Artisan should be a Worker job (aka please let slaves make my tables and chairs)

[n0z3k1ll3r]

I've run into a brick wall playing a slaver empire due to a complete near inability to actually produce consumer goods up to requirements, despite adding numerous consumer goods factories. It took me a while to realise that slaves weren't actually allowed to work in said consumer goods factories, and frankly that's kind of mindboggling. Surely by the time of Stellaris that's just assembly line stuff not individual bespoke craftsmanship stuff, right? If I'm a decadent slaver I'm not building my own sodding white goods.

It adds to the more general problem I'm finding with slavery, namely that there's so few jobs available to slaves that I actually want them to do, and the best of that bunch (food, mineral and energy production) are heavily restricted by the planet's terrain. I haven't actually picked Slaver Guild's (I was relying purely on alien slaves) so I can only imagine how mindbogglingly bad throwing a civic point away on making 40% of your population nearly useless is.

On a whim I modded artisan to be a working class job and loaded the game up with that. The economy fixed itself immediately. I took it off again, and it went back to -200 consumer goods a month.

I strongly advocate for moving Artisan to the worker category, and allowing the ruling class to do something other than maintain their own existence while the slaves sit around unemployed and angry.

 

[kalauer]

You could argue the same for anny other specialists Jobs, though. Why do the hard research yourself, or the pole dancing or the culture-thingy…?

My perception of the strata is the Level of qualification needed to fulfill a Job Position. And while there could be even more Differentiation (e.g. unqualified?worker, medium qualified=factories, high qualified=Researcher, culture, and lastly ruler), I feel the current System works well enough to ccreate a differentiated Society.

However, it is true than you cannot, atm, create a Society of 1% rulers and 99% slaves. This might be, as you already did, realised best with mods for the time being...

 

[Promethian]

It seems to me that the problem is more miscalculation with the slavery civic than a need to change something as drastic as a job tier. Making consumer goods a worker tier job would ripple all over the place with what bonuses affect it, the contribution of the people working it towards stability and other things. On the other hand changing the slavery % from 40 to 35 affects a single civic and would solve your problem.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

I've run into a brick wall playing a slaver empire due to a complete near inability to actually produce consumer goods up to requirements, despite adding numerous consumer goods factories.

Slaver empires are oriented for raw resource production. Nothing surprising here. It's balance and a sensible one.

It took me a while to realise that slaves weren't actually allowed to work in said consumer goods factories, and frankly that's kind of mindboggling. Surely by the time of Stellaris that's just assembly line stuff not individual bespoke craftsmanship stuff, right? If I'm a decadent slaver I'm not building my own sodding white goods.

Oh my. Do you really believe that they still use such ancient means as actually putting people to work on the assembly lines in the year 2200? What are you, a luddite?

Alloy and consumer goods production jobs are no way related to actual assembling. It's a programmers, 3-D modellers and designers jobs where all the manual tasks are automated and done by machines. Obviously slaves can't do it.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

On the other hand changing the slavery % from 40 to 35 affects a single civic and would solve your problem.

It won't. He haven't even taken the slaver guilds civic.

 

[Latheloi]

It would be good if there was the equivalent of droids for slaves (droids can do consumer goods and alloys) that gave you the option to enable to do those jobs, probably at the cost of greater political power and upkeep for that living standard of slave)

 

[r3xm0rt1s]

Slaves can work as entertainers, or even domestic servants that require no pop slots; as well as mine, farm and operate generators. Granted, I play with settings easy enough to not need that +10% minerals or something.

I would not be opposed to adding alloy and consumer goods production to slave jobs though.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

Surely by the time of Stellaris that's just assembly line stuff not individual bespoke craftsmanship stuff, right? If I'm a decadent slaver I'm not building my own sodding white goods.

Would you trust disenfranchised, poorly-treated slaves to design a fridge or washing machine and then implement an assembly pipeline for it? No? Me neither. If they were educated enough to do it in the first place they'd probably secretly turn them into bombs or something.

Remember that consumer goods are also consumed by your researchers. It includes highly specialised technical devices. Consumer goods does not mean furniture.

 

[Archael90]

I think that almost every job should be able to be done by slaves, bcs everyone, even slave can work in manufactures, and offices, but some of them, like consumer goods, could be made with worst quality, than made by free pop, it could be displayed as less production, like slaves in specialist job makes 20% less output or such. And AI that is trying to fill higher strata with free pops, should do exact opposite when assigning slaves - slaves are more likely to be put in worker strata than specialist, and once all worker jobs are filled, they are filling specialist jobs.
Or is it at the moment, and i just didnt notice it?

 

[ffsffs1]

Slavers have it easy when it comes to conusmer goods since slaves use so little. Satisfying consumer goods demand is way harder for egalitarian empires using utopian abundance or even social welfare.

