"I've been involved in numerous raiding bombardments on Fallen Empires, and I have over 300 confirmed friends."
- 7
Slavery's bad, mmkay?
- Thread starter GloatingSwine
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
"I've been involved in numerous raiding bombardments on Fallen Empires, and I have over 300 confirmed friends."
Does anybody else feel like thrall worlds come too late in the game to matter?
- 3
Assuming they come at all.
Honestly, they're pretty good planets. You can max out all the rural districts to get some decent resource production and you get a huge growth boost to get some pops to export. Unfortunately, any normal planet can out-perform the real bonuses provided by thrall worlds with 1 building and 1 pop. Makes them useless for any empire that uses robots, and kind of mediocre even for those than don't.
Maybe instead of a tech it should be a T0 AP and the designation should additionally remove habitability penalties to resource production and growth rate, perhaps with an additional penalty to housing or something?
- 1
Ok sure, but that would then apply to the liberated slaves as well.
So also no slaves escaping unless crime.
At this point the theoretic railroad does nothing.
Ed: Tying anything to crime before a rework will result in it doing nothing.
Last edited:
Those are called fortresses and provide defense armies.
I could see that working against slave raids, i'll concede to that, so sure.
Build fortresses instead of precincts.
So the game very much DOES provide for your roleplay.
You just don't want to use a building slot on it.
My proposal, at the start of the thread, was that slaves need overseers. They would have a parallel structure specific to slaves which, if the overseer positions are fully manned and the slaves are kept working, prevents escapes and increases their outputs.
Crime wouldn't make it easier or harder to poach or liberate slaves, having too many of them idle or not enough whips would. A different problem to manage that makes the system feel different to use.
- 3
I think the link here is that crime is already high for slaves and answers questions like: do unhappy slaves need more overseers than happy slaves? How many more?
Enforcers kinda do the job of Overseers, if the metric is measured by crime (especially from unhappiness).
And right now that does feel different from a non-slave society, where I can often have 0 crime at over a hundred pops with sufficient happiness.
From there, it's easy to tie crime into other slave-related events -- like if you don't have enough "overseers" (Enforcers) then sometimes slaves escape.
- 1
And then you said:
"To do it at pop scale covertly (landing parties would not work covertly at pop scale, that's how you abduct individuals like assets or leaders) it would need an established criminal underworld to hide within."
Why wouldn't this apply to a slave society as well?
Sorry if this has already been said (I haven't read through the whole thread), but I wonder if the place to start is by fixing the way free pops behave.
Right now, it seems like slavery is defined by two main differences. They're pops without factions and politics, but with a higher chance of negative events. They also have modestly adjusted upkeep costs.
So it seems like the first fix needs to be making factions and politics matter. If I cared about different pops with different politics, then I would care about enslaving them so that they can't create problems. Or if I cared about the fact that my xenophobes detest living alongside free aliens, or that my authoritarians need someone to grind under foot to be happy, same thing. I'd say we start by sharpening the difference through fixing how free pops behave.
Then I think a good way to adjust this might be through three more changes: First, make upkeep harder to pay. As with many areas of Stellaris, the game assumes that resources are harder to come by than they are. Things like housing and happiness should be more expensive to achieve, because right now I can't think of a time I've ever actually thought about the costs of maintaining my population.
Then, give players more control over slavery living conditions. I'd like to adjust housing, food and amenities down to barely anything. If population upkeep is a real, meaningful cost for my empire, a population that requires virtually no upkeep will be a big win. Now I can see the benefits here.
Finally, I've never found that the random chance of negative events makes much of a difference. I would keep that, but I would also have slaves require enforcer jobs. The right balance would probably be based on living conditions, the more I make their lives hell the more I need to crack down. But basically I need X enforcers per Y slaves, otherwise those slaves will escape and become criminals, pirates and refugees to other empires.
Together, this might give a good balance. You have a real reason to want slaves, since they can spare you both messy politics and expensive housing, but also a real balancing act, since it's pretty easy to get pulled into a cycle where basically your free pops do nothing but oversee the slaves.
Right now, it seems like slavery is defined by two main differences. They're pops without factions and politics, but with a higher chance of negative events. They also have modestly adjusted upkeep costs.
So it seems like the first fix needs to be making factions and politics matter. If I cared about different pops with different politics, then I would care about enslaving them so that they can't create problems. Or if I cared about the fact that my xenophobes detest living alongside free aliens, or that my authoritarians need someone to grind under foot to be happy, same thing. I'd say we start by sharpening the difference through fixing how free pops behave.
