Serfdom

C

Culture Bomb

Warlord
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Feb 3, 2010
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When (if ever) is it worth using the Serfdom civic?

Slavery for whipping, Caste System for specialists and generating GP, Emancipation when you have to...

The one time Serfdom might be useful is very early when you want to improve food & resource tiles as quickly as possible, but by the time it becomes available, most of the tiles should already be improved. Even then, if you wanted to improve tiles quicker it might be better to build/whip more workers.

I guess the one time I might use it is if I want to build railroads quickly between my cities, but even then I'm not sure if it's worth the lost turns of anarchy unless I'm playing a Spi leader.

Any other civics that are rarely if ever used? (I never use Environmentalism, but maybe that's because it comes so late.)
 
Its occasionally worth it for Spiritual leaders when you intend to do a lot of land remodelling, apart from that its only worth it on advanced era starts.
All other civics have a time and a place, even if you personally avoid certain ones.
Personally, i'm no fan of Theocracy without Spiritual, I almost never touch Vassalage, and avoid Emancipation like the plague :p
 
I've heard it is useful on Marathon speed, but I don't play that speed.

It is very useful and advantageous to switch to it immediately on later era starts since it is available. You can quickly chop out several workers and improved your land very quickly before switching to slavery or caste.
 
It can also be pretty useful around the time when you discover Civil Service and just want to chain irrigate everything.
 
Culture Bomb said:
When (if ever) is it worth using the Serfdom civic?
Click to expand...

If you're Spiritual or in a Golden Age, and just acquired a tranche of territory; and you're not one of these whip-all-game types, and your cities are big enough a whipping takes forever to regrow.
 
^^^Spiritual maybe, but during a Golden Age I'm gonna want to be running Caste.

Serfdom is generally considered a very weak Civic except in isolated situations.
 
if i'm playing spiritual, and i'm going to be using slavery whips, i like to bounce in and out of serfdom because of the cheaper upkeep. that's about it. it doesn't make much sense to swap between caste and serfdom, because are probably relying on the extra specialist slots for research.
 
I can't remember the last time I used serfdom.
 
Even as Spiritual I rarely have much use for Serfdom with Ancient starts as I'd have enough workers by the time it becomes available so assigning multiple workers to complete irrigation chains wouldn't be a problem (in most games I'd have CS earlier than Feudalism anyway). Late game starts are another matter. Interestingly the AI won't have too much use for it so you can really shine (especially if you managed to "acquire" some free workers :)) I don't have too much experience with Marathon but Lymond's comment sounds very viable.
 
There's not a lot of things that I can say "I've never built that" or "I've never done that" but Serfdom is one of those things. It just never occurred to me--not even as a Spiritual leader--to use it. I don't even have the slightest idea which tech enables it.
 
Oh come on, doesn't everyone play as Gandhi for the fast workers then prioritize the The Hagia Sophia and switch into serfdom to form the ultimate worker machine? ;)

Yeah right. As far as I'm concerned they might as well take it out the game. I've NEVER once that I can remember run serfdom. Maybe when I was a complete noob and knew nothing.
 
Yeah, I was just thinking the other day there might be something wrong with me since I never, ever used it. Good to know I'm not alone. Caste System is just way more useful.
 
There would be a drawing card in it for getting the workshops up, esp. over jungle, without having to build additional workers— but for the fact that slavery can capitalize on earlier worker builds for overflow, and caste system is baseline for early workshops' output!

Marathon workers spend more than 90% of their time improving tiles, but I agree it's a terrible switch without spiritual. Not even golden age civic zigzags can use it, because you should be running caste at all times during these turns. A game where you can't get so much more mileage out of slavery OR caste, and opt for the lower maintenance of serfdom, is a rare game.
 
I've had a couple games where I thought in hindsight that I should have used Serfdom briefly during the game; always games where early rushes gave me juicy wonders (TGW, GLH, Stonehenge...), lots of empty land, and such a dominant position that I was just REXing for a long time afterwards before I was ready to wrap the game up with some later-game techs.

I look back on those games and how many workers I needed and get the sense that it might really have sped up my REX more to have Serfdom than having the Slavery I chose to rely on; haven't ever actually crunched the numbers so my instinct could be wrong about that.
 
I've used Serfdom with SPI, when switching from farms to workshops and watermills everywhere for SP :)
During that period whipping would usually be bad, it's not always useful but if most cities are just growing so they can use max. workshops soon...no harm done with Serfdom.
 
Emancipation is great for a Financial civ running lots of cottage cities as it works really well with Free Speech, although it does need Great Lib/Oxford in a dedicated GP Farm for Great Scientists.

I also use Vassalage with OR and forego Bureau/Theocracy if I can expand enough early on. Don't often hear it mentioned though, does anybody else use it?
 
If you forego Bronze Working in favor of beelining Feudalism, then serfdom is your first labor civic. Works well in that role, as you'll be trying to improve as many tiles as you can early on. Getting Feudalism first also means that you don't need Code of Laws for Civil Service, so you can bypass that too early on. If that's your tech path, Serfdom could be your only labor civic for quite awhile.
 
Brennus.Quigley said:
If you forego Bronze Working in favor of beelining Feudalism
Click to expand...

Ok, but I'm kind of confused about why you'd do this when bronze working is one of the best early techs because of chopping, even if you don't want to use slavery.

Please explain...
 
lymond said:
^^^Spiritual maybe, but during a Golden Age I'm gonna want to be running Caste.
Click to expand...

During yes, but I meant more on the last turn of one, I might select Serfdom, especially if I anticipate another GA coming up to let me switch back once I've got my improvements out.
 
During Golden Ages (or if being Spiritual) it is certainly a valid tactic to continuously switch back and fourth between Slavery and Serfdom.

With a little more micro management, this should allow you to reap about 80% of the benefits of the Slavery civic and 50% of the benefits of the Serfdom civic. Obviously there will be times during the Serfdom civic where it would had been optimal if you could whip, but in certain eras of the game (e.g. pre corporations and to some extend pre-Hagia Sofia) the synergy of this tactic will be higher than staying with Slavery all the time.
 
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