Why do specialist slaves benefit from worker bonuses?

[Incompetent]

As is well-known, authoritarian slaver empires can be pretty overpowered due to the amount of production bonus you can get on all your slaves, compared to the easily mitigated downsides of oppression (due to how political power works).

The exact numbers can of course be tweaked, but at a more basic design level, it seems like a bad idea to me to let all slaves benefit not only from slave bonuses and job/resource-specific bonuses, but also generic "worker" bonuses, regardless of the stratum of the job the slave is currently doing. (They don't benefit from specialist bonuses, but let's be honest, as an authoritarian slaver empire, you're not going to have many specialist bonuses compared to worker bonuses.) The effect is particularly drastic for jobs like Metallurgist and Artisan that don't get that many bonuses otherwise, and it also leads to absurdities like a Very Strong slave researcher or culture worker using their muscles to produce extra science/unity. It might make more sense to treat slaves (at least for productivity purposes) as their own stratum, below Workers and above Undesirables.

If this is all working as designed and the devs don't plan to change it, are there at least mods that allow specialist slaves but don't let them get so overbuffed?

 

[Pancakelord]

Specialist slaves are definitely an outlier, that have been around for too long to be a critical bug, I guess. But Imo, this is the real issue

compared to the easily mitigated downsides of oppression

You continue to increase in slave output, whilst slaves never grow any more unruly or dangerous. (One could argue the same for free pops - which ought to demand more food or amenities for their extra output, but they don't increase anywhere near as much as slaves, so it's less of an issue).

What might be interesting is to increase slave PP (or even crime, adding "escaped slave" criminal jobs) in-line (or in a ratio of x:1) with slave output over base.

That way you can run a broken strong society - but it'll cost you in security forces and extra police or soldiers, unless you want to be putting riots down every five minutes.

 

[TrotBot]

Yeah there needs to be massive nerfs to slaves. Happiness and stability on slave empire worlds should be capped to never be anywhere near what is possible under utopian abundance. 100% stability should be 100% impossible for slavers. Slave specialists should be utter trash compared to utopian abundance specialists.

 

[Jman5]

Yeah there needs to be massive nerfs to slaves. Happiness and stability on slave empire worlds should be capped to never be anywhere near what is possible under utopian abundance. 100% stability should be 100% impossible for slavers. Slave specialists should be utter trash compared to utopian abundance specialists.

100%. Though I would say that I think Chemical Bliss should be allowed to break the cap since it comes with its own downsides. I would make it a sliding scale so livestock is 60%, Chattel slaves might be capped at 70%, and servants/thralls might be 80%. I would also knock the bonus slaves get from excess amenities to 75% to counteract their reduced amenities. Otherwise you wind up with a perverse situation where their lower amenity upkeep is actually making them happier and more productive.

IMO, a more realistic view of slavery would focus their benefits on low upkeep and working in low-habitability conditions. Just dumping loads of production bonuses is not only imbalanced, but not accurate.

In real life, the benefits slavery was:
A) a captured labor force so you didn't have to worry about not being able to find anyone to pick your crops at harvest time.
B) you can force them work in terrible conditions that free-men couldn't even be paid to do.
C) you can use slaves as a form of mobile capital to take out loans and expand your business. So you would use your slaves' value as collateral to borrow money from the bank and then use that money to buy more farmland.

In terms of raw production, I have read studies that argue that production output from slavery was no more efficient than what you got from hired help.

 

[Pancakelord]

Happiness and stability on slave empire worlds should be capped to never be anywhere near what is possible under utopian abundance. 100% stability should be 100% impossible for slavers.

There's definitely something wrong with the stability/PP stats in defines.
This is a slave world with like 50% of its population as unemployed, pissed off, slaves and no planetary soldier or police jobs. How on earth is that still a 64% stability rating?? (in fact pop approval actually was increasing stability by ~+5). Even if it's the capital world, that place should be kicking off riots left right and centre.

Screwing with these defines (specifically the highlit one) gives me the below with the same scenarios. More testing needed.

Interestingly this isn't the first time someone's looked at these specific defines, in-depth. Here's an old bug report looking at improper slave approval scaling from like 2.2 (which was fixed to the values currently in the defines file).

Edit: setting everything to 0 disables pop approval, removing it from the stability equation.

As pops are so easy to keep happy (and I see nothing that will change this in 3.0 so far), it, initially, makes sense to instead negatively bias the system to the extreme
Then you realise this makes little difference for slaves, as they have bugger all PP.