If you don't have enough non-enslaved pops to work as artisans, then you have high proportion of slaves which means your consumer goods requirements are low. At the very least, it should be trivial to buy enough consumer goods on the market. Its probably possible to get them all off trade with consumer benefits.

 

[Zavaleta]

The 40% enslaved for slavers is so arbitrary and makes little sense for the pop mechanics. I don't understand why they can't enslave pops based on jobs like before under the caste system.

 

[n0z3k1ll3r]

Slaver empires are oriented for raw resource production. Nothing surprising here. It's balance and a sensible one.

People keep saying that and it's not true. There's like 0 point to having high levels of food and minerals; beyond a certain point more just doesn't matter. Energy is useful but only insofar as you can swap it for other things, and it'd be more worthwhile just to build those things; I immediately ran a massive deficit the moment I tried buying my consumer good shortage off the market.

Consumer goods and alloys, which actually matter, aren't producable by slaves. Slaves have no useful jobs. The tradeoff isn't worth it. Period.

Would you trust disenfranchised, poorly-treated slaves to design a fridge or washing machine and then implement an assembly pipeline for it? No? Me neither. If they were educated enough to do it in the first place they'd probably secretly turn them into bombs or something.

They aren't designing crap. They're sticking component A into socket B, over and over again, on a conveyer belt. There is no way you'd need a whole pop's worth just to do design and implementation for one factory. Given they can already work (uselessly) as clerks there's clearly not a job education barrier.

Alloy and consumer goods production jobs are no way related to actual assembling. It's a programmers, 3-D modellers and designers jobs where all the manual tasks are automated and done by machines. Obviously slaves can't do it.

Really? They seem to be able to do the mine management and robotic miner programming for mines easily enough. I can make arbitrary flavor extrapolations too!

 

[Matoro_TBS]

Servant slaves are covered by domestic servitude, but it's a problem you can't easily have both domestic servants and chattel slaves on the same planet.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

I can make arbitrary flavor extrapolations too!

Great, now keep thinking. Obviously, operating mining and farming equipment is much easier. You don't have to design anything, don't have to reprogram the tools for new products. All the work is mostly standartized. A slave or a pretty stupid robot can do it.

But when you are making consumer goods... you have to make your machinery assemble a new model of a mobile phone every 6 mounths or so, as well as any other goods. New designs are requested, standards are rapidly changing in order to keep up with the consumers tastes and so on and so on. Same with alloys. You need to create many kinds of them for various purposes, regularly repurposing your software. Such jobs require creativity and programming skills. Not for slaves.

They aren't designing crap.

They definetely are. Who would you think is doing all the design otherwise? You don't have any designer or modeller jobs. If you are so found of perceiving your artisans as conveyer belt assemblers you may indeed mod it as a job of a worker strata. But than, in order to be consistemt, you would have to make a separate specialist job for all the creative work requested which can't be done by slaves. So you will end up having a more complex abstruction but the same problem: your consumer goods would still be handicapped by your specialists. And I believe if PDX had implemented such system there would still be people complaining about the facts that slaves can't fully run the economy, despite the fact that it's totally intended and reasonable.

People keep saying that and it's not true. There's like 0 point to having high levels of food and minerals; beyond a certain point more just doesn't matter. Energy is useful but only insofar as you can swap it for other things, and it'd be more worthwhile just to build those things; I immediately ran a massive deficit the moment I tried buying my consumer good shortage off the market.

Hmm... what do you think isn't true here? If you take a raw resource focusing build don't be surprised to have more raw resources than you need and sell them. And if your economy is made from uneducated slaves obviously you would suffer from manufactored goods shortage. Seems pretty obvious to me.

 

[Ecervele]

When I first read the title, I thought you wanted to used slaves as furniture... I'm not sure if it was questionable or awesome...

 

[BroAdso]

One practical suggestion is to combine the forced pop growth function with the 1000-food "Boost Planetary Growth" decision and the energy-credit cost "Healthcare Campaign" edict to rapidly grow as many POPs of a non-enslaved race as you need to work your specialist jobs.

Alternatively, buy POPs of a race that doesn't already exist in your empire from the slave market and set their rights to 'Free,' they can serve as guest workers in your specialist jobs. Another alternative: if you can, close off some suboptimal specialist jobs - maybe a couple of researchers - and those workers will move to the artisan slots to rebalance your economy.

Finally remember that you can set monthly automated market trades. Are you a slaver empire producing approximately one bajillion food but not enough consumer goods? Set a monthly automated trade to sell 100 food and buy 25 consumer goods per month and see how it impacts your economic balance over a year or two.

