If you’ve read my posts over these months you no doubt realize I like Hittite. There are several reason for this. For one thing they have my favorite iron age units in cats, horse archers, and scythes. Secondly, they are not gold dependent, and that is big with me. Third, is their awesome military bonuses and that their bonuses are for my favorite units. Now I’m not going to try and convince you that Babs is a top tier civ. But they have some definite positives. The beauty of Babs is they share the best bronze age tech tree in the game, along with Shang and Phoeny, and they get horse archers, heavy cats, and scythes---the Hittite connection. As a Hittite player I have often suffered from compie envy, In 1v1s or 2v2s, where the games are usually won in bronze there are no doubt better choices even among slow civs, but Babs can hang. For instance Egypt has military and economic bonuses plus very good unit flexibility which makes them the winner head to head, all variables being equal. Phoeny, a fast civ, is a better choice in bronze because of their economic bonus, but militarily there is no bronze age difference between the two. Beyond that, Babs can use their flexibility to play with anyone in bronze. In 3v3 and 4v4 standard vic games, Babs starts to make even more sense. They can use their bronze flexibility to make a difference and then you have a pretty good land-based iron age (iron age navy sucks) that can compete with anyone except Hittite and Sumer. Egypt, with their awesome scythes and long range priest will also cause problems, but Babs is at no major disadvantage against other civs in iron. Also, their great walls, towers, and priests make them the choice to build the wonder when the game goes long and things are looking grim militarily. What would a Babs strategy be? Well how about this: Take a normal chariot archer civ approach leading up to bronze with the addition of mining gold a little earlier. In early bronze you send an early CA attack against your opponent of choice. He or she will react to the CA attack expecting more of the same and will train a defense/counter attack force geared towards chariot archers. Meanwhile you are switching to compies and an escort unit such as camels or cav for enemy stone throwers. Obviously this doesn’t work against Minoan since they have the better compies. If you know who your greatest threat is you have the flexiblity to counter it. Against Minoan you use the typical approach with many STs and archer cover to defend against cavs. Against a chariot archer civ like Hittite or Assy you go for massed compies and something to deal with enemy STs. Sure all this can be done with Egypt, but then you don’t get horse archers and Cats in iron. My point in all of this? When the random civ gods give you Babs, it ain’t all that bad. Thought?