AzureTheta If yoruus was bordering filthy though, the 4 spearmen, handaxes, archer, and brutes would have attacked yoruus' scout fortified on filthy's borders and killed it for him. Now you see why Filthy likes the friendly barbs.
I love these guides. I've gone from a pathetic Civ player, to rousing my friends into returning to the game, and now a few of us can play it at a level of tactical evaluation/analysis which is really engaging. All thanks to you man.
Never really had much trouble with barbs, but I certainly learned a lot about their AI from this. Notably that they cant move then shoot, and that if you stay on the defensive instead of charging them they are much more manageable.
I've just started playing multi games with my friends and I noticed that we have problems with early barbarian aggression and this video is extremely useful. Thanks Filthy!
Very helpful Filthy. I've always enjoyed farming CS workers for influence, but I've typically wasted time and hammers on military units when I'm swarmed. Must experiment now!
note on your zone-of-control: citys count as a unit too, if the barbarian you use as an example move towards your city, it will not be able to move further to the hill (because you are at war). Had your city not been there your argument is perfectly valid.
this was easily the single most beautiful civilization video I've ever witnessed, all these workers of different colours, all this blocking, all this city state insanity, just perfect.
I actually liked this vid a lot. I know it was not as in depth, but it was informative as it was. I actually learned some things, now excuse me as I go take advantage of barbs.
Love the Bob shout out. :D But honestly Filthy that was a very useful guide. I think many players including myself don't fortify our units enough in situations like that. Thanks for the guide!
So is it worth taking the instant heal promotion? because I always thought it was a waste of a promotion. Unless of course the unit will die without it. But usually I'll take the 15% combat bonus for whichever terrain i'm in, then run away an fortify/heal when convienient. my second promotion is usually the cover promotion, as is the third, because i think it helps when attacking cities to have the extra defence from the city bombardment and any ranged units that may be garrisoned. Would doing a video about promotions and which ones to take be worthwhile? Also, barbarians aren't an issue in your example, but when you already have many improved tiles, they just destroy them which ruins your food and production, and sometimes gold
+Tʜᴇ Gᴀᴍᴇ Cʜᴀɴɢᴇʀ In multiplayer units typically die much more frequently and often upgrading a warrior through the swordman > longsword to musket is either difficult due to lack of iron or inefficient as the hammers are cheaper than the gold to acquire most of the time. Particularly pre barracks units as the first promotion is quite easily to get on a new musket vs spending gold twice and requiring iron to get the same benefit. Generally you use spearmen as your front like damage sinks as your tech path typically gets to civil service before steel and swordsmen are cost more hammers, more gold and require developed iron for 3 strength and they are weaker than spearmen vs chariot archers which are the best unit in the era.
Great guide, everything you say makes sense. I've had one Babylon game where 8 different camps made life difficult, though, and I think talking about things like recapturing civilians would be useful for some. That moment when your escorting archer gets rushed by 3 horsemen :/
That trick of dangling a worker in front of barbs so you can liberate it for influence; Does that work for workers that you've tributed as well? Great vid, BTW. I knew barbs could mostly be ignored, but I didn't realize they were THAT beneficial. :)
Definitely one of my favorite vids along with your ancient and classical warfare vid. Perhaps your next video could be on warfare in a different era? Anyway great content as always.
7:27 'Respawn'? Are you saying that encampments aren't independent? That there's a limit on how many encampments can be in the area at once, or something? This seems like something you should have elaborated on! My take was that if a second encampment were to spawn up there, it would have spawned regardless of whether the first one had been cleared out or not. Therefore you need to clear encampments lest too many spawn all around you and you get overwhelmed. So is that not the case after all?
At the beginning he says that encampments don't spawn close to others. If there is a camp west to your city, no other will spawn in that direction as long as that one is there.
Thousands of hours put into this game. Even I learned something. I definitely do kill cramps too quickly. Never thought of city state farming them. Only used them for culture farm
Side note: I just played a game with a friend and we found two barbarian encampments two tiles from eachother. Only time I've seen it, presumed to be a bug, but just throwing that out there, they can spawn closer to eachother. Sometimes.
