Slaves and education

[JerryvonKramer]

Hi all, old-school Colonization player here, absolutely loving this mod which I discovered earlier this week. Everything CivCol should have been but more.

Just want to clear up something. In the Colopedia in-game, it talks about how slaves can be educated in schoolhouses, but with African Slaves and Native Slaves, this does not work.

Is this a feature that was turned off?

Is there any way for slaves of either sort to become other units? Thanks.

 

[Schmiddie]

Hm, where did you read that? African slaves and native slaves cannot be educated in schoolhouses and cannot step-up by learning by doing. Slaves are field workers - nothing else will make sense ingame.

 

[JerryvonKramer]

It says it right in the Colopedia. Something like "the only way out for them is education".

 

[Schmiddie]

Hm, I have tried to find such statement but could not find anything in this regard. The description of the slave says that they are excellent field worker - but nothing else.

Please provide the concrete Location. Thanks

 

[ConjurerDragon]

In the Colopedia unter Servants, Criminals and Slaves under the paragraph "African Slaves", the last sentence:

 

[Schmiddie]

thx

 

[HayRoss]

Though what I find if you have a great university and a few founding fathers with a boost to education, you CAN actually educate slaves at a non-laughable rate. I think I managed to get over 4 uhhh... Books? Papers? Education points, whatever they're called near late game

 

[Schmiddie]

That's interesting. I will check this in my next testgames.

 

[HayRoss]

It's extremely difficult to do, and is only really possible with a great university, a healthy city with a high rebel sentiment, and at at least another 75% education bonuses from other sources. Cheesy and impractical, but possible

 

[Sarin]

Yep. I did it in my game though, as I ran out of free colonists to train in military proffessions as I was closing to WoI.

 

[devolution]

In CIV4UnitInfos.xml, we see that UNIT_AFRICAN_SLAVE has the following set:

<YieldChange>
<YieldType>YIELD_EDUCATION</YieldType>
<iChange>-3</iChange>
</YieldChange>

This means that a slave will only produce education points (or rather yields) if the education institution provides it with at least 4 education per turn due to building upgrades or founding fathers.
So slaves are certainly not prevented from getting an education, they are just severly inefficient. I have to look in the code but I think they can flee as well. If this is the case it would make sense to make it so that a slave that is getting an education (and is thus upgraded to a free person) should have no incentive to flee!

 

[Schmiddie]

Yes, slaves CAN flee.

 

[clearbeard]

On the topic of slaves, while we're here, I found native slaves to be ultimately more annoying than they were worth. With their lower production values than African slaves and equal propensity for fleeing, leaving a pesky hole in my cities' production, I was tempted to just delete all the ones I got. That felt too much like eugenic culling though, so instead I eased their education penalty (-2 instead of -3) and gave them an extra food production (+1 to +2, to match the Africans) to make them worth having. Still ended up with large stacks of them hanging out idle in cities and training in my great universities, of course, but I found that to be a good balance.

 

[devolution]

The goods news is that in RaR 2.7, the AI has been taught that it can travel to Africa to sell goods and\or buy cheap labour in the form of slaves.
In my test runs the AI was so aggressive at bringing over slaves that we had to nerf them a bit and make them more expensive , otherwise the AI simply exploded in population.
It should be mentioned that the AI has a cheat that prevents slaves from ever escaping. We're considering to remove this advantage though.