Musings about Civ 4 Labor Tree

[Chris Stalis]

Ok, so, Civ 5 is on its way, and we're all excited (yes, even those of us who just lurk here...). But, truth be told, I'm still kinda stuck musing about Civ 4. From creation to final patch, it has been a wild ride of different events and a LOT of changes have been implemented with the 2 expansion packs. But the thing that I will remember the most about the game was the concept of civics. Doubly so because I jumped from Civ 2 to Civ 4, and the sheer randomness of change took me forever to get the hang of. I mean, the notion of being able to build something that was more or less my own unique government was brilliant, and the design decision to have the differences be parallel boosts rather than progressive boosts (+2 or +2 or +2 vs a choice of +1 , then +2 , then +3 , etc) really brought home the flexibility of the system. And while I'm sure Civ 5 is going to have some brilliant new system for modeling government (once the bugs are patched ), I still find myself musing on if there isn't some way to improve Civ 4 and make it just that little bit more awesome.

Disclaimer: I'm not actually proposing a mod/patch/real change at all, I'm just kinda musing and wondering if other people have had similar musings. This thread is intended for idle discussion until and unless someone gets the idea in their head all by themselves to take action on any of this.

So, the civic tree that really catches my attention and kinda begs me for a rethink is the Labor tree. See, simply put, the labor tree feels like it really only has 3 settings: Default Tribalism, Empire Building Slavery, and lastly Unhappiness Avoiding Emancipation. The moment I get Bronze Working, I start building every building in the game I mean, it lets me virtually double my hammer availability by turning into directly. Sure, there's some unhappiness, but what do you do if the people start whining? Whip 'em till your gold resources keep the survivors happy! Don't really ever need serfdom, because I can just whip out more workers to do the jobs I need done anyway (if I can't, I'm probably too far behind to win). And I don't ever really need Caste System because it's hard to feed those blasted artsy types indefinitely when I can just kill 'em and build some wonders instead. There's another thing: whipping on wonders, even at the extreme cost of lives, is what usually determines who gets the wonder and who doesn't. If I don't whip it, the AI probably will.

Now, I used to have similar complaints about the Economy tree back in Vanilla Civ. But with BTS, the strategy of managing corporations really took over the Economy, and helped diversify your options by several orders of magnitude. And that's what I've pondered on how to fix with labor once I realized how boring it was in the grand scheme of things. So, I kinda pondered the following...

When doesn't a civilization use slavery? Like, not just in the game, but think about the concept being emulated by the rules here. There were still slaves and serfs, and I'm pretty sure India's caste system was just a better codification of the slavery issue than the European "free market" slavery. And really, you never wanted to KILL your slaves when you had them... sure, some dying was part of the give and take of investing your money in being a slave owner, but by and large you tried to keep 'em alive because of that significant investment. So... why does whipping lead so directly to death in the game? Yeah, it's certainly a balancing act, but is it providing the best balance and latching onto the right concepts the game is trying to convey?

Personally, my readings of history indicated that slaves were a class of citizen, not unlike artists or doctors or blacksmiths. It was a bad class to be in, but it was just like those specialists you've got in the cities. So, would it be a terrible idea to move the slaves and make 'em a specialist? Consider the following description for this specialist's default (no labor mods) system:

1) Citizens assigned to be slaves produce 4 each turn.
2) Citizens assigned to be slaves do not return to the production field when unassigned from slavery. Instead, the citizen is unassigned, and the population of the city is decreased by 1 with each assignment.
3) Each citizen assigned to being a slave adds a 1.5% cumulative chance for sending the city into a slave riot each turn (so, 3 slaves would mean the city had a 4.5% chance to riot each turn)
4) Total number of citizens that can be assigned to slavery is [City Size]-1. If City Size decreases for any reason, slaves are the first citizens removed from the city.

Now we've got a give and take situation. You still need to keep feeding these people, so you don't want to go overboard with setting your population on them and you REALLY don't want to add enough that you're going into riots every 20 turns, but you're probably going to want at least 1 or 2 anyway... just to keep production up.

So, what would this do to the Labor tree? Well, it seems natural to me that labor would now work more directly with these newly enslaved citizens and adding a few tweaks to the specialists. In my own mind, the tech requirements for each option wouldn't change, but the effects would as follows:

Tribalism
No Change

Slavery
Slaves produce +3 , +1 , +1

Serfdom
Workers are built[/b] 50% faster
Workers cost no upkeep
Slaves produce an additional +4 , -3
Slave riots do not occur

Caste System
+1 of each specialist available in cities
Specialists produce +1
+1 from workshops

Emancipation
Slaves cannot be recruited
Slaves are automatically freed in all cities
+100% growth for Cottage, Hamlet, Village
penalty for Civs without Emancipation

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Now to justify each.

In Slavery, it would feel natural that you'd basically work these people into the ground. It's turning future useful people into cheap (food wise) labor. Unfortunately, being treated in this fashion leads to more unrest, so there's also an unhappy factor for each slave. Yes, they can be worth a lot of hammers, but now you have no convenient way for dumping all that unhappiness you're generating, which means you actually have to manage it. That's what keeps you from essentially getting all slave cities developed.

