0.91 Drengin. 379 Turns, 28 Hours, Prestige Victory.

Slavers sans slaves?

"A Slaver Without Slaves is a Slave to Themselves!"

Alright, I’m going to start this off by saying that this was a tough-ass game. And actually my 2^nd Drengin game. I’d started one with patch 0.90 and gotten about 150 turns in before making a new game when 0.91 dropped. I think I’ll include a screenie of both the galaxy settings as well as what the galaxy layout ended up looking like, since I’d already done this on a different thread for something else and this is an easy way to present the information. But basically, 4 large sectors, with all AI’s present (4-5 civs starting in each sector) with pretty middle-of-the-road settings for all of the other galaxy settings except for “very slow” pacing & tech pacing. Both Drengin games were played on the “Bright” difficulty, prior to 0.90 I’d been playing on “normal.”

I really liked how the galaxy turned out. The single-line of sectors was a really nice presentation, and very fun to play. Frankly, I liked this better than all of the sectors sort of clumped together, and hope that in the future (it’s really not something I’d advocate for getting right away, but eventually…) there are various “sector layouts” that can be selected as a Galaxy Setting. Anyway, it made for a very nice screenshot, especially after getting the Navigator’s Tech that illuminated all of the AI homeworlds even in the sectors that I had not yet discovered. I said in the other post that this screen was taken at turn ~170, so I guess that’s when it was taken. A couple of generation oddities with the galaxy: ‘Minor Races’ were set to ‘common’ but there was only 1 in the game (I never met them, but their homeworld showed up on the above screenie), and the bottom two sectors only had 4 prometheon in them total. Part of the reason I didn’t restart a bad start and uphill game was because I did manage to lock down a 3-prometheon lode very early on – as it turned out this was 75% of the available prometheon to the 9 civs on the bottom half of the galaxy – those poor Onyx.

Part of my impetus for doing a fresh game when 0.91 dropped was because the Drengi homeworld managed to get the plague at turn 16 in my 0.90 game, and by turn 150 or whatever, I still never came across the tech to cure it – the game wasn’t going so well for some other reasons that I don’t specifically recall also, but that was definitely fairly annoying. So the decision to make a new game for the new patch wasn’t a particularly heart-wrenching one..

So… tough-ass game… Yea. I’ll note that with the exploit that allows AI’s to grab the yellow and red anomalies it’s REALLY tough for me to disentangle the early AI ramping up vs the snowballing effect of the AI being able to knock down these free resources. For example, in my 0.90 game I recall a fleet of 4 Festron ships zooming by my home planet at around turn 10-15, which is frankly insane. My 0.91 game was equally dangerous. I started in (what turned out to be) a sub-optimal starting spot next to the Alterian’s, and could not ever go toe-to-toe with them. I had to wait until they got themselves into a protracted war with their Onyx neighbors before I was able to finally move into their space and take Altaria around turn ~150 or so. Prior to that I had to pick on the Terrans, who (again, as it turns out) started in an even worse position than I did.

I was actually keeping some notes on my play experience over on a private channel where some friends and I talk GalCiv which illustrated that I was pretty disgusted with the Drengin performance vs their Altarian neighbors. A friend of mine who is very knowledgeable on intended race balancing throughout the series commented that this was intentional, and how it should work. Ship to ship the Altarians should win, especially early game, because they have better tech and better ships. Where Drengin have the edge is in production and Altarians will lose in wars of attrition – especially later game the Drengin will outscale them in production capacity. On a related note, I did scum-save this game back to an earlier savepoint after declaring war on the Altarians too early. I lost probably 2 or so hours of play. The issue was that, like the Altarians, the Onyx also have much better ships than the Drengin – it turns out that declaring war with the Altarians meant the Onyx (and some other civs that were less meaningful) would also start attacking me, fml, and that was a completely untenable situation.

Why aren’t the baddiest baddies in the game, the Drengin, better at fleet combat earlier in the game? As my friend pointed out, the Drengin are not actually about ship combat, rather they are about invading worlds. Having it illustrated like that really changed both my thinking of how my Drengin game was going, and how I felt about them (it made me feel less disappointed about how they played and my personal performance playing them). I think that this perception is also the root cause of some more recent posts on the forums etc of people feeling underwhelmed with the Drengin.

