As to escorting captives through non-friendly territory, perhaps their maintenance costs should double or triple to simulate bribes to foreign officials (to let them pass and look the other way) and otherwise using up more resources than a normal unit would.
Could be an interesting mechanic... would take some direct programming to handle that. When I consider the AI on that project I can take a look at this too.
Ok, so,
@ALL:
I've been thinking deeply on the subject of Slavery in general. Many of us are frustrated with the slave mechanic (but don't get me wrong, its way more advanced and improved over the old one!)
The frustration mainly amounts to the specialist assignment mechanism not playing well with a specialist type that has such a strong positive but also some rather powerful negatives. Seeing the positives in a stronger light than the negatives, the system is all too willing to automatically override the player's better judgement round after round, resetting previous specialist assignments to stock up on slaves that do produce a lot but also overwhelm the city in crime, disease, unhappiness and unhealth.
Ok, so there's some modders on the team with some good plans and ideas on what needs to be done to the specialist panel and the 'ai' from which the player cannot escape. Both of those things are probably important on a level beyond just resolving this issue and yes, they could create a solution to these frustrations.
But in our discussions, someone mentioned something that really struck me... slaves are pretty much a caste. A population of people don't just go into and out of slavery willy nilly. Once a slave, most of the time a slave spends the rest of his or her life that way. Once freed, they rarely ever return to slavery. Usually the situations that lead a person into slavery are fairly extreme in the first place. It is not very immerse into a slave mechanic to make the transition from citizen to slave and back so liquid in our cities.
Some have suggested limiting the amount of slaves to keep cities in line but the counter argument still stands pretty strong - cities of the Ancient and Classical ages had more slaves than free men, and Most citizens of the Medieval eras were Peasants which does not differ greatly from slavery. MOST human beings if you take stock of all history have been slaves. So drastically limiting them doesn't really fit a good model of Earth history.
Another problem we have currently is that when slavery is removed as a worldview, we get a LOT of collected slaves becoming 'Freed Slave' units that have no current ability to offer the nation outside of major support expense/ being upgradeable into worker units. They sadly end up being a big waste to the economy at the moment... offering regret to the one who would liberate them. Admittedly I assume that DH had some further work to do for them to give them more utility. Perhaps some of these ideas could help. Although I think its mostly the military captives that become the settled slaves that are then released to be these free slaves but perhaps some of these concepts can help nevertheless.
I have come up with some ideas that could provide us with a solution to all of this. A somewhat different approach. DH was saying he wanted to implement more slave types but as usual we're still up against the citizen panel limitations (for now.) And he's out for a bit and was wanting to hand this project off anyhow. So here's my proposed vision in mod steps:
- Remove the Slave assignable specialist type.
- Make upgradeable series of buildings that only captives (under slavery worldview) can auto-build.
- Design a number of slave types for the 'free specialist' section. These would include Mining Slaves, Farm Slaves, Plantation Slaves, Servant Slaves, Cleanup Slaves etc... Each has its own strengths but they all primarily share the same sort of penalties generically. Keep the balance points pretty similar to the way they are now. We also keep the generic settled slave for the military slaves to become. I think those are well balanced to their 'psuedo 1/3rd population' consideration.
- Each time one of the aforementioned buildings is built by a slave, a few things happen:
- The building adds one population to the city (one shot non-removable.)
- The building brings with it very minor benefits and penalties associated with the 'housing' of the slaves.
- The building immediately 'employs' the population it just added.
- The building gives a free slave of the above mentioned slave types.
- Then when Slavery is no longer a worldview, these buildings go obsolete, leaving the population they added free to be reassigned to other tasks.
- These buildings should have prereqs based on map vicinities and other buildings in the city. Some examples:
- Mining Slave Camp 1: Requires 1 Mine in the city radius.
- Mining Slave Camp 2: Requires Mining Slave Camp 1 and 2 Mines in the city radius.
- Mining Slave Camp 3: Requires Mining Slave Camp 2 and 3 Mines in the city radius.
- Obviously, the Farming Slave buildings and such of the like would follow similar patterns.
- City Cleanup Slave Compound 1: Would be available after the initial Slave Market - offers a slave that brings improvements to unhealth, disease, water pollution.
- Gladiator Slaves 1: Requires Arena or Fighting Pit - The slave from this offers new units an xp, the building itself perhaps offers access to a new Gladiator unit type that a Military Slave can be upgraded to if in this city. The slave brings +1 :Happy:.
- More ideas would be welcome as we could build some extensive building chains and slave types here.
The real benefits here is that slaves introduced into the city as slaves stay slaves until slavery is released. At which point they become the population they added and subsequently employed until the building went obsolete. This takes them out of the sphere of assignable specialist and into something a bit more meaningful. Also, we don't have a limit to the # of definable 'settled type specialists'. Our current coding I believe can account for all of this so it becomes purely xml with a touch of graphics and adding the new autobuild options to the captives.
Any opinions?
to -1
Maybe a tech unlocks more than that? I dunno...
), I keep capturing workers (ambushers are decent explorers
) deep behind enemy lines. This civ I will apparently never have Open Borders with and there doesn't look like there's any way of getting these workers home without it. I even have a Scout out there in the same predicament. Declaring war won't help as they are too far away to rescue safely. I will have to delete these units (have deleted a few already) if I do DoW or they will be captured back.
).
