Do people mostly run Emancipation in the late game?

[dankok8]

Assuming you're going for Space and it's a long game, do you usually end up in Emancipation?

I've been trying to not switch to it in the last few games and with lots of happiness resis plus HR I can certainly handle up to +8 unhappiness from citizens wanting Emancipation and still grow cities very large the late game. However I find the benefits of Slavery and Caste to really wear off in the late game. Slavery simply becomes inefficient after cities become large and take long to regrow and by this point there are full yielding Workshops plus Factories and Power Plants to make cities into conventional production monsters. Also by the late game I've typically popped a lot of GP's already so the next ones are slow to come and even when they do their benefits are rapidly diminishing. Working mature towns is usually much better than specialists. It's not like Emancipation is good but the alternatives often aren't great enough to swallow up to +8 unhappy faces.

Thoughts?

 

[Qactus]

Whenever I can afford to not run Emancipation on my way to space, I really want Caste System for the hammer bonus to all my State Property workshops.
I don't usually play Corps, but I think if you go down that route you'd want Caste as well, with the specialist slots offering a way to put all the corp food to good use.

 

[lymond]

I avoid it like the plague. Most games I don't play too late, but even going for Space I try to avoid it if I can. Emanci is a complete waste of a civic for most of my setups. Sometimes you can't avoid it, but if I've killed or vassaled most everybody it's not too much of an issue. I try to steer my vassals from Demo, or bribe them to switch back to Caste, which is much easier to do than a non-vassal.

I mostly stick to Caste late game to boost my SP workshops, which the bulk of my empire will have. Hammer economy is very stronk late game.

Bulbing may diminish, but GMs are always valuable late as well as as many golden ages as one can muster.

edit: and I'm likely running Rep too

 

[krikav]

Emancipation is almost always completely useless, but in a very cottagespammed empire it can add some nice benefits really.
I did a throughout calculation/analysis here:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ctoria-of-england.655742/page-5#post-15694778

tldr:
Wow, emancipation seems to add almost 50 beaker per turn in a cottagespammed 10 city empire. Nothing extraordinary but not something to completely ignore either.

Sometimes you have farms everywhere and have gotten biology and gotten Kremlin, and then it can make sense to be in slavery still.
But most common is that you have a huge amount of workshops all around, and that +1 hammer on workshops from caste is all the reason you need to stay there.
Castes utility to run merchants/scientists paired with rep also never goes out of style.

But yeah, sometimes the land allows for really large cities, and the unhappines really becomes too hard to work around that you just have to go emancipation for that reason too.

 

[AcaMetis]

Barring massive, rapidly teching cottage empires, like that Victoria game, Emancipation is the civic of annoying everyone else on the board. Except AIs don't really care about unhappiness, and all of them are hardwired to love Emancipation as much as Lincoln anyway, so in practice it's just the civic of annoying the player.

 

[6K Man]

I run Emancipation because I have to, not because I want to. The Caste boost to workshops is just too good to pass up, until you start getting 8+ from lack of Emancipation.

I guess Emancipation could pay off in a cottage heavy nation, but most of the time, I switch from Cottages to Watermills in the late game.

 

[drewisfat]

I run caste system until the UN tells me I can't.
And then I... consider it.

 

[SnipedSoul]

Caste is almost always better, but I have messed around with emancipation and full rush-buy economy with cottages/windmills everywhere and it works surprisingly well. The tech rate is insane and you can instantly switch to max production (gold) to make units appear anywhere if needed.

 

[Orion Pax]

It stinks when civics’ main benefits are time-specific, and come later than ideal. Like Emancipation and Serfdom mainly. Only part of Slavery & Caste’s efficacy goes down over time but that seems more well-designed - larger cities and better tiles (Slavery), longer wait times for GPs (Caste).

Emancipation should have some other actual positive than faster cottage growth. My personal take has been that it should just be no upkeep. At least then there would be some more universal benefit for some diversity? And it’s more an event anyhow, not even a structure that needs to be upkept like the rest.

 

[Lexicus]

Assuming you're going for Space and it's a long game, do you usually end up in Emancipation?

