[SPOILERS] Lurkers Rooting for More Destruction

[Krill]

One thing of note though which partly explains why I'm OK with this - if you have pre-placed barbarians and/or barbarian cities - which everyone seems to be expecting - actual barb spawn rates plummet dramatically, even on Raging. I wonder whether players will know this and adjust their plans if/when they see evidence of this, or if they'll play it safe regardless. For example, PB76 had barbarians enabled (but not raging), but in practice almost none spawned due in part to proximity to barbarian cities.

In particular, one little-known fact is that barbarians actually "fog-bust" themselves: No new units can spawn within two tiles of an existing unit, regardless of owner. This is also why barbarian animals get despawned at some point, to make way for bigger barbs.

With that being said, I wonder how Gav's great wall gambit will go; it's at the very least an interesting ploy.

Depends if he goes true farmers gambit and gets HA rushed or not. GW does not allow players to not build units, nor does it stop players from placing sentries. Gav knows this, so I reckon he can pull it off.

[scooter]

Also, a subtle easter egg that I am really curious if anyone will discover before T0. A couple of them will find it easier to spot than the others.

Was looking at the screenshot to see what other tech we want (presumably hunting or mysticism) and noticed in our capital a mysterious building far beyond our understanding. (Bomb shelter in the lower right corner. Very cool, Scooter!)

+1 point to Naufragar for noticing first. Of course, they were one of the teams that have the best view of it.

[scooter]

The more I think about it as I watch a few players consider Civs, the more I wonder if Mysticism is a sneaky-good starting tech for non-Creatives here. Normally it blocks your worker. Here it shouldn't as long as your other two starting techs are good. Popping an early religion and/or targeting Stonehenge is a good way to get yourself more cultural control early on, and I wonder if the third starting tech makes it less costly. Finally, it's a very expensive tech, so you are essentially being given ~15-25 commerce for picking it over everything else other than Wheel.

[Mjmd]

We had multiple people wanting Native America, what a world.

I would probably be on the take creative and and make sure wheel was one of my 3 techs here.

[Thoth]

With all the player talk about The Great Wall and a few mentions of pre-placed barb wonders a thought has occurred to me: what happens if the barbarians are given the Great Wall and pre-placed cities?

[Krill]

Do it!

[scooter]

With all the player talk about The Great Wall and a few mentions of pre-placed barb wonders a thought has occurred to me: what happens if the barbarians are given the Great Wall and pre-placed cities?

Do it!

My tests show giving barbs the Great Wall does nothing except make it not buildable AND pop the borders of said barb city. It would be funny, but doing it means the city must be semi-equally reachable by all, so I'm hesitant to put an outright wonder in one.


I really wanted to put something wilder in a barb city/cities. Academy or Military Academy were two I considered, however this results in border pops, and their placements don't really fit border pops. So I've backed off that idea.

[Thoth]

Barbs may pop their borders anyway no matter what you do. Eventually they'll have Mysticism and build monuments.


It's a bit late in the setup process to start adding wonders to the barbs for this game I think. Fewer available ancient wonders changes the value of Industrious for the worse.

[scooter]

Yeah I'm definitely not going to screw with wonders at this stage.

2) I had to make a very tiny one-line tweak to CtH to make things work. Specifically there's a very weird barb behavior I am sidestepping that appeared in my playtesting. I'll explain this a tiny bit more once you've all explored a bit. But I assure you this has virtually no impact on the way the game plays - it's just mitigating an issue. I'll post the mod with the updated file once I confirm with Zulan how he would like it named so that things are easier on his end.

So this is a fun story and is a good example of how making this thing has been more effort than expected. I've spent quite a bit of time playtesting and/or watching the barb behavior in debug mode, and I noticed a possible showstopper. The T0 barb cities that exist have some stronger defenders, but they were getting disbanded seemingly randomly and without warning. I wasn't sure what was going on. Finally I noticed it was happening once a barb city completed a Barracks. Once they did that, they disbanded all pre-placed units. I could do things to slow down Barracks completion, and I experimented with giving them certain techs to encourage other builds or slowing them down, and I even fiddled with promotions or unit level thinking that was a root cause. But no matter what I did, they disbanded their strong units and rolled with Archers once the Barracks was up. This is bad and not intended at all. I even tested starting the barbs with Feudalism, but 1) they disbanded the pre-placed longbows anyway (after building new ones) and 2) the early randomly spawning barb longbows were horrifying.


I moved onto the more drastic solution which was a mod tweak. I set the iAIWeight for Barracks to -100, and it did nothing. I changed it to -999, and that was apparently enough. The barbs would refuse to build a Barracks at all costs, and no units were disbanded, despite me watching pretty deep into the game via debug mode. Very strange! I am curious why the barbarian cities do this, but I'd rather this work as intended. As far as I can tell this is directly triggered by Barracks completion - it's literally the very next turn every time. I'm also not quite sure why we did not have this issue in PB76. Best guesses are that either 1) we captured all of them before a Barracks could be built, or 2) by that point Longbows were an era-appropriate unit, so that mattered somehow.

[Qgqqqqq]

Did you consider giving the barbs a barracks?