you aware of the ability of fortresses?

He already answered that. Cool and fun. And, he wanted to claim the territory before the AI got it.

Good point about forts, but they won't help if you don't have the territory.

I'm applauding the whole thing anyway. He's having fun, which is the whole point. All too often people are so focused on WINNING and min/maxing, which IMO is not the point. Of course, winning has a big effect on how much fun you have, but that aside....

Wodan

[mrp]

I use the custom play mode and one of the things I do is turn off barbarians. I don't want to jack with combat in the beginning and barbs only give you 10xp slow you down so I turn em off. Once I started one and in the beggining a bunch a barbs kill me so from then on I basically said screw the barbs. Peace expand now combat later. Also having the Romans on your door step is also a recipe for disaster. Also if it sticks you in the tundra reload or you could travel x turns to the north or south and hope for best. Flood plains, rivers, hills, and or food resources. also you can speed production in the short term by clearing forest you don't need

[johnmcd]

Barbs are cool, the over expansion thing is a killer unless you make pottery a priority out of the gates. It's the only thing that will save you!

[wodan11]

Pottery can help, but specialists are usually a better "savior".

Wodan

[johnmcd]

Specialists rapidly lose their bite but towns keep on giving, plus, early game, what buildings are giving you the specialists?

[Supr49er]

Gotta have Barbs.

What you dont want (or need) is the cursed event that spawns masses of advanced Barbs.

[wodan11]

You would have to be going for Metal Working or something to screw yourself up before you could get Writing (Libraries). Pretty tough to do, but if you managed it, then yes, go for cottages.

I don't see where you get off with "specialists lose their bite". In fact, specialists (scientists, in particular) keep giving you research NO MATTER WHAT you're paying for maintenance.

The problem with cottages is that they feed your addiction. If you have managed to get yourself overextended and paying too much maintenance, then cottages simply give you more means to keep digging yourself deeper. If you have the discipline to STOP and use that extra commerce to get out of the hole, then yes cottages can help. But, the thing is, if you had that discipline, then you wouldn't be in trouble in the first place.

Scientists, on the other hand, will allow you to research Currency (etc) and THAT will definitely begin to get you out of that hole.

Wodan

[ben_vii]

Barbs
Those cities that connect seas and stuff

[nbarclay]

I absolutely hate the way barbarians are set up in Civ IV. I can see how people who enjoy a lot of early fighting can enjoy the way barbarians work. But I've always preferred a focus on peaceful expansion in the early game, and being forced to fight a constant, never-ending war against barbarians throughout the early part of the game isn't fun for me.

Worse, at least on the higher difficulty levels, barbarians advance through the military part of the tech tree way too quickly. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if I could research the peaceful techs I want and trade for the military techs I need to fight off the barbs. But with tech trading disabled until Alphabet, and with AIs not necessarily being willing to trade, the power of barbarians interferes with my research options a lot more than I consider fun. That's especially true on Monarch difficulty level, where AIs get Archery for free, meaning that if I research it (which would usually require researching Hunting as a prerequisite), I put myself way behind in the race to try to found a religion.

And as if all of that weren't bad enough, the unit upkeep cost mechanism puts a serious dent in the strategy of trying to build enough warriors to be genuinely safe against barbarians. I don't consider it fun to have to either take serious risks with barbs - risks that AIs don't have to take because they can build archers instead of warriors, and because they get dramatically bigger bonuses against barbs than I do - or slow down my science to pay for upkeep on extra warriors.

The end result is that I long ago gave up on playing games where barbarians are enabled. The worst part of that is that it's keeping me away from Apolyton University, which I enjoyed a great deal in Civ III. The last time I tried to play an AU game, barbarian troubles caused me to abandon it relatively early.

[Lancer]

I found out my waterway led to a bay enclosed by ice and started a new game.

[Lord Avalon]

Perhaps you should research Bronze Working earlier.

[Lancer]

I think I did so too early actually, I should have gotten pottery first. My thing is to found Judaism too, that took alot of the early time, but the AI civs were mostly my buds because of it.

[Lord Avalon]

If you were worried about barbs, how could you have BW too early?

