Representation of Slavery

[Adm.Naismith]

Well, I personally don't see any need to speak against CTP, I'm here to suggest about CIV III or any other good clone that, using our suggestions, will reach the shops.

Back to slaves, I want to detail my previus post:
Slaves as specialist in city I was thinking of a "head" reproduction into a city of slaves citizens (a contraddiction in fact, slaves where not citizen, but you have got my point). As specialist, they can have plus and minus to reproduce their peculiar status. During a revolt you can change normal worker into slaves (as The Joker said), as criminals or politics prisoners, and back to normal workers (free slaves or prisoner).

That switch shouldn't be too easy: we need to relate slaves to unhappines, less research points (as in SMAC), etc.
Any city must have military units to keep the slaves in control, and may be you should not be able to have more than two slaves for every common worker or specialist (something similar, to avoid unrealistic "only slaves" city.

About the slaves hunt, I suppose we can model it capturing indigeneus tribe.
Depending on the general model, they will be Village of Native Citizen (see my "capturing cities idea in previus post) or indigeneous units (as mindworms in SMAC, see my "capture POW" ditto).

As others have said, Social choices (or goverment type) and Wonders can limit the slaves use, but I will add a World Counsil's Law (as in SMAC). I agree with MidKnight and others, how devastating could be ban slavery as atrocity (trade limited or stopped) to crush a police state that fund its production on criminals/slaves!

I know this model doesn't take care of slaves trade, but I'm not sure trade was the most importan part of the slave affair. I think on country level use of slaves was more important in production and public works than in trade income.

Best part of this model is IMO that we use already tested concept and representation (in CIV II o SMAC game), and we can keep the same concept from ancient age (proper slaves) to modern age (criminals and POWs during wars), until social choice, world counsil's law or a wonder make it no more viable.

Look Youngsun, once a time I don't see the need of a panel to cope with slavery

------------------
Adm.Naismith AKA mcostant

[S. Kroeze]

'Report: SLAVE TRADE EXPANDS

"Every year all over the world more than a million women and children are sold like slaves; this slave trade is still on the increase"

A report of the American authorities, that was yesterday presented at the beginning of a special conference about trade in humans in Asia, says so.
Gangs would sell every year about 250,000 women and children out of South East Asia and from about 150,000 to 200,000 out of Russia. In Europe women and children are 'bought and sold' for 30,000 dollars, according to the report.
The US designate trade in humans as the third most paying sort of organized crime.'

(source:'Metro' of 30/03/2000(a Dutch newspaper);my translation)

So slave trade is definitely not something done with. It may be beyond its peak and have changed its character, but essentially it is still there!

[raingoon]

Ideas for Slavery in Civ 3

Slavery, as with every feature in Civ 3, should compell the player to have to make an interesting choice. Do I want to practice slavery for the production advantage it gives me? Or do I fall behind in production by outlawing slavery while striving to build a more industrial economy? That is the fundamental dilemma. Here are the four main new features in Civ 3 that I think speak to the problem of slavery:

1) A Slave Economy. A slave economy should be about twice as efficient at building things than no economy at all (which would essentially be a pre-industrial, merchant economy, one that traded to compensate for what it could not build). This would make slavery tempting early on. Later an industrialized economy should be about three or four times more efficient than a slave economy -- at processing energy, building its own infrastructure, units, etc. This would roughly model the difference between South and North in the United States during the Civil War.

At some point an economy that grew large by investing heavily in slave labor will be challenged by the more-rapidly increasing capabilities of those who have suffered without it, but invested in industrialization instead. The trade off is that the past's slave labor allowed them to dominate up until then.

2) The First Kind of Slavery: Enslaving Your Own Population. First, the player should have the option of enslaving some of his own population. I suggest this be shown on the game map as a proportional decrease in their City Size and increase in production capability. To make it interesting, if population units are distinguishable by their religious beliefs, this might be one way of singling out the unfortunate group. Of course, it can also be as simple as changing a pop unit from an Elvis to a Slave, and reaping the resultant bonus to production (say, double). This covers newly-captured cities as well. I do NOT believe citizens can be stolen en masse from cities you do not contol, as in CTP.

About enslavement, I agree with those who say you should not be able to undertake this lightly. If you decide to use slavery, either captured or drawing on your own population, you should have a window of time to change your mind, perhaps five or ten turns, after which it should take no less than 25 turns to emancipate (more below).

