Sid Meier explains Slavery...

[Jowy]

I think Slavery is comparable to Flash in League of Legends. Both were not intended to be any stronger than their counterparts (in Civ4 other civics, in LoL other summoner spells). But both became such an integral part of gameplay and balancing that it is impossible to remove them. The devs want to remove them, but then you mess up the overall balance you've worked so hard to achieve. It's just not worth it!

[Sullla]

Sirian could answer this better than I could, if by some chance he's reading this. The original Slavery had a much worse conversion rate of population to production; I believe it was akin now to what you get at the swapping penalty (1 pop for 20 production). The mechanic was also different in terms of how long the unhappiness lasted, if I recall correctly. I think that when you whipped for 2 pop, you received 20 turns of whip unhappiness, instead of the current 1 whip = 1 penalty regardless of number of population whipped. Again, it's been seven years now and I don't have the old numbers in front of me.



Old civics for the curious at an earlier pre-release stage. The civics were changed, err, a lot. They went through more iterations than anything else in the entire development cycle. This picture itself is far from the first incarnation too. Poor Federal Reserve civic never made the final cut, and with good reason. (You received compound interest each turn on the gold in your treasury. It was either pathetically weak at like 2% compound interest, or laughably overpowered at like 10% compounding. We could never balance it. Poorly designed mechanic.)

I think Jowy's comparison of Slavery civic in Civ4 to summoner Flash in League of Legends is absolutely perfect.

[Molach]

I love the bureaucracy from that screenshot - can deficit spend, yeap, that's something many bureaucrats are good at, heh.

Also interesting that 'hereditary rule' equalled 'god king' in FFH - can that be a coincidence?

Wonder what would be most balanced .... '20 pop per hammer', or '1 unhappy per pop point whipped'. Both together, and it becomes, as Sid said, something to be used only in an emergency.

[Krill]

1 unhappy per pop whipped (and dropping 1 unhappiness every 10 turns!) would definitely have been the worst civic in the game. 1 unhappy per pop whipped for 10 turns would have been maybe the worst. 20 hammers per pop (not what molach said!) would have made it closer to RB mod slavery than vanilla slavery.

Thanks for those posts Sullla.

[TheHumanHydra]

Yes, they were very interesting; thank you.

[Krill]

You know, looking back at that screenshot, I wonder if leaving HR as Bureaucracy wouldn't actually have been a better choice...

[Molach]

20 hammers per pop (not what molach said!) would have made it closer to RB mod slavery than vanilla slavery.

Yeah, grow a city to 40...then whip 20 pop...and you get one hammer. Slightly underpowered.

Another thing about slavery, that useless 'population' stat says 1 citizen is 1000 people, 2 citizens 6000. So whenever someone whips a size 2 city, they are killing 5/6 of your city's population. So think about that when you press that whip button.

Citizens get a bit annoyed by that, naturally, but 10 turns later - all forgotten.

[Rowain]

Citizens get a bit annoyed by that, naturally, but 10 turns later - all forgotten.

Quite natural since those 10 turns are some hundred years and later when they just some years you have television and modern advertising so you can manipulate people to your hearts content anyway .

[Merovech]

Pretty cool, Sullla. If you have more old pictures of the game during development, I would love to see them when you have the time.

[Krill]

Technically shouldn't post any of them as they are still covered by the NDA IIUC.