[BTS] General questions about slavery

[Phoenix Master]

I've read the article Vocum Sineratio: The Whip and had trouble understanding it. Can someone please explain to me if you need slavery to beat the game on noble difficulty and, if so, what the best way to go about it would be in simple terms?

 

[Thrasybulos]

No, you don't need slavery to beat the game on Noble.
You don't even need it to beat it on Emperor (I should know, I rarely use it myself)!

Slavery is a powerful tool in the human hand, as are all rule breakers, but unless you're playing at the highest difficulty or a particular hard map with a narrow path to victory, no tool is mandatory. Of course, the more tools you ignore, the harder you're making it on yourself.

As for your other questions, it might be better if you were a little more precise, because as such it reads as: "I've read an article about Slavery. I didn't understand it, could you please write another, simpler, article for me?"

 

[a pen-dragon]

In my experience it is possible to comfortably win most games up to Immortal difficulty without using slavery.

As for using Slavery, basically what it does is convert food into production. The amount of production generated is constant (30/pop), while the amount of food needed to grow increases with population (at normal speed 20+2*pop). Thus it is more efficient to whip at smaller city size. So at a small size roughly 1=1. This changes dramatically with a granary, since that building almost halves the amount of food needed to grow (reality is more compilcated, but this is a good approximation), meaning 1 = 2 .

Now whipping comes with a downside, namely that each time you whip a city that city gets an additional unhappy citizen for 10 turns. Note that this stacks with already present whipping unhappiness, there is a counter for all whipping unhappiness in each city, and to that counter 10 turns get added. Every ten turns the unhappiness decays by one. This means that if you whip frequently the unhappiness lasts longer. Also this is independent of how much population is being whipped, whipping one popultaion will result in as much unhappiness as whipping away three popultaion. Thus it is frequently better to try to whip away some popultaion at one time, than to whip it multiple times.

Summary:

1. Use a mod that improves UI to show the real whipping unhappiness, e.g. BUFFY (or anything that includes BUG)
2. Slavery converts food into production with approximatly 1 = 2 with a granary.
3. If you plan to whip a city frequently, make sure you get a granary
4. Try to whip away 2-3 population in one whip.
5. try to keep your city at (population you want to whip in one whip)*2 population

Edit: fixed food, hammers

 

[AcaMetis]

One additional note that makes slavery a very powerful civic is the concept of production overflow. When you whip away population you always whip away as many as you need to finish a build, with whatever amount is excess becoming overflow for the next build. So, say you want build an army of 35 Axes, and you've got 4 invested into an Axe. One pop would only put it at 34/35, which isn't enough to finish the build (even though it technically is given the city tile alone always produces 1, but whipping only looks at the current state of the production bar and ignores everything else). So you need to two-pop whip the axe, putting the build at 64/35. Let's say that city produces 2 from tile yields, so next turn you've got an Axeman and 31 overflow. Sink the overflow and the city's 2 into a new axe, and you've got a new Axeman at 33/35 the turn after you just pumped one out of that city, and a second Axeman the turn after.

Remember that, with a Granary, a wet corn has the effective production yield of about three plains hill mines, and you can probably see how slavery lets you pump out an army in record time.

Of course that isn't the only application of production overflow. Another option is to put that production overflow into a wonder in order to generate a fair bit of failgold, or just give it a quick injection of hammers. Directly whipping wonders is penalized, you don't get as many hammers per pop as you do whipping a unit or regular building, but whipping a unit or regular building and putting overflow into a wonder is perfectly fair game.

 

[sampsa]

I'm sure you CAN beat the game without slavery, but not sure why you'd want to do that. In general you want to do things that make the game easier.

In addition to the mentioned things - slavery saves a ton of worker turns, as you don't really need mines.

 

[Fippy]

No slavery games are fun cos so much changes

 

[Gumbolt]

I think no slavery moves you toward communisim and workshops. Whipping an army would be impossible. You can chop out an army. Not being able to whip granaries will slow down city growth. Early HA/pult attacks or axe rushes would be much harder.

Not convinced it would work well on emperor/immortal.

 

[Tecumseh1]

Some generally tips:
- Usually avoid whipping away good tiles. Stuff like good food resources, pastures, river cottages etc
- Whip more if you have a high happy cap
- whipping away average tiles like 3 food farms and non river cottages and growing back is usually better than working mines
- whipping at smaller city sizes is better because the city grows back sooner (requires less food to grow back)
- early game before granaries you really only want to whip critical stuff like settlers, workers and occasional military unit in an emergency like barbs.
- Limit whipping when you’re in a research/teching phase of the game. It’s better to grow and work scientists than whip useless buildings or units.
- during war buildup don’t be afraid to whip a lot. You can often whip 2 or even 3 turns in a row just before declaring war. At this point you’re okay with giving up short term commerce since units win wars and wars win gold and land.

 

[SittinDown]

Can say that Prince is beatable without whipping. Cottages, farms and mines, with wonder spamming are enough to get a cultural victory. You need to expand decently early though, if you're not going to fight. You can't do it with 3 or 4 cities. You need at least 5-6 cities before the map is closed up. If you don't expand, someone will get too big and attack you eventually.

(I used to play that way before I joined the forums and learned how deep this game actually is).

 

[antimony]

The way that food is converted to production at an advantageous ratio with the granary is one reason slavery is very powerful as a civic, another one is that you can "store" production as surplus population and then, if you unlock a new military unit via technology, rapidly produce those units with a few rounds of whipping.

Before you have the late game production tools (workshops with state property, factories/etc.), there would be one other way to rapidly produce an army from a new tech, and that is to slowly produce some older units that can be upgraded to the newer ones with gold when you unlock the better unit (e.g. horse archers into cuirassiers, catapults into cannons). The price is very steep though (gold price for upgrade: 3x difference in production, +20gold, so the upgrades mentioned before are 170 gold per unit). Great merchants can help for that, one reason a Philosophical leader is very good for a non-slavery challenge.

 

[a pen-dragon]

Not convinced it would work well on emperor/immortal.

Back when I was playing on Immortal my preffered strategy was a sword-rush, followed by going space. I still won most (maybe 80%) of my games, although at that time I was playing Willem almost exclusively. I only started using slavery when I wanted to beat Deity.

And, speaking from experience, even then a Workshop-econ is not necessary.