Liam M How, in all probability would you be able to know if someone did it? If you are at war, you'd spend too much time and focus on the war, and would only realize if it put you at a huge disadvantage, and by then the damage would already have been done. It is not as obvious as shift moves and much harder to prevent.
You can chose Honor policy it helps because barbarians are always there and additional 33 buff for dealing with them worth it +you can catchup with your culture while killing those barbs)
Interesting information on barb swarms, and I couldn't stop laughing every time another CS worker was taken. I have never seen that many taken in an opening before. I do have a question though; how much influence do you get from giving back a CS worker to the CS? 60 influence? Also does it depend on game speed? Thanks in advance. Looking forward to the next multiplayer game upload.
Barb behaviour depends a lot on the map size and city placements. This map is very large with a lot of city states and only 2 civs so plenty of room for barbs to run around and keep going for workers. I used to like playing the Australia map for the coastal starts but by like turn 10 every time a barb army comes to pillage.
You can also let barbarians capture other players workers and settlers. I always leave barb camps near my opponents in the beginning, only clearing the camps closest to my cities. I never return settlers or missionaries (which I delete). If I have enough workers I give those back and that helps relations quite a bit with the AI.
I find Barbarians to be an interesting concept that has been implemented poorly. They are a transparent and arbitrary control mechanic designed to slow down the player for the sake of slowing them down. They act so irrationally (not just that it's bad AI, but that they were programmed to be this way) often attacking something of mine to their own detriment. Who plunders a farm and stays in range of attack until they die? Like, i would get it if they attacked and then ran away with the loot, but they just suicide into my cities. Poor form Sid. Poor form. 9:30 case in point. That camp spawned not because it was predestined to on that tile at that time... it spawned there exclusively and specifically because you were walking that way and had a settler. so obnoxious. just turn the barbs off it's tilting me.
Hey Filthy, don't know if you look this far back, but I had a question now on Civ 6. From your limited amount of time spent on the press version, would you say barbarians now pose a more significant threat? Do you think what you said here still applies?
Hahaha poor bob lost a worker a spearman a scout and a warior to barbs and now you say this? I guess the next time he is arabia he will bring the pain with all the camels. Good video tho, the early game defending vs barbs wasnt new info for me but i love how you learned me to see them as some kind of resource midgame, keep m coming filthy!
This is kind of a moot point 5 years after this video was made and maybe some of the DLC's or patches have altered the game somewhat (hopefully), but I have had to turn off barbarians in most games for a long time now. Why? Because their spawn rates are absolutely broken. I've followed this guide, but when you select alternate maps, a.k.a. anything that's not your standard large pangea, you get barbarian camps every few feet away, and even worse sometimes your starting point (as in 65% of the time) is farther away from other Civs. I usually play on Emperor and occasionally win, but on several occasions I've folded due to how ridiculous barbarians have been. I started as Morocco in the desert on non-standard map and I was surrounded by 4 barbarian camps all spawning about 2-3 three units every couple of turns. I had 2 warriors and one archer in both of my early cities that I'd settled, but I was getting absolutely reamed early on. I don't know why this is, but I'm assuming that their must be an issue with quick game speed and map generation. As in it spawns them too quickly, and it spawns them closest to the player rather than the AI. I've experimented with this with the map debug and found that in every scenario (with fog of war disabled) the barbarian camps are closest to my starting point right off the bat. At higher difficulties this looks more like artificial intelligence abuse by the systems in play to make the scenario more "difficult" for the player, when in all actuality its effectively targeting the player, and the player only on every occasion. Stuff like this has really turned me off from the game, that and a "raging" barbarian match I started with Greece that had me constantly under attack for well over 60 turns. When I finally met Ghengis Khan he had 10- 10 freaking cities and had declared war on my three that I had been struggling to defend since the beginning of the match. I also noticed Filthy's guides are usually the original versions of Civ 5 rather than the later Brave new world expansion, either that or he's using a modded UI.
