The Barbarians

The Barbarians raid every player once a barbarian day, keep villages of their own on the map and guard the artifacts.

The barbarian day

The Barbarians act once a barbarian day: one day divided by the world speed, but never less than one hour. Their raids start two barbarian days after the world opens.

Their raids

Every barbarian day each player is raided once, at his village nearest to a barbarian village, from one of the three barbarian villages nearest to it. Players under beginner protection or on vacation, and players who paid a tribute that covers the day, are spared. A raid is always a raid: both sides lose troops, no building and no loyalty is touched, and the Barbarians take loot.

The size of a raid follows the village it hits:

barbarians = S × 0.1 × g × v, between 5 and 5,000

S = the village's population (the troops at home do not count);
g = 1 + 0.1 × (day − 1), but at most 5: the waves stop growing with time at five times the first day's;
v goes from 0.4 for a player with one village to 1 for a player with four or more.

The world's difficulty (below) and the Barbarians' strength from the tributes multiply it. Wiping out a raid pays 10 of each resource and one culture point for every 4 barbarians killed.

Their villages

The Barbarians keep max(minimum, players × per player) villages on the map (at most 500; in new worlds the minimum is 80, one for each artifact they hold, and one per player). New worlds have them from the first day, spread over the whole map and of a medium size; the count is checked every game hour: when players join, more villages appear; none disappears when players leave.

A barbarian village left without troops stays: it keeps producing (it can be raided for its loot) and its barbarians grow back every barbarian day. It disappears only when it is razed (its population brought to 0 by catapults) or conquered by chiefs; another then appears elsewhere.

The tribute

A day of the Barbarians' favour costs a share of your gross production of one barbarian day set by the world's difficulty (7% on Normal, 10% on Hard), in four equal parts; you can prepay up to 5 days. You choose the villages that pay and each one's share (by default in proportion to its production); every village pays its share from its own store, and if one cannot, nothing is paid. The tributes of the last five days make the Barbarians stronger on the whole map, at most three times.

Artifacts

At the instant the administrator chose when creating the world (by default 7 days divided by the speed) the artifacts appear in barbarian villages picked at random, one per village, each with a strong Barbarian army to guard it. There are two kinds: the ones that work for their village and the ones that work for the whole account (at most three active, one of them account-wide). A surviving chief of a won normal attack takes the artifact home; the village is razed and another barbarian village appears. Artifacts that found no village yet appear as new barbarian villages come.

Difficulty

The administrator gives the world a difficulty, the same for every player, and can change it while it runs; a player cannot choose his own. It sets the raids' size, the tribute's price, the garrisons of the barbarian villages and of the oases, the guards of the control points and of the artifacts, and how aggressive the server's bots are toward the humans. Against Hard (the Barbarians at full strength): Easy raids ×0.3, tribute 5%, garrisons ×0.6, control-point guards ×0.5, artifact guards ×0.4; Normal (new worlds) ×0.5, 7%, ×0.85, ×0.75, ×0.6; Brutal ×1.5, 15%, ×1.3, ×1.5, ×1.4. A Custom world has the administrator's own numbers. The Barbarians tab shows your world's.

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