Barbarian race discussion

[Seravy]

Played a Chaos/Sorcery Barbarian game but it was so disappointing I dropped it in 1405.
Even with Resist Magic berserkers are still weak to poison and ranged attacks, and still aren't completely immune to curses. While they are powerful enough to win battles, they take a lot of damage and in more serious battles, a lot of them dies.
Meanwhile, you lose your ability to produce settlers (barbarian cities don't produce resources), so maps that would otherwise be very favorable for late game strategies, turn against you, having no use for the empty territory whatsoever.
I recorded the "game" but I have doubts it's even worth uploading. I started on a huge empty continent full of good terrain, and all 3 enemies were lawful or peaceful. Could have won by doing nothing but building settlers and maintaining peace but barbarians aren't even capable of that.This alone was so annoying that I don't even want to continue. It's not that other strategies can't have bad luck but that type of start is the BEST luck for this strategy if played by anyone else but barbarians. If picking barbarians eliminates your ability to take advantage of what you're the best at, that's simply a bad choice and a sign of it weakening your core strategy far too much.  Simply put, Berserkers can't make up for having no economy and magic through the things they conquer (conquest building destruction rate, time it takes to settle after razing, worse unrest table, etc) which makes them fail at what they have been designed for, to offer this tradeoff. Life might be an exception but that's not only because Life is so good with berserkers (it is) but because Life doesn't need what you're sacrificing (stronger economy) in the first place. Life wins on commons and Prayer, uses minimal mana crystals on combat compared to other realms, can create a good economy out of nowhere, and most importantly, Life midgame is heroes and heroes don't really use much of your economy either. None of the other realms can afford this - they rely on combat spells and summons which need you to have mostly nonbarbarian cities, but there is no guarantee you will have one you can spread in the early game where it's most important nor that nearby AI will fill those lands with such cities.

If all this wasn't bad enough you have to spend 1 pick to play the race - Alchemy is kinda required. Might as well pick Myrran instead for the same cost, which unlocks far superior races and better advantages. That by itself makes Barbarians a horrible design.

I think we might need some drastic changes for this race not that I have any good ideas.

[Nelphine]

Play a strategy that doesn't require long term economy from your starting race, and works with early conquest? That's what the race is for. Build 6-12 barbarian cities, and pump out a never ending stream of bezerkers, making sure you have whatever you need to let those bezerkers win battles (when you build a stack every other turn, you don't really care about casualties; if you lose too many in the combat, raze the city, send your next stack to the next one).

Heck, you absolutely can win by maintaining peace, assuming you can get neutrals. you grab all the neutrals, you settle with them. You conquer ALL the dangerous lairs/nodes/towers, because bezerkers are amazing at that (on lower difficulties, do it so fast that you can still settle some of myrror with those neutrals you conquered). Because when you maintain peace, your opponents can't attack you at all. So 'peace' doesn't mean 'actually have pacts/alliances with enemies' it means 'declare war whenever the hell you want, because the enemy doesn't have the strategic strength to attack your 8+ bezerker garrisons anyway, so unless they have city curses, they literally can't threaten you'.

So you just build bezerkers, take what you can, raze what you can't hold, and then .. build more bezerkers to do it again. And again. Take life to neutralize city curses, take life to let your bezerkers crush rare summons. But you can go with other realms as well, as long as you realize the limits of bezerkers and have a plan for when they don't work anymore - which includes figuring out how to get a late game economy if that's what you need. But if you need a late game economy.. why are you playing barbarians?

Life by the way needs tons of combat mana - raise dead is very expensive, and you lose a LOT of bezerkers.

[Seravy]

Play a strategy that doesn't require long term economy from your starting race, and works with early conquest?

Early conquest either requires summoning stuff or high enough casting skill for multiple spells in battles. Barbarians don't produce magic power to do either. So they can't play any strategy with any realm that does anything except putting cheap common buffs on berserkers.

Ultimately what you're saying is pick no books and play without magic - 6-12 barbarian cities means you have no research, no skill, no nothing. Sure berserkers in such quantity might be able to do that but since I have those picks and need to spend them, I might as well spend them on Life books, warlord, etc and we are back to the same old thing again, which I already tested. This only proves Barbarians are unplayable for ANYTHING except that one strategy, the whole point of the second test would be to prove the race is playable for enough other strategies.

you grab all the neutrals, you settle with them.

By the time I produced the first settler, every spot in a 20 tile radius around that neutral was taken.
You need the neutral to be
-close to you
-of a good race
-with high enough population to support massive settler production
-but low enough garrisons that you can conquer it early
-far from all AI wizards (so the terrain is still available)

On top of that you need money for settlers, and that's also something barbarians are not good at. I mean, hunting for lairs, without life magic.

Maintaining peace is nice and all but if I only have barbarian cities what's the point? I should be winning the race to very rare spells, not stay around watching how the enemies do that while my own lands produce nothing.