One time I moved my settler around a mountain on turn number one and got vision of a barbarian. This wouldn't have been a problem, but I'd moved my warrior two tiles to scout in the opposite direction. The barb took my settler on turn 2. I never heard the end of it from my friends :P
I've never seen barbs not attack the healthwise weakest unit i.e. full health scout standing next to a 95 health pikeman, the barbs will (as far as I can tell) always attack the pikeman. The only exception I've witnessed is if say there were a swarm and a couple of units that could only attack the scout, occasionally they will attack first weakening the scout enough for the other units to focus it.
Craig Schnabel That's not been my experience. This is all untested and unverfified, but it feels like barbs attack the unit with the lowest combat strength, or that they can kill, and, of course, go for non-combat units. Also, there is some RNG with barbs, I've had camps NOT steal unprotected settlers from time to time as well.
FilthyRobot I don't doubt it at all. I have half the hours you have in this game at best, and probably all of that is at lower difficulty so I'll happily defer to your experience. Just relating my experience. Thanks for responding though! Your guides have already improved my game significantly, I hope to learn more by watching playthroughs and streams. Keep up the good work!
I better like to spend one policy for Honor and then hunting and farming barbarians for more colture. It can boost culture a lot. Especially useful in slow games...
@FilthyRobot Hey, I know it's been over 5 years, and I don't know if you still check these old videos, but out of curiosity why did you plant the 2nd city on the tile directly next to Lake Victoria instead of on the river 2 tiles over? I know there's the hill bonus, but I was curious whether the one extra hammer was worth losing out on all the bonuses having a river city gives
Looking back, probably a variety of reasons. Mountains for observatory, fitting Casablanca in with immediate marble improvement via settling, adjacency to a lux and the natural wonder in first ring (so auto-claimed by settling), and of course hill defense and production. But I don't recall the game from a quick peak, so that's speculation.
@@FilthyRobot Gotcha. I've been trying to get better at settling cities with overlapping workable tiles; I tend to get too hung up on "max tile efficiency" planning for late game, which ends up preventing a stronger/faster late game ironically. Also trying to get better at settling/recognizing places with high potential for growth but low luxury resources. As a result of both, I tend to have much fewer cities than I need to. Any advice on this, or a direction to a particular video (I know "The Early Game" touches on a bit of this, and I've already watched it) would be appreciated. Thank you very much for the response! I've gone through most of the guides, and am probably about to start watching individual games. The time and information you've got in these things is massive and super valuable, and I'm very much grateful for them. I'll def be supporting the stream in the future.
@@skyrimshock Yah, I'd suggest watching some Liberty games or playing some yourself. Tile sharing, city locations, and max cities/space are all super important to Liberty play. So you can either watch me do it in my games or do it in your own games to practice! Best of luck!
I don't understand why players get granaries before settlers. All it does is give 2 food, right? I also never understood how sometimes wheat gives the same production amount as a hill, when the wheat has 3 food 1 hammer and the hill has 2 hammers.
Don't forget that some unit and civ gets bonuses from killing units. An example is the Aztecs, they unique ability is that when they kill a unit they get culture.
I was moving a settler almost at the spot where I wanted to make a city. Then boom a barbarian appears out of nowhere to take it. Hoping it didn't screw up my early game real bad because I had to spend a few more turns to build another warrior to gang up on them and take the settler back.
depends. few turns lost on growth science and such and hammers wasted on units to get it back. wouldn't call it game breaking but it always is a setback if turns are wasted. that's why you escort settlers all the time, even if there weren't barbs be4: they do spawn out of nowhere and they also can't stay still so they are always out there lurking.
Question: you said that you can only get level 3 off killing barbarians. If you choose insta heal does that count as a level up still? or does a level up only count when you choose a passive improvement like Drill?
