Am I badly missing something about slavery...?

[Danny Pockets]

Is it completely borked? I'm playing with slavery for the first time since 2.2, and I just don't see how it offers any real advantages, but I'm not sure that I'm not just badly misunderstanding how to do it right.

Main problem is my slaves just don't seem to be growing. So I can't send them off to my other worlds do all the labour (which is what I assumed I would be mostly doing) and neither can just sell them on the market for profits. So I just don't really see any major benefits from slavery...?

It just seems to me that only having a single pop grow per planet at one time completely nerfs what I expected slavery to be, which is a way to grow a lot of pops really fast. But if I can't grow my slaves along side my regular pops then what's the real point?

Admittedly the first (and only) race that I've slaved so far is a bit weird: They have Gaia world habitability, but they spawned on a tropical planet, and the two planets closest to them are also tropical (so they never expanded off their first planet). Also, my species just happen to be tropical pref too, and so I think what's going on is that I'm not getting any growth from the slaves because my own species is better suited to the planets we're on.

But again, this just feels dumb.

 

[bmt17]

I haven't played slavers much since 2.2 either but in my limited experience I had pretty much the opposite problem, slaves would outgrow free pops which left me with open specialist jobs. I had to micromanage planets with population controls which is less than ideal with the penalty that applies.

Playing a Megacorp with indentured assets seems to be better as far as management of interns...I mean indentured workers go.

 

[rjinswand]

Slaves are good if you can keep your planets stable. It seems like your biggest issue is that your Gaia slaves have no habitability for the planets you have and therefore are not chosen for growth over your main species at all. The attraction for slaves is low CG upkeep, improved base resource production and trait customisation. Personally, I have only played much with Syncretic Evolution, where I am guaranteed to start with a specifically tailored slave race with happiness and worker output bonuses right off the bat. In such a build, the base resource production is increased from a base +20% with no traits and +35% for any additional trait (Agrarian, Industrious, Ingenious). Needless to say, this is incredibly powerful in the early game where base resources are so so important, and lets you specialise your main pops for specialist jobs immediately. Also, in such a setup the slave race would have the same habitability as the main pops and grow in a 50/50 ratio. Differences in habitability will greatly skew this ratio all the way to 100/0 as you have experienced now.

For "normal" slaves, you rely on some luck to find a suitable slave race, which can be mitigated by playing aggressively or having raiding opportunities. I would suggest to combine normal slavery with stability increasing ethics/civics to avoid losing the production bonuses to low stab penalties. All in all, it is very strong if you have the right starting civics (SE), some luck (finding prole/tomb world primitives early) or an aggressive playstyle (nihilistic acquisition).

 

[Kryndude]

Are you playing in 2.2.5? Cuz I think they changed something with slave growth in the beta.

 

[Danny Pockets]

Are you playing in 2.2.5? Cuz I think they changed something with slave growth in the beta.

Yeah, playing 2.2.5 (with Glavius, although shouldn't make a difference). From memory they changed it so that habitability is weighted more heavily when it chooses which pop will grow next on a planet...

I'm about to conquer a bunch of new slaves in my current play through, so we'll see if I have better luck with slave pop growth after that.

The whole 'only one pop grows at a time' still seems like a big problem that makes this all a huge bummer, I hope they can figure out a better way to do pop growth.

 

[namewhichisnottakenyet]

Anybody else having problems with slave processing facilities? Once the building is finished and I enter the planet screen on which I built it the next time, the it is not there anymore.
Now I have to listen to 25% more complaints from the tasty, tasty Qwe'Pulci!

 

[Kryndude]

Anybody else having problems with slave processing facilities? Once the building is finished and I enter the planet screen on which I built it the next time, the it is not there anymore.
Now I have to listen to 25% more complaints from the tasty, tasty Qwe'Pulci!

Btw slave political power will be counted as 50% whether you have slave facility ot not. Unhappy pop's PP is capped at 0.5 min.

 

[Vielmann]

Depending on how you use them slaves range from completely useless (my Ecumenopolis forge world without worker jobs), to somewhat broken (0.25 housing of a city district giving 4+ food...). If you get low stability because them slaves are angry, increasing their living standards (0.05 cg/pop is not really noticeable) and using the tree anomaly for happiness help a lot. I once got my serviles with chattel slavery to 55% happiness.

 

[Morthra]

Depending on how you use them slaves range from completely useless (my Ecumenopolis forge world without worker jobs), to somewhat broken (0.25 housing of a city district giving 4+ food...). If you get low stability because them slaves are angry, increasing their living standards (0.05 cg/pop is not really noticeable) and using the tree anomaly for happiness help a lot. I once got my serviles with chattel slavery to 55% happiness.

Use Domestic Servitude as your slavery type. Unemployed slaves will generate Servant jobs which give Amenities, which is actually OP because it basically removes the need for Clerk jobs anywhere.