Pesky Barbarians

You know, life throws a lot of curve balls. Whether we admit it or not we all have a master plan. It may just be go to work, get home, sit down and watch TV but that's still what we expect. And things can be painful when we're interrupted. Lately, aside from reading, I've been playing Civilization IV (sometime I'll do a post about Civilization and Me). In the most recent game I tried out a scenario of the ancient Greek World which is very neat. I'm the Romans and started out with just some legions and two settlers. The legions are pretty tough and pretty soon I had conquered what is now Italy, France and Spain. To me part of the fun of games like this is to build the cities and add to them- essentially making the kingdom great. Rather than just attacking the world- which rarely goes well- I was hunkering down and solidifying my rule, building up great cities, creating monuments, and converting each city to Christianity. So I was frustrated again and again by those pesky barbarians.

In Civilization, you are one civilization competing against others. Aside from them are the barbarians who have no civilization- they just want to attack and raze the cities of the civilizations to the ground. I've noticed for quite a while that typically this happens as they come out of unexplored regions of the world map. But you don't have to worry about them except on the frontiers of the civilization- the theory being that in the heart of your civilization they don't have anywhere to spring from. That rule didn't play out here.

The picture at left is what was happening left and right. Normally barbarians would filter in from the frontier and you'd get warnings about the city of Such-and-Such being alarmed by barbarians. They'd get closer and closer and then if you hadn't done anything or had troops in the city, that city would be destroyed. Now I always have troops in the cities. In fact, in this case most cities had two defending units. But the barbarians did three things I didn't expect: 1) They gave no warning, 2) They came in great numbers, and 3) They popped up anywhere. A turn would end and suddenly there would be barbarians right next to a city in the heartland. There was no time to get help to them, no warning they were coming. And they usually had about seven units attacking which made the sack of the city almost a sure thing.

You should know (and I should remember) that no matter what it is you or I want to accomplish that it will not go as we expect. At my Dad's work training Army officers there's a slogan I remember- 'No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.' Even when we know the enemy is upon us, things don't ever go exactly as we expect. Rather than get frustrated, recognize that barbarians will be at the gates sometimes. Expect them to take a lot of time to deal with and expect them not to come calling when you've finished what you were working on. Don't worry. Hang in there.