Barbarian minimum distance from another barb camp to spawn was 5 tiles in vanilla I think, fully tested (civfanatics forum), not seen any more up to date information on it than that, and I'm sorry, but I'm too lazy to do the referencing for youtube. Not that important anyway :P
"barbs are resources"... it always cracks me up but it is so damn true XD free exp for units, free CS influence (stolen workers and ofc barb killing on their borders also can really add up if you have some xbows fortified near their borders for the sole purpose of farming barb kills for easy CS influence) and they do harrass your opponents as well ^_^ and heck, on civs like Aztec they also are nice for culture farming... sure it ain't much individually but farm tons of barbs and boom ^_^ faster policies are never a bad thing. and heck, if i play marathon it at least keeps me entertained ^_^ even in peace times i still can kill stuff to level my troops since i pretty much always have raging barbs enabled and ifd i play with mods i always use barbs evolved to make them more aggressive and they spawn like crazy XD really fun stuff, especially if you allow them to capture cities
Dicsoupcan Kind of. If you do it too early it still hurts more than it helps, but if you can clear 1 or 2 quickly you can snowball a little bit as Germany!
I believe my game is broken or something. I started playing this game and enjoyed it quit a bit at first. I started palying on the easiest dificulty and there were no issue whatsoever. Than I played level three and the game was more challenging, but nothing I couldn´t handle. But than I tried level 4 and with raging barbarian and didn´t finish the game for some reason. Later I started a new geme on level 4 with raging barbarians turned OFF, and since this, at every level (even level one) barbarians spawn at a very unproportional rate it´s incredible. I think it´s a bug in the games AI or something. Before turn 10 I have at least 5 barbarian camps spawning all around my capital and each spawning three barbarian units. I have to deal with at least 3 barbarian units all the time. As soon they are dead, another 3 appear. They kidnap my workers all the time. Now I have to play Civ like I play Comand and Conquer. Building a whole bunch of units to be able do defend myself and than, after wasting a lot of turns building units, I can actually get to evolve my Empire while the AI players don´t have to deal with all that shit and can evolve without worrying. I think it is a bug or something. Problem is, I uinstalled the game quite a view times and it didn´t solve shit. I think I´ll turn barbarians off but it will make the early game pretty dull.
I'm so unlucky at Civ5 :) I usually toy with barbs (getting some XPs for my troops and IPs from city-states, etc.) but in every game they manage to steal something: pillage a trade route when I need the money badly (or a luxury when I need the extra happiness). But the city-states are the worst. They protect their workers so well that the barbs never could capture one of their workers. They captured some workers from AIs and sometimes even from me, but those bad-ass city-states have a tight security. They even tend to kill the barbs before I can do it :) this is so annoying. (E.g. a composite bowman from a city-state one-shots an archer (a barbarian with 100% HP) and robs me of my 5 XPs. That's so mean. If I stole their worker in return, they would just "curse" me for the rest of the game. -2 IPs per turn instead of -1 and -10 or even -20 resting points instead of 0 or 10, etc. That's insane...)
Hey man, awesome tutorial vids. Say Filthy you play a huge amount of mp games. I'm having major problems with de-syncs and players not being able to move units since the last patch (aka since forever). Is there any particular way you guys manage avoid all this buggy de-sync nonsense consistently?
I'm running the enhanced interface mod btw. but I doubt that has anything to do with the problems, as I encounter people complaining about the same mp bugs on the civfanatics forums all the time. My friends and I found it unplayable so we stopped playing around two months ago in the hopes it would be fixed eventually, but Firaxis don't seem to give a shit about patching Civ V anymore. So how do you manage to still play it so much in multiplayer?
FilthyRobot By the way I'd love to watch you play a complete mp-playthrough, by now you got like 100 games up though so I don't even know where to begin. Can you point me to one or two games where you feel a fairly advanced player can still learn a lot from? Games where you were between a rock and a hard place yet still pulled off a successful defense for example. Mainly I'm inexperienced in effectively coordinating attacks in simultaneous play, like messing someone up with war chariots for example.
RealGrok There's a playlist on the front page called "Filthy's Favorite Few". Pick one of the more recent ones there and you ought to find some good stuff :)
For a single player game would you recommend stacking the open or rough terrain combat bonus promotion? I tend to almost always go for rough to counter the defensive bonus an enemy unit would get.
