Which difficulty for "Raging barbarians" ?

[The Great Commandy One]

Hello !

I'm actually playing a COOP game with a friend, the settings are as such :


Map : PerfectWorld3(v5b)
Size : Huge
Difficulty : King
Speed : Marathon
Ressources : Sparse
Advanced : Raging Barbarians

2 players, 10 AI, 12 City states.

I've already played with similar settings on G&K and the AI was doing OK.
However with BNW it seems that the AI is being completly crippled by the barbarians, I don't know if BNW changed the barbarians or the way AI deal with them but almost every single AI is overwhelmed; I attacked ethiopia (which was for a long time the first in score) only to discover ALL of the tiles around his capital were already pillaged by barbarians.
Several other AI suffered the same fate, which leaded to a very easy game for us (and thus, boring).

So here's my question :

Do you think that doing the leap from king to emperor (...maybe immortal, but my friend is still a newbie) will increase the AI well enough for them to not be totally wiped by the barbarians ?


Or do we need to disable Raging Barbarians completely ?

Thanks


Ps : sorry if my english isn't perfect.

[Damsteri]

Normal barbarian in the BNW are almost as bad the raging barbarians in the G&K. Barbarians are spawning much faster in the BNW and they have randomly better units early (handaxe, horseman). Other think to note is that when barbarian unit captures a caravan they get free unit from it. They can get even swordsman quite early from plundering the caravan. AI tend create early caravans and barbarians get more units because AI don't know how to protect their caravans. AI also tends to send settlers and religious units without escorts and don't understand to stop even if all of them are captured by barbarians. AI is made a little bit active against barbarians, I think there was a rule in the fall patch that makes AIs to destroy barbarian camps faster if they are in 10 tiles distance from their cities. But it's not enough if AI is not expanding fast enough.

Raging barbarians has always been advantage for the human player. Level of normal barbarians in the BNW have made raging barbarians setting almost useless. Barbarians are more issue in easier difficulties. In harder difficulties AI will make more army and expands so fast that not that much barbarian camps are spawn. But that's in case of immortal/deity.

I think the best option for you is to not to use raging barbarians. The BNW normal barbarians are already quite challenging compared to the barbarians in the vanilla or the G&K.

[The Great Commandy One]

Thanks, we'll try the next game without the option.