God why are barbarians so annoying

[Ssnakes_Everywhere]

theres 5 other civs here besides me, but noo i need to be pelted with 6 barbarians at once!
oh unlocking tech? NOpe gotta keep getting more fighters
cant get builders cuz theere on all sides of me,
help

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Barbarians cannot heal, you can. The math of that situation is devastating to them. If no other strategy is working for you, fortify melee units on hills and let them attack you while you heal until you outnumber the barbarians and then beat them down. Then hunt down their camps to prevent them from sending more raiding parties. Unlock and use the policy card that gives a combat bonus against barbarians, and station units to intercept and kill barbarian scouts before they can return to their camp (which is what causes a raiding party to appear).

[Sargef101]

I don't want to sound like a smart ass or something. Here comes my favorite word-- BUT after playing some 3500 hrs I have notice when a game is set up, if you were to scroll down a little bit there is a box you could check that says no barbarians. Maybe you posted this as a joke or you really needed some help.

So if it's is suppose to be funny. Blast me I can take it.
If not glad I could help.

[Stormwinds]

Barbarians exist to punish players who don't focus on military early. They're a check on players who runaway with the game by solely focusing on infrastructure. If you don't like them, you can always disable them before creating a game.

[Ssnakes_Everywhere]

Originally posted by sargef101:

I don't want to sound like a smart ass or something. Here comes my favorite word-- BUT after playing some 3500 hrs I have notice when a game is set up, if you were to scroll down a little bit there is a box you could check that says no barbarians. Maybe you posted this as a joke or you really needed some help.

So if it's is suppose to be funny. Blast me I can take it.
If not glad I could help.

yea i know theres a setting but if i turn it off then my units wont really get more powerfull unless if i just go super hard on being a warlord

[Catalytic]

Like Stormwinds said, the barbarians exist as a mechanism to counter REX strategies (rapid early expansion). You can't just ignore your military and get away with it.

I think there is a balance point here, however. The question isn't whether barbs should be in the game. It's how strong that pressure is. If you end up with bad luck with the spawns and you aren't able to kill scouts with the exclamation points over their heads, you can rapidly find yourself overwhelmed by a game that's effectively cheating to rapidly spawn units to fight you faster than you could possibly produce them yourself.

Then you get out of the ancient era, all the barbs are cleaned up. No camp that spawns in any habitable zone in the game lasts more than a few turns and barbs end up populating the edges of the map and never presenting any threat at all. That's a big problem. The mechanic is too strong early and too weak late. All they do is put you way behind the curve starting out and give the AI time to grab land, forward settle on you and build passive defenses that'll last them til you get air power.

What I'd like to see is the barbs continue to provide pressure throughout the first four ages. How?
-Change the minimum distance from a settled city to gradually get smaller as age increases up to a certain threshold (say 4 tiles)
-Flesh out the barbarian unit line so they can present era-appropriate threats, and upgrade the units already on the map
-Smooth out the barbarian unit spawn so it's less broken if the scout gets back to base. In fact, remove that mechanic entirely. All that should do is tell the AI where you are. The spawn rate should be the same regardless.

And here's a key one:
-Finish out the upgrade lines for the player and barbs. Skipping whole eras with unit upgrades is a big problem. We go from Classic to Renaissance with no in between in the melee, recon, and siege unit lines. We've got to fill that in for the threat from units to continue to escalate smoothly.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Catalytic:

-Smooth out the barbarian unit spawn so it's less broken if the scout gets back to base. In fact, remove that mechanic entirely. All that should do is tell the AI where you are. The spawn rate should be the same regardless.

Removing barbarian scouting would be a mistake, because that is one of the great advances in barbarian spawn mechanics in the Civilization series - the idea of having a way to control the danger barbarians pose to your civilization without necessarily needing to hunt down and kill their camps.

As the game is now, if you have enough forces on your border to immediately kill any barbarian scout that shows itself you will never have any barbarian issues. Compare that to Civ IV, when a barbarian camp could appear just outside your explored area and almost immediately spawn 24 barbarian horsemen that would then ride over and start attacking your cities before you even were aware that there was a danger. Civ VI gives you that scout to warn you, which then gives you a little time to respond or at least prepare.

Reducing the barbarians to a flat spawn rate would be a mistake as well. If they trickle in units one by one every few turns then they will never be any threat at all. The alternative is to try to have them rally up a force over a period of turns as they spawn and then move out once they have enough to pose a threat, but the AI doesn't do so well with coordinating units with one another. Having a raiding party of three units spawn in when the scout reports back, and then another three if the raiding party returns results in a reasonable overall spawn rate of barbarian, plus gives the player agency to reduce it further (by sniping the scout before it can report back), which allows the barbarians to pose a threat to players trying to ignore military while making barbarians very manageable for players who build an adequate military.

[Sargef101]

Originally posted by the gongoozler:

Originally posted by sargef101:

I don't want to sound like a smart ass or something. Here comes my favorite word-- BUT after playing some 3500 hrs I have notice when a game is set up, if you were to scroll down a little bit there is a box you could check that says no barbarians. Maybe you posted this as a joke or you really needed some help.

So if it's is suppose to be funny. Blast me I can take it.
If not glad I could help.

yea i know theres a setting but if i turn it off then my units wont really get more powerfull unless if i just go super hard on being a warlord

I kinda thought you did. But why then complain about them if you want the money & the upgrades?

[Maya-Neko]

There are also some mods out there, which give you some starting units, so that you can take it a littlebit easier on unit production early on.

Or just learn some basic of how to scout your surroundings and how to deal with attacking enemies. 3-4 units should be enough to defend your capital. If you're building way more, then you propably don't use your surroundings to your advantage