Who needs engineering science in the early game?

[HFY]

2. Livestock when you're out of the district for that basic resource (also almost never, if that was a scenario that could come about without you turning every planet into an ecumenepolis nonslaving empires wouldn't be playable).

Food can also come from buildings and starbases (and vassals), so it's not even district-limited.

So, in short, slaves are useless. Robots are good. Ideally this will be changed so that authoritarian has more going for it compared to egalitarian.

Robots also grow in parallel to normal pop growth, so if you're not Bio Ascended (which could grow clones in parallel) then robots are unlocking a growth box which otherwise would be wasted.

 

[Dr. B]

I don't see the how xeno slaves is not a power boost when you vacuum up the entire population of an enemy homeworld with raiding to serve as unpaid labor, but maybe that's just me.

Is you use slaves instead of regular superior master race pops, not in addition to, then I fully agree they are worse pops per empire size.

 

[Thiend]

I don't see the how xeno slaves is not a power boost when you vacuum up the entire population of an enemy homeworld with raiding to serve as unpaid labor, but maybe that's just me.

Is you use slaves instead of regular superior master race pops, not in addition to, then I fully agree they are worse pops per empire size.

Because there's no reason not to hoover up all their pops and NOT enslave them instead. That's the thing people fall for so often - they think they're adding slaves instead of nothing, but they're actually adding slaves instead of free pops. Either is better than not getting more pops, but freeing them is always better than enslaving them. Upkeep just doesn't matter compared to output.

 

[DamnedLackOfTropicalFruit]

Slaves are always bad, as the only two scenarios in which slaves do anything at all that free pops wouldn't do better are: [Livestock and Domestic Servitude]
[...]
Because there's no reason not to hoover up all their pops and NOT enslave them instead. That's the thing people fall for so often - they think they're adding slaves instead of nothing, but they're actually adding slaves instead of free pops. Either is better than not getting more pops, but freeing them is always better than enslaving them. Upkeep just doesn't matter compared to output.

Vacuuming up homeworlds is the impossible scenario from your previous post in which livestock and domestic servitude actually have a niche use case. Depending on galaxy settings, you can hoover a lot of pops very early, because you don't need to wait for first contact and the AI is entirely incapable of dealing with a 2203-2207 corvette rush on any difficulty. You can just fly in and kidnap everyone on their capital, and they can't tell you to stop until they complete the first contact.

This early on, there's simply no way to create jobs fast enough to keep up with successful raiding - the limiting factor isn't building space, but the construction queue. You can either be less successful in your raiding (not getting more pops), or use livestock/domestic slavery.

I agree that slaves are pretty bad in every other situation though. I'd like to see more specialist jobs open up to slaves - they could definitely work in industrial jobs.

 

[Ramidel]

freeing them is always better than enslaving them

That "always" is doing a lot more work than it should in that sentence. (Did you put it on Chattel Slavery? )

There are plenty of builds where slavery works. Enslaving Serviles is obvious if you have them, and designing your empire as a slave state can produce significant energy so long as you make sure to have enough peeps in the alloy foundries. Stacking slave production and stuffing your power plant districts is valid so long as you're playing wide enough to have enough power plants.

The trick is not to overcommit. Slaver Guilds doesn't really work with foundry ecumenopoli, and ecus are of course "the meta."

domestic servitude

You use that with Corporate Hedonism. Not for the servants, but because you want to stick the entire race into entertainment jobs.

I'd like to see more specialist jobs open up to slaves - they could definitely work in industrial jobs.

Yeah. Indentured Servitude does allow that, but that weakens one of the big advantages of slavery (the part where slaves have essentially no political power and therefore don't affect stability, just sit there with a big face). It might be better for stability than Residence, though (I'll have to science that out next game).

 

[Thiend]

That "always" is doing a lot more work than it should in that sentence. (Did you put it on Chattel Slavery? )

No I didn't, and no it isn't. Your premise relies on any slave ever being better than a nonslave at the same thing, which they are not. Ever. Take the forge world you have going, free all the pops, observe as production goes up significantly in return for a large percentage increase in the trivial absolute value of pop upkeep.

That "always" is doing exactly as much work as it should be. Slave pops are always worse than free pops. This is, literally, always the case. They have lower output and lower upkeep. Output has been powercrept larger and is now a massive loss, upkeep has not so it is increasingly irrelevant. If you can produce an example of slaves with higher output than nonslaves on the same planet, then and only then will "always" be an overstatement. You probably can't even with the Instrument of Desire empire-unique building, you certainly can't without it.

