@ Bones' post about 'bitching' about church settings -> barb nobling.
I'd like to comment on this one, as one of the biggest barb noblers on this world, I wrote in parts my reasoning for nobling barbs in another post. That was my reasons for doing it to achieve growth.
My points (claim?) are based on the assumption that we can agree on the fact that in a fight between competent players/tribes the issue is very often not to GET the village, but to KEEP it, which the settings on this world makes 10x harder.
The settings:
The discussion regarding the settings on this world that makes barb nobling / clustering so beneficial for fighting should not be focused on the church setting.
The setting that makes clustering so good for a fighting accounts is the "no outside of tribe support"...
Normally, without that setting activated, you can fake with support as well as time support before nobles land, which is almost 100% needed if one does not have multiple villages in short range of the target with a good amount of defensive troops.
This is because you never want to pour the support in over time when the wall is low, and keep getting hit, it's one of the things players get baited into doing so often.
Normally one need only that one really close range village (the one you send noble from + on this world a church), to get a village off good faking and pressure (nuking).
On this world this is not as easy, because you have to send the support after the capture, giving those with a huge amount of close range (clustered villages) a huge advantage.
This game is already favorable to the defender, and this setting just pushes the advantage even further...
My 2 cents, as I feel the focus on the church setting is not good for the discussion about barb nobling, as it's not the main reason a lot of us has done it.
I based a lot of my gameplay on this, AXE was just north-east of where I started with already developed accounts at the time, and they were mostly bullying *******s, so I built to fight them, which now in hindsight might have been a waste since they all (or most) mass deleted...
Cheers.
Edit: English is not my first language, so I might have repeated myself a few times to be sure to get my argument (point) across.