I decided to force myself to take Serfdom. Why? Aside from the challenge of not using the whip, I simply wanted to see the conditions under which it made sense.

I played as Liz (Financial / Philosophical), Monarch level, epic speed. I did a Oracle slingshot to Feudalism right after I hit Monarchy. This allowed me to switch into Hereditary Rule, Vassalage, and Serfdom all at once. I immediately started cranking out 5xp longbows (not Protective, but you can't have it all), and tore Willem a new one. Note to self: Longbows have no counter if you get them soon enough ...

Serfdom allowed me to:


Stop building workers -- I was getting plenty of manpower from the ones I had, plus the ones I captured from Willem;
Get Willem's former cities improved lightning fast; powering captured, low-production cities to create buildings with speedy chopping instead of whipping;
Once I got Iron Working and Calendar, the jungle practically disappeared overnight, replaced with lovely cottages and plantations.
Since I wasn't whipping, I was able to keep working all of my cottages. My researched dipped to 50% at one point, but I was still bringing in 150+ beakers per turn. In other words, I didn't lose time working cottages due to population loss or from having to work food tiles to regrow.
I never had to micromanage food or happiness issues as I do with Slavery and Caste System.


I'm not saying this is the new uber-strat. I'm merely saying that it is viable in certain instances. I think it would be even more fun for India, as Serfdom would leverage Fast Workers and Spiritual (both Asoka and Gandhi) would let you pop in and out of Serfdom in between bouts of whipping, if you are so inclined.

As spiritual I use serfdom now and again, but I really cant justify having a turn of anarchy to get it.

Its a semi decent civic to have in preparation of switching to caste system, and building lots of workshops and chain irrigated farms.

The main problem with it is that after you fight a war (the only really justifiable time to have a worker shortage), you really desperately need slavery to rebuild that infrastructure.

Im somewhat curious as to where your hammers are coming from prior to caste system if you arnt running slavery.

Yes, yes, and yes. I agree with this. If you can nab feudalism slingshot, that is a really powerful way to go. Even if you don't, if you follow the approach you mentioned it is a good approach imo. Uber? No. As good as whipping? Depends. As good as caste system? Depends. Works great in certain situations if you build your strat around it? Yes. Really beneficial for india because of UU and spiritual? Yes.

As spiritual I use serfdom now and again, but I really cant justify having a turn of anarchy to get it.

Its a semi decent civic to have in preparation of switching to caste system, and building lots of workshops and chain irrigated farms.

The main problem with it is that after you fight a war (the only really justifiable time to have a worker shortage), you really desperately need slavery to rebuild that infrastructure.

Im somewhat curious as to where your hammers are coming from prior to caste system if you arnt running slavery.

As DaveMcW is fond of saying, a commerce city only needs a granary, which can be chopped. Production cities can get their production from mines. If you're in HR then you can just grow your cities large to the point where slavery is said to be less efficient anyways.

My hammers were coming solely from mines; I didn't even have forges yet. Most of my units were coming out of the capital and a production city. Hereditary Rule plus getting Calendar pretty soon after my Feudalism slingshot allowed me to have a happy cap of about 13 or so (I was just to the north of the jungle belt in that game, and hooked up 3 happy resources pretty quick), which was plenty big enough to get some major production from those two cities. In fact, I didn't even have to mess with the culture slider (and didn't have Drama yet anyway) before Willem was toast.

If you're curious, my longbows were promoted to Combat II. Not glamorous, but with an adjusted strength of 7.2 and a first strike, I was getting 40% odds or so against Willem's mixed stacks. I was killing defenders at a 2:1 ratio, with no siege units and 40% cultural defense.

But back on topic: Serfdom compliments the vertical growth strategy afforded by HR by getting all those tiles worked faster. And the beauty of playing as Liz -- you can go either CE or SE, and both fit her traits fine, while Serfdom lets you swap out farms for cottages quickly.

Last point: the other reason I tried this experiment was that I was noticing (a) that when I run Slavery, I only whip as an emergency (i.e., I'm not maximizing its use unless I'm Monty with his UB) and (b) when I run Caste System, it's only really useful in pre-Biology in those few cities where I can crank up the food production -- in other words, I'm running an empire-wide civic just to benefit one or two cities. Serfdom is nice because it's passive, it gets used all the time, and is empire-wide.

Serfdom doesn't give the flashy instant production of Slavery or the great people of CS, but it can be consistently useful if you use it properly.