Long story short we need to prove barbarians are worth picking for a non-Life wizard. That's the purpose of this test game. If it's not possible, then we need to think about whether it's acceptable to have a race in a strongly magic focused game that's bad for all the strategies that primarily rely on magic which is about... 90-95% of the possible starting choices, really. 

Even then, it still feels something is wrong for three other reasons :
-A race that is extremely bad at using magic and weak against magic at the same time in a game where "magic is the most important" is the primary design. (poison on most early summons belongs here as well)
-A race that doesn't work unless you make a very specific choice (Alchemy) that's strictly inferior to a different choice that enables stronger races for the same cost (Myrran)
-A race that's unfun to play - you have very limited options within the race itself, and require luck to be able to get other races early enough, if not, the strategy does more harm than help.

(I'd risk the statement the first also puts it into the unfun category - at least for me. No surprise since it goes against my primary design and I obviously went with that design because I enjoy playing that way.)

Oh and one more thing... Gnolls are faster at rush (wolf riders) while having a better economy and late game (they are the second most limited race but still get like 3 times as much economy buildings as barbarians do). In exchange barbarians should have a stronger but not so early "earlygame" but I'd say Jackal Riders are better in that department. (Yes they come later and cost more but are much more durable and have more figures. As long as you can somehow let them hit flying enemies... thrown is yet again one thing only Life and maybe Death needs, other realms can deal with flying units on their own.)

[Nelphine]

Of your three statements, the first statement is really an extension of the third statement, and therefore, it is subjective to you. Looked at specifically... you absolutely can use magic, strongly; more than that, barbarians require more magic than many races. Magic is integral to playing barbarians; barbarians themselves don't provide a lot of power, so you have to figure out how to make up for that. They're weak to magic, which is fine, because they're ridiculously strong against normal combat (an elite bezerker with prayer and half health, against 2 war bears in a nature node with survival instinct.. and the bezerker wins). (And woe against anyone who has to fight magic immune barbarians. Sorcery barbarians are actually a rather dangerous force, but you have to commit to running around in the early game conquering with them, and life is simply better at it - but better, doesn't mean not capable.)
Your second statement, is putting it more strongly than you should. You need alchemy, holy weapon, or flame blade. And on expert, you could get away without any of them, but it would be difficult.
Your third statement is very subjective - for instance, I can't understand why anyone would ever play orcs or klackons because for my playstyle they simply are never an optimum choice (literally, name any realm/retort combination, and I'll name a race that I believe is stronger than those 2), but, I have to assume that doesn't mean those races are unfun. (I also think nomad fall in that category, but horsebowmen are strong enough that I won't try to claim it.)

For the gnoll thing: Thrown is about killing the enemies before they strike back. It's ludicrous how much offensive power they have in the hands of the human player (when you can always force getting first attack. One shotting sky drakes without taking damage never gets old.)

And maintaining peace against maniacal wizards while you kill off the other wizard is absolutely an amazing thing. No other race has the amount of diplomatic control that barbarians do, where you can control 95% of all wars. Peace doesn't have to be a race to SoM.

[Seravy]

I'd say a race that cannot make magic on their own in a game where every other race, even other races who are bad at it, can, qualifies as "can't use magic". Being unable to do it while also strongly needing it is the worst combination ever that resembles a puzzle game more than a 4X race.
I'm not saying "alchemy is required" for having the ability to bypass weapon immunity. There are enough other ways to do that, some of which you listed. No, I'm saying that because having no actual real magic weapons means the unit has 1 lower chance to hit. That's a big deal, and having those spells won't make up for it - while for bypassing the weapon immunity you only need to buff that 1 unit that is hitting the immune target, to make up for not having the increased hit chance, you need the buff on every single unit. That's not viable ESPECIALLY for a race that produces no magic to have the casting skill to do that, while mass produces the units in question at a very low cost. 
Sure you can play barbarians without Alchemy - but the resulting berserkers would be so much weaker that it's not worth doing. Thrown especially requires that extra To Hit both to overcome armor better and because thrown damage is what prevents counterattacks from hurting the berserker too badly, but their high base attack power also benefits greatly. Technically losing that bonus is "only" a 20% drop in damage output but due to armor making it nonlinear and thrown doing what it does, it's probably closer to dropping the overall effectiveness of the unit by a third to half. Meanwhile, that 20% is a direct 20% cut in your overall military strength bar so that diplomacy advantage also suffers significantly - but really the lowered effectiveness of Thrown is what I'd say is the reason why Alchemy is pretty much required. You yourself say thrown is most important so we seem to agree on at least that part.