In Serfdom, it's still really easy to get workers to built up your empire. The change to the slave system is that now your basically using your slaves to feed your other people. Each slave you have lets you have another free citizen working on whatever, though this comes at the cost that the slaves offer almost not production value. Heck, letting slaves produce only might be better balanced, just to drive the difference home. Oh, and just to make sure that the workers don't destroy the economy, they offer no upkeep expense. Build what you need, then delete 'em when you change civics if they're actually dragging your economy down.

In Caste System, the +1 to each specialist refers to the cap. So, a fresh city would be able to have 1 hired engineer, or artist or whatever. They also provide +1 , because the idea is to offset the by-turn food cost of the people so you can have more of them than you otherwise would. A food city could probably support a lot of these guys. My rationale for getting rid of the "unlimited" clause is because... honestly? I've just never used it for that purpose. Yes, it has the obvious application of being able to control a great person pop, but I personally think it adds better flavor to make the great people a little more random. You can still rush the points, you just need to actually design the rush a bit more.

And in Emancipation, we now have the obvious removal of slaves. It's also the only way to get citizens assigned to be slaves back onto the field. If an emancipated Civ took over the city of a non-emancipated civ, than all those slaves would go free automatically. It would also probably be cool to provide a 10 turn +2 boost per slave freed, but I wonder if that would be viewed as an abuse if a Civ kept switching back and forth to keep that happiness constant. *shrugs* I dunno, and since I'm only posting this for discussion, I don't care all too much The other change I would make to Emancipation is to decrease the LEVEL of inflicted on Civs without Emancipation. Simply put, the penalty as is basically removes the value of any civic EXCEPT Emancipation in the end game, and that is royally boring (even if it is historically accurate). Maybe cut the rates in half or to 1/3 their current values, just to promote some choice for the players.

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So... that's the odd thought that's been knocking around my head for a month or three now, and I just kind wanted to share it with folks and ask if anyone else had thought up similar ideas that they would be interested in sharing. Or heck, just ask if these changes would seem kinda cool to actually toy with in the game while they wait for Civ 5 to release. *shrugs* Drop some comments, let me know what you've pondered too. I'd love to spark some discussion.

Thanks for reading

 

[GoodGame]

There was an Expanded Civics mod in development for a few years, but I forget the proponent of it.

I'm pretty happy with the default labor pool myself. And I have to say that Serfdom and Slavery are largely mutually exclusive in my mind. Yeah a serf system might hold a few slaves, but the slaves are largely people who are foreigners or some kind of criminal. If you want to get more productivity out of serfdom, I'd suggest a quest option to have an a nasty sheriff extract extra taxes from the peasants; or a transient War Tax option (a la EU3).

 

[Tholish]

The core of the idea is to have a Slave specialist instead of population hurrying, and then mess witht the values of that specialist in civics. Good idea. Would have any sort of population hurry? Maybe State Property? People flee the oppressive regime and or die in famines and gulags?

And Civ 4 is worth musing about. Still plenty of unrealized potential here. It has a long way to go.

 

[Chris Stalis]

The core of the idea is to have a Slave specialist instead of population hurrying, and then mess witht the values of that specialist in civics. Good idea. Would have any sort of population hurry? Maybe State Property? People flee the oppressive regime and or die in famines and gulags?

Personally, I don't think there should be a situation that radically removes population from cities. Perhaps variable food yields in order to slow the growth of cities, but not to remove population. It's an analysis based on the design principle that sane rulers do not sacrifice their population. Obviously, a game that purports to mimic the growth and advancement of an entire civilization needs to address the very glaring fact that civilizations have historically had slaves. And while the idea is not popular in the modern age, a reversion to such a mindset would not be out of the question, nor would the continuation of slavery into the modern day have been entirely impossible if it had been handled "in house" for the civilization. For, certainly, modern day slavery is still a legal issue that is pursued, so the idea has not been eliminated. It has merely fallen out of favor because it is correctly viewed as abhorrent.

So, yes, I say introduce it like you would artists or blacksmiths or other citizens of note in the world. Treat it no differently, but recognize that the assignment of labor is reflecting, for most of history, the systematic manipulation of the lowest of masses.

As to my desire not to see mass exoduses from cities, I see that as a strange design decision to implement. I split my time evenly between using the game's current slavery civic to strategically rush buildings and to remove the surplus population when I accidentally stop paying attention to a city's growth. I don't think a player should be rewarded in the second case, because that's just a sloppy play style. In a game about controlling the world, enforcing a population cap should be within the realm of expected player behavior. If a city is too unhappy with how many people are in it... then let the player have the option to exercise "brutal force" on the city, and just slay citizens outright. There would be a brief cost of increased unhappiness in the city, but the value of the action is now simply the city management instead of rewarding poor city planning.

Any other comments? As you can see, I'm verbose because I enjoy the subject

 

[XCodes]

I think you've got it pretty much nailed. After building a Library/Theater/Market and putting in a couple specialists you're not going to have much food left for growth unless your city has some really amazing food producing tiles or you farm everything, and that's the major downfall for the Caste System civic. Also, once cities are producing lots of hammers and not very much surplus food, Slavery becomes too costly for the investment. All that leaves is Emancipation, and if Emancipation is the only serious Labor option late game then it actually kinda defeats the purpose of the civic altogether.

If instead of Labor you used a more generic "How my civ treats the peons" name for it, then you could justify a lot of interesting alternatives to the current options.