slaughtering populations?

[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? 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?

[DisruptorX]

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.

[econ21]

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.

[PFJ_bejazuz]

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

[ChaosLord]

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.

[PFJ_bejazuz]

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

[Doug-Thompson]

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?

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.

[Oaty]

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

[andrewt]

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.

[Doug-Thompson]

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 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.

[TinCow]

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.

[hellenes]

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 ) 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% ) (note the city is FULLY upgraded)so i have to repeat this procedure every 5-10 turns ...

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

[Devastatin Dave]

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.

[vodkafire]

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)

[Akka]

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 ?).

[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

[Basileus]

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

[Jambo]

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?

[ToranagaSama]

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

I LIKE, I LIKE, excellent suggestion!!!

[nokhor]

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.

[LittleRaven]

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.

[Lichgod]

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.