 

[Kat Tsun]

Slaver empires are oriented for raw resource production. Nothing surprising here. It's balance and a sensible one.



Oh my. Do you really believe that they still use such ancient means as actually putting people to work on the assembly lines in the year 2200? What are you, a luddite?

Alloy and consumer goods production jobs are no way related to actual assembling. It's a programmers, 3-D modellers and designers jobs where all the manual tasks are automated and done by machines. Obviously slaves can't do it.

Machines are capital intensive. Slavery is labor intensive. Since capital and labor are inversions of each other (being high in capital is being short in labor, and vice versa), investment in machine assembly lines makes zero sense for a society that practices slavery and is not collapsing economically. Slavery guilds would likely have freemen doing the hard work, i.e. engineering, and using slaves as biorobots to do the assembly line tasks. A slave society literally cannot function if it has sufficient capital to operate machines, otherwise it would be using machines instead of slaves, because the people who use slaves would be getting out-competed by the vastly superior machine production lines. This happened to the Confederate States of America IRL.

Likewise a society which has a suitably large mass of labor, like the Ming Dynasty, would not invest in machines, because they have no reason to invest in machines and anyone who does so is getting out-competed by the vastly superior slave owners and sharecroppers.

Make slave jobs require food and minerals for upkeep or something, instead of energy, to show the difference between labor and capital focused economies.

Another idea is to divide jobs of strata by economic form: slavery economies would have a lot more jobs at the bottom, perhaps granted by special buildings, than free economies. Free economies, conversely, may have more specialists, or leverage their superior production of capital (energy) to provide for more goods to be bought in trade markets or something. The current strata setup is probably pretty close to what a mechanized free economy would look like, since you have your basic resource producers, your clerks, and then loads of specialists. Invert it for slave economies, where you have thinkers and tinkerers who command legions of slave proles who work on specialized assembly lines.

It might be represented as slave economies requiring more investment in land space/special buildings, while free economies are more district focused, but that's OK because buildings are locked behind pops anyway, so it's something that would leverage the mass populations of slave economies to begin with.

 

[Hyomoto]

Hmm. I wonder if it's possible? As it stands jobs are defined as part of a strata. So it should be possible to define those jobs as slave jobs for slavers, perhaps through a economic policy, species rights, government gating, etc...

So here's my question, what would be the trigger that makes this change? What conditions would be met for that job to be what you are asking? If it's possible I might just give it a swing.

 

[Vitruvian Guar]

Machines are capital intensive. Slavery is labor intensive. Since capital and labor are inversions of each other (being high in capital is being short in labor, and vice versa), investment in machine assembly lines makes zero sense for a society that practices slavery and is not collapsing economically. Slavery guilds would likely have freemen doing the hard work, i.e. engineering, and using slaves as biorobots to do the assembly line tasks. A slave society literally cannot function if it has sufficient capital to operate machines, otherwise it would be using machines instead of slaves, because the people who use slaves would be getting out-competed by the vastly superior machine production lines. This happened to the Confederate States of America IRL.

Likewise a society which has a suitably large mass of labor, like the Ming Dynasty, would not invest in machines, because they have no reason to invest in machines and anyone who does so is getting out-competed by the vastly superior slave owners and sharecroppers.

Make slave jobs require food and minerals for upkeep or something, instead of energy, to show the difference between labor and capital focused economies.

This logic works only untill slaves are cheaper than machines.

 

[Kat Tsun]

This logic works only untill slaves are cheaper than machines.

Like where I mentioned the Ming Dynasty of the 15th century not investing in Manchurian steel, because it was cheaper to put more sharecroppers to work in the rice fields, so they never had an Industrial Revolution like Britain?

Neither slaves nor machines are inherently better systems, they're just relatively better. An environment that supports societies that have a large population, with high growth, will necessarily have little in the way of capital. This is just how it works. India, Nigeria, Mexico, and Pakistan are all young, low capital economies IRL. Therefore they tend to have large amounts of unskilled labor and very little money to spend. Conversely, the United States, Germany, and Japan are all middle aged, getting older, and have a massive amount of capital because of it, so they tend to invest in machines to do their work.

All this would mean in game is that slave economies would have more jobs for the Worker stratum while free economies would have more jobs for the Specialist stratum, and they would require different resources to maintain their jobs. Free economies will still use energy to maintain their buildings, but slave economies will use labor (represented either as a special "Custodian" job, possibly?), food, and minerals to maintain their buildings.

Slave economies would be early game powerhouses that require expansion to survive while free economies would be long play slow-movers that can survive in static galaxies. Once the galaxy stops expanding, it becomes harder to be an economy focused purely on expansion of labor, because labor needs land to live in. Capital just needs clerks typing away at trade manifests in offices.