slaughtering populations?

So except for the first few settlements which you need to grow, is anyone NOT slaughtering the populations when they take over a new settlement? I seldom want to leave much garrison as my army needs to retrain and move on to the next engagement so I don't need the unrest so I almost always slaughter them. The money is pretty handy too.

I guess as my empire grows larger (I own all of Gaul and some Med Islands as Julii) that I might have the resources to allow the populations to survive because I will want quickly expanding towns. For those of you farther along, has this happened?

No, I slaughter every city I capture, for obvious reasons. Taking slaves is a no-no because it increases the size of all of your cities and makes them unhappy.

I also keep a standing army for every 4 or so cities, to go in and slaughter them when they start getting too big.

I'm enslaving everything as I want my core cities to expand (esp. the capitol to get Marian reforms). I gather trouble could be in store in the future, but exterminating all cities just sounds wrong. (Enslaving is not exactly right but sounds rather Roman). No loyalty problems so far (c20 provinces), and my home cities are growing nicely. Hopefully extermination is not necessary, otherwise the campaign has a serious flaw.

I'm only at 240BC on my first campaign but thats exactly the policy & size of empire i'm looking at (or will be again later tonight)

I've even just let Patavium rebel & get thinned down nicely so it's giving me 500D at turn rather than -300D

One full stack in N Italy
One in southern gaul
&
One to finish off Alesia & the north

just training up a new stack to re-appropriate Gaul

I'd maybe suggest 4 to 6 provinces can be guarded and policed by a full stack. I keep 4 town guards in each settlement & quite frankly if thats not enough to keep them quiet theres nothing quite like executing the lot of them & filling up the coffers if they get a bit uppity

i'm sure they've been warned by whats happened to other communities with 'ideas'

but as i said - its my first campaign, i'm only a little way in & it could all blow up in my face big style any turn now

Ouch, thats cruel. I enslave all the cities I take. Exterminating will just mean a longer wait for them to become useful again. I'm not having any happiness problems either, despite some of my cities being 30k+. I do have garrisons of 8 troops or so though, of varying quality depending apon their location.

the 'off with their heads' policy does give you money to invest back into nice things for the next inhabitants tho ..

if theres a need to be fluffy

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Originally Posted by Satyr

So except for the first few settlements which you need to grow, is anyone NOT slaughtering the populations when they take over a new settlement?

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Frankly, no.

Take the Brutii, for example. They conquer Greece. They occupy the Greek cities. That becomes their power base.

The best thing for them to do is make sure that power base doesn't go squalid. That means high taxes and "happy buildings."

If they enslave other cities, that defeats the purpose. The slaves add to the population in Greece. If they occupy cities, they have to garrison each one. That burden becomes greater the farther they get from the capital.

As I've said before, everybody wants great, high-tech units. Only big cities can provide this. However, if you capture a great city that HAS the BUILDINGS to make these units, you don't need the people any more.

So, to be specific:

If a city is on the verge of expansion and you want the buildings that can come with expansion, consider occupying it.

If your base cities back home need a greater population, consider enslavement.

Under all other conditions, massacre has brutal logic on its side.

Well just to thorow some math in the game. I'm playing as the Julii and have 49 provinces and yet Egypt has maybe 20, ca'nt remember off the top of my head. Yet somehow they have a bigger income than me and a higher population.

Population = taxes = money

So me being an executoioner has caused my empire to be 1 big slum. Over half my cities are under 2000 because I would use the small 1's to train troops for garrison and I'd retrain troops there. Now that I'm actually letting them grow and letting the people be happy I'm getting muku bucks. The time to execute them is when you first take over a big city to reduce the gariison needed to maintain public order. I've found once the culture penalty goes away and the unrest then you can keep the city pretty much under control. Also temples/pantheons help greatly. Wow look at that awesome temple sure you can tax the bejesus out of us. And on very high tax rate it's near impossible for a population to grow over 20,000

I only slaughter when it is hard to keep order. I just occupy the ones where I can easily control public order. When a city has the last upgrade, though, it is automatic slaughter.