I recently used serfdom in a game with Zara. I had a ton of land locked off on a peninsula which I wanted to rex. Switching to serfdom, I settled about 5-6 cities and built farms, mines, cottages, etc. I figured I wouldn't use caste system because I didn't necessarily need it (I had some specialists, but I focused on cottages and growth to maximize use of production tiles). That way, I could build up a military for border protection and tech ok with cottages and specialists, while rexing.

Being organized and creative, plus having the henge, allowed for quick courthouses, free stele's, and cheap libraries to run scientists temporarily in to keep research stable. IMO, serfdom is a good trait to boost a midgame rex and keep your economy stable.

Nice job taking the initiative to test this. I'd still like to see it on the new world.

serfdom sucks. it's a lazy person's civic. i'm not insulting you, and you're right that it has some uses sometimes, but if you're careful with your workers you never need the extra speed. i also think that that hagia sofia (sp?) sucks, too. maybe i don't expand enough, though i doubt it, but i always end up with too many workers by 1000 a.d., and i end up agonizing where to put them to work; end up building forts inside my own territory.

honestly, i don't use the whip enough either. i keep thinking that i should grow these cities for the long term payoff. but then i look at some of these other people's games, and getting infrastructure up asap will payoff because pop will always regrow.

i know that it's all situational, but slavery is good for almost any situation. i play warlords, without the slave revolt.

I've just used Serfdom myself with success. It's actually in the latest Noble club game. With a spiritual leader, after a massive period of rapid growth (IE killing of the neighbour AI and keeping most of the cities). In this case I got alot of undeveloped cities which I needed up and running fast, I didn't capture enough workers to have atleast one per city. In this case I switched to serfdom which rapidly made these new cities productive, with switching to slavery when it was possible to whip in a courthouse in most of the cities at the same time, then switch back again.

This is in a marathon game where worker actions seems to take forever, so maybe the gain isn't that noticeable in a normal speed game, but it's certainly worth it in marathon, even for a non-spiritual leader if you time things good enough. In this game I didn't have any use for Caste system at that time either as I had whipped my old cities too hard during the war so I couldn't make any gain in CS either.

Zombiestomp, if you have too many workers not doing anything in 1000 AD, go to war to get some new land to improve.

@Slobberinbear: Great article :thumbsup:

Cottage cities need only a granary? Theoretically, yeah... practically though, I find it a little unsettling if I don't have a courthouse in every city, and that usually means taking out the whip. So yeah, that's when spritual is useful. I guess I've always underestimated that trait.

nicely written slobberinbear. Ironically enough, I used serfdom in my current game with Peter and is the first time I've used it in ages.

Running a pure SE with Peter. Had great turf, plentiful resources (stone and built pyramids), but only one river in the capital. Researched CS and traded for feudalism; spent 15 turns in serfdom to fully irrigate my lands and fuel a tech boom with scientists. Without serfdom, I probably would've fallen far behind in tech at a crucial time where the AI starts to ramp it up.

Serfdom is still only rarely circumstancial at best, but in this case it got five cities up and going much much faster.

I did a Oracle slingshot to Feudalism right after I hit Monarchy.

What is the tech path on that?

What is the tech path on that?

The minimum tech path would be:

Mysticism -- Meditation -- Priesthood -- Writing -- Monarchy (building Oracle simultaneously)-- Feudalism.

(Writing is a prerequisite of Feudalism).

Of course, that path ignores key worker and military techs. In most games I wouldn't start building the oracle until I had the wheel, pottery, mining, bronze working, and animal husbandry first; and of course you'd also need hunting and archery before you could build longbows from feudalism.

This also sets you up to get a great prophet, which you can then use to get Theology once you pick up Monotheism.

I find serfdom can actually be quite powerful right after a classical age war. Around the monarchy/calender period your happy cap can grow so fast that you need serfdom to keep up. However this doe create another problem as the faster you build infrastructure the faster your workers have nothing to do. This is the problem I have in my current game. For about 30-40 turns I was rocking with serfdom and now I have 15 useless workers. luckily I was spiritual and just switched out. I think it's a powerful bonus for spiritual civs but for others you would need to focus on getting it early, like you have here, to get a lot of benefit from it.

This strategy works well with Saladin too, Protective + Vassalage + Longbows + Spiritual is Awesome, and you start with with Myst Tehc to boot so you have a head start on Oracle and Preisthood and you also need Feudalism for Guilds and UU.