700 hours into Civ V and I've never even come close to getting a city sacked by Barbarians aside from the one time I did it explicitly for an achievement.
Lol. I have two barbarian enhancement mods that basically change the whole game focus until you get to the medieval-renaissance era. One of them (Leuigi's barbarian enhancements) or whatever his name was, it gives the barbarians great generals in their encampments giving them bonus damage, and some other enhancements it didn't say. The other one is the major one, Barbarians Evolved. Which adds a Barbarian Civ that goes to war with every civ and city-state it meets, is super military-focused, and Barbarian Encampments all work with it and eachother. And you can set the number of turns an encampment will "Evolve" which gives the barbarian civ a settler there and the barbarian civ gets that city at the encampment. They also get more unique-units, and get a version of a nuke unit that's basically a scout with nukes, but you can limit the amount. You can also change the rate of which barbarians spawn. The encampments and barbarian cities also spawn 1 unit in defense if you attack their city. Like I was playing a game with it earlier, their capital was next to India and their capital had none of their cities near it cuz they don't settle much, and they took over all of india. You can usually handle new cities from them if they're on your continent and the capital isn't, because they usually puppet the new cities (I think how it works is the barbarian encampments make the cities and then give them to the barbarian civ) so they won't spawn any units besides that defense one and won't get any units there fast enough if you hurry. I had the spawn rate on King difficulty on a chieftain playthrough (I'm a noob lol) and I'd get hordes of like 8 barbarians attacking me or see packs of 6 running around basically destroying the other civ's economies in the early game. The ai is improved and they work together more, like I was attacking a barbarian encampment and another encampment south from it sent an archer to help them. It makes the ancient era pretty interesting too.
The MOST shitting thing is barbarian ships screwing with your trade routes, why the hell cant we allocate a naval vessel to act as an escort, or a tech to have armed merchantmen. Both of these are historicaly accurate and would give a bit more fun in the game.
thorshammer25 Yep. it's a PITA. Even worse imo is city-state caravels in the later eras when you're at war with a player with CS allies. You're guaranteed to lose trade routes to a caravel 500 tiles from their home city.
FilthyRobot i do remember you mentioning next level strats with aztec and dissidents. I'd like to find out about more weird next level strategies in future vids!
Filthy. Maybe you can do a guide on water the pros and cons, fresh and Ocean tiles and why *you* take ages to improve those (fish and lux) tiles. Growth and production of it. Values or negatives. thanks bud. One would assume because its down a tech tree (useless one) but perhaps there is more to be said.
You said not to destroy camps. But you are wrong. Camps near Your city are useful only with panteon giving faith for every kill 4 tiles away. Otherwise removing camps from direct neighbourhood is vital especially for songhai or germany. You say not to destroy nearby camps because they will respawn. But this is actually what we all want, because it is a chance that will respawn near city states do the city states get attacked instead and that means influence from rescuing workers.
Stormtrooper Elite They get a large AI bonus to damage dealt against barbarians. I don't know if their programming is actually any better, but they can sure clear them out faster than the player possibly could.
Yeah, I was convinced it had happened to me (where a full-production city starts to starve while making a settler), but I did some googling and it seems you are right. Just curious, how many of your multiplayer games do you win?
haha I figured he seems to know the game pretty well, and he plays on immortal, so he would win a 6 way game once in a while (if only 1 time on 6). I don't know the calibre of civ 5 multiplayer players though, so if you tell me you don't win I will believe it. I think what's going on here is you do win, but you want to see my train of thought because you made no mention of winning in your video.
Andreas Petrela Paiement I don't know my overall win %, one of my viewers was interested in doing some stats with my channel, but I haven't heard from him in awhile. By chance alone there's a 16.7% chance to win a FFA, anything above that is "better than average".
AI is really bad. I've seen multiple situations where a barbarian archer shoots a lone unit and the only response from that unit is fortifying. And if archer does less than 10 damage, then this continues for half of the game.
