Building a mining hellhole - can it be made efficient?

[FailFailWin]

Sci fi is full of dystopian mining hellholes, but in stellaris the second you stop providing amenities and housing for your hell hole - boom, 50% production penalty and risk of rebellion.

Now you can somewhat counter this - enforcers reduce the crime and provide defensive armies to fight the rebels, and it being a hell hole means you don't care how many pops you stuff on to in, so in theory if you more than double production, you just about make up for the penalty (but not the bonuses for good stability, so still not great)

So you find yourself forced to provide amenities and housing for the hell hole and it becomes...pretty normal. which sucks.

The problem seems to originate from the fact that housing and amenity shortages effect not just workers, but specialists and rulers as well, and there's no way to provide those things for one class but not the others. You would think (much like the real world) a housing shortage is a problem for the workers, not the rulers! and likewise in an amenities shortage the rulers would be able to buy up enough for themselves, even if the peasants suffered somewhat.

My question is this - have any of you managed to make a hell hole (negative amenities/housing) work efficiently? and if so, how?

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

Sci fi is full of dystopian mining hellholes, but in stellaris the second you stop providing amenities and housing for your hell hole - boom, 50% production penalty and risk of rebellion.

Now you can somewhat counter this - enforcers reduce the crime and provide defensive armies to fight the rebels, and it being a hell hole means you don't care how many pops you stuff on to in, so in theory if you more than double production, you just about make up for the penalty (but not the bonuses for good stability, so still not great)

So you find yourself forced to provide amenities and housing for the hell hole and it becomes...pretty normal. which sucks.

The problem seems to originate from the fact that housing and amenity shortages effect not just workers, but specialists and rulers as well, and there's no way to provide those things for one class but not the others. You would think (much like the real world) a housing shortage is a problem for the workers, not the rulers! and likewise in an amenities shortage the rulers would be able to buy up enough for themselves, even if the peasants suffered somewhat.

My question is this - have any of you managed to make a hell hole (negative amenities/housing) work efficiently? and if so, how?

I'd argue your prognosis is incorrect though - is a hell hole supposed to be more efficient than a well run state?

 

[Matoro_TBS]

I don't think there's any sci-fi hellhole dystopia with absolutely no housing etc. Just give them bare minimum and then cut a little corners. I've got many hellhole mining worlds with tons of crime and 30-40% stability even with lack of housing and amenities. Those amenities I have are either from slave clerks or domestic slaves, which I imagine serving only the colony administrators. Slaves and stratified society helps a lot with hellhole builds. You'll want to maximize the happiness of ruling species with all sorts of happiness bonuses you can find - same with stability bonuses. That combination keeps stability up and the production doesn't tank that much.
You can get flat +25 stability with aristocratic elite, noble estate, deal with the crime lords and pacifism. There might be even more stability modifiers besides amenities, but at least those come to my mind.

Besides there cannot even be mining hellhole with infinite jobs, since you can only have so many miners. Clerks are usually my second choice for slave profession on those planets. Sure, they produce amenities, but I'm sure that won't make most of the workers any happier.

 

[MeowBeep]

Purge - forced labor. It uses no housing or amenities, produces food and minerals. The hellhole will require ongoing topping up though..

 

[Lord Dakier]

Purge - forced labor. It uses no housing or amenities, produces food and minerals. The hellhole will require ongoing topping up though..

Probably the most sci-fi like hell hole possible. In movies and such you don't see the changing over as miners typically but they're always considered to be dangerous.

 

[ranma100]

If you treat the people badly their will be discontent.

 

[Losttruppen]

Purge - forced labor. It uses no housing or amenities, produces food and minerals.

Yeah this is what I use my penal colony for. Psi-corps, 2 upgraded precints, a shield generator(for RP), and the rest of the slots filled with fortresses, then put it on martial law once you have 75 citizens. I can usually fill the building slots with the first batch of labour and build the whole thing up as soon as I get the tech and a suitable location. I force spawn a friendly megacorp of my primary species though so I'm not sure what a criminal branch at a 100% increased crime will do, I guess just add more Halls of Judgement if it's an issue.

 

[el freako]

Remember amenities also include things which would detrimentally affect slave production if skimped on.
Things like:
Infrastructure - your slaves don't mine that much if they have to also drag buckets of ore all the way to the spaceport.
Administration - You have a lot of slaves working an almost worked-out mine and far fewer working a really rich seam because there aren't enough clerks working to enable you to see which is which.
Entertainment & culture - with nothing to distract them or get them to accept their lot in life the slaves are more likely to organise among themselves, leading to lower productivity.

 

[OrigamiPhoenix]

Pretty sure slavery already fits this niche, no?

 

[Tindalosihound]

It would be interesting if Penal Worlds got their own specialized buildings for this purpose.
Possibly similar to the Syndicate buildings.
A black market instead of commercial zones, producing trade for the prisoners. Trusty recruitment centres instead of precinct houses.
And communal barracks instead of luxury estates, more like shared burden's communal housing, which increases housing more, but with less amenities to go around.

 

[Talanic]

So...a Thrall World? They're in game already. Needs neural implants as prerequisite for the tech. Can only build resource districts and special slave-only buildings, and only slave pops grow.

 

[Losttruppen]

Yeah I would love to see the special planets(penal, resort, etc.) and focuses(mining, tech, forge, etc.) expanded more with unique buildings, districts, and decisions. 2.2.x has really opened the doors for some very unique focused worlds but I feel we will need to wait a while for this to bear fruit while the basic stuff is worked on.

I want to turn sanctuary into an enormous penal colony, build shrine worlds as spiritualist, and the like. Special buildings/districts that reduce the cost to send undesirables to penal worlds, or just help keep a nice jobs to housing balance on worlds you won't be filling with normal cities and districts like ecumenopoli have.

 

[Alimaeus]

Not negative but you can negate a pops amenity usage by not allowing them citizenship, either guest workers (residence) or slaves, non-citizens don't count against amenity usage. At least this was how it worked in 2.2.2 and 2.2.3

As for housing yeah you're shit out of luck, but then again housing is pretty cheap, you get all you need for your miners every time you buy another mining district.

You're still gonna need some housing for enough enforcers to keep all these unhappy pops crime down and some ruler pops to keep the stability up.