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Originally Posted by oaty

So me being an executoioner has caused my empire to be 1 big slum. Over half my cities are under 2000 because I would use the small 1's to train troops for garrison and I'd retrain troops there. Now that I'm actually letting them grow and letting the people be happy I'm getting muku bucks. The time to execute them is when you first take over a big city to reduce the gariison needed to maintain public order. I've found once the culture penalty goes away and the unrest then you can keep the city pretty much under control. Also temples/pantheons help greatly. Wow look at that awesome temple sure you can tax the bejesus out of us. And on very high tax rate it's near impossible for a population to grow over 20,000

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I don't have any objection to letting the survivors live happily and grow AFTER I've made my point. Also, I do use peasant settlers. I do other things, too, but that idea keeps cropping up.

Supposedly, Brutii temples of Juno cuts the culture penalty.

I occupied all of Gaul, I didn't enslave or exterimate a single city. My empire is strong, but my income is only about +7000 per turn, which doesn't allow for a whole lot of building and training in an empire of 25 provinces. Due to... uh... some complaints by my people about the sanitary conditions of their neighbors and a Senate demand, I recently found myself at war with both Brittania and Spain. I'm a bit stretched thin, so the 10-20k dinarii from exterimation was too hard to resist and I am carving a bloody swathe through both of those regions. It's working out rather nicely I think.

I was opposed to extermination in the beginning as I was trying to uphold the International Charter on Pixel Rights, but I am reconsidering that. Perhaps I might 'accidentally' click the wrong button some more in the future.

Well i dont know wich version are you all playing but my uk version makes the REGULAR extermination of population a MUST...The squalor BUG (and dont tell me its not a bug when it decreases loyality rapidly :furious3: :furious3: ) the garisson that neede to keep the 38k people in line makes the prosedure of losing the city to the rebels and when taking it back exterminating the population a MUST the population goes from 38k to 6-7k and the troops can be trained EASILY and it needs MINIMUM garisson with public order at 160% with the taxes at very high ( but still the pop is raising at +6/8% :furious3: ) (note the city is FULLY upgraded)so i have to repeat this procedure every 5-10 turns :help: :help: :help: ...

edit: im playing at very hard camp/ medium batt
Hellenes

Well currently in my Brutii campaing i slaughtered all cities i've gone into. Basically they are all "happy" now. I think i have to slaughter them, especially if they are of a different culture. I have not had a rebellion(unless it was a bloody raid and run). And my cities are now growing nicely and giving me a plump budget. I slaughtered Byzantium for example and after leaving 2 peasant units in it, with taxes on normal the order was higher than 100. Yeah after that i massacred the thracian capital(tylia, tyloia ??) and it was the same story left three peasants and they were happy. When a city becomes accustomed take the peasants somewhere else. When i invade an large area i take my main army and an occupation force of peasants.

So when i take an enemy city, i massacre, destroy all religious buildings and begin replacing with juno temples(lowers culture difference) and add 2-3 peasants.

I think a massacre establishes your power, youre basically saying to the people
"your mine now and i can do with you whatever i please!!"
Ohh and the looting extra cash helps too ~D

I use to enslave or just occupy, but now I slaughter the citizens of the cities without blinking an eye. The money come in handy, but more importantly, you get rid of the locals that will cause you a lot of head ache for the next 10 to 15 years or so. Like someone said earlier in the thread, taking the slaves does increase your population, but I think it increases it too fast and so more sqaulor appears.

So what sizes and what culture's cities should one exterminate? Is it really worth it to exterminate a city below 2000 population? What difference does it make? Also, I heard it is good to occupy Greek cities to make them the base of your troop building. On the other hand, does one slaughter Roman cities in the end game? They shouldn't even have culture penalties right? (unless they were recently conquered by the other faction)

There IS a gameplay problem with the incredible rage of rebellion of cities.
Slaughter is required if you want to play without too much of a headache. Not doing it is asking for trouble.