[snoopy369]

Originally posted by nbarclay
I absolutely hate the way barbarians are set up in Civ IV. I can see how people who enjoy a lot of early fighting can enjoy the way barbarians work. But I've always preferred a focus on peaceful expansion in the early game, and being forced to fight a constant, never-ending war against barbarians throughout the early part of the game isn't fun for me.

Worse, at least on the higher difficulty levels, barbarians advance through the military part of the tech tree way too quickly. It wouldn't be that much of a problem if I could research the peaceful techs I want and trade for the military techs I need to fight off the barbs. But with tech trading disabled until Alphabet, and with AIs not necessarily being willing to trade, the power of barbarians interferes with my research options a lot more than I consider fun. That's especially true on Monarch difficulty level, where AIs get Archery for free, meaning that if I research it (which would usually require researching Hunting as a prerequisite), I put myself way behind in the race to try to found a religion.

And as if all of that weren't bad enough, the unit upkeep cost mechanism puts a serious dent in the strategy of trying to build enough warriors to be genuinely safe against barbarians. I don't consider it fun to have to either take serious risks with barbs - risks that AIs don't have to take because they can build archers instead of warriors, and because they get dramatically bigger bonuses against barbs than I do - or slow down my science to pay for upkeep on extra warriors.

The end result is that I long ago gave up on playing games where barbarians are enabled. The worst part of that is that it's keeping me away from Apolyton University, which I enjoyed a great deal in Civ III. The last time I tried to play an AU game, barbarian troubles caused me to abandon it relatively early.

I think that was the idea, though. Trying to encourage people to NOT focus on early peaceful expansion, but make it a bit harder to just massively expand without keeping adequate barbarian defenses is VERY important. You can always turn them off, after all, if you prefer to 'sandbox' it and play more peaceful of a game; but I think for a normal game, the old SP 'fast expand, light military' early game was not a good thing, and it made the MP transition very difficult.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by snoopy369


I think that was the idea, though. Trying to encourage people to NOT focus on early peaceful expansion, but make it a bit harder to just massively expand without keeping adequate barbarian defenses is VERY important. You can always turn them off, after all, if you prefer to 'sandbox' it and play more peaceful of a game; but I think for a normal game, the old SP 'fast expand, light military' early game was not a good thing, and it made the MP transition very difficult.

There are two problems with the "You can always turn them off" idea. First, it doesn't work for things like Apolyton University games and CivFanatics GOTMs. For those, I'm stuck either using the settings Firaxis provided or not playing. And when I play most of my games with barbs turned off, it makes it that much harder to try to play games where barbarians are active.

And second, the "turn them off" solution doesn't provide any middle ground between barbarians who are far more dangerous than raging barbarians in Civ III on one hand, and no barbarians at all on the other. The only way I can have barbarians at all without having way too many of them is to tinker with the XML files. And even there, my experiments thus far have only been able to tone down the numbers and give me a bit bigger bonus against them, not to solve the problem of barbarian archers and axemen showing up sooner than I want them to.

I'll also point out that what players have to do to deal with barbarians is a whole lot more than just keeping adequate defenses. It's one thing to have to build a mixture of settlers and military units to make sure your cities are defended. But it's something else to have to continually build new units to replace the ones barbarians kill, and to have to keep moving units around to maneuver against barbarians approaching from different directions. Further, the enormous number of barbarians in Civ IV dramatically increases the odds of barbarians having a lucky streak sooner or later so that what is usually adequate defenses ends up not being adequate. That problem is especially serious if humans try to compete for peaceful techs instead of pursuing Archery early - a choice AIs don't have to worry about on Monarch and above because they get Archery for free.

And as I pointed out before, the upkeep cost structure is rigged against players who try to have enough warriors to be safe against barbarians. Without archers (or other more advanced units if the right resources are available), players have to either take risks with their defenses or pay upkeep costs that put a significant dent in their research.

If it weren't for barbarians, giving AIs Archery for free on Monarch and above would be an elegant solution to the problem of how to give AIs a defense against players who like early rushes while at the same time allowing AIs to compete in a race for peaceful techs. But with barbs, humans can easily be stuck in a situation where they have to either give the AIs a big head start in the race for peaceful techs in order to pursue Archery, or accept serious costs and risks trying to fend off barbarians with warriors.