forum.freeciv.org

Hi all,
I’ve been playing Freeciv for a while and noticed something interesting: land barbarians feel extremely rare compared to naval ones. Most of the time, I only see barbarian ships or coastal raids, while inland spawns almost never appearwacky flip.
I was wondering how this is actually handled in the game logic. Is barbarian spawning explicitly weighted toward ocean tiles, or is it more of an indirect effect caused by map generation (like cities occupying most land tiles early, reducing valid spawn areas)?
Does difficulty level or ruleset settings change this behavior significantly, or is it mostly fixed in the core server code?

Would love to hear from anyone familiar with the implementation or long-term multiplayer experience.

From what little I've picked up, the barbarian-spawning mechanic was carried over from Civ 1 and/or 2. So you're right; it's cities reducing valid spawn areas. There's nothing in the ruleset files that changes this, though I believe the "OnsetBarbs" setting in the Game file determines when barbarians start spontaneously spawning. You might try setting this to turn 2 or 3, so barbarians start appearing before all the land gets eaten up by cities.

See my post in viewtopic.php?p=111150#p111150