It radically destabilises worlds when a ruler gets unemployed though (which only really happens during a regime change and doesn't affect slavers much).

So instead I come back to the simple issue that Slave PP is too low.
The way I see it there are 3 ways to solve this, they all conditionally boost slave PP:

1. co-modify output modifiers - so slave PP rises as slave output rises.
2. use slave class happiness* to spawn criminals (criminals spawn via events) "Escaped slaves" "Renegade Slaves" - that increase the PP of slaves on that world and may fast-track uprising/riot events.
3. spawn blockers if slaves are mis-treated - if slaves lack amenities or housing, spawn "shanties" that increase crime per pop, or flat decrease stability and spawn more slave-PP boosting criminals.

*if average happiness of worker slaves < X spawn Y criminal-slave jobs if <X2 spawn Y2 slave jobs etc (to emulate scaling with # slaves and general levels of resentment).
Could have separate criminal jobs for indentured servants - as they work in more "sensitive jobs" they could steal energy creds, or damage equipment lowering specialist output etc. in addition to +slave pp.

 

[Jman5]

Regarding stability, I would make sure you are reloading after moving pops off jobs. I have had issues with stability not being correctly updated until I reload the save.

 

[Pancakelord]

Regarding stability, I would make sure you are reloading after moving pops off jobs. I have had issues with stability not being correctly updated until I reload the save.

advance a month, close and open the planet window, and it recalculates.

 

[TrotBot]

the way that slavery makes happiness bonuses for utopians a moot point is just crazy, and it contributes to the liberation wars dynamic being really bad. if slaves were a lot more unhappy it would force slavers to invest in putting revolts down rather than being able to snowball constantly. it would also make for more interesting liberation wars, granting an actual cassus belli to back the slave uprising and impose ideology.

that would be more balanced because currently free people need to invest a lot in consumer goods instead of alloys for max happiness, and there's not enough to show for it if slavers can get the same happiness and pour it all into alloys and war.

 

[Pancakelord]

it would also make for more interesting liberation wars, granting an actual cassus belli to back the slave uprising and impose ideology.

We need to see how intel/espionage plays, but there's potential to do something like "Arm slaves" setting off -X stab on worlds and +slave PP to force riots. And if a riot triggers rebels could ask for your support.

One thing i've tried this evening (though its primitive still and only quickly tested) is exerting an "ethos leak" on all egalitarian empires.

So if you're a slaver and your colony is 1 system away from my democratic worlds worlds, the slaves there get huge egalitarian ethos pull + some PP, with closing borders halving the effect (though ive also modded closed borders to not stop ship travel, but increase ship upkeep + reduce foreign ship speed in your space - so they're more like a form of censorship / not granting navigational aid IMO). This then leads to considerably decreased approval ratings, causing instability, and I had one neighbour fall to riots on an early-game colony.​

This border "leakage" could be scaled up for all 8 ethos doing different things - maybe as a policy to select which of your governing ethos to project, and a second policy to setup how strongly you project, with a unity cost.
So authoritarians could instil the... perks of authoritarianism in surrounding empires, possibly triggering coups.
Or spiritualist empires could cause fundamentalist uprisings, for example. Sort of like a more passive version of "actively supporting" rebels.

Either way, I agree, PP & Stability need a shakeup; they're too "sticky" when things are going well and too hard to actually make bad enough to make rebellion really relevant.

 

[HFY]

It radically destabilises worlds when a ruler gets unemployed though (which only really happens during a regime change and doesn't affect slavers much).

Happens when I'm purging Exterminators from a conquered world, and the free 50 pops Merchant job goes away.

Happens when I successfully Expropriate away a Mega Criminal.

Both of those are independent of being a slaver.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

I'm ok with a slave society being able to get 100% stability and big happiness. [[In what follows, I'm not at all condoning shit, obv-- I'm only saying these cultures appear to have done the 100%.]]

Look at Ancient Egypt. The more you dig into their society and archaeology, the more it becomes clear that they had both most of the time. They did all their stuff because they LOVED being alive, specifically being alive in Egypt and nowhere else. Even the slaves had that "omg creation is so beautiful HERE" mentality. And not just propaganda-- like there's real archaeological stuff that demonstrates it. In their specific case, it was a mentality comparable (mostly) to Inward Perfection. "Mostly" because they did conquer outside the Nile, but really did it like... JUST to have a buffer between the Nile and those dumb barbarians that keep trying to crash our party.

