starvation abuse

[jpowers]

I am schocked at the number of strategy guides that recommend starving your people (or newly conquered people of another cultural origin). In reality, if a regime practiced this, it would be internationally shunned and its people would be very likely to revolt (see China, 2000 BC to present). Shouldn't there be heavy happiness and diplomatic penalties (as well as negative cultural points) for a leader who allows his people to starve?

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

Civ3 sucks! Period!


Really, are you surpirsed? the Game is extremely flawed, because many fine concepts, such as culture flips, are actually implemented in such a poor way! Amongst them: reputation!

 

[Lt. 'Killer' M.]

to clarify: I love the game, but some things are rather tedious!

 

[The Last Conformist]

Actually, starving their own people has rarely cost rulers anything more than lost tax revenue and the odd peasants' revolt. But I agree that starving foreign nationals should have a negative effect on your reputation.

But the really freaky thing is that starvation doesn't cause unhappiness in the city were it occurs ...

 

[Catt]

Originally posted by The Last Conformist
But the really freaky thing is that starvation doesn't cause unhappiness in the city were it occurs ...

But it does prevent WLTKD, even if the city is inhabited entirely by happy citizens.

 

[Graeme the mad]

Starvation in civ doesn't occur in the same way it does in real life. The citizens just die but in the real world the citizens will all (or mostly all) be suffering

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by jpowers
I am schocked at the number of strategy guides that recommend starving your people (or newly conquered people of another cultural origin).

I'm shocked to read this thread. What do you call it when people turn a city of size 30 to a size 5 by bombardment? "Bombardment abuse"? Between the two evils, I think starvation is not so bad. With starvation, only 1 citizen is lost per turn. With bombardment, dozen of citizens are killed each turn. Moreover, starving people do have a chance to say good bye to their families and friends. With bombardment, people died unexpectedly in a awful way.

Either ways, any kind of war is no good. Let's give peace a chance.

 

[jpowers]

Moonsinger, you don't bombard your own cities. When you attack another civilization's city, you are at war with them. When you let your own people starve, you are committing the most heinous crime a leader can commit against his/her own people. When Stalin allowed millions of Soviets to die in famine, every leader in the world without a Soviet gun to their head shunned him.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by jpowers
Moonsinger, you don't bombard your own cities. When you attack another civilization's city, you are at war with them. When you let your own people starve, you are committing the most heinous crime a leader can commit against his/her own people. When Stalin allowed millions of Soviets to die in famine, every leader in the world without a Soviet gun to their head shunned him.

No, you mis-understand my post. I am talking about taking over enemy city and make sure it doesn't do a culture flip. There are at least two ways to do it:

1. Bombard to reduce the city size first before you take over.

2. Take over first then starve them to death to reduce the city size.

There you see....you smoke too much and couldn't read my post clearly.

 

[GI Josh]

. . . plenty of civs have starved/attacked their own populations. Stalin starved over 5 million Ukranians to death to collectivize the farms - yet he continued to be lionized by socialist and communist movements worldwide, particularly in Europe. Saddam has killed hundreds of thousands of Shiites and Kurds in Iraq to maintain his control, even using chemical weapons, and yet most of the Arab world (including the countries he invaded and looted) publicly complain about sanctions designed to slow-down his rearmament, while France has a subrosa diplomatic offensive to end the sanctions so that French companies can increase sales. My point is not to start a political debate, but to show that it is certainly *not* stupid of Firaxis to have a game where certain situations, such as conquest of city that doesn't want to be conquered (i.e. has a higher cultural value), starvation/oppression of the civilian population is a strategy to control it.

Where your criticism does have some real merit, Lt., is the scoring system. The score only reflects domination and does not reward alternate victory/development decisions. There should also be other victory routes - economic domination, etc. Reputation should factor into score, and any starvation, whether of your own citizens or of a newly conquered city, should have a negative score impact. But overall, the game dynamic is not ahistorical and not stupid. Don't confuse the relatively recent (and still quite selective) modern obsession with "human rights" with a persistent, historical dynamic in international relations.

Also, note that starvation only makes sense where you're on a "rolling" invasion. If you have limited objectives - say 1-2 cities - it makes more sense to heavily garrison the city and keep the population. Significant starvation is only important where you can't afford to strongly garrison the city - much the same dynamic as the Ukraine, Iraq, etc.

 

[jpowers]

At least protracted warfare garners the ire of your opponent and their allies. Currently, starvation of your own people only leads to benefits.

 

[jpowers]

GI Josh,
The intentional starvation of one's own people should make it much easier for culture flips and riots in those cities affected. I don't think that people have ever been happy to be starved, whether in our 'human rights-obsessed' modern culture or in the past. International reputation has never profited from democide. The Irish potato famine did nothing for England's reputation, even in the pre-human-rights era. Also, the abuse I am speaking about is the cavalier advice given in some of these strategy guides: Too much war weariness? Population pressure? Not enough luxuries? Cities too corrupt? Afraid of culture flipping? Just starve some folks! This goes way beyond the 'traditional' uses of democide which are usually punishments of minorities.

 

[Evincar]

Well, I don't think starvation is such a crime. Why do we starve people? Because they are unhappy! If they were smiling, I would gladfully let them live but...they are suffering, I can't stand it, I simply need to do something about that...OK, I'll turn them into happy artist that also make other people happy. Yeah, they'll die, but they'll leave this world glad, instead of suffering an unhappy life. So, as you see I don't starve people in my own interest...I just make them a favor

Don't take this post seriously, of course

 

[Moonsinger]

Moreover, when my citizen starve to death, my heart is broken too. I always want what is best for them but they wouldn't listen to me. For example, I told them 1 kid per family, but they decide to breed three kids per family. Since a city has only a certain a mount of resource to support up to a certain size, they can't blame for not providing them enough food.

Some other time, my citizens decide to quit their jobs and go on strike against the war or something. When there are no one left to work on the farm, they would run short on food and some would die of starvation. They can't possibly blame me for that. I told them not to worry and be happy, but some of them (especially the foreign citizens) refuse to listen to me.

The bottom line: if I told you not to jump into the ocean because there is shark, but you don't listen and go ahead for a swim anyway and get eaten by a shark. How can you possibly blame me for your death?

 

[GI Josh]

Evincar - point taken, as far as game mechanics, I agree starvation should cause unhappiness. But Civ3 is at bottom a game modeled on simplified historical factors - it shouldn't be a morality lesson. Starvation as a strategic weapon to cow a civilian population is quite historical, and my impression is that it *very often* has little or no repercussions on reputation internationally. It may have some impact in some quarters of public opinion, but not until quite recently has it made a decisive impact on the official stances of nations. Post 9/11 we've suddenly been ignoring the wholesale slaughter of civilians in Chechnya, because of our strategic interests - I'm not saying it's right or wrong, I'm simply saying that it happens often enough to not be a "stupid flaw" in the game. Most importantly, it does not throw off the game balance. Cities that are starving should have some modicum of increased unhappiness, but starvation usually leads to the submission of the civilian population, *not* in uprisings.

 

[wohmongarinf00l]

hehe...this is a funny one.
i certainly see nothing wrong with starvation. it's all a matter of priorities. someone mention something about "human rights obsession" and i chalk this one upto that.
when germany was invading the ussr for "lebensraum" u dont really think they were going to let all those ukrainians mix in and gemanise over time. they were gonna be starved and pushed out by any means to make room for germans. the colonial story in africa is much the same way: imperialist europeans moved into these countries and starved and pushed away the natives to other less productive areas to make way for their own populations. and don't let's start about the story of the New World.
bottom line is: u wanna limit the number if foreign nationals in ur newly conquered city as much as possible and make way for ur own population. howver hard this may seem, it happens in real life and has been happening. we can call it any number of cutesy names but it's the reality.

 

[wohmongarinf00l]

my heart doesn't break at all when i starve a newly conquered foreign city. if everything was perfect and newly conquered cities seemlessly merged into ur network there would be no need for forced starvation.

 

[warpstorm]

I think all starving people should add an unhappy person for each "missing" food.

 

[Moonsinger]

Originally posted by warpstorm
I think all starving people should add an unhappy person for each "missing" food.

That doesn't do any good. The more unhappy people, the less food that city will produce, the more people will starve to death.

 

[sabo]

Moonsinger, you don't bombard your own cities. When you attack another civilization's city, you are at war with them. When you let your own people starve, you are committing the most heinous crime a leader can commit against his/her own people. When Stalin allowed millions of Soviets to die in famine, every leader in the world without a Soviet gun to their head shunned him.

I take it you are all talking about starving them by making comedians in the city to avoid civil unrest. Once again you are not starving your own people you are starving the citizens of another nationality, if they were your's then they wouldn't be unhappy, besides it's not all that bad to starve a city by creating comedians to avoid unrest, it's like someone mentioned on here before, "at least they died with a smile on their face"