Next BTS question...did Barbs get a big boost?

[Billybgame]

Playing an Always War Gauntlet game at Civ Fanatics(hope that's not wrong mentioning that site....I can only access yours at work, and I've read enough to know you have some extremely knowledgeable players here....might become a regular here, too).

Anyhow, I was doing so-so...taking out the Ethiopians...had some vacant land to the South of me....some Barbs warriors had come a few times. All of a sudden....4 barb horse archers!(yikes!). I had only archers in my cities, which were far from the front lines. My capitol went down in no time. That was a waste of 4 hours...abort.

I've not seen a Barb attack like that since the days of Civ 2. Certainly not in vanilla. Or, was it just some freak thing from this game? Or, something to do with Always War?

[wodan11]

There are some events that cause multiple barbs to spawn and attack together.

Again my first question is whether you have the 3.17 patch installed? You might also consider getting the so-called "unofficial" patch to 3.17 (the patch to the patch).

[Billybgame]

I've got all the patches for 3.17.

Edit: They had to be spruced up in BTS....this is crazy...it's a Prince Always War game, and the Barbs are just out of control. Not even to AD in my latest aborted game, and I've got Axemen and Spearmen coming after me....I had a good game going that other time when that stack of 4 Horse Archers ruined that game.

Makes it awfully tough, as you're trying to war with others, and these barbs are coming from all other directions.

[Ming]

There is not much you can do about the special event... which this sounds like it was.
You can always turn off special events, but heck, why lose the good for the bad.

For other barbs, you can always station units to clear the "fog of war" and make sure that they appear closer to other civs.

I've never really had troubles with barbs. I make sure I race to one of the early military upgrades so that I can take the battle to them before they get to my cities and improvements. You say it happened four hours in... four hours in, you should have better than just archers

The event you mention is a tough one... unless you want to play without any events, really nothing you could do.

[Billybgame]

Special Events? Do you mean one of the new random ones that BTS announces? No such thing like that happened. It just seems like Barbs are either much more plentiful in either Always War or BTS, or a combination of both.

Either that or I'm wrong, and there's just been too much open space out there.

It is Epic speed, so it takes time to get things done. In the good game I had going, all my axemen were at the frontlines. I didn't expect 4 Horse Archers to come out of nowhere. Never would, having never seen that since Civ 2.

[rah]

4 horse archers had to be an event. Check your game log.

[joncnunn]

I think the random barb events messages get delivered to every single player in the game regardless of how far away the barbs just generated are.
The ones closest to where they appear also get a message saying their likely to feel the brunt of them as an extra warning.

Also, the barbs became smarter with the Better AI (Warlords version) much of which was incorporated into base BTS.

I note that barbs are much more of a problem on huge region maps than normal world maps.

[Willem]

Edit: They had to be spruced up in BTS....this is crazy...it's a Prince Always War game, and the Barbs are just out of control. Not even to AD in my latest aborted game, and I've got Axemen and Spearmen coming after me....I had a good game going that other time when that stack of 4 Horse Archers ruined that game.

Makes it awfully tough, as you're trying to war with others, and these barbs are coming from all other directions.

Barbs in BTS can be pretty outrageous sometimes but that's not always the case. I've had games where it's been very quiet with hardly any raids at all. I guess you just got unlucky. I've had some games though where I just gave up because I was being spammed so much. There's also the posssibility that one of your neighbours built the Great Wall. When that happens, any Barbs that were supposed to go for him will turn your way instead.

[self biased]

usually, when it rains it pours in my experience.