Suggestion: Slavery Not Good Enough

[Proteus_MST]

Originally posted by Ansaga
I miss the slavers from Call to Power. A slaver was a invisible unit going to other civ's cities and you capture their population and they become your slave in the nearest city. Basically it was a free pop, always a bonus, and they also ate HALF food. Now THAT is awesome. Of course the downside is that if you have too many slaves they will of course riot. Not to mention the fact that there was the Emancipation wonder, if you didn't build it and you have tons of slaves prepare to be royally shafted.

Anywho I think I went off topic... moral of the story is I want slavers to come back to the game.

Yep, it was great.
In my Game of Ages of Man (CtP2-Mod)
I had my Combat units (Pezhetoi which act a double duty as combat units and slavers) gain one slave after the other from combats.
Most of them ended in one special city near the border where most of the combats took place, so that at one time 75% of the cities population consisted of slaves.
As I managed to keep the population of the city content they never rioted and the city was the best city of my whole empire in terms of production (of course I wasn´t able to turn the slaves into specialists, therefore all the happyness-management had to be done via buildings).

Therefore I agree, in CtP 2 slavery was really beneficial to your society, much more than it is in Civ IV

[ChaotikVisions]

I think we're missing the obvious way to introduce slavery and have it be useful, through specialists. With Slavery civic enabled you can turn citizens into slaves for a +5% boost to production/food/trade? Or whatever anyone feels is balanced. But slavery should be trading normal citizens(the dregs or captured) for cheap effective labour, as it was in history.

Edit-I meant the boost per citizen turned into slave, with maybe a max of 5-4-3(quick-normal-epic) per city.

[Backpack]

Just a Thought -
You could scale the effects as a Civics Applied +H -H bonus to tiles through the ages..... Slavery Itself let see..... +3H to Mines, +1 Food to farms, +1 H to every other tile..
Get to (I'm making this up without a tech tree in front of me) , Get to Literature gives -1 H to every tile.
Machinery, -1F per farm, -1H to mines
Gunpowder, give another -1H to mines
Replaceable parts gives -1H to mines (And here you break even)
Steam power or Assy Line give ANOTHER -1H to all tiles, and here you pay DEARLY for hanging onto it as a civic.



Thoughts?

Backpack

[playshogi]

Actually I was thinking the slavery civic was overpowered. No matter how many pops used the penalty is the same: 1 unhappy for 10 turns. In your high food, low production cities, its the easiest way to get things built. Plus, any excess hammer carry over to the next build.

[Grumbold]

I agree with those who think slavery is oddly represented, because no nation that I can think of took their otherwise happy, productive citizens and forced them into slavery. It was normally prisoners captured in war and criminals that were used as forced labour.

Still, pop for shields can be a very useful trade in the right circumstances and the game is probably the better for not having everyone out raiding each other for slaves. Civ 4 is undoubtedly balanced more toward taking a more thoughtful approach to whether it should be peace or war between civs rather than between war now or war later.

[Sarxis]

Agreed - slavery is too weak to be used regularly.

[player1]

I like it.
It's very good in emergecy.
With good placed slave rushing you can pop out two units in turn.

It's also good in cases when you make mistake and leave city to grow to unrest (when having no happines building available).

Also 2-3 or 4 pop it's still just 1 unhappy citizen for 10 turns.


Anyway, I think it's worth at least that 1 turn of Anarchy.
Just to help in emergency or so.

[Skanky Burns]

I'd prefer a whole extra turn of production in every city and keeping my population high compared to the benefits of slavery. If it increased production, perhaps at the cost of health and/or happiness as well as poprushing, perhaps it would be used.

[sabrewolf]

i'd like to hear that from one of the great players. i know that in civ3 forced labour was a feature that only great players could use effectively... and then it was only 20 shields per pop!!

[Skanky Burns]

Certainly. There is potential for turn-advantage here.

The thing is, though, virtually every ancient nation used slavery, not just the ones who were strategically superior. If it was a must-have in the real world, it stands to reason that it should be in the game also rather than something only a master can turn into something useful.