Anyway, having clearly gotten sidetracked, I'd probably focus Society with most empires if I had a choice and forgo engineering until a little later in the game. That may be an artifact of my tendency to do either psionic or biological ascension. Without that, perhaps physics? It takes a long time for engineering to start providing valuable tech if you aren't planning to build robots. Part of that is mining upgrades being not so valuable until you're actually employing more miners, so the earliest major payoff from engineering is Orbital Rings most of the time for me. It's much more critical later on.

 

[Ramidel]

If you can produce an example of slaves with higher output than nonslaves on the same planet, then and only then will "always" be an overstatement. You probably can't even with the Instrument of Desire empire-unique building, you certainly can't without it.

Okay.

Chattel slavery for workers on a rural world with Domination Traditions. Slaves will produce more basic resources.

Alternately: Commercial ringworld segment, Indentured Assets megacorp, clerks, Assets Appropriation Officer at Level 10. Stack clerks floor-to-ceiling and have the AAO make more trade off slaves than nonslaves. Take advantage of the Instrument building (which doesn't actually help with slaves specifically, unless you know something I don't? It's a happiness/trade booster) and an Instrument-chosen leader and use this to jack trade value off the charts.

Alternately: On your thrall world, slaves will produce more pops.

Alternately: If you've picked up nerve stapled pops from somewhere else, enslave 'em because they're no good for anything else.

Alternately: If you're a regular machine who has captured pops, grid 'em. Same with a hive who hasn't yet ascended.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

With respect to the slavery debate, one problem I have with that is that many of the connotations we have with regards to chattel slavery are hard to apply to the science fiction setting.

Our worker slaves aren't poorly educated people, who go mining with pickaxes or pick cotton by hand or other jobs where the major expense is having access to a lot of warm bodies, who'll learn on the job - they are workers in a fully mechanized economy, with a starting point in the 23rd century; Which means that skills and education are a lot more important than numbers.

 

[Incompetent]

Our worker slaves aren't poorly educated people, who go mining with pickaxes or pick cotton by hand or other jobs where the major expense is having access to a lot of warm bodies, who'll learn on the job - they are workers in a fully mechanized economy, with a starting point in the 23rd century; Which means that skills and education are a lot more important than numbers.

It depends on how dystopian you imagine the interaction between technology and society in Stellaris; if there's actual slavery, you'd have to imagine it has taken a turn for the worse. If you want a worrying example of automation from the real world, there's what Cory Doctorow calls a "reverse centaur": this is where instead of a human using machines as tools, you basically have an AI running a production line, but it uses a human as a tool for certain tasks because the human is better at that specific thing, or just because minimum wage is cheaper than the equivalent machinery. For example, human hands are currently a better/cheaper "picking delicate stuff up without breaking it" tool than robots, so Amazon has a patent out for bracelets that vibrate in such a way as to basically guide the wearer's hands towards what they should pick up while sorting parcels. Humans in this situation can become like horses being ridden by a robot.

Often the tasks are cognitive in nature, but extremely repetitive and hyper-specialized in a way that would be beneath the dignity of a sapient being in an ideal world, but are perfectly sustainable in a world of high economic inequality. There's a joke that "AGI" stands for "A Guy in India", because of the ways people in low-wage countries are used as "humans in the loop" to try to make up for the mistakes of neural nets, LLMs and so on when attempting to perform complex tasks, while the company pretends to its Western consumers that everything is fully automated.

Now granted, Stellaris is set 200 years in the future, with all the technological advancement that entails. But if you go 200 years into the past, the technological cutting edge was something like the steam-powered cotton mills of Manchester. In terms of "automation" still involving a lot of human drudgery, how different is now to then?

 

[HFY]

It depends on how dystopian you imagine the interaction between technology and society in Stellaris;

Really depends on the empire.

Some empires in Stellaris are going to be incredibly dystopian.

 

[Thiend]

Okay.

Chattel slavery for workers on a rural world with Domination Traditions. Slaves will produce more basic resources.

Alternately: Commercial ringworld segment, Indentured Assets megacorp, clerks, Assets Appropriation Officer at Level 10. Stack clerks floor-to-ceiling and have the AAO make more trade off slaves than nonslaves. Take advantage of the Instrument building (which doesn't actually help with slaves specifically, unless you know something I don't? It's a happiness/trade booster) and an Instrument-chosen leader and use this to jack trade value off the charts.