A large/huge city, if not slaughtered, is nearly impossible to keep down when you take it. The unrest + culture penalty + squalor + distance to capital make it so that even with low taxes, a good governor and 20 troops, it still barely hover above 75-85 % loyalty. If you ever need to move some troops or your governor, or after a while due to population growing, well, you have a riot on your hand.

Slaughtering cuts the population, the culture penalty and increase the garrison effect.

I hope this will be adressed in a patch, because it's one of the worst problem in the game, to be REQUIRED to kill everybody (just like in Civ3). At least, there should be some kind of penalty to make other options more interesting (unhappiness problems in the whole empire due to draconic rule ?).

What slaughtering SHOULD do, it sounds like to me, is create a permanent happiness penalty, or culture penalty, or something like that, in the city that was exterminated-- even for new residents you truck in. That way there would be some balance to it.

And if you slaughter too many cities with no justification, your reputation and the loyalty of your people should take a hit. And regardless of justification, you should get a permanent penalty with populations of the same culture as the raped, which perhaps would wear off with time.

OR-- perhaps that penalty could be given to the specific character who carried out the dirty deed.

But seriously, while atrocities were somewhat more common back then, they DID have repurcussions. From what you all are saying there doesn't seem to be any modelling of these whatsoever.

..

I mean-- it makes sense that they will be scared of you. If the act was justifiable in some way, they may even respect you. But regular and wanton murder is going to turn people against you, at least in real life-- and a game where it doesn't is just plain unbalanced and boring.

DA

When you play some factions you need to enslave just be able to have your settlements grow or to be able to support an army. I think the whole system needs fixing though

OK, I have a question about slaughtering the population:

When you slaughter the population aren't you supposed to kill all the people? When you then move into the city there always seems to be a substantial amount left. Does slaughtering leave a proportion of people alive, or do these new residents come from your other cities?

Ok Slaughter is now neccessary in my Brutii campaign, holding Greece is getting annoying (I guess I should destroy those Mars temples and Build Juno ones to help).

Carthage has revolted for the second time running and each time I reoccupy it I do a massacre, pretty soon there won't be anyone left to revolt!

On top of this I am sure that squalor is a bug. Suracuse (or whatever its called) in Sicily, is now on the verge of being upgraded to the highest city level and Squalor is rampant... The thing is I still have capacity in this city at its current level and needs MORE people to be able to upgrade to the next level, yet Squalor is extremely high and population growth has just gone stagnant on low taxes.

So right now I am moving peasants in from other towns to bring the population up to upgrade level, then hopefully the Marian reforms will kick in.

Hi guys,

I've only played since a few days so my perspective may be limited, but I don't think that the system is buggy. It's historical that squalor is an issue that needs management skills.
So far I've conquered 10-12 provinces as brutii. I enslaved every city so far. This pushed my population in the troop producing big cities, making it able to upgrade and reduced the conquered population to a reasonable level. I need those slaves badly because the filth troubles the cities the most when they are on the brink to expand to the next level, a quick injection of fresh "citizens" helps to shorten the time to build the next health building. Temples of Juno do also help (tear down those old temples of them and bring them a new religion). It's crucial though to plan this transfer, i.e. you have to be aware where your governours are and where those slaves go to.
I can imagine that extermination may be an option in the future but right now my economy booms and only my two biggest cities make little problems. In those two I build all the happiness buildings available. So far it works out fine. For the future I intend to build academies in the big cities to give the governours some extra management skills.
I really enjoy how you have to manage your empire and ensure its survival. After all it's the people and the economy that enables you to build armies.
The new guide at IGN is a good source for information on this matter.

~:cheers:

R'as

I am obviously getting too emotional during gameplay, but if a settlement makes me really have to fight hard and lose good men to take it I tend to exterminate them. If they put on a show, but basically leave the gates open for me, I tend to let them live on happily. I think I am just being too nice about this ~D

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Originally Posted by Del Arroyo

What slaughtering SHOULD do, it sounds like to me, is create a permanent happiness penalty, or culture penalty, or something like that, in the city that was exterminated-- even for new residents you truck in. That way there would be some balance to it.

