Barbarian camps are not always barbarian forever. Once a game is past a certain turn, every
barbarian settlement rolls each turn to be adopted by a nearby real tribe — the site
changes hands, and the barbarians standing on it become that tribe's soldiers. It is rare
because the roll is a few percent and the site has to be quiet at that moment.
Transcribed from Tile.doTribeTurn and
Game.findNearestSettlementTribe; numbers from tribeLevel.xml.
The roll, step by step
- Only barbarian sites are eligible. The site's tribe must be one that cannot do diplomacy — Rebels, Anarchy, Raiders, Barbarians. A site already held by a real tribe never re-rolls.
- The clock has to have started. Nothing happens until the turn passes the tribe level's start turn (below). Before that, the check is skipped entirely.
- Roll the percent, once per site per turn.
- Find an adopter. Two different distances are involved. To qualify, a tribe must own a settlement within 12 tiles of this site in straight-line hex distance — terrain-blind, so it counts across mountains and water. Among every tribe that qualifies, the winner is the one whose settlement is closest by actual pathfinding (land or water). No qualifying tribe, no conversion.
- The site must be quiet. Scanning every tile within 3 of the site: if any player unit is present, or any barbarian of that site is damaged, the conversion is cancelled for that turn.
- The flip. The site becomes the new tribe's, trade networks rebuild, and each barbarian in range is re-created under the new tribe — or, if it has a city to strike from where it stands, converted straight into a raider against that city.
When it can happen, and how likely
Both the start turn and the per-turn chance come from the game's Tribe Level
setting. The cumulative columns are the odds that one undisturbed site has flipped after
that many eligible turns — 1 − (1 − p)ⁿ.
| Tribe level | Starts after turn | Chance / turn | after 10 turns | after 25 turns | after 50 turns | after 100 turns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None | never converts | |||||
| Passive | never converts | |||||
| Weak | 60 | 3% | 26.3%by turn 70 | 53.3%by turn 85 | 78.2%by turn 110 | 95.2%by turn 160 |
| Normal | 50 | 4% | 33.5%by turn 60 | 64%by turn 75 | 87%by turn 100 | 98.3%by turn 150 |
| Strong | 40 | 5% | 40.1%by turn 50 | 72.3%by turn 65 | 92.3%by turn 90 | 99.4%by turn 140 |
| Raging | 30 | 6% | 46.1%by turn 40 | 78.7%by turn 55 | 95.5%by turn 80 | 99.8%by turn 130 |
Higher tribe levels convert earlier and faster — Raging starts 30 turns before Weak does and rolls twice as often. On Passive and with tribes off, sites never convert at all, which is why the mechanic is easy to play hundreds of hours without noticing.
Who can adopt a site
Only the 7 tribes the game lets you negotiate with — the ones with a
bDiplomacy flag. Each must already have a settlement of its own within range
to reach out from.
Why the adopter can look far away
The 12 tiles are measured to the tribe's nearest settlement, not to wherever you think that tribe lives. Two things follow, and together they explain conversions that look impossible:
- Tribes own scattered settlements. A tribe's "home" cluster can sit 30 tiles away while one outlying camp of theirs sits 9 tiles from the site being converted. You see the name and colour of a distant tribe; the game measured to the near camp.
- Conversions cascade. Flipping a site registers it as a settlement of the new
tribe (
Tile.changeImprovement→addSettlement). That fresh settlement is itself a valid anchor, so it can pull the next barbarian camp 12 tiles further out into range. A tribe can walk across the map one adoption at a time, ending up owning sites nowhere near where it started.
The practical consequence: a barbarian camp near an established tribe is on borrowed time, and when it flips you gain a neighbour you can talk to — trade, truce, alliance — where before there was only a permanent enemy. Keeping a unit parked next to the camp blocks the conversion indefinitely, and so does leaving one of its defenders wounded.
See also Tribes and Camp Unit Spawning.