3) The Second Kind of Slavery: Enslaving OTHER Populations. You should also be able to enslave populations NOT in your cities and not in any other cities -- in effect, capture slaves. I don't think slave trader units are necessary. Any military unit attacking another unit would be an opportunity for taking slaves. These victimized populations would be taken from either barbarian units or units belonging to other civs -- anything from a spy, to a settler, to a tank. But first they would have to be defeated in battle, at which point the game would give you the choice of finishing them off or taking the survivors prisoner (as others have suggested). In a stacked battle, the sum of all the surviving and wounded, etc., would simply be abstracted and, should you choose to take prisoners, then whatever unit(s) they had been, they would now all be converted into one or more PRISONER UNIT(S), say a unit resembling a settler in chains. There would be several options in dealing with your new prisoners:

a) First, the prisoner unit could be put instantly to work on your infrastructure -- roads, highways, rail, or developing resources such as coal mines or oil fields, etc. (the rate of their work would be diminished by about what a settler's speed is to an Engineer's in Civ 2). Your civ's economy would be instantly labeled a slave economy, the five to ten turn grace period would begin, and any resulting social penalties applied. After the grace period emancipation would take up to 25 turns to return your social happiness to what it was before (see Emancipation below).

b) Second, the prisoner unit could be made to "JOIN A CITY" as a slave, which, as with drawing slaves out of your own population, would NOT add to the population of that city but instead increase that city's production capability. NOTE: if you are already at war with that prisoner's civ, they would not be considered slaves and you would suffer no slavery penalties; their number would be kept track under a "POW" list -- you could still trade that number back (see below, prisoners of war). But if you were NOT at war with that civ, they would be instantly declared slaves, any resulting social penalties would be applied against you, and they could not be traded back but only emancipated (see below).

c) Thirdly, if you are at war with their home civ your prisoner unit(s) could be fortified in a fort as prisoners of war, as opposed to putting them to slave labor. Again, their number would be tracked under a POW list. Perhaps the difference between putting POWs to slave labor as opposed to fortifying them in forts is that the former would decrease their number gradually. In the latter case, their number would be the same as when they were captured. The advantage is you can use prisoners as future bargaining chips against their home civ. Eventually you might amass enough of a prisoner population that the civ may be willing to concede something to you for the return of their manpower (this assumes that units in Civ 3 are built by taking actual population from your pop window, thereby making population a resource). This would make using POWs as slave labor a potentially expensive proposition.

d) Obviously, prisoners taken by your victorious unit(s) could be either executed or released, on the spot.

4)EMANCIPATION. You should be able to emancipate, to outlaw slavery. This means all slaves (not POWs) would be counted, finally, amongst your city populations. I suggest that, after emancipation, you continue to experience unhappiness or civil unrest, and in increase in migration out of your civ (if such a thing is modeled), until the discovery of CIVIL RIGHTS or some other equalizing social mechanism.



[This message has been edited by raingoon (edited March 31, 2000).]

[MidKnight Lament]

raingoon has raised his hand in a big way! I think I'm happy with most of what you've written. Just some thoughts from my end...

1. I think we can all agree that the choice whether or not to use slavery should be a big one. It should also be quite tempting, because let's face it, some big civs went far using slave labour.

2. I agree that we shouldn't just be able to nab slaves out of an enemy city. What we were doing in CTP? Drugging them chloroform first?

3. I was unsure how a system would go without a slaver unit, but I think you've just about convinced me. It does beg a question though. If a slave is captured in battle, how does the slave end up in your city. Should it have to be escorted?

4. Interesting seperation of slaves vs POWs. I'm going to have to have a think about this one. Sounding ok though. Particularly towards modern warfare when bargaining could become quite lucrative.

5. Emancipation is probably a must. You should get good reputation brownie points out of it too. (Side thought: How as a bill of Human Rights or the Geneva Convention not been a wonder so far? I guess that's for another thread.)

Plenty of stuff to discuss about slavery yet though.... Thanks for your solid input, raingoon.

- MKL

[Adm.Naismith]

S.Kroeze, interesting figures indeed. I will look around to other sources because I would like to check them in comparison between born/death rate, enslaving duration etc.

Often women and child are enslaved as prostitute, still they are sometime released after some years because no more "profitable" (my excuse because of crude concept, I don't know a better, polite word).

To tell the true, I'm not sure Firaxis P.R. would be happy to walk on this "thin ice" concept of modern slavery where slavery on old history can be easily accepted.

Raingoon, I'm not sure to understand why you prefer to model slavery as improved city production but not as "civ head" in city screen.

My proposal to keep them as "special worker" has some advantages.

