Avoid Barbarian rape by giving away a city

[zeace]

I'm sure you've all noticed the occasional barbarian uprising, aka 10 barbarian horsemen riding towards your city. I had just plopped down a city nearly completly surrounded by jungle when the uprising took place. I gave the city to my friends the french and they were grateful. The barbarian rape on the undefended city then proceeded to take nearly 300 gold from the french coffers. The french are still grateful(?) Sucker...

Ze Ace

[Chuckles]

Haha, that's funny. And you'll probably re-absorb the city eventually through culture.

[Draco of GL]

LOL. That's priceless! I gotta give that a try.

English: "Here's the keys to the city. Enjoy"
French: "Thanks!"
(English tear out of town like a bat out of hell)
(Barbarian horde appears on hill behind city)
French: "Well, they sure were in a hurry to leave"
(Looks behind them)
French: "YOIKS!!"

Chris

[Tennyson]

No, no, no, it would be "SACRE BLEU!!"

[Johnny_Vegas]

hahha

That's a good one!

I've stopped doing things that take advantage over bugs in the game though. Like I stopped asking the computer for gold/per turn until that bug is fixed..

Anyway, giving away a city that is doomed, is hilarious.

[Gaius Marius]

I regularly do this when I am off on some punitive military campaign (goes like this - some civ declares war on me/threatens me too much, and I take 2-3 cities with cav/tanks/whatever). I then move all my military units out and back home, and give the cities to the most powerful civ. The civ I attacked in the first place (or someone else) retakes the city and takes gold from the leaders. Also, it often creates a situation where the AI players fight over filling the power vacuum in that part of the world, keeping them in a destructive cycle of war and unable to trade techs. I especially like it when they switch out of Democracy and I'm able to Propaganda the cities I really want.

[jdd2007]

ur strategy is kinda like one of mine. whenever i absorb a city by culture i give it to the highest bidder, getting tons of gold per turn...

[Saint Marcus]

English: "Here's the keys to the city. Enjoy"
French: "Thanks!"
(English tear out of town like a bat out of hell)
(Barbarian horde appears on hill behind city)
French: "Well, they sure were in a hurry to leave"
(Looks behind them)
French: "YOIKS!!"

Change English to French, and French to Americans and you got Vietnam

[Pingu]

Not an uprising an INVASION

Just playing a nice little game, tiny map got a large Island to myself, after dispatching the Persions (Playing Babylonians). Everything going hunky dory, included my nice little Hunting Preserve Tactic!
Basicaly leave a little part of the island unseen (jungle/desert) and station a Babylonian Longbowman to hunt the barbarians. He's had a wonderful time and in no time at all is of elite status, every now and then up pops a Barbarian and my longbowman (bob) kills the hapless foe and his leader, earning 25 gold every few turns.
He's was promised the rule of the forbidden palace when it was built, another 5 years maybe!
Then from out of the darkness a rumble could be heard, the sound of hooves across the land, and over the horizon they came, between 30 and 40 thousand horseman, heroic bob took a stand and managed to despatch 5 thousand of these barbarian horsemen.
I had maybe 18 thousand troops spread around the Island, my people fell before them.

so ends the reign of Pingu

Has anyone else had a barbarian uprising, with 40 units of horsemen in one turn!!
Hunting Preserve Tactic!

[Excelsior]

Re: Not an uprising an INVASION

Originally posted by Pingu
Has anyone else had a barbarian uprising, with 40 units of horsemen in one turn!

40! The biggest one I've seen thus far was 22 horsemen. They appeared two turns away from a city I'd just founded. It had no defenders and was still at size one pop. The barbarians ignored my capital 4-5 tiles away and instead proceeded to ransack a perfectly useless city 22 times!

[AnnC]

sedentary, eh?

The largest uprising I've seen is 12 horsemen. And it happened on a map which had been generated with barbarian activity set to 'sedentary'.

[Elucidus]

I had two groups of 24 apear within two tiles of each other on the same turn to attack a newly formed undefended city... Ugggh!

[IronSpam]

Actually along the same lines, I gave a city to the Chinese in order to make trouble for the lead civilization, the Russians. I conquered a small Zulu-held city (population 1) on their continent in an area between China and Russia. In their war with each other, they made the combat zone a wasteland with aerial bombardments and pillaging.

I parked about a dozen tanks and mechanized infantry inside the city, then called up Mao and gave it to him as a gift. He accepted with glee, and I thought I was helping to destabilize things by giving Russia's mortal enemy a lot of military hardware. That area of the map went dark for me, since I had no more units there.

In some other thread, someone noted that when a city defects because of cultural pressures, that the units inside regrettably also go to the other civilization. I thought, why not turn this around? Plus, I was trying to cut military costs anyway and my people were sick of war.

A turn or two later I noticed that there were extra tanks and mechanized infantry in Washington, my capital. I also noticed that my military maintenance hadn't changed all that much since the fire sale to China. I thought maybe that I had built more units and my maintenance had filled the gap made by the giveaway.

I had an opportunity to again destabilize things. I repeated my steps and gave Mao another city in the same region plus units. This time I left a destroyer in the city along with everything else. After the giveaway, lo and behold, my gift of land units plus the lone destroyer appears in the capital!

Well, in either case, the Chinese clearly didn't get my gift of arms, since the Russians shortly took both of those cities with what appeared to be little resistance. I so loved giving arms to third parties in Civ II. It seems fitting behavior for a world superpower. Is there any way to do this in Civ III? It's a shame if not.

On a side note, I suppose that this giveaway quirk could be used as a fast mass transporting technique for far-flung military hardware. These units were turns and turns away from the nearest airport. It probably would have taken the rest of the game to for all of these guys to get home given how far away they were. But they got back to the mainland in the blink of an eye, even a naval vessel. Think about that potential!

This trick obviously has the best payoff for large groups of units rather than one or two stragglers abroad. I do have a feeling that maybe a unit or two may have stayed behind and gone to the Chinese, but I can't be sure. I'd have to do it again and do a proper accounting.

[Grim Legacy]

Funny, but instead of giving away a valuable city, you might also think about just spending all your money until you have 20 gold left (buy things, trade with AI for raw gold).

Then the horsies will ride happily away with 1G each.

[MarshalN]

I've noticed sometimes that the AI doesn't want my cities, even if I give them out for free. I don't know why, they just don't want it. One of them even had a wonder in it, weird..

At least barbs no longer take cities and grow a whole Civ. I remember in Civ2 sometimes you have a whole barbarian Civ with 5 cities (stupid AI lost to the barbs) and it's no fun when they pump out archers and just keep hitting you....