Leoreth Plays Congo

[Leoreth]

And there we go:

Spoiler :

This is actually the game I mentioned earlier. In the end I collected a good bit beyond 1000 gold from the slave trade, which is useful to fund 100% all the way through. So these goals also interconnect in fun ways.

Not much else to add. You are fairly safe from everyone after the Portuguese conquerors show up, which are also both an interesting wrinkle and source of randomness in this game. But then you are protected by the jungle to all sides.

In the end I thought that expanding to grab Namibia and South Africa for the Gems might have been worth it, but as you can see you can complete the third goal with the historical cities alone.

 

[Leoreth]

I'm probably completely OOTL here, but doesn't sub-Saharan civs also have the option of getting slaves from its own cities? The drafting-ish thing?

That used to be a mechanic, but I replaced it with the current system where you gain slaves by defeating native units. I think the system worked fine for a human player (balancing growth and happiness against the slaves you gain), but it was hard to make the AI use it correctly. It's an even more severe version of the slave trade AI issue I mentioned above: if you make the AI cautious about using it, you never see any slaves. If you make it proactive about using it, they will reduce their cities and drown in unhappiness for little comparative gain. It's hard to make the AI find the right balance or even define what the right balance would be.

There also were ethical/historical concerns, in the sense that literally sending your own population into slavery is still a level below enslaving outside populations. And in fact most African participants in the slave trade, in particular in West Africa, got their slaves by raiding their neighbours, not by selling their own population.

Lastly, I also think it's more fun. You get a reward for fighting natives, which is an otherwise tedious task you have to do anyway. And you can be proactive about it too, by trying to find units outside of your borders to capture.

 

[Bu77Trout]

Is the UHV for having the most votes in the Apostolic Palace referencing a specific historic event?

 

[Leoreth]

It is meant to generally reflect their conversion to Catholicism and emissaries to the Holy See.