[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Barbarians

[Mark Metson <markm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 19 Oct 2003, Morgan Jones wrote:

> Not sure I agree with this.  In my interpretation barbarians in civ
> represent hordes of invaders such as the Sea Peoples at the end of the
> Mediterranean Bronze Age, or the one of the numerous Indo-Iranian or
> Turk/Mongol pastoral nomads.
> 
> The latter peoples can be considered the most lethal fighting force in
> pre-firearms history and that's down to their mobility and
> coordination..
> 
> Personally I'd like to see barbarians more powerful (even though I'd
> get slaughtered).  At least powerful enough so that when a major
> invasion occurs, an alliance of players would be necessary to hold
> them back.
> 
> But that's probably just me.

Surely an entire people like that would be one or more actual 
civilisations? Albeit maybe if they somehow survivie without cities the 
game mechanism might have a hard time representing them. The "barbs" on 
the other hand seem to be much smaller units, either smaller than huts or 
sort of "unfound huts", their origin is wherever there might for all 
anyone knows actually have been a hut, possibly allowing that maybe there 
didnt used to be a hut there but the square has been unvisited / 
unlookedat in so long that maybe a new hut might have grown there. That 
is, I dont think they are big peoples, they are small groups that eke out 
a living on a scale that is usually too small for the game to bother 
noticing them. Maybe they might be part of where all the massive excess 
population comes from that one can attract to a city by means of rapture 
or something like that (if you figure rapture cannot always be entirely 
due to mrere breeding at least once turn scale in years gets to short 
turns).

I think entire nomadic peoples would be actual civs. Possibly needing some 
tech that allows mobile "cities" of limited capability or some method of 
living without "cities" if there really should be no cities associated 
with such folk.

The huts angle could be one approach though maybe. Maybe barbs and huts 
could be consolidated or related, like maybe allow that there might be 
twice as many huts as indicated but half of them are invisible and are 
only discovered by a non-casual inspection of a square, such as by 
irrigating the square or putting a road through it. Then all the huts, 
visible and invisible, could serve as potential spawners of barbarian 
units. Hey maybe they could even also feed off of curruption/waste, maybe 
even putting a road through or irrigating might not discover or eliminate 
an invisible hut, maybeinstead the invisible hut-people would be "happy 
huts" happy becuase you are giving them free corruption and waste to feed 
off of. Maybe they would be most likely to go frenzied when you shift to a 
mode (govt type) that cuts down on the curruption/waste thus threatens 
their living. For example maybe they are highwaymen and bandits living 
along the edges of your roads between high-curruption cities, constituting 
part of the reason for the corruption and waste, then when you go to a 
democracy they go crazy due to not being registered citizens not having a 
gote so opposed to your new democratic government that proposes to deny 
them their easy life of banditry...

-MarkM-