I'm running a domination marathon prince specialist game. Emancipation would really ruin all my strategy, but at this point, the unhappy people seem to be starting to get to me...

Should I just not bother? Draft or starve the pop back down below the limit?

Thanks for the advice!

Another question... should I farm the new Babylonian cities I've captured?

If going into Emancipation isn't your style (or your just not going to), Draft/Whip your cities down to size, and make sure you have a ton of :) buildings to help offset the :mad:

Didn't look at the save but (assuming you are not a spiritual leader, your OP didn't specify leader/civ)

If you are running lots of specialists then make sure every important city has a theater and colosseum and up the culture slider. Each 20% will increase the happy cap of those cities by 5 (2 for culture 1/10%; 2 for theater 1/10%; 1 for colosseum 1/20%)

If you are going to whip then you're not going to be in caste so why not switch to emancipation? You are going to incur a lot of revolt time if you plan on switching between caste and slavery.

Drafting will kill you since you lose fewer people but incur a flat 3 unhappy each time.

Build more happy buildings and maybe consider HR and keep some spare military in key cities. This is good for 2 reasons:
1) You can quickly airlift them to newly captured cities
2) They provide happy while they await deployment

Some cities may just end up naturally starving down to their long-term size anyway without having to resort to revolts.

I'm really not sure drafting is a great solution to happiness problems since it adds 3 unhappiness and subtracts 1 pop.

I would use the culture slider though. In full-blown SE games a situation often occurs where you have put off the transition to a cottage econ or are forgoing cottages altogether. The culture slider can be used to buy a little more time in CS to get the techs you need to dominate or whatever. When playing a relatively low-commerce game, like in the situation described above, the culture slider is giving you more bang for your buck by converting less commerce (but same % of total commerce) into the same number of happy faces.

Another late-game solution is to tech down the electricity line and build wonders like broadway, rock n roll, and hollywood. The resources they give provide happiness and can be traded for other AIs' happiness resources if you haven't already taken them for all they're worth.

Post-Rifle drafts are 2 pop though, so mabye Assemble Line would be the ticket to using drafting to reduce city pops.

Also, the unhappiness from whipping and drafting run concurrently, so doing both in the same city could help a lot, but you would still only have the 10 (or 15 on Epic) turns of frownies.

Have you reached the point where you can skip out on Pacifism? FR can give you a substantial boost for the very cheap cost of missionaries. Eventually the GPP are worth less than the +10% science to your overall science and economy; even if this isn't the case it might be worth it.

Just to check the basics; you are not able to bribe or spy the emancipated civs to swap to CS?

I personally don't see how emancipation ruins the use of specialists later on THAT badly. In your oxford/wall street cities you'll still be running 7 of scientist/merchant. ANY city can run 4 of those with the right building. You can just run a couple of different specialists in other cities if you have THAT much food in THAT many cities. You can still run rep for the science boost etc.

Is lowering the science slider 1-3 notches just to stay in caste better than switching to emancipation and running a few specialists? I'm not convinced - there's lots of sources of passive commerce - riverside tiles, gold/gems/furs/calendar resource, water tiles, and trade routes (which with the huge SE cities should be quite relevant), and although it's not your emphasis the building multipliers will be in place and that means the effect of passive commerce will not be insignificant.

By the time you'd have to switch, having to get a specific GP is probably a thing of the past - so I don't see why you can't just go emancipation and then use buildings to run the specialists. The hammers take a hit too but even so - 5+ emancipation anger isn't worth keeping for the benefits of caste IMO, even for SE.

^^Eventually you will have to switch and, like you said, it often doesn't hurt as bad as you think it will. In IU IX, however, I was running 9-10 scientists just in regular cities which made me want to hang on to CS a little longer.

Normally the bigger thing for me with CS is not the specialists, late game, but the hammers. It is not uncommon for me to flip to SP, Bureaucracy, and CS after razing my cap's towns for workshops. CS can easily be the difference of a turn to finish the SS engines. Alternatively, if I'm making a major military push, those hammers can be the difference between 2 units per three turns and 2/2 out of my promotion cities (settled generals + HE in one, IW + WP in the other, and possibly the cap + settled generals for a third).

I'd just switch to emancipation and run scientists plus merchants to get a max of 8 specialists. The extra gold can be converted into beakers anyway by bumping up the tech slider, and by that time my bigger cities have the lesser commerce buildings anyway for health/happiness, so you just need to add banks. You lose GP point purity, but I can live with that for getting rid of all those unhappy faces.

I also wouldn't farm over towns in captured cities. New cities lateish in the game will take too long to get enough GP points and with GP points out of the equation, there's no doubt towns are better for commerce.