Quoting myself (sorry for this) into the Migration thread by Sir Shiva:

quote: I underline that immigrate or refugee model has lot of shared point IMHO with slavery model: they are special citizen with limited rights, source of some kind of unhappines, potential resources if you are able to integrate them into your CIV as common workers.

Let's see, then: special workers that add only different numbers to production, unhappiness, but still are in need of food, can be killed by an attack (may be more easily than common workers, because they will be less protected by defending troops), can be converted into common workers (released or "assimilated").

They can revolt, as unhappy citizen, or crushed by police and military troops using martial law.

The only difference I really see is when you propose to make PoW tradeable, to let them go back at the end of war. This will interfere with a simple "civ head" model.
Keeping a POW list can be a workaround, but I bet that if some kind of cultural origin will be stored with population "head" we can use this as a better way to count back the POW numbers. As cultural will change with years, so less and less PoW will be ready to go back into original country. On actual CIV timescale we will have war ended after some decade, so I'm not sure PoW will be really interested to go back, if not by emigration model: they will be free in cities, so if the cities are good place to live they will stay there with their new families (something it happens on small scale after only five year of WWII, but I'm almost sure was more common in old centuries, where travel where difficult and expensive).

About the feature to secure PoW into fort, I would like to suggest instead (once more as in Slavery thread) to let the player to control the "PoW settler", ordering to it to found a Prison Camp (a kind of city without feature available).

You must put enough sentinel units (any infantry or SMAC police unit will be good) to avoid revolt and escape. The advantage against a "escorted settler" is that you need less military unit to control them (higher police ratio because of fence and walls of a Prison camp).

On this line, during a Prison Camp revolt you don't have a production stop, you have the appearance of a "runaway unit" that will try to go back home.

If the Prison Camp grow too large, itself food production will not be enough to keep prisoner alive. You must decide if share food with your cities or let prisoner starve (I suggest that's a major atrocity on the diplomatic level).

To sum up, I suggest to introduce:

- Slave/PoW settler, when captured (immigrate/refugee settler into migration model) under control of warder Civ player

- Special Worker Slave/Immigrate into common city screen

- Ability to build Prison camp / Refugee camp by above special settler, instead of City

- A "runaway unit", very low level infantry or special settler that you can try to recover back to original Civ (PoW) or found a new, separate Civ (Slave)

I bet they are not too difficult to add to current Civ model, if Firaxis will keep basic things similar enough.

In exchange we have lot of interesting choices to make during the game with (I hope) tolerable micromanagement.

Or may be I completely miss the wrong part of my idea, so please make a good postmortem examination of it!

------------------
Adm.Naismith AKA mcostant

[S. Kroeze]

The current idea seems to be that the slaver in CalltoPower is irrealistic and not historically founded.

I would like to point out that during the last two centuries of the Roman Republic(second and first centuryBC), a period about which we have a lot of sources and reliable research, there were three sources of slaves:
-children sold as slaves by their parents because of poverty and the inability to feed them properly; this was only a small part of all slaves, not exceeding 10 %
-prisoners of war, accounting for about half of the origin of all slaves (and in this period Rome was waging a war somewhere all the time)
-slaves acquired during slave raids by pirates; this constituted the other half of origin

In the sources we read about districts of the eastern Mediterranean becoming depopulated as a result of constant slave raiding; most people were rurals living in small villages, not able to defend themselves against well-organized pirates, coming by sea. At first the Romans did nothing to restrain this piracy: instead they were very glad with this constant supply of cheap slaves! Only when several Roman aristocrats, among others Julius Caesar, became victim of the pirates, they suppressed the piracy. From that time on most slaves came from Germany and southern Russia.

The Viking raids and the slave raids in Africa follow the same pattern: slave-raids are usually carried out by well-organized private companies, willing to fight. 'Barbarians' are often even more skilled in it than civilised nations!

[MidKnight Lament]

Interesting stuff. Minor nations could be both the experienced instigators or the helpless victims.

Nabbing people out of small villages and whisking them away by ship sounds much more realistic than walking down the main boulavade of your enemy's biggest city, with 50 slaves in chains behind you. "He'll be back..."

Good info there, S. Kroeze.

- MKL

[raingoon]

Very interesting. It points out the crux of slavery. It's an economic issue.

Meaning, there should be the ability for one civ to capture slaves then sell them to another. The buyer would use them to increase their production, while the seller would of course increase their coffers.

And pretty soon it becomes clear how such a horrific thing got started in the first place. Awful as it is, I think a true Civ game would accurately model the despicable side of human history as well as the greater good.

[Adm.Naismith]

Bumping for easy reference in current Slavery topic.

I think it contain some great touch able to improve CIV, also without changing too much its model.