WTF is with barbarians in 6?

[Kitsunerune]

I've played 4, 5, and now 6. In the last two it barbarians were a nuisance but nothing you couldnt deal with. In 6 I've played three games, two at prince and one at settler. Not a single one has made it passed two techs learned because barbarians rampage through my city taking everything out. Literally turn 3 of my last one i run into a camp with a spearman and 5 turns later my scout runs into a horseback archer! This is the first time using the No Barbarians option sounds freaking mandatory!

[megansweden]

Build a slinger as one of your first units (I usually do one scout and then a slinger, but sometimes I start with the slinger). Barbs can't kill your capital no matter how much they attack it. Keep a slinger in there and just keep attacking them each turn. You'll have the boosts for Archery (kill a unit with a slinger) and for Bronze Working (kill 3 barbs) in no time.

And you can take out early barb camps with just one warrior most of the time. If you find a camp on turn 3 just park your warrior there, hit the camp then heal for a couple of turns. Repeat. After 3 attacks the warrior will promote. And then the 4th hit will take out the spearman and the camp. You get gold and era score. The spearman won't even activate to attack on its own turn unless a scout comes back to the camp (which will also trigger the camp to spawn another unit). If that happens, leave the warrior fortified and he can tank the hits.

If a scout comes back and the camp spawns a horse archer or a quadrireme (if your warrior is on a coast tile) then you want to retreat. If they have ranged units you need your own archers to compete.

[Evrach]

No mandatory, you'll learn to deal with them, but yes, they are far more agressive and hard to deal with than in previous games.
Here some tips : use the terrain. Barbarians (except scouts and spearmen on outposts) will always attack, even if they are in a weak position. You'll beat them more easily if you let them crash on your fortified units on high defensive terrain with a well-timed promotion that heal 50% of its HP.
One of the first military civics card is the +5 bonus against barbarians. Take it without hesitation.
Scouting is the key. Barbarian outposts can only spawn in the fog of war. Don't let fog of war near your cities. For the same reason, it's not a good idea to put less civilizations toward the map-size. A common beginner mistake is to choose a huge map with a few civilization to have a lot of available land to develop, and at a very slowe speed like marathon or epic. It's a bad idea because it means a lot of fog of war and not enough civilizations to deal with them ; especialy at the lowest difficulty levels where the bot civilizations are weaker, and the slower the speed is, the more barbarians will be a pain.
On the other hand, barbarians are also very useful. They give you some eureka and can xp your first units efficiently. If you don't want to turn them off completly, there's a lot of mods that let you reduce barbarians strengh. Like "civilised barbarians" option from BBG/BBS that is used in competitive FFA to reduce the RNG bringed by barbarians.

[Sstavix]

Barbarians are extremely aggravating in this iteration of Civ. But it is possible to deal with them. You need to be more aggressive in terms of early military production, and get you units out into your territory. Once you figure out where you want your cities, fortify your units so they can keep an eye on the surrounding land - barbarian camps do not spawn when people are watching (e.g. only in the fog of war - and, unfortunately, the city-states don't seem to count).

Also, as Evrach pointed out, there is a policy card that gives a bonus to fighting barbarians. Until you have your empire established, I recommend leaving this one in place.

[plaguepenguin]

I almost always go with two scouts as my first two builds, and still manage to deal with the barbs at relatively low cost in every single game I play. They are more or less difficult to manage in some games compared to others, and at the more difficult end of that spectrum they do distract a bit from other priorities, but it has been years since they made any significant difference to any game I have played.

You learn to take certain precautions as insurance, even if the barbs haven't yet posed a huge threat, then do more only as needed against any threat that does develop. Scouts actually are quite useful at preventing barb hordes, because an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and preventing a horde by running down the barb scout before it gets back to the camp, is so much easier than dealing with the horde. The scout then explores to find out where the camp is, so that it can be dealt with later at my convenience. Depending on the situation, I often leave a scout a certain distance from my early cities' frontier with the wild country, to fulfill that pursuit role. Later,after the scout is no longer needed in that role, I send it out to explore the wider world, a quite valuable second role.

Barbs can be frustrating, no doubt, but they are hardly the end of the world. They can be dealt with, at some, but minimal, distraction from your progress towards victory.

[Kitsunerune]

My first game I tried making a scout do exploration. 5 tiles from my border it ran into a camp with two slingers and a warrior. It was promptly killed, along with every unit I would try and use to take the camp out. My second game I managed to take out the first camp, a nearby city-state had a warrior there helping me fight. It was the horseback archer circling my city and hunting anything I could send out to fight it that made me go no more.

[Copernicus]

Originally posted by Kitsunerune:

My first game I tried making a scout do exploration. 5 tiles from my border it ran into a camp with two slingers and a warrior. It was promptly killed, along with every unit I would try and use to take the camp out. My second game I managed to take out the first camp, a nearby city-state had a warrior there helping me fight. It was the horseback archer circling my city and hunting anything I could send out to fight it that made me go no more.

Scout units are, in general, only useful for fighting scouts; however, they are faster than anything other than horsemen. Your scout gets three movement points; try to end the movement either on a defensible location (a hill or a woods), or reserve the third move to backtrack away from potential danger. Don't use the third move to explore a new tile unless you feel confident your scout will survive sitting on that tile.