You're actually correct here, I misremembered; it was the Chosen of the Instrument chosen one trait that boosts slaves, not the building. It's pretty tailer-made for slaves, as it boosts their actual output and stability too.

That having been said, you have provided no examples of slaves having better output. You have provided hypotheticals where slaves have high output. Even with AAP, you need a planet of the same number of only free pops to compare trade, preferably that has a civic and council position boosting free pops to compare to AAP boosting only slaves.

I used to use slaves, but they're worse. They're just... always worse. Total output is higher every time after compensating for higher upkeep.

 

[Ikael]

I always viewed slaves in Stellaris as akin to big ships shooting each other like naval vessels, star-faring civilizations invading primitives, or starfighters manned by flesh creatures. They make no sense from a scientific, economic, or practical POV, but it is a classic sci-fi trope and thus, fun to roleplay or fight against.

Alternatively, even in our modern, highly technological world, there are unfortunately many cases of forced labor. The reason why it has persisted even nowadays is that it is often far cheaper than regular labor, even if it is not more efficient, mind you. Not to mention that it requires far less investment than automation. And not a lot of education or training is required, either.

Not to mention that slavery in sci-fi settings also gave us one of the best chapters of Andor, so at least there is that!

 

[Troyen]

Where does this idea that Engineering is the largest tech tree come from?

Society is the largest of the disciplines, having far more techs than any of the two others, and to make matters worse it its heavily frontloaded being especially numerous in the early tech tiers.

Of core techs (the base 00_<discipline>_tech.txt files), society has 138 distinct techs that aren't disabled, and engineering has a mere 84. This is why 00_soc_tech.txt is 100.647 bytes long compared to 00_eng_tech.txt being 54.400 bytes long. (And 00_phys_tech.txt is a mere 39.018 bytes long.) There are a few - a very few - in the core that are mutually exclusive (e.g. biological vs machine version of same tech), but not enough to change the picture.

Likewise all the DLC and other tech files taken together doesn't do much to change this general picture, because most DLC has either a few techs that aren't mutually exclusive or no techs at all, and the only two that have many that aren't mutually exclusive are First Contact (12 physics, 6 society, 4 engineering) and Megacorp (Megastructures adds 6 physics, 4 society, and 2 engineering)

The Society tech tree is massive compared to both engineering and physics, which is why players who pass up on important early society gateway techs like Planetary Unification risk greatly hindering their long-term development because the sheer number of techs once they break into tier 2 means that even common techs aren't that common until your science investment is large enough that you are churning society techs fast.

Society has a lot of techs that are ethics dependent. Gestalts, Machines, and Organics have entirely different branches, so one empire is not going to encounter all Society techs. I counted 52 different Society techs with some form of Gestalt/Hive/Machine/Non-Gestalt check on the 3.5 tech tree. Engineering has a few techs that are gestalt vs non-gestalt, but not as many - primarily just the robot lines. I think Physics just has the final combat computer different between empires. I don't think the DLC have changed these numbers much, though Machine Age will be adding all those +Lifespan techs into the Machine Gestalt pool.

A quick skim of the wiki shows that Society has some 50-odd T4/T5 techs vs Engineering's 40ish, but most of the late-game Engineering techs are available to everybody (robots/robomodding/colossus being the exception), but many of those late-game Society techs are gated behind Ethics, Ascension Perks (including ascension paths), precursor projects, Archaeostudies, and crisis debris.

So on paper, Society looks bigger, but it's more likely you're encountering a larger portion of the Engineering tree. Engineering's biggest size decision is whether or not you want to go down the kinetic line, which really fans out starting in T3. Society gives you a fairly different experience depending on your empire, galaxy settings, and whether or not you have First Contact enabled.

 

[Ramidel]

whether or not you want to go down the kinetic line

And/or the missile and/or torpedo lines or strike craft. Engineering has a lot of options weapon-wise, and if you're doing a combination of kinetic and missile weapons (for example, Giga Cannon/KA/Whirlwind Missiles - and if autocannon corvettes are a part of that game it's even worse), that will eat up a whole tubful of engineering research while your physicists sit off in the corner making sad puppy eyes. One good reason to go for stuff like lasers, lances and disruptors is simply to take the load off your engineering pool.

So yeah, engineering is potentially useful early, very important later.