On a related note, I also managed to build both “Elon’s Lift” and the “Beacon of Babylon” on Drengi. Elon’s Lift really made me feel like I was still in the game and I think bumped my production a lot, and without the Beacon I think that the Altarian’s influence push would’ve just been completely untenable. I actually think that the Altarians can be pretty dangerous neighbors. Having so much of my game trajectory hinge on those two “one per galaxy” buildings is slightly haunting.

So, enough about my lame problems, what did I think?

I felt like the Drengi played pretty well. Their repertoire of Policy choices at the start of the game are AWESOME, and perhaps the best I’ve seen (unless a bunch got added for all civs in 0.90). Overall they are a very fun race and the later game ability to pump out fleets is really great. Unlike other races where I might want a war to stop so that I can retrench, rebuild and address some domestic concerns that I have been neglecting, the Drengin thrive in a permanent state of war, and it’s hella-fun. My race-balance friend was saying that the Drengin should be able to continuously wage two wars all game, and they certainly play like that. There was a lull in the action for several turns where the Iridia sued for peace and I was like “meh, ok whatever, I’ll just focus on finishing off these Altarians…” then the next turn the Altarians surrendered. Man, once the fighting stopped I was just ITCHING to start attacking someone else – it was great! I’d already wiped the Terrans back to a single planet, and everyone else was fighting each other already. So that “someone else” ended up being the Navigators – they probably surrendered 10 turns later. The Drengin really hit their stride somewhere in the 150-200 turn range – at least on my settings.

But, here’s the thing… I’d read something inspirational about the Drengin prior to them being the latest civ I wanted to playtest, and the whole time I was playing I kept asking myself the question: “do the Drengin play up to the standards that have been set for them?”

(thanks RedSkittles for the article link from which I grabbed this text snip: https://www.pcgamesn.com/galactic-civilizations-4/drengin-civilization )

My answer is: “I’m not so sure.” While they can definitely be played as perpetual warmongerers, as I was just swooning about in the prior paragraph, and this is really great, but slavers? Not really. Locking up your own citizens seems more like “slavery is a legal framework”, rather than the Drengi being actual slavers. Right? Really doesn’t feel so bad-boyish to me locking up your own old ladies..

One of the things that I sort of expect of a society defined by slavery is that the overarching social and economic underpinnings of such a society cannot exist without it. I don’t want to get too political here, but I’ll just throw out there that my own country’s history with slavery (the US) suffered from this dynamic. At its core, no one could figure out how the economy could function without slavery and these economic considerations overrode other considerations perpetuating that practice. The broad view being that economic considerations generally override social considerations repeatedly across time and space. But the Drengi don’t feel like this, they don’t feel like they need slaves, or that their society wouldn’t function without them. Slaves seem like an afterthought rather than an overarching social philosophy. Though slavery has been historically common, the example I would like to use (that everyone is fairly familiar with) is the Romans (the Akkadians are probably a better template for the Drengin, but I really do not know enough about them to pontificate on the matter). The Romans had several internal path dependencies which ultimately made their empire unsustainable. Their penchant for conquest (I actually like Spengler’s aside on how proficient they actually were at “conquering” anything, but that’s neither here nor there) partly derived from an economic imperative to continuously find more slave labor. Most people aren’t really aware of this, but Rome did not just have “citizens,” “non-citizens,” and “slaves.” It would make sense that they would have had these three classes of people – instead they had almost 100 different social classes and varying distinctions of personhood. Without slavery and the movement of individuals through these different places on the social hierarchy, Rome would not have been Rome. The very fabric of Roman society depended upon slavery. Does Drengi society equally depend upon slavery? I’m not sure, but I didn’t have the impression that it did while I was playing it.

Needless to say the slave buildings and slave mechanics in the game are both lacking and not very exciting. The bonuses the buildings give are pretty weak, and there’s only one per planet. Slaves are just imprisoned home-grown citizens. And as far as I could tell, that was the entirety of Drengin slavery. I’ll note that I did not go up very high on the social research tree – it’s possible that there’s other slave stuff on there that I didn’t see in my game.

Ok, Potential ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Changes?

I think that there are two interrelated changes that I would advocate for:

• Make going to war and being at war more of a default imperative

• Make a slaving mechanic that seems fun and produces the type of behavior that we would love to expect from the Drengin.

