slaver tip and question, abolitionist question

[stranglylucid]

When I first started i avoided the slaver. I just started using them and wow. I just beat diety last night. with the slaver it was not that hard. I am trying to do the one city thing, and i noticed that if you have enought slaves to cover all 20 grids you have to first pull the regular pop off the grid to place the slave. If you have 20 slaves on the grid, then you have to pull one of them off in order to manually switch the placement of the reg. pop as scientists and entertainers etc. Since you can have more than 20 slaves in a city, can you do anything with them? Also, what happens if you have more than 3 per troop in city? Do they always revolt, or just sometimes?
As for the abolitionist, I have never made one. can they cause your city to revolt? or just free a slave? any thoughts would be appriciated.

[J Bytheway]

I think that slave revolts are not certain if you're short of troops, but they are very likely (I'm not sure, though).

Abolishionists can indeed cause a slave revolt as well as freeing slaves one at a time, but the latter is cheaper and more likely to succeed.

[Aolathiin]

If you've got some neighbors that have invested heavily in slavery, then abolitionists are a great way to improve your civilization at their expense. In my current game, I sent an abolitionist into Mali territory. She freed seven slaves, and my city of To Dineeshzhee went from population of 3 to population of 10 in a very short time.

That's the flip side of slavery. Yes, it pumps up your population, but it leaves you vulnerable to abolitionists (who can also cause slave revolts) once you get to the Renaissance. I personally prefer to avoid capturing slaves so that I'll be able to exploit my neighbors' unenlightened ways later on, but that's me. Another advantage is that freeing slaves costs 1/5 as much as capturing them.

[stranglylucid]

Not true. First off, once i get samuri's, i build two of themn and a slaver for the express purpose of catching those annoying clerics and abolitionists, and since it is done in combat, they are free, thus cheaper than the yours. Also, since my slaves recieve no pay, eat half the food, and do not factor in city unhappiness, then they are even better than my citizens. My current strat is to build three cities and then pump them up to around twenty or so with slaves. I have found that eight mounted archers and a slaver are able to dominate the battle fields until musketiers are out, wich is a long time. The last game I played on diety I was so far ahead of the computer by the time musketeers came out i just started to overrun all but two of the eight computer players. the others were to far, but tanks got them. The slaves aleviated all of the early game probs that slow down production.