Slaves

Outline of how to manage slaves

Overview

This short guide partly supplements the manual and gives you some tips about how to manage your slaves.

I've added some comments re 1.04 as that alters some of the strategies.

HOW DO I GET THEM

They come from war - won battles (if large enough), sieges and raids. So if you are getting too many you may want to be less aggressive (realise there are other dynamics at play here).

Sparta is a special case (see section 6.3.5 final paragraph) as new population points can be created as either citizens or slaves but only in their own capitol region.

WHERE DO THEY GO?

There are two rules at work here.

If you have no slave market, they go to your capital. You rarely want too many here so ...

If you have a slave market within 10 regions of the event (battle etc), they will go there. Now there are a couple of quirky bits here. AFAIK they do not cross the sea, so a slave market on an island will rarely get slaves (except off naval battles).

SLAVE MARKETS

Ok, time to leave morals out of this.

You need these, in part to ensure that the slaves don't all go to your capital and then revolt.

They help spread the load as you win battles, and also the more you have, the more control you get over the slave population.

In general work on a ratio of 1/12 regions and if you can put them in regions where you plan to build culture/loyalty buildings

To repeat, the more slave markets you have, the more often you can intervene to minimise the problem.

Unofficial tip - you can disband existing ones (causes a small short term loss of loyalty) and rebuild elsewhere ... this is one to get them to spread around especially if you have civ level 1 government.

PUTTING THEM TO WORK

The easy bit, in the main use them for agriculture or infrastructure, but they can do commerce/culture in an emergency.

They also, generate building slots ---

personal view, in early playing of the game, people over-emphasise how important this is. FWIW, I'd rather have a loyal region with some missing buildings than one hooching with unrest

--- for none Scottish readers, I'll leave you to guess what hooching means.

LOYALTY

here's where they hurt. The table in 6.4.3 is your friend here.

Every slave adds their nationality + 50% to the unrest value of the region. If this gets high enough, the region becomes first very inefficient and then you have a revolt risk.

So those German slaves you took when you invaded that region on the other side of the Rhine? 9 unrest points each.

Again AFAIK, slaves don't flip to your ethnic group while they are still slaves so you are stuck with this.

There is a decision (its the that allows you to free slaves - see below) that means you can increase slave loyalty or worsen it.

If you opt to improve their conditions all your current slaves have -1 on their loyalty score, so depending on their nationality that can make them just a little more rebellious than the same citizen. if you work them harder, they add +1 ... which is probably fatal if they come from a rebellious ethnicity.

Remember this choice permanently affects all your current slaves - so not any you add afterwrads.

Also improving their working conditions will hit loyalty in regions with slave markets.

MOVING THEM

There are three ways to move them.

First, there is the freedman decision (rare if you are civ level 1 govt), this converts slaves to citizens (initially with their old ethnicity). Its good as you keep the building slot but generates a block of unrest in regions with the slave markets. You don't need a slave market for this decision to come up.

So if you have a lot of slave markets - be careful with this one.

The second way only occurs if you play on easy or balanced, there is chance that one slave will be moved each turn. They will not be removed from a region where pop is less than 2 above the building slots in use so its not that great but helps,

The third is a decision that can only come up if you have 1 slave market (and its frequency is determined by how many you have).

This will shift a lot (up to 10) from regions with slaves to those without. The transfer takes no account of where the slave markets are. The only constraint is this will not reduce your pop below that needed for your current level of buildings.

GETTING RID OF THEM

This might seem unintuitive. After all you won a war and these are the spoils of tha war. And they give building slots and you want as many as you can?

Well yes and no. There is no point having lots of slots in a region with low loyalty as loyalty is part of the formula for converting potential output to actual output (as an aside this is why loyalty > 100 is good).

For myself, I take this option almost every time. The money is nice, I've funded emergency armies of mercenaries from it, and it really sorts out low loyalty.

Yes my regions grow more slowly but they stay loyal.

See the comments under 1.04 at the end - I think this strategy is now less valid than before.

CIV LEVEL 1 GOVTS

These have real problems and are hard to solve - mainly as the free/move/sell decisions come up more rarely.

Equally, many such factions need to raid for the income (at least when I play them).

So what to do?

The only real solution is to be careful about early expansion and build a lot of slave markets. That'll mean the sell etc decision comes up more often, at worst it'll help spread them around.

You can always disband some of these when you advance.

But I've lost my capital in a few games to slave revolts with tribal starts.

Well I just founded another, at some stage retook my original and sold them all for profit and new armies.

1.04 Patch

While this does not substantially change the mechanics I think it alters the logic to selling your slaves.

To progress, you now need more buildings for a couple of reasons.

• First, the need to keep the cost of your army down means more military buildings and these will crowd out the older focus on commerce and culture;
  
• Second, the higher legacy bonuses for more cultured regions means you need a lot of culture buildings in a few regions - in effect there is a real gain to building some very large cities;
  
• Third, you need more commerce buildings.

So on balance, there is more a need for larger populations. Some of this can come from growth (but of course that means more food/health buildings) but most will have to come from slaves.

Clearly there is still a trade off betwee high population and loyalty, so I think the selling decision has its place. But my current feeling is I will be making more use of the decision to raise slave loyalty by altering their working conditions.

[ArcSine]

In the late game, slaves seem to be a decent way to grow regions beyond 20 pops. Just have to redistribute them every now and then to prevent accumulating at the slaver market.
I just wish I can sell off those slaves with higher unrest first XD

[loki1006]

We originally thought we could do something similar to WiTW, where a version of the manual (with no images) has updates and rule changes at the end of each section. So fairly easy, its basically the patch notes assigned to the right section.

However, after a test this won't work for Empires as the game is evolving substantively with very new concepts and reworks of some of the originals. So we are exploring an on-line approach where we first break up the manual and then its a lot easier to overwrite or expand a given section.

We may well need volunteers as we can do some of the basic work but there will be a lot of formatting etc. If you are interested contact Pocus and have a chat with him.

[gmsh1964]

A Living Manual. I always wanted that for many of the complex games. Is it in WORD? If so, can I help? I love manuals.

[Comrix]

Thanks Loki

[loki1006]

I'm afraid that was an idea we had on release, to update the manual as patches were released. We have the text for this (ie we have been updating as the game develops) but no ready means to release it (we need Matrix/Slitherine to set up a system).

[Comrix]

Loki1006 You mentioned a 'Living Manual.' How does that differ from the Game Manual and where can one get it?

[loki1006]

Pocus mentioned it on the slitherine forums ... I also have just updated the living manual to include it.

yes some slaves are pretty easy to manage, if you use the improve conditions decision then they can reduce their rebellion value to the same as citizens if you have them from a group that tends to have low loyalty value (Hellenes/Egyptians etc).

[Bobit]

Ok cool. Where dd you get this info from, and doesn't that still mean that slaves are sometimes better? (which makes some sense, maybe the majorites want imnorty slaves or they're just easier to control than citizens :| )

[loki1006]

aye, but that will change in 1.3 as there will be a loyalty cap (8 I believe) for your own ethnic population

[Bobit]

Once you have 20+ pops it seems like foreign slaves actually give BETTER loyalty.

But yeah I sell like crazy, mostly because battles are easy so I end up with 50 slaves in my capital lategame.