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Tinto Talks #34 - 23rd of October 2024

Hello and Welcome to another Tinto Talk, where we spill information about our entirely secret unannounced game with the codename Project Caesar.

This week we will talk about how slavery works in this game.

Slave Pops
One of the six types of pops we have are the slaves. These lack pretty much every right in all countries, and are simply exploited. They are not allowed to move around on their own, they have harsh enough lives that they are basically only keeping the current population levels at best of times, and they have absolutely no income nor any political power. If they get any sort of literacy they are very likely to be rather upset. At the start of the game the usage of slaves is mostly gone from Europe, but it's more prevalent in other parts of the world.


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Part of the slaves in Cairo at the start..

Usage of Slaves
Slaves are primarily used in resource gathering operations, but they can also be used in various buildings. These types of buildings can be categorized into two types of buildings.

First we have the slave-soldier buildings that require slaves to function, and produce manpower or sailors. These include buildings like mamluk or janissary barracks that provide a part of the armies of the Mamluks and Ottomans.

The second category of buildings are the plantations. These are buildings that you can unlock from Age of Discovery advances. There are three types of plantations, for sugar, tobacco and cotton. These are far more productive than the RGO for the same goods, but require slaves to function.

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One unique building to get you a lot of sailors.

Of course there are other uses for Slaves. In some religions you need a steady stream of them to sacrifice daily to make the Sun go up the next day.


Acquiring Slaves
There are multiple ways to get slaves.

First of all you have the classic way of conquering nearby territories and enslaving part of the population as you sack their cities. This is something that as diverse cultures as amongst others, the Haudenosaunee, Aztec and the Kanem Empire can do from the start. They also get easy access to casus belli to go on slave raiding wars. As you sack a city, a percentage of the population will become slaves and appear in the closest slave market you have, and if none is near enough, then to the closest slave market nearby.

Secondly, we have the Berber States, who engaged in slave raiding from the sea. In Eu4, this was a button you clicked on your ships when they were near a coast that had no slave-raiding-cooldown active. In Project Caesar this ability is a part of the privateering mechanic, in that if you have access to this ability, then your privateers will raid a random coastal location in the area they are in, and take some of the pops as slaves for the closest slave market. This is stopped by having a truce, above 100 opinion, or a good old coastal fortress.

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Morocco is one of the countries that can do this from day 1.

Thirdly, you have the Slave Market Building. While it acts as a hub for slave trades, it will also try to enslave pops of non accepted cultures, and different religious groups. This is to simulate how the Delhi Sultanate and others enslaved people in their conquered lands over time.

slave_market.png

It all adds up over time..

Fourthly, you have the possibility to build slave centers in foreign locations that have less power projection than you. This is to simulate part of how the Europeans got their slaves from West Africa to the New World. While a significant part of slaves were bought from other African Kingdoms that were willing to sell slaves taken from their enemies, they were also locally captured by the slavers themselves near their slaving centers. If you wish to fight this in your territories, you need to go to war and forcefully expel them.

Finally, you can trade for slaves. In Project Caesar, slaves exist both as a type of goods and as a type of pop, and they are slightly linked. Buildings can produce slave goods and require slave goods as input. When a slave goods is traded between markets, the game will also move pops in relative sizes to locations that have a demand for slaves.

Thus, if you have buildings or resource gathering operations that can use slaves, they will create a demand for slaves in the market, and if you trade from a market that both produces slave goods and has enough slaves present, the game will move about 200 pops from the slave market each month for each good you trade.

At the start of the game there is the Trans-Saharan trade, where northern african countries import slaves from West Africa, many sold by the Kanem Empire.

Later on, during the Age of Discovery, you