With all the hate for the barbarians, I feel like it would be nice to defend them. For me, barbarians, as agressive as they are, serve the following purposes:
- One issue I often have in Civ (and their weak barbarians) is that at the start of the game, if you don't want to go all militaristic, you have two choices : the safe one where you build a reserve army to deal with other players eventually attacking you, or the risky one to focus solely on economy in order to rapidly gain the upper hand, but if you're attacked by a stronger civilization early, you're toast. That's not ideal, because then you're encouraged to neglect your military capacity (worst case scenario, you lose early and launch another game), whereas being careful and suppporting a potentially useless one punishes you in the long run. With strong barbarians, conflict is a given, but still mild enough to don't force you completely into a militaristic game. Instead of having a coin toss between war and peace, you're constantly in a low-intensity conflict that requires everyone to carefully adapt their military force, and you're less likely to be caught off guard by other warrings nations.