And if you slaughter too many cities with no justification, your reputation and the loyalty of your people should take a hit. And regardless of justification, you should get a permanent penalty with populations of the same culture as the raped, which perhaps would wear off with time.

OR-- perhaps that penalty could be given to the specific character who carried out the dirty deed.

But seriously, while atrocities were somewhat more common back then, they DID have repurcussions. From what you all are saying there doesn't seem to be any modelling of these whatsoever.

..

I mean-- it makes sense that they will be scared of you. If the act was justifiable in some way, they may even respect you. But regular and wanton murder is going to turn people against you, at least in real life-- and a game where it doesn't is just plain unbalanced and boring.

DA

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I LIKE, I LIKE, excellent suggestion!!!

i would guess the frequency of rioting populations depends on the campaign difficulty you're playing at. because some people have a problem with it and others never seem to.

jambo, i think enslave takes 50% of the population away and exterminate kills 75% or something like that.

Exterminate can lead to a -ve effect, although probably not severe enough. Each time there's a 10% chance the family member will receive the Bloodthirsty trait, which will eventually lead to a -1 to Command and -3 to Troop Morale.

I enslave rather then exterminate as it allows the frontier settlements to grow so yo ucan build the structures for legionaire, archers, etc, in short the better military units so that they are closer to the front lines. Tearing down relgious temples and building ones for your faction tends to aid the settlements inauguration for want of a better word, and anyway if things go right you'll be sending them off to die for you soon so solution in itself.

Slaughter vs. enslavement has a lot to do with your style of play and your faction's situation. If things are going well and you can gradually expand along with your family tree, enslavement works fine. You do have to knock down old temples and build new one and maybe some other entertainment buildings but it should be okay.

But if you need to drive into an enemy's heartland and deliver a killing blow before you're overwhelmed by other adversaries, say the Seleucids vs. the Egyptians et al, you've got to slaughter and move on until the threat is eliminated.

I'm trying to roleplay how I deal with captured settlements, taking my lead from the fact that Rome relied upon a cycle of conquest and enslavement for much of its history...

- if it's a Roman settlement I only ever occupy, even if they've rebelled against me.
- if it's a Greek settlement I usually occupy, but occasionally enslave if the strategic situation is such that I have no option or if the settlement has rebelled against me or another Roman faction. I count Corinth as Greek even though it's held by the Macedonians at the beginning. This is just my attempt to emulate the Roman's admiration for many aspects of Greek culture.
- everybody else usually gets enslaved, unless they've rebelled against me or another Roman faction, in which case I usually exterminate them upon re-capture. I'll usually also exterminate 'problem' cultures... for example, if the Carthaginians have given the Scipii a lot of trouble, particularly if they've taken a Roman city. Revenge is a dish best eaten with lots of chilli sauce and a diet coke is my motto.

What slaughtering should do is severly cripple the city. I'm beginning to think that slaughtering should destroy every building that the cities post-slaughter population would be unable to build. That would refelt the damage from looting, and force people to consider a little more carefully the consequences of slaughtering a population. Right now, it's all gain and no pain. That doesn't make for good gameplay.

Carth H/H Long

I kill em all. Need the cash. I have 7 towns producing nice troops. Need the rest passive and paying taxes.

I will usually exterminate the populace of a newly conquered city as it gets rid of the culture penalty. Another thing is that exterminating the populace has a 2 fold effect it massacures a percentage of the population not everybody in the city, granted it's a high percentage 60-75% IIRC. And it lets your troops do extensive looting of the city, hence the large padding of your wallet. Enslaving the populace takes a smaller percentage of the population, 25-40%, and you only loot from the people you enslave. IMO massacuring the population gets rid of the cultural penalty because the praticers of the old culture are gone. Slaughtered in a night of the long knives-esque orgy of mass murder and mass thievery. The new people that migrate to the city are immerest in your culture and values and have no idea of what went on before, especially if your knock down the old temples.

Something else population growth in RTW comes from migration not reproduction. Other wise it makes no sense