changing the barbarians

[steve.wray]

I've always thought that the barbarians in Civ don't scale very well.
At first they are dangerous, then irritating, then once you get to the modern age they are just annoying distractions.

I think theres a case for moderm era barbarians to be characterised as 'terrorists.'

To this end, I'd like to enable barbarians to arrive with modern age units... preferably stealth units, like spies and infectors.
Maybe even corporate branches


Also, barbarian stealth units should appear *inside* a civs borders... and behave as destructively as possible.

Ewww imagine barbarian eco rangers like this.
Now thats a scary challenge!


My first look thru the config files etc didn't show anything
so I wondered if anyone had any pointers?

[J Bytheway]

The only barbarian related file is risks.txt, ut that doesn't allow the kind of things you wish to do.

In theory you could do this with SLIC. If you want them appearing in empires then use the create unit function to make one which is about 3 or 4 squares from a city chosen at random from among the players land cities on each players turn given a certain probability. I believe that the barbarians are always player 0.

To determine which units to create you'd probably have to tiresomely check whether each player has certain advances.

If you're not a programmer I could give you a few pointers on how to do that.

The problem is that the Barbarian AI may not be able to cope with unconventional warfare units - you could do some experimenting to find out with simpler SLIC triggers.

John

[steve.wray]

I noticed that the type of the barbarian unit that turns up changes over time -- at first they are warriors, and over time they seem to get 'upgraded',
I was hoping to be able to hook into that upgrade process.

Are you saying that this is somehow hardcoded?

[J Bytheway]

The only method youhave of affecting barbarian choice are these lines from risks.txt (which are repeated for each risk level - the sample here is from 'huts only'):

BARBARIAN_CHANCE 0.00 #Chance of barbarians appearing at random

# When choosing barbarian types, all units available to players
# are looked at. The best unit that will be considered is the RANK_MAX'th
# best unit available to anyone (0 meaning the best unit)
# The worst that will be considered is the RANK_MIN'th.
# value is determined solely by attack strength.
BARBARIAN_RANK_MAX 15
BARBARIAN_RANK_MIN 30
MAX_SPONTANEOUS_BARBARIANS 1
FIRST_BARBARIAN_TURN 20
LAST_BARBARIAN_TURN 350
MINIMUM_BARBARIAN_DISTANCE 5

So you can change the chance that barbarians will appear, the maximum number which will appear at a time, on which turns they will appear and how close to existing (cities/units?) they will appear.

The only way to affect the coice of unit is to change the RANK_MIN and RANK_MAX. Unfortunately, since they rank solely by attack strength, you're never going to get barbarian unconventional warfare units because they have attack strength zero. You could change those numbers to something like 1 and 10, and then the barbarians will get the best units available to the most advanced player, but that's as harsh as it gets.

The only way you'll get eco terrorists is with SLIC triggers.