Settling next to barbarians

[legacy_programmer]

I fired up my first game with default settings (forgot to set the parms I wanted before hitting 'Play Now'), so maybe this happened due to the easy difficulty level...

Anway, I decided to settle within a couple hexes of a barbarian stronghold to see how a town could fare on it's own. I would never have done this in a previous version of CIV because you'd be guaranteed to lose the city. Well, as soon as I founded my city it caused the barbarian encampment to dispurse, leaving just a single barbarian unit. My city's ranged attack took a nice chunk out of him, and then finished him off when he wandered within range a couple turns later.

I'm hoping this is just a case of the easy difficulty level (level 2), but if it's not then I'll be sending my settlers forth to clear out the barbarian hordes!

[Sillyflower]

Not a lucky fluke so carry on with the tactic.

On prince level one of my settlers found itself next to a barb. Luckily I wanted to build there, so I made a city and barb just mooched around staying in range until it died. It never attempted an attack - nor have I ever seen a barb attack 1 of my cities

[Dreamer]

Yeah, I don't think Barbs attack cities (not that they usually have the strength to conquer them anyways)

Still, settling near them is rather annoying. They'll immediately take over any workers and destroy any tile enhancements, thus hampering the cities growth quite a bit

[Wacamole]

You are better off with a few units next to a barbarian outpost to farm it for xp than dispersing it with a city. They produce an infinite ammount of dummys for you pointy sticks.

[FarmerBen]

In the old days I'd settle next to barbs just to give them cities on purpose, and see what happened.

In a recent game one of my allied city states took over an AI city I was at war at, and razed it. I wonder if that city was a capital, would the city state have to take it into empire? That could be cool.

[legacy_programmer]

You are better off with a few units next to a barbarian outpost to farm it for xp than dispersing it with a city. They produce an infinite ammount of dummys for you pointy sticks.

XP Farm, good one

[AndyWiltshireNZ]

By default you can only gain 2 upgrades by farming Barbarian camps, but there is the mod 'Barbarian and Ranged XP Mod' available that gives:

Increases the XP limit on Barbarians from the default of 2 Promotions to 4(100XP). This allows for 2 extra promotions to help build an early Offensive/Defensive force but won't turn Barbarians into "XP Farms". Also tweaked Ranged XP to give +1 additional XP in Attack/Defend over Standard XP gains.

So I use that with Raging Barbarians turned on and the first Honor policy at least so you can easily detect camps. Allows me to spend some time as a barbarian hunter, which is quite fun, plus you get some nice gold and upgraded units and focus on quality of my units rather then quantity in the early game.

[MadDjinn]

barbs will attack cities, but there needs to be more than 1 around.

2 barb archers will fire at the city to knock out it's defenses, but of course, only melee units can take them.

[Floating Pants]

In the old days I'd settle next to barbs just to give them cities on purpose, and see what happened.

In a recent game one of my allied city states took over an AI city I was at war at, and razed it. I wonder if that city was a capital, would the city state have to take it into empire? That could be cool.

They can do that. I remember Greg talking about it in the stream. But if someone were that unprepared... has to be something wrong. Maybe possible if you just really beat the crap out of the city and then come marching along their spearman, and you purposely let them have it.