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Stellaris Dev Diary #26 - Migration, Slavery & Purges

Hi folks!

It has been a very busy week for yours truly, with a load of press demos and, of course, the grand Paradox press conference in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the rest of the team has been hard at work finishing up the revised start-up screens, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about today… Instead, through the confused haze of my jet lag, I thought I’d say a few words about how to manage your population in Stellaris! As you might recall from the dev diary on Policies and Edicts, your initial choice of Empire ethos will heavily affect what you can and cannot do and what your initial population will tend to frown upon. Three of the more interesting Policies concern Migration, Slavery and Purges.

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Let’s begin with Migration. There are two ways in which Pops can move between planets; spontaneous migration or resettlement. If you are playing a Fanatic Individualist empire, you must allow at least your founding species Pops to move freely as they like (there is an option to disallow alien Pops from migrating - not popular with Xenophiles.) Pops who are allowed to migrate will tend to move to planets they like better than the one they currently live on. This is not just a matter of the Planet Class, but also things like whether the planet has Slaves (which Decadent Pops like), if there are alien Pops on the planet (which Xenophobes dislike and Xenophiles like), and whether the planet lies within a Sector or the core worlds (dissidents and aliens tend to move to Sectors to live with like-minded individuals.) If another Empire is granting you migration access, your Pops will also consider migrating to their planets.

Now, unless you are playing an Individualist Empire, you can also enact a Policy to allow the forcible resettlement of Pops. This will allow you to simply move Pops between planets; at a hefty cost, of course. There is one more way to control migration; fanatic Xenophobes can enact planetary Edicts to strongly discourage xeno immigration. In the same way, fanatic Xenophiles can strongly encourage it...

stellaris_dev_diary_26_02_20160321_resettlement.jpg


So that’s basically how migration works. Next, we have Slavery. Like the migration Policies, you have three options; allow it for all Pops, xenos only, or not at all. Fanatic Individualists cannot play with Slavery unless the founding species has the Decadent trait, and only Xenophobes can limit Slavery to aliens. Why use slaves? Well, reprehensible as it is, enslaved Pops are harder workers (but poorer scientists.) Of course, slaves can - and will - join Slave Factions, although Collectivist slaves are more accepting of their lot, for the Greater Good.

Finally, let’s talk Purges, which is simply a way of getting rid of troublesome Pops… permanently. Naturally, this is something that both your own population and other Empires tend to react to rather emphatically.

That’ll have to do for now. Next week, we’re aiming for a more cheerful dev diary about sound and music!
 
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Sorry, but any document can be considered an historical document. A magazine, newspaper article, photograph, a baseball bat.

The Bible certainly qualifies. (As does Pravda - by the way).

It all depends on the subject of investigation.

(Before you ask - yes I do have a History Degree)
Being a historical document does not give it any special veracity in presenting the truth (or the Pravda ;). The bible is first and foremost a book of religious doctrine. Given that it states (allegedly, at any rate) the Earth was created 5k years ago and is the center of the universe, I'd not use it a reference of real historic events.
 
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Being a historical document does not give it any special veracity in presenting the truth (or the Pravda ;). The bible is first and foremost a book of religious doctrine. Given that it states (allegedly, at any rate) the Earth was created 5k years ago and is the center of the universe, I'd not use it a reference of real historic events.
But you rly can. Sure most historic events are amplified a bit and there are large parts that bear no historic truth. But after all, people wrote about things they knew, heared and experienced. There's a whole part of history discipline to research what parts of the bible have an historic centerpiece in it.
 
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Being a historical document does not give it any special veracity

Did I mention anything about "special veracity"? My statement remains true. A historical document. It has also been used as such for historical inquiry by many peer-reviewed professional historians.

I guess you fella's would not consider The Dead Sea Scrolls to be historical either. :rolleyes:
 
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Doesn't change the fact that its silly to claim the pyramids were built by slaves because of the Hebrew.

In the same vein, you could say the Golden Gate was built by slaves too, because less than 800 years before or after its construction, the US had a slave polulation
 
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Sort of. I think heresy and the like will still probably exist for religious civs but it does sound like it'll be taking a lot of ideas from victoria. Some of the additions seem very cool though, concentrated dissident pops so uprisings actually feel like civil wars? yes please.
Wait. Do religions actually exist in Stellaris?
 
Well, the same could be said of some religions. the worlds jewish population for instance has held on so long because they've historically been nigh on impossible to convert.
I think he means the sort of converting that goes on in the other Paradox games.
 
Can you breed slaves (or let them breed naturally)? It seems like it would be cool to be a xenophobic empire and get some fanatical collectivist slaves, but I imagine few migrants would want to go to a xenophobic empire that enslaves their people.
 
When i read this dev diary, i felt devs have played a lot with distant worlds, and took insipiration there.
A good thing, since distant worlds, for those who don't know is a must-have in 4X game.
 
The Bible claims that pi is exactly three. This doesn't mean that pi was ever that value, only that people believed that it was. The Bible is therefore useful to us as a record of what people's beliefs were like back then, not as a record of facts. Pravda is the same.

I remember reading once that a lot of the "Jews built the Pyramids" beliefs come from the same place as the "aliens built the Nazca ruins" beliefs: that is, the nineteenth-century unwillingness to believe that people of colour can achieve impressive feats of planning and engineering. I'm not a historian so I can't speak as to whether or not this is true.
 
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The cultural insistance of Egypt using massive amount of slavework for their building achievement probably stems from the Western world's only exposure to ancient egypt was through the Bible. And in the Bible, Egypt's most important characterisrics were:

1. They worshipped idols
2. They owned the Hebrews as slave

Therefore, when considering the fantastic constructions of the Egyptian people, it's easy to assume they were built on the back of slaves.
 
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Trying to get primitives back then to think in fractions wasn't going to work. 3 was the best that could be done, whether by divine revelation or by a mad scientist back then calculating the geometry of shadows.

For them, building it could be fudged a bit, because friction and gravity did most of the work to lock them in. They didn't need perfect mathematics because perfect mathematics wasn't useful when people just wanted buildings that didn't fall over.

The amount of people in the modern world that could derive pi from geometric symbols without using inherited knowledge, is pretty rare, even if people tried it now.

As for the Bible, it's been translated too many times, and many of the translation sources come from heresies or apostasies that diverged (ethos divergence) from the original Middle East Christianity (that Islam wiped out more or less).

At least modern propaganda on Facebook and Russia/China is direct to your face, and you can hear the intent of the propaganda, for those students of the Art of Propaganda at least.
 
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I agree with the lot that says slavery shouldn't have a higher productivity than paid labor, although historically it was often introduced where there was a labor shortage and low productivity out-produces no productivity.

What is a bit more baffling is the idea that slavery would have much to do with production at all in an interstellar civilization. We are probably only a generation or so from a future in which manufacturing and its precursors (mining, farming, etc... to get raw materials) will be completely automated. A relatively small number of people will do creative or administrative work and the rest will be drones. Or civilization collapses and it looks like a Mad Max movie, but that sort of society won't colonize the galaxy.
 
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Does space slavery make sense? No, not really. Is it an awesome scifi trope that aliens enslave humanity? Hell yea. I love the idea of being an evil xenophobic empire and enslaving the galaxy from my despotic empereror's chair. I don't think it has to "make sense".
 
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