[BTS] Slave revolts: what do you do?

6K Man

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(Besides "turn off events")

Maybe this has been gone over before in this forum, but it seems to me that the best solution to slave revolts is to ignore them (usually).

The description of the event is as follows:

Event12:
Slave Revolt
Prereq: Slavery Civic AND city with population 4 or more AND WRITING or MONOTHEISM or PRIESTHOOD or IRON_WORKING
Obsolete: None
Active/Weight: 80/500
Result:
1.+1 angry face (like whipped) AND -2 population AND 1 turn revolt AND will trigger 3 next turn
2.you pay 10 gold AND -1 population AND 1 turn revolt AND will trigger 3 next turn
3.1 turn revolt AND 40% chance to trigger 3 next turn

However, it seems options 1 and 2 do not trigger 3 ( see https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/random-events-list.236727/page-11#post-7978769). So your options are

1 turn revolt, lose 2 pop
1 turn revolt, lose 1 pop and 10 gold
1 turn revolt, and 40% chance of a second turn, 16% chance of a third turn, 6.4% chance of a 4th turn, 2.6% chance of a 5th turn, ~1% chance of a 6th turn.

So as I see it - if you get a slave revolt and you were going to pop-rush whatever you were building anyway, you're better off waiting it out. For most cities, it will take more than 3-4 turns for a pop point to regrow.

The exceptional cases would be:
- where you urgently need whatever is being built in the city but don't have enough population to whip it, yet. In that case, you might pay the 10g.

- where the city is a production powerhouse. If it's cranking out 30+ base hammers, a turn of production loss isn't that different from what you get from whipping a pop point. Even so, there's only a 40% chance of the extra turn (or more) of unrest. So even here, I would hesitate to sacrifice population.

- a city with a ton of food (multiple fish/corn, for example) might regrow fast enough to make option 2 viable.


But if I'm running slavery in the late classical period and have 10-15 cities up, I'll always wait things out. It's not worth sacrificing a pop point to avoid a possible 2-3 turns of revolt.

Thoughts?
 
Last edited:
Take the hit or switch out of slavery. This is reason many have events switched off. Along with barb uprising.

It will just keep revolting till you take 2 pop hit. Which can kill the city size.
 
The other point (which I neglected to mention) is that you're losing GPP production and commerce during the revolt as well. So in your capital or GP farm, the argument to burn a pop point to get it over with is stronger.
 
Burning 1 pop does not always work. If you do nothing you can lose buildings? Not great.
 
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