Third is not about optimum choices, it's about meeting the bare minimal you consider worth playing. I know you're a crazy perfectionist and your bare minimal is the best there is but most players are fine with whatever as long as it is fun to play and can beat the usual difficulty level they normally beat with their average strategies. Replayability is one of the greatest strengths of this particular game and finding one "best" strategy really is bad for that...anyway that's not the point.
If I roll 50 games with the random game generator and win 80% of the nonbarbarian games, the same for barbarian games will be like 20% because they are below average for anything that's not a Life Alchemist. That's not acceptable, it means I actually can't play barbarians unless I'm fine with doing the same thing over and over again which I'm definitely not.

About "they are strong against normal combat", that only applies to melee and even then situational - berserkers actually have horribly low defense. Ranged attacks or fast enemy units that can hit them first make them look like straw dolls although the latter only really happens if there is a road on the tile that allows the enemy to reach them on turn 1. I went into a nomad city with random early game crap in it and lost my 5 berserkers in 2 turns. Sure it included 3 ghouls but the rest were swordsmen and horsebowmen.

[Nelphine]

Right but the replayability primarily comes from your spellbooks and retorts.

You consider race to be an integral part of those choices - I consider race determined by those choices, in the same way that if you are choosing chaos/nature books, you don't pick both war bears and hell hounds as starting spells. The existence of hell hounds and war bears does not mean that one or the other has no replay value - it means you only choose it when appropriate.

The actual gameplay difference between most races is relatively minimal. (However, this actually reaches over into the garrison thread. Since I consider garrisons useless, and uncommon Summons better than all unbuffered city troops, I don't see the point of 90% of city troops.) The difference comes from minimal building selection, maybe 1 city troop per race (and gameplay, the difference between say, hordes and pikemen and halberdiers is practically zero), and economy (which is relatively hard to see the difference). So, I'm perfectly comfortable with race being decided by wizard picks. It does nothing to reduce the replay value.

That doesn't make me right, but I'd wager the majority of players do not worry about more than 5-7 races for similar reasons. They know what's cool for them, they know what's good for their playstyle, and they use those.


And regardless if I'm right, I'd also say, it's a strong enough argument that it doesn't actually matter if you're right.

All THAT being said, change doesn't have to be bad. If you really want to revamp barbarians, go ahead.. but I can't imagine a game where I'd choose gnolls, despite your claims to the contrary. (I should have put them in my list with orcs). So you're going to be making gnolls indirectly worse.

[Bahgtru]

Barbarians are fine, they work very well as a basis for many kinds of rush strategies. I've made them work with monoblue naga rush...

[Seravy]

That doesn't make me right, but I'd wager the majority of players do not worry about more than 5-7 races for similar reasons. They know what's cool for them, they know what's good for their playstyle, and they use those.

That's fine.
My problem is that most components in the game, spells, races, retorts, books - can be picked with any other. Sure, some combinations are better, others are kinda weak, but we have been trying to keep this difference reasonable to make sure a diverse array of choices are worth playing.
Barbarians break that. The vast majority of choices are awful, while the good ones are above average even compared to other races (at least that's the impression I'm getting from your game reports) and there is no middle ground. So Barbarians don't offer any of the diversity we've been trying to achieve. Assuming our definition of balance is that diversity of viable choices, Barbarians are not balanced at all.
   

Basically, up till now we've been working on making sure everything stays between the two purple lines, and preferably peaks close to the middle. Barbarians are the opposite of that I think.
(whether we are are ok with this one exception or not, is the main question.)

[Nelphine]

Right so my argument would be that the 3 races, orcs, klackons, gnolls are much closer to going up with the green line, and then going down close to the red line. They are above the red line, but much below the green line. Basically each race is its own line, and while the red barbarian may be lowest, it at least has the bubble at the end, while the 3 other races don't.

However, I've argued before that bezerkers are overly high in potential strategic strength when highly buffed. But you've rejected changing thrown which is almost as unique as multigaze, and the number of figures. So I'm not sure what else you'd do. I also argued that they should get magic markets (flavor being shamanistic items) but you rejected that as well.

So I'd be fine with some minimal changes.


I'm also glad to hear baghtru has used them for mono blue successfully. That supports my experiences that they can work with other realms as well.

[Seravy]

I agree, the green line will be positioned slightly differently for each race or other feature.
But the area under the line, entirely, or almost entirely stays between the two purple bars - meaning no matter what you pick the race with, it won't be unplayable or overpowered. 
For barbarians half of the territory falls outside the purple line, into the "unplayable" area, and most of the remaining is also below average. Which means if you pick barbarians, there is a high chance it'll be unplayable, or at least, worse than other races - at least until you learn the race is bad for most strategies and start avoiding it like the plague.

I have absolutely no idea what I want to do, but first we need to determine whether we are fine with having one and only one possible choice in the game which directly and significantly lower your chances of winning at the very least until you realize it's a trap that must be played with at least Alchemy and preferably also Life books and Warlord. So far we worked hard to eliminate all such choices - we buffed every race, retort and book pick that seemed too weak or marginally useful compared to others.

In particular, being required to pick Alchemy is what I feel is the worst part.