Part of the big issue is that their slave system didnt have cruelty as its driving emotion the way slavery from the Roman empire till today has. They were all "let's turn *everything* into rape, chains, and brutality."

 

[TrotBot]

I'm ok with a slave society being able to get 100% stability and big happiness. [[In what follows, I'm not at all condoning shit, obv-- I'm only saying these cultures appear to have done the 100%.]]

Look at Ancient Egypt. The more you dig into their society and archaeology, the more it becomes clear that they had both most of the time. They did all their stuff because they LOVED being alive, specifically being alive in Egypt and nowhere else. Even the slaves had that "omg creation is so beautiful HERE" mentality. And not just propaganda-- like there's real archaeological stuff that demonstrates it. In their specific case, it was a mentality comparable (mostly) to Inward Perfection. "Mostly" because they did conquer outside the Nile, but really did it like... JUST to have a buffer between the Nile and those dumb barbarians that keep trying to crash our party.

Part of the big issue is that their slave system didnt have cruelty as its driving emotion the way slavery from the Roman empire till today has. They were all "let's turn *everything* into rape, chains, and brutality."

Egypt was not a slave society, it's far more complex than that. The pyramid workers were paid. In fact, the first recorded strike in human history was on the pyramid construction site in ancient Egypt. So no. It is 100% impossible not just for slave societies, but any class society (as in not Utopian Abundance or at least Shared Burdens or Comrade Servitors) to have 100% stability. So long as there is a ruling class living like literal gods since you picked Egypt, there will be people who wish to bring them down. And in Egypt, there was also the backstabbing over how many gods should there be. So yeah, not stable societies. Stable looking because the timescale of social upheavels was far slower before capitalism and before radio, television, and finally the internet. But over their long sloth-like existences, pre-capitalist societies had explosive class struggles.

100% stability should be 100% impossible for slave societies, hell even for anything with disparity between the pop classes of any sort. 100% happiness for the slave owner class is realistic, but for the slaves it is 100% not. There should be a cap. Or stability bonuses should continue boosting for utopians the higher their amenities go, with no cap. The consumer goods costs for people reaching 200-300 amenities per planet are astronomical, give us something for roleplaying utopian abundance RIGHT please.

 

[Tamwin5]

I think having conditional modifiers to increase slave PP is probably the best solution: from espionage, political events, recently conquered pops trying to drum up a revolution, stuff like that. I also think that having unemployed slaves shouldn't cause unhappiness, or at the very least cause less, since people being forced to work and who can't make money from their labor probably would be fine to have time on their hands. Having a bunch of slaves with free time however would make it more likely to get some slaves "getting ideas" though, firing one of the above mentioned +slave PP events.

 

[OnyxAbussos]

Egypt was not a slave society, it's far more complex than that. The pyramid workers were paid. In fact, the first recorded strike in human history was on the pyramid construction site in ancient Egypt. So no. It is 100% impossible not just for slave societies, but any class society (as in not Utopian Abundance or at least Shared Burdens or Comrade Servitors) to have 100% stability. So long as there is a ruling class living like literal gods since you picked Egypt, there will be people who wish to bring them down. And in Egypt, there was also the backstabbing over how many gods should there be. So yeah, not stable societies. Stable looking because the timescale of social upheavels was far slower before capitalism and before radio, television, and finally the internet. But over their long sloth-like existences, pre-capitalist societies had explosive class struggles.

100% stability should be 100% impossible for slave societies, hell even for anything with disparity between the pop classes of any sort. 100% happiness for the slave owner class is realistic, but for the slaves it is 100% not. There should be a cap. Or stability bonuses should continue boosting for utopians the higher their amenities go, with no cap. The consumer goods costs for people reaching 200-300 amenities per planet are astronomical, give us something for roleplaying utopian abundance RIGHT please.

1. Much longer time tables between upheavals? So... more stable?
2.

 

[HFY]

1. Much longer time tables between upheavals? So... more stable?

Before cars, the words "more stable" certainly describes the world.

 

[TrotBot]

1. Much longer time tables between upheavals? So... more stable?
2.

i'm saying those time tables were a result of technological backwardness extending "social time" the way geologists refer to "geological timescale". so a modern slavery on a far larger scale means compressing those same upheavals into a shorter timescale.

or, as lenin would say: "there are decades where weeks happen, and then there are weeks where decades happen".

