GenericKen
Not at all suspicious
- Joined
- Sep 2, 2005
- Messages
- 202
Most people dismiss slavery as the junk, emergency civic that people pick up alongside hereditary rule for the heck of it. I've been doing some math, however, and I've found slavery as a repeatable source of hammers to be viable, but ONLY on the quick gamespeed.
The quick gamespeed does several things for Slavery:
-Units cost 2/3 less (rounded down)
-City growth costs 2/3 less (rounded down)
-Unhappiness only lasts 6 turns
-Each population point still gives you 30 hammers regardless of gamespeed.
Ordinarily cities require 20+2*pop to grow. On blazing speed, the food requirements come out to:
1 - 14
2 - 16
3 - 17
4 - 18
And having a granary obviously cuts that in half. Thus, you can turn 7 food into 30 hammers, which isn't a bad deal.
On a 1-2 population cycle, a city can whip every two turns, maintaining 3 extra unhappiness, off of two unimproved floodplains or one irrigated floodplains and a random 1 food space.
Pop 2, 0 food stored, get 4 food, 1 hammer into production
Pop 2, 4 food stored, whip to pop 1, get 3 food, grow next turn
32 shields can buy you a lot on quick speed. Swordsmen/horse archers cost 33, pikemen/crosswbowmen/elephants cost 40. Archers/spearmen/axemen/etc cost less and can help you build up hammer overflow if needed.
Now, it's worth noting that even on quick speed, slavery is not an end-all powerhouse. It requires a lot of set up, requiring an anarchy, a granary, and probably a barracks to get going, meaning you likely won't see units for some time after founding the city (15 turns?). 16 hammers/turn isn't unheard of in the early-mid game through general hills builds which don't forfeit the city's growth and the commerce it brings.
However, a key difference is in worker turns, in that the slave city doesn't require any, nor does it require hills to be productive, nor does it require a cultural expansion for better tiles or better tiles at all. It can easily expand into a larger city later if the better tiles are there (the unhappiness only lasts 6 turns), and it's not a tremendous loss if it somehow gets autorazed (rather than captured with a full set of mines and bad culture shutting down your roads).
I would not advise making a slave-city with Fish or Crabs, as that would require researching fishing AND building a work boat on top of the granary, anarchy, and rax. However, if you have a Fish city with no hills whatsoever in the radius, then the whip is likely your only option for getting infrastructure into place (do NOT forget to granary before everything else). Remember that most of your food surplus comes from the bonus resources and that everything else just feeds itself and makes it harder to grow, so don't be afraid to whip down to 1.
I do need to do more testing, however. I confirmed that the whip does add 30 shields, and that production bonuses (say, from being agressive and building a baracks) don't factor into rush math. However, I think there may be some odd legal-whip-check math. A granary costs 40 hammers on quick, but during my last testing session, even when the stored hammers got to 10, I couldn't whip until the city hit pop 4 and beat two people out of the city, at which point the granary went from 18/40 to 78/40, and the carryover of 38 went over just fine. I'd like some other people to play around with the math on the faster gamespeeds, to confirm whether or not this is a bug.
It's worth noting that under normal circumstances, slavery still isn't a terrible civic. You can build up large amounts of unhappy population and whip them away two turns after you discover a new building tech. It's the closest thing to a prebuild you'll see in civ 4. There's pretty much no chance in hell of you whip-rushing a wonder, but "prebuilding" is still handy for things like forges & libraries.
The quick gamespeed does several things for Slavery:
-Units cost 2/3 less (rounded down)
-City growth costs 2/3 less (rounded down)
-Unhappiness only lasts 6 turns
-Each population point still gives you 30 hammers regardless of gamespeed.
Ordinarily cities require 20+2*pop to grow. On blazing speed, the food requirements come out to:
1 - 14
2 - 16
3 - 17
4 - 18
And having a granary obviously cuts that in half. Thus, you can turn 7 food into 30 hammers, which isn't a bad deal.
On a 1-2 population cycle, a city can whip every two turns, maintaining 3 extra unhappiness, off of two unimproved floodplains or one irrigated floodplains and a random 1 food space.
Pop 2, 0 food stored, get 4 food, 1 hammer into production
Pop 2, 4 food stored, whip to pop 1, get 3 food, grow next turn
32 shields can buy you a lot on quick speed. Swordsmen/horse archers cost 33, pikemen/crosswbowmen/elephants cost 40. Archers/spearmen/axemen/etc cost less and can help you build up hammer overflow if needed.
Now, it's worth noting that even on quick speed, slavery is not an end-all powerhouse. It requires a lot of set up, requiring an anarchy, a granary, and probably a barracks to get going, meaning you likely won't see units for some time after founding the city (15 turns?). 16 hammers/turn isn't unheard of in the early-mid game through general hills builds which don't forfeit the city's growth and the commerce it brings.
However, a key difference is in worker turns, in that the slave city doesn't require any, nor does it require hills to be productive, nor does it require a cultural expansion for better tiles or better tiles at all. It can easily expand into a larger city later if the better tiles are there (the unhappiness only lasts 6 turns), and it's not a tremendous loss if it somehow gets autorazed (rather than captured with a full set of mines and bad culture shutting down your roads).
I would not advise making a slave-city with Fish or Crabs, as that would require researching fishing AND building a work boat on top of the granary, anarchy, and rax. However, if you have a Fish city with no hills whatsoever in the radius, then the whip is likely your only option for getting infrastructure into place (do NOT forget to granary before everything else). Remember that most of your food surplus comes from the bonus resources and that everything else just feeds itself and makes it harder to grow, so don't be afraid to whip down to 1.
I do need to do more testing, however. I confirmed that the whip does add 30 shields, and that production bonuses (say, from being agressive and building a baracks) don't factor into rush math. However, I think there may be some odd legal-whip-check math. A granary costs 40 hammers on quick, but during my last testing session, even when the stored hammers got to 10, I couldn't whip until the city hit pop 4 and beat two people out of the city, at which point the granary went from 18/40 to 78/40, and the carryover of 38 went over just fine. I'd like some other people to play around with the math on the faster gamespeeds, to confirm whether or not this is a bug.
It's worth noting that under normal circumstances, slavery still isn't a terrible civic. You can build up large amounts of unhappy population and whip them away two turns after you discover a new building tech. It's the closest thing to a prebuild you'll see in civ 4. There's pretty much no chance in hell of you whip-rushing a wonder, but "prebuilding" is still handy for things like forges & libraries.
