Slavery vs Anarchy

Has anyone done the math on the benefits of the Slavery civic (whipping 1/turn units, controlling unhappy pop) vs the downsides of anarchy from changing civics?

I find that happiness is tough to control in the mid game when you're more focused on military units and expansion than building happiness providing buildings in your cities.

Slavery offers a solution in that you can whip units out of those unhappy citizens, but doesn't offer any other real benefits, so I'm wondering if it makes sense to switch to slavery for a few turns, and then switch back to [whatever], on a fairly regular basis (maybe 1/75 turns or so)?

Slavery is hard to be useful.

1. It comes too late
2. Aristocracy makes it so that you don't want to whip your farms ( los commerce)
3. Apprenticeship is often too valuable to give up ( the extra xp make a huge difference)

4. Granary and Smokehouse cost too much to help slavery most of the ime

Late response here, but there are a few reasons why slavery can be nice:

• Whipping is great immediately before blight hits (Armageddon Counter = 30). Blight's severity is based on city population, so whipping before blight hits means you get a much smaller blight hit. If you have lots of large cities that are close to the health cap when the AC hits the high 20s, it's a good deal to switch to slavery and whip out some free buildings. Obviously this is even better for spiritual civs.
• Slavery can be nice if you are conquering a lot of big cities and you're not popping their culture with disciple units. Just whip a couple times right after the city comes out of rebellion to get a couple of the basic buildings.
• Slavery is nice for slaves. This is especially true for the Balseraph, Doviello, and Mercurian civs, all of which have special uses for slaves (slave pens, Doviello slave upgrade path, and Lunatics that become Angels later, respectively). But free workers are nice for anyone.
• If most of your troops are not getting the XP bonuses (e.g. Luchuirp pumping golems), or if you have other sources for the easy 2 XP (command posts, Form of the Titan, Conquest, etc), then Apprenticeship becomes pretty easy to drop as a civic.

One of the major schools of thought for the Illians is to use slavery heavily, in conjunction with your ability to spam 5-food tiles thanks to Temples of the Hand (and appropriate civics / techs).


Personally I find giving up apprenticeship kind of painful, but as doktarr points out it's not nearly so bad if you can land the Titan.

In answer to the OP, its not really possible to do the math on slavery in ffh definitively, especially vs. anarchy. It needs to be done on a case by case basis.

But it really does depend. I know some players swear by it, others never use it. The real cost, though, isn't the anarchy (I'd say that doing a slavery revolt on its own is foolish, and its better to combine with CS/Aristocracy/FT or Religion, or even some later civics, or to simply wait for the end of a GA), its the other options you're giving up, as others here have said.