I used Serfdom in a recent game with Joao. It wasn't really until later in the game (but I did get Machinery and Feudalism both late), but I used it to cover over a lot of my land with windmills, watermills and lumbermills quickly. I'm sure it would have been much too slow for me otherwise, especially in the areas I had a lot of floodplains or few roads.

Thinking about it I'm not sure why exactly I did, but that entire game was a bit wishy-washy in terms of what I was doing.

Cottage cities need only a granary? Theoretically, yeah... practically though, I find it a little unsettling if I don't have a courthouse in every city, and that usually means taking out the whip. So yeah, that's when spritual is useful. I guess I've always underestimated that trait.

well, if i understand it correctly, dave's argument is that adding the cottages gives you more commerce than the courthouse would save you. i'm a fan of courthouses too.

I often use serfdom due to the fact that I build settlers and not workers. It works out fairly well. Again, only when Spiritual though :/

I'm thinking if you could pull off a feudalism sling off the oracle and then REX hard...I mean really hard...serfdom could be outstanding (in that case).

Funny, I just tried this is one of my games and logged on just to post about it when I see this thread :crazyeye: It's not difficult at all to get feudalism from the Oracle. Another bonus is that AI's seem to use Longbows all the time for defense, and since AI's don't go after techs as often if someone else has it, their city defenses are a ton weaker than they could be.

back@diamondeye:

captured cities usually have improvements, especially matured cottages if you don't raze them. plus, you are also capturing new workers and your core original cities already have thier improvements and don't need their workers anymore.

i guess that you have to look and see if the cost of building a few more workers is worth not using the whip or having lots of merchants and scientists.

The minimum tech path would be:

Mysticism -- Meditation -- Priesthood -- Writing -- Monarchy (building Oracle simultaneously)-- Feudalism.

(Writing is a prerequisite of Feudalism).

Of course, that path ignores key worker and military techs. In most games I wouldn't start building the oracle until I had the wheel, pottery, mining, bronze working, and animal husbandry first; and of course you'd also need hunting and archery before you could build longbows from feudalism.

This also sets you up to get a great prophet, which you can then use to get Theology once you pick up Monotheism.

COOL! I just did this in a game on my way to work this morning, and it worked like a charm. (It didn't hurt that my capital is in a glorious spot, and that the Vikings got overrun by a Barbarian special event while I was doing it.)

I am totally switching to Serfdom as soon as I have a few more workers, because my empire is WAY too big right now, and I need those cottages asap. I actually let it get too big, because I knew that I could do this slingshot, and I saw an opportunity to grab or block ALL of the iron and copper from the other three (now two) civs. Then it got WAY too big when I simply HAD to go take the former Viking capital (and lone holy city on the continent) away from the Barbs before the English got it.

This will be the first time since Civ II that I will have an extended period of Serfdom running.

That sounds like my Liz vs. Willem game. Serfdom allowed me to quickly spam cottages and plantations for cash, fueling my military expansion. Alternatively, I could have used serfdom to go farming like mad and run a SE, though that can be dangerous in captured cities when you don't have slavery or enough hammers to quickly crank out libraries.

Early serfdom is much better than later serfdom.

I always use Serfdom over Slavery because slavery=more management.I can't pay attention to hurrying when i'm also talking to a friend.Plus I like developed countries.

fueling my military expansion.Interestingly, the Barbarian slaughter of the Vikings (which seems like poetic justice), and the fact that I'm playing with a leader with cheap settlers, meant that Serfdom allowed me to REX recklessly. It wasn't until well into the time when Gunpowder was starting to show up that I even wanted to go to war. I'm so used to being in Serfdom at this point that I'm not even sure which Civic I should swap into now.

Yes,serfdom early does let help more than later.But it has its drawbacks when in war as slobberinbear pointed out with capturing cities.It can be very useful when preparing for war though as it allows you to build up roads,forts,railroads,etc faster and allows you to stop making workers sooner.

i guess that you have to look and see if the cost of building a few more workers is worth not using the whip or having lots of merchants and scientists.

The difference between Serfdom and Caste System is not only the hammers for 50% extra workers, it's also the additional upkeep cost for Caste System and the additional maintenance for those 50% extra workers.

India (fast workers) + Hagia Sophia + Serfdom is pretty big imo!! Serfdom is a low upkeep civic so it does cost less than Slavery or Caste System. However, the Hagia Sophia does obsolete with Steam Power.