Curious Civplayer - Mysteries of the DLL

[Charriu]

So this

A) NumCities > 2*NumPlayersAlive:
Barbs will enter your territory if they can pillage an improvement on their next turn [...]
Barbs will enter your territory if they can attack a city on the same turn [...]
B) NumCities > 3*NumPlayersAlive:
The restrictions for the missions are lifted to
pillage on the 3rd turn
attack city on the second turn

from DanF5771 on civfanatics has been quoted a lot.

Is this information actually correct?
If so do roads count as an improvement for barbs to pillage under A)?

I had a look at your request and this will be a little bit out of line of my usual format. The reason is that Dan provided accurate informations. For reference we are talking about this post by DanF5771:

Dan's post

Like I said for the most part Dan is correct there are only three things where I need to provide additional information:

Dan wrote:

• Once they have entered your territory, they will consider the following options for their current turn
  

1. pillage an improvement (50%)
   

That's partially correct, but for the full picture it should phrased this way:

pillage an improvement (50%) on the same turn

For all 1-movers this means pillaging a tile they are standing on, but of course 2-movers can pillage neighboring tiles. It should also be mentioned that this 50% pillage chance is checked before all the other NumCities checks. So in theory if there would be 2-movers before any of the limits that Dan described, they could enter your border to pillage a neighboring tile. But this almost never happens because by the time the barbs can spawn horse back riders, the NumCities limits are already done.


The second addition is for the tiles considered for pillaging. The game actually checks if the tile that should be pillaged is inside any cities BFC. If it is not in the BFC, the AI won't pillage it.


As for the last addition this is for all types of attacks involving combat, so city attack and attack a unit. Everything is correct what Dan wrote, but in addition the game also checks the odds. If the odds are to low the barb won't attack. There are different thresholds, but they are mostly so low that it won't matter that much. I could investigate those thresholds some more, but here the code gets a lot more complicated with multiple possible scenarios of attacks. You can test this yourself if you give yourself a modern armor for example and put barbarian warriors next to it. They won't attack it.

As for your last question: All kinds of routes (roads and railroads) are always considered for pillaging.

[civac2]

Thx.

I don't think barbarians can have horse archers or any two-movers except for that one event.

[Charriu]

They can get horse archers spawned. It's just very very unlikely, because:

- They need to get the right techs for it
- There needs to be an open slot for a barb to spawn
- There needs to be enough unowned territory to spawn.

Normally by the time the first point comes into play, the other two points already took care of barbs.

[civac2]

That's actually horrifying.

[Charriu]

As for which techs they need to spawn horse archers:

Horseback Riding and Animal Husbandry

Consider this:

How do barbarians gain new technologies?

and this:

What determines which type of unit is spawned for the barbarians?

but like I said it is very very unlikely that this happens. I tested this in-game, but I needed to provide them with the techs and remove enough barbs via world builder, so that there is room enough for them to spawn.

[chumchu]

It happens often in medical starts. The barbarian horse archers can wreck your game if you are not careful.

[Mjmd]

It happens often in medical starts. The barbarian horse archers can wreck your game if you are not careful.

Those horse archers like to perform precision operations for sure.



I'm ashamed of everyone who thought of something better than this and didn't post it. I was waiting on someone else to step up to the plate.

[NobleHelium]

My brain mentally corrected the error and I did not notice it.

[civac2]

re river connections

• If there is an enemy civ between our trading plots, then being in a war or having closed borders with them doesn't break trade connections with any other third civ
  

You posted something similar in my PB56 thread. This seems to contradict experience. If your trade routes to Civ B go exclusively through territory owned by Civ A then Civ A can cut off your trade routes to Civ B by declaring war on you. Am I misunderstanding what you wrote above? The whole trade route article is hard to understand.

[Charriu]

I remember testing it back then, but I must have made a mistake back then. Tested it again and you are right, that war between me and Civ A breaks the trade route. This is only true for war though. I can have trade routes through Civ A's territory to Civ B even though I have closed borders towards Civ A. I will fix my initial analysis.