Barbarian horsemen are extremely hard to deal with in the very early game. However, falling back onto your home city can often be helpful. Your city can absorb quite a bit of damage, and will protect any unit garrisoned within it. Allowing horsemen to attrit themselves from attacks on your city can provide an opening for a warrior to perform a useful counterattack, and horse archers (who have to come in close to shoot) are even more susceptible to a melee counterattack. If you can hold the barbarians off long enough to get a spearman, you can finish them off fairly easily (as spearmen have significant bonuses against horses).

Ultimately, the Civ VI early game requires significant thought to be taken on how you are going to deal with barbarians. You cannot ignore them; their threat will dominate the game at least until you've gotten walls around your frontier cities, or generated a significant mobile strike force.

[grognardgary]

I've never built a scout. I get more of them than I need from goody huts especially on lower difficulty levels. My first three builds are slinger best melee and slinger and that for every civ. There are some where four melee may be better most notably aztecs where the eagle warrior can convert enemy units into workers But I don't know enough about how that works to be certain. Early on prince and down no matter who you play most of your money will come from barb camps now this is what works on huge maps on marathon time. it may well be different on smaller maps and shorter time settings.

[lar unuruur]

barbs just should not let be unchecked.
do not wander far with initial fighter. get a slinger, hunt down barb camps and scouts.
with 3 attacks fighter should get promotion, have second slinger or scout.

i can assure you, on prince barbs are easy, even beneficial to advance to golden era, get gold, promote units. initial horse units are very weak, use terrain(woods, rivers, hills, chokepoints) properly.

i most situations i start with scout, slinger, slinger, settler, monument, builder. but it always depends on situation. same with research priorty.

and remember, barbs can not take out capital. all their attacks just weakens them.

[jmerry82]

Things to remember about barbarians:
- Barbarian units never heal (unless they pillage something like a farm). Your units do. Since units don't fight to the death, you can grind barbarians down over time.
- Barbarian units never promote. Your units gain experience and eventually get promotions. The obvious first promotion on a warrior will give you a +7 combat bonus against land-based barbarian units. So that's another way time is on your side.
- While barbarian camps defend with spearmen who have higher base strength than your starting units, warriors get +5 against spearmen so that's fundamentally an even matchup. The only advantages the barbarians might get are from defensive terrain and fortification.
- As soon as you finish researching the first civic Code of Laws, you can take the Discipline policy card for +5 in combat against barbarians. You'll likely want to run this for most of the Ancient era, unless you're training units and plug in the cards to boost production of them.
- Barbarians cannot defeat you completely. Even if they lay siege to your capital, they can't deliver the final blow. Which means you can always counterattack, and eventually clear them out.

Stack a couple of these advantages together, and a warrior can easily take out a barbarian camp. At least, a standard camp. There are just a couple of catches ...
- If a barbarian scout spots your city and then returns to its camp, that camp will then produce warriors and slingers to attack your city. These assault forces will overwhelm a lone warrior, forcing you to retreat (either back to your city, or possibly to strong defensive terrain).
- Barbarian camps that happen to be near a Horses resource train mounted units instead of slingers and warriors. These barbarian horsemen and horse archers are faster and thus much more dangerous. If you get one of those near your capital, you'll probably need to train a slinger or two to fight back effectively.

[grognardgary]

One terrain is your friend. 2 at levels below Prince Barbarian spearman Will chase and attack slingers until the spearmen fall below 50% hit points where upon the slingers can chase the spear men back to their camp stone them and take the camp. Spearmen however never seem to attack warriors unless another barb unit is adjacent to the spearmen whether the other unit can attack you or not. Once in a great while a spearmen may attack your warrior when you first move adjacent to it if your warrior is in grassland plains or desert. This is not a bad thing other than the fact that you get more xp from attacking than from defending.

[Reaper King]

Btw barbs are so much harder in this game because unlike in earlier civ they are bassically the only units which ever act agrissve or fight wars. 80 plus hours in the game all at above level 4 and so far I have exactly 1 time a nation declared war on me and 1 time a nation wanted to fight a war alongside me. This isn't earlier civs where the normal AI would come out to fight you. Nope. It's either the barbs or nothing. As others said build a slinger and sit back.

[Stardustfire]

one early slinger and the militaery diplomatic card for more power vs barbarics is al you need, as soon you learn the pattern how the camps dish out units.
only problematic moment is when they start to get archers and you ignored that research.
must admit i tryed the modification for tribal barbars a few days ago and it gives them alot more usefulness beside "find and extinct them"

[grognardgary]

I am in the classical era on a huge continents map just me left on the continent with six city states. I've got for or five barb camps that I am mining for xp now that I have may GA points for medieval locked up.

[fmalfeas]

Originally posted by Stardustfire:

one early slinger and the militaery diplomatic card for more power vs barbarics is al you need, as soon you learn the pattern how the camps dish out units.
only problematic moment is when they start to get archers and you ignored that research.
must admit i tryed the modification for tribal barbars a few days ago and it gives them alot more usefulness beside "find and extinct them"

90% of the time, exactly this.

Single slinger will fail if the barbs spawn right up on horses so they're popping cav right out the gate. But for that, the answer is to get Bronze Working ASAP, and spears, as well as archery. If you've got horse barbs on your border, don't try to build improvements, or really build much of anything that they can reach. Just make the slinger, make the monument, hold your ground until you can kill that camp and station someone near it to prevent a new horse barb camp. At least until you can drop a settler and have your own horses.

[DYNIA]

they are easy, skill issue