I've been trying to not switch to it in the last few games and with lots of happiness resis plus HR I can certainly handle up to +8 unhappiness from citizens wanting Emancipation and still grow cities very large the late game. However I find the benefits of Slavery and Caste to really wear off in the late game. Slavery simply becomes inefficient after cities become large and take long to regrow and by this point there are full yielding Workshops plus Factories and Power Plants to make cities into conventional production monsters. Also by the late game I've typically popped a lot of GP's already so the next ones are slow to come and even when they do their benefits are rapidly diminishing. Working mature towns is usually much better than specialists. It's not like Emancipation is good but the alternatives often aren't great enough to swallow up to +8 unhappy faces.



Thoughts?

I agree, in the very lategame Slavery becomes primarily useful for things like rushing infrastructure in recently-conquered cities, and switching can be helpful usually not because of the happiness from other civs having emancipation, but because it immediately removes all the unhappiness you've accumulated from whips.

That said I usually do stay in Slavery to the end.

 

[Fish Man]

It stinks when civics’ main benefits are time-specific, and come later than ideal. Like Emancipation and Serfdom mainly. Only part of Slavery & Caste’s efficacy goes down over time but that seems more well-designed - larger cities and better tiles (Slavery), longer wait times for GPs (Caste).

Emancipation should have some other actual positive than faster cottage growth. My personal take has been that it should just be no upkeep. At least then there would be some more universal benefit for some diversity? And it’s more an event anyhow, not even a structure that needs to be upkept like the rest.

How about this - for every extra happy face in a city you get +5% or +10% hammers, or something like that? Or, like, +2 or 3 hammers per specialist, kinda like the other side of rep? It would thematically fit because one of the tenets of modern-day liberal democratic society is people work better of their own volition and creativity and when they're content in their own specialized labor, not at the end of the whip (though in practice...coercion is still omnipresent in capitalism). And also it would give it some sort of production bonus, to compare with the other actually good labor civics which are top-tier in large part because of that.

 

[AcaMetis]

Honestly I'd axe Emancipation entirely, it's too much of a ball and chain to the game's mechanics to be made functional with a simple rebalance. Also, giving a bonus per happy face would make running the culture slider extremely ridiculous. Just imagine Globe and Ironworks in the same city while running 100% culture slider.

 

[Fish Man]

Honestly I'd axe Emancipation entirely, it's too much of a ball and chain to the game's mechanics to be made functional with a simple rebalance. Also, giving a bonus per happy face would make running the culture slider extremely ridiculous. Just imagine Globe and Ironworks in the same city while running 100% culture slider.

Nah, it won't be that powerful. If the bonus is 5%, Globe + say 20 happy faces + 10 more from theater is still just +150% hammers. Seems wild, right? Well, turning on the culture slider makes you unable to tech, bank money, or accumulate spy points. Without it, Globe giving +20 happy is +100% hammers and basically another Ironworks, which really isn't that big of a deal, especially considering how % bonuses are additive. Finally, not every city can have Globe. By the endgame, most cities may have just a handful of extra happiness, especially with motherland anger. So if 4-5 extra happy faces per city, on average (and that's generous), you'll get 20-25% at most, which is about on par with the caste bonus. Also the game could just cap it at, say, 25-30% or around that value.

And if we axe emancipation...we can't have a neat 5 civics for every one of the 5 categories .

 

[Lexicus]

Actually I think changing Emancipation to something like Social Democracy, and giving a production bonus for happiness, would not be a bad idea at all.

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

Honestly I'd axe Emancipation entirely, it's too much of a ball and chain to the game's mechanics to be made functional with a simple rebalance. Also, giving a bonus per happy face would make running the culture slider extremely ridiculous. Just imagine Globe and Ironworks in the same city while running 100% culture slider.

Allow tribalism to negate emancipation anger. Small backwards players that will never be able to finish the democracy technology should not be automatically hosed out of the game. Players with little chance of winning should nevertheless be incentivised to stay properly instead of throwing and ruining. Allow everyone to continue to participate and have fun.

Emancipation seems weak only because it is locked until very late.

 

[Orion Pax]

Actually I think changing Emancipation to something like Social Democracy, and giving a production bonus for happiness, would not be a bad idea at all.

Totally. I’ve thought the same - something that builds on Emancipation could approximate that? Like bonuses that come with certain techs if running Emancipation, to model the better health or happiness or productivity or whichever. That’d track with Social Democracy building on the emancipation of serfs/slaves that came before it.