Not cool!

[Blaupanzer]

I noted that I had such a group march thru my territory to go take out another civ. I still don't know why. I had a couple of clean (no promotions) warriors in my capitol which was not on a hill, but I was bypassed. Who knows what Blake used as the logic in that case.

[rah]

It's like early in the game when you have barb warriors cruising around but not entering your area. It's like they're waiting for a condition to be met before they start coming at you.

[Lord Avalon]

I think that when that event occurs, there's a primary target. It might be you, it might be someone else, even if they appear right outside your borders and have to go through your territory to get there. If it happens early, and you're the target, you could be screwed. Of course, you might reap the benefits of it being someone else. Send a few troops when their capital gets taken, and you might arrive to find it undefended, as the barbs have moved on.

[rah]

YES, I've done that before and reaped the benefits. Once I was able to claim an entire civ with just a couple of chariots. Granted if four barb archers can trash a civ, a few chariots probably would have been able to come close but it's always better if you can do it without a DOW.

Yes, sometimes in the event it tells you that you are likely to be the one attacked.

[slnz]

They do have a plan usually, which is to go for the weakest Civ in a few dozen tiles' range. If you just have 3 Warriors to defend that's enough if your neighbor has 2

For normal barbs there seems to be a set time for when they can attack. The earliest normal barb attack I've seen is pretty much exactly 2400BC/2600BC/2800BC for Emperor/Immortal/Deity.

[Dis]

well that explains the 4 horse archers then. I just don't remember seeing an "event" message in the log. I may have missed it. The good thing was it was a border town with a resource I was trying to protect (my only source of iron, and I had no copper). So I had 4 defensive units there at the time. So in that case I guesstimated they would go for my city. So I moved the two units off the iron resource into my city to fortify (taking a chance that they would move onto the iron and pillage it). It was enough to resist the attack of the 4 horse archers.

So I'll have to keep an eye out for this in the future. As I often leave cities with only one defender . Except in cases like this of course.

[Ming]

It's the early horse archer event that is deadly. I don't typically have a bunch of spearman at the time, unless it's my UU. I mostly have axes or chariots depending on the available resourses. In MP games, I've been able to beat off the archers and axemen events. But the horse archer one is bad because I rarely have enough of the counter, and they come at you quicker.

[wodan11]

As soon as one of those event is reported, every single city is switched to unit production. Whipping time. I don't wait until the bad guys appear on the border.