Make going to war and being at war more of a default imperative:

• Approval bonus for being at war! This seems like an obvious tweak to me as the Drengin love fighting.

  • Something like +7.5% approval for each (major) civ the Drengin are at war with. Maybe this could be stepped up for subsequent races by 2.5% or something. So 7.5% for the first, 10% for the second, 12.5% for the third, etc. Approval rewards for pushing the envelope and fighting more! Having an external enemy always makes life better at home!

  • Something like a -10% approval hit (for X turns) if a war ends. Again, if we were stepping up each approval for each race at war with, the approval penalty should be stepped up also.

  • For example, your approval is 80%. You go to war and it’s 87.5% You sue for peace and it falls to 70% for X turns before returning to 80%

  • A civ being eliminated while you were at war with it leads to the approval bonus either being permanent, or if this is too strong merely persisting for X turns before falling back to baseline.

• Conquering planets produces slaves!

  • Conquering a core world produces 2 slaves.

  • Conquering a colony world produces 1 slave.

  • I’m not sure on the above numbers, obviously there would need to be a balance pass, but something along these lines seems like it would make sense. Maybe 3 & 0.5 (like a 50% chance to get 1 slave from a colony) or something. I dunno.

• Note, I did not advocate for a bonus of money, nor approval for taking planets. These were used in the past IIRC via either traits or ideologies, but I don’t feel like they’re particularly interesting – and the Festron already get money for taking planets.

Make a slaving mechanic that seems fun and produces the type of behavior that we would love to expect from the Drengin:

• Slaves do not count toward pop cap.

• Slaves consume less food. Currently the “Slavers” trait indicates that they consume “less” food. I’m not sure about %, but yea, slaves don’t need to eat so much..

• New building: “Slave Processing Center” – description: “allows this planet to accept new slaves”; effects: -5% crime, +0.25 control per turn, one per planet; adjacency bonus +1 all; no level-up effects.

• Whenever new slaves are produced, they go to a random planet with a “Slave Processing Center”

• Slaves are produced by:

  • Conquest (see above).

  • Trade routes, each has a small % chance generate slave – maybe slave-trade techs?

  • Executive Order: Buy Slave. Produces 1 slave, Control cost, cooldown, tbd – balance

• Slaves are eliminated by:

  • your planet being conquered, they are all ‘freed” and disappear.

  • They can starve. See my other post on food. But slaves starve first.

  • Attrition, small % chance per turn for slaves to disappear. They either die, escape, etc. So you always need to get more slaves! Crime makes this attrition worse.

  • Executive Order: Sell Slave. Eliminates 1 slave, Control cost, cooldown, tbd – balance. Selling slaves is a legit way to get some money.

• The Slave buildings could get a re-look. At least they could receive adjacency bonuses. Also the UI should be clearer that you can only build one slave building per planet (the research one, the production one, etc) because it took me a long time to figure this out. The current slave labor buildings really aren’t so great, TBH.

• I’m actually not sure how many different slave buildings exist (I only saw production & research buildings in my game), but it may make sense to have one for every productive output: prod, research, wealth, food, influence (fighting pits!). I did not include ‘entertainment’ on this list, because the Drengin may play better having to go to war for Approval.

  • I also request that the wealth one be modeled on the HQ of Well’s Fargo …

• There could be a Commander Ship that helps get more slaves.

And that’s it. This would make the Drengin conquest-obsessed slavers!

A couple of minor things that could be addressed:

• The first-tier Commander Ships aren’t so great. (the 2nd and 3rd tier ones are awesome). The +manufacturing one is actually pretty awesome and VERY helpful to get the Drengin production off the ground, but the other two aren’t super inspiring. Maybe none of the first-tier ships are, but the Drengin ones definitely are not.

• The Drengin could really use a unique +production (one per player) building. I feel like they need “Elon’s Lift” too much

• Intimidation: Drengin get a bunch of + intimidation. I couldn’t really figure out what to do with this, or how it worked. Maybe the mechanic isn’t obvious enough for me?

Thanks for reading, if you made it this far, you've read a lot!  & I would obviously appreciate any feedback on what I’ve written!

Cheers,

-tid242