Slavery or Caste System

[rjmatsleepers]

Blake has done an excellent job explaining and advocating the use of whipping. He has also produced a modified AI which places a low value on the Caste System.

I have read his thread on whipping and can see the benefits in the examples he shows. But somehow, I never seem to have cases like that in my own games. On the other hand, I do like to have lots of specialists in my GP farm, so Caste System works well for me.

What do others think?

RJM

[Blake]

What I wrote in the other thread:

It's like this... Caste System might be useful for 20 turns of the game - it might be VERY useful for those 20 turns, but it needs EXTREME focus. The AI fundamentally... meanders too much, they can't focus on one goal. What's more, when they do generate a great person, they don't use it well. So it doesn't matter *which* GP they get.

Exampels of uses for Caste System:
Generate a Great Scientist for an Academy or Philosophy lightbulb, without first building a Library.
Run LOTS of scientists to help overpower the prophet GPP from oracle - like running 2 scientists gives a 33% prophet chance, running 4 drops that to 16%.
Run a lot of Artists to force a city to flip, or to get a Great Artist to bomb.
Run Merchants to get a GM to lightbulb Civil Service (under limited cases this is better than Prophet CS, and you can go with mixed Priest+Merchant points and use either)

Caste System is a useful precision instrument - very specialized. But the AI does much better work with blunt objects.

Spiritual use is I believe quite obvious - pop borders with artists, etc.

For non-spiritual, long term use. It's quite obvious that it'll be useful for Cultural Victory, if Artists are your thing (and especially for philo, artists are a good alternative to Cottages).

The only other time I've used Caste long term was in a RBCiv game, where an objective was to grow a city as large as possible. I ended up with a size 48 city - running a good 28 Merchants .

[Swiss Pauli]

Re: Slavery or Caste System

Originally posted by rjmatsleepers I have read his thread on whipping and can see the benefits in the examples he shows. But somehow, I never seem to have cases like that in my own games. On the other hand, I do like to have lots of specialists in my GP farm(italics by Swiss), so Caste System works well for me.
RJM

As Blake writes, Caste System is quite a niche civic and potentially very good, but Slavery is useful in every city, whereas the main benefit of Caste is (as you wrote) in your GP farm. Assuming you want lots of Great Scientists, then Caste will avoid the Artist pollution from National Epic, but in this scenario, I'd probably favour a Great Library/National Epic combo and assign two scientists of my own in order to keep the artist possibility low (whilst running Slavery).