 

[Kapitalisti]

1. Much longer time tables between upheavals? So... more stable?
2.

Try to remember that we have very, very fragmented information about the day to day stuff that happened in ancient societies. Often only the most momentous events are specifically chronicled with stuff like "peasant riot in province X" etc being just normal boring stuff not worth being, metaphorically speaking, carved in stone for posterity. So of course our mental image is that those societies spent hundreds or even thousands of years just chilling and doing nothing.

 

[Pancakelord]

I've done some more digging, it turns out some static modifiers arent actually static, rather they are scalar.

# Happiness Levels
pop_happiness_positive = {
    pop_government_ethic_attraction = 0.50
}

pop_happiness_positive_slave = {
    pop_ethic_authoritarian_attraction_mult = 1
}

# Also reduces stability
pop_happiness_negative = {
    pop_government_ethic_attraction = -0.50
    pop_cat_worker_political_power = 1.00        #+100% worker PP when angry
    pop_cat_specialist_political_power = 0.50    #+50% specialist PP when angry
}

pop_happiness_negative_slave = {
    pop_ethic_egalitarian_attraction_mult = 5
    pop_cat_slave_political_power = 5            #+500% Slave PP when angry
}

Here's a planet without a slave processing facility. Slave PP GROWS as Happiness FALLS

@ 10% happiness PP = 1.237​

@ 30% happiness PP = 0.737​

@ 48% happiness PP = 0.297​

(logic follows that it'll = vanilla PP of ~0.25 at 50% happiness).

This actually means that everything in that pop-window could be used as a scalar modifier (and other things, too that arent really used for pops in vanilla)

.

• For slaves
  • PP ^ and Sprawl ^ when happiness declines below 50%->0% (representing "unrulyness" and greater administrative work needed to keep them in-check - short of an actual riot).
• For free pops (Workers, Specialists, Rulers)
  • ^ Amenities usage as happiness grows from 50% -> 100% (to make you actually need to work hard to keep a happy population... happy)
• Class specific
  • (criminals - making crime hurt)
    • planet immigration v planet stability v -- though there's probably better ways to handle this than tying it to happiness for criminals lol.
  • Rulers (lavish luxury time)
    • ^ Pop Upkeep and ^ CGs usage as happiness increases (in addition to aforementioned ^amenities for all 3 main strata ) making rulers a bit harder to please.
  • Scalar custom resources (decisions + scalar modifiers)
    • Decisions can also add scalar upkeep requirements by adding a base slave upkeep value =/=0, which a scalar property can then multiply e.g.: pop_category_slave_BOMB_COLLARS_upkeep_mult = 1 (An example modded resource in this case - for a decision to distribute bomb collars to slaves to reduce PP - but slave unhappiness demands more bomb collars per pop).

Example of Amenities usage rising with happiness (which then lowers free amenities, making higher happiness harder to achieve without real work).

This is all just tweaking existing stats, handled on a pop stratum basis.
Doesnt look like these happiness settings can be used to fire planet modifiers like -stab (wasnt able to add jobs based on happiness), likely because these are coded to affect pops and cant scope "up" to a planetary level.

But you could add jobs via event [checking per month for aggregate slave-cat happiness] like "Escaped slave" that increases slave PP pop_cat_slave_political_power = X (where 1 = 100%) or -stability planet modifiers (or spawn blockers as i mentioned earlier - spawning "slave shanties" that decrease stab + spawn unregistered slave "criminal" jobs).

 

[Jman5]

Interesting stuff. Perhaps a simpler solution would be to instead look at the political power of the Ruler class for Stratified society and knock it down a peg. Right now it's set at 10x per pop which really makes it overwhelming. If ruler class wasn't dominating the approval rating average quite as much, it would leave more space for unhappy slaves to impact stability.

I also still like the idea of adding a happiness cap to slaves and reducing the impact of happiness they get from excess amenities to 75%.

 

[HugsAndSnuggles]

Perhaps a simpler solution would be to instead look at the political power of the Ruler class for Stratified society and knock it down a peg.

To make everyone switch to academic privilege instead?

I also still like the idea of adding a happiness cap to slaves and reducing the impact of happiness they get from excess amenities to 75%.

They used not to get any, same as residents. No idea why this was changed, not like slaves need any happiness to begin with.