Then I think a good way to adjust this might be through three more changes: First, make upkeep harder to pay. As with many areas of Stellaris, the game assumes that resources are harder to come by than they are. Things like housing and happiness should be more expensive to achieve, because right now I can't think of a time I've ever actually thought about the costs of maintaining my population.
Then, give players more control over slavery living conditions. I'd like to adjust housing, food and amenities down to barely anything. If population upkeep is a real, meaningful cost for my empire, a population that requires virtually no upkeep will be a big win. Now I can see the benefits here.
Finally, I've never found that the random chance of negative events makes much of a difference. I would keep that, but I would also have slaves require enforcer jobs. The right balance would probably be based on living conditions, the more I make their lives hell the more I need to crack down. But basically I need X enforcers per Y slaves, otherwise those slaves will escape and become criminals, pirates and refugees to other empires.
Together, this might give a good balance. You have a real reason to want slaves, since they can spare you both messy politics and expensive housing, but also a real balancing act, since it's pretty easy to get pulled into a cycle where basically your free pops do nothing but oversee the slaves.
- 2
Because slaves outnumber your ruling class, so every slave housing unit can harbour railroad and resistance pops. You have no mass social basis for kidnapping and enslaving my utopian pops, none of my pops are going to hide you. I have a mass social basis for liberating your slaves, and your own pops will help me and hide me from your enforcers.
It is ok, in fact it is essential, to have asymmetry between freedom and slavery when it comes to how the political simulation plays out.
- 2
Yeah.
Slave pops can also work to escape and free themselves (with or without external support), but in the converse case free pops generally don't enslave themselves, and must be forcefully captured & enslaved by someone else who must be strong & organized enough to capture them and move them off-world.
So it's reasonable for slaves to sometimes spontaneously escape, and not reasonable for free pops to spontaneously enslave themselves.
It's not a perfectly mirrored situation.
- 3
Factions and politics are actually a decent source of Unity income, particularly if you invest in them. Really, investing in them should be easier. Right now there's just one tech, one Government type, two civics, and Egalitarian ethics that boost them (that last bit doesn't even make any sense, if you have an imperial society then keeping the powerful noble houses happy should boost unity just as keeping the powerful political factions does in a Democracy).
No. Living standards are worth a particular upkeep and the more expensive living standards are not trivial to pay. If you made Utopian Abundance also cause pops to use up double the amount of Amenities or something, it would be garbage.
Using Indentured Servitude slavery to incorporate Specialists into your empire with no CG upkeep is already a big bonus, and is one of the two big, worthwhile uses of slavery in Stellaris right now. The issue is that Chattel Slavery is garbage and most slavery bonuses are geared towards Chattel Slavery, so slave empires have no real incentive to invest in slavery.
I wish there were more asymmetric trade-offs in lifestyles.
Like if Pleasure Seekers consumed more Amenities but NOT more CG, that would make it more interesting for me. Right now it's a just-plain-better choice which doesn't really shape my job allocation. But if Pleasure Seekers consumed more Amenities, then I'd build planets which had more Amenity jobs -- and then my planets would start to look like they're full of pleasure seekers.
This is topical because it might make Domestic Servants worth using sometimes.
- 5
I was expecting a thread about how people love the sound of the whip but the constant crying from the slaves was tiring for people. Not sure if im dissapointed or not...
- 2
Isn't that the other way?
Hearing the lamentations of their women is high on the conqueror satisfaction list, while over-loud whip snapping can cause tinnitus.
- 4
I know. I personally cant sleep if im not enslqving se xenos scum in my mines. But the topic title is anti-slaver so I was expecting dome complaints about hurt feeling or something..
No no, this is the slaver convention. And we are just pissed that slavery is not as effective as it was in the good old days, and by that, I am referring to Stellaris and not actual history.
Right now slavery is morally bad if you're not a slaver, and it's mechanically bad if you are one.
In this patch slavery is objectively bad. Poor slavery! Won't someone think of the children? (... working in my mines ...)
- 10
- 1
Mostly I want slavery to be good enough to be interesting for me to overthrow, and to open room to buff utopia some more in ways that make it interesting to play
- 4
Yeah, a slaver empire should be scary for an Egalitarian empire -- but also an opportunity, whether by espionage or diplomacy or force of arms.
- 2