...in the official Civilization IV tutorial from 2005.
Link
Many of the top players in our community would be well advised to listen.
Link
Many of the top players in our community would be well advised to listen.
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Sid Meier explains Slavery...
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I thought this would be on how to run a Q/A department.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." “I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
Kotaku did a long-form profile of Sid recently that was also fun reading.
http://kotaku.com/the-father-of-civilization-584568276
Interesting to read that CivWorld shut down last month. I was involved in the alpha testing for that game, and wondered about the realistic life expectancy of its design.
2 years isn't too bad I guess for a social game.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." “I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”  (June 26th, 2013, 22:35)Lord Parkin Wrote: ...in the official Civilization IV tutorial from 2005. I am a total Civ 4 noob  , but I read some of the early Civ 4 reports and am currently watching Sullla playing on his Youtube channel and I was wondering if some of the more experienced players could explain to me why the slavery/whipping mechanic is implemented the way it is? Listening to the link you posted it seems pretty clear to me that it is not used the way Sid intended but rather as a convenient alternative building method with weak repercussions. I don't want to dwell on the topic of how realistic a game has to be, but let me just say that I severely doubt that repeatedly killing off ~40% of a city's population would result in minor unhappiness and a quick "grow back" of population. Were there never discussions to increase the whipping penalty in a patch? Again, sorry if this question is "so 2006". 
June 27th, 2013, 10:44
(This post was last modified: June 27th, 2013, 10:49 by antisocialmunky.)
"Kill millions, so you can build a hospital."
"We must sacrifice most of this city to the Librarian Gods!" "The most efficient way of training this man in using an axe is is to make him kill 1000's of his friends." It makes the player look like a highly competent but completely insane dictator if you think about it too hard.
In Soviet Russia, Civilization Micros You!
"Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." “I have never understood why it is "greed" to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else's money.”
Slavery was never intended to be as powerful as it turned out to be in Civ4. During the pre-release testing, Slavery was significantly weaker for most of the process, weak enough that it was rarely used. We buffed it shortly before the game was released, and it was completely unexpected to everyone on the development team how Slavery became an integral mechanic to playing the game at a high level.
Now that said, should future patches have changed Slavery to make it weaker? Although you could certainly make a good case for it, I'm actually pretty happy with how things ended up, even if it was somewhat of an accident. Slavery speeds up the pace of the early game, and forces some interesting decisions about food versus production versus city happiness. It's one of the things that jumped out at so many of us when we first played Civ5, how slow and boring the early turns were in that game. There's a rhythm and pace to using the whip in Civ4, as it forces you to think constantly about whether it's better to sacrifice pop to have something now, or build it over time (or chop it, etc.) Think about how much less interesting our Pitboss/PBEM games would be if we universally agreed not to use Slavery civic. So while Slavery is definitely overpowered and crowds out the other civics in its column from seeing much use, I still believe that it's a net plus overall for the gameplay. It just happens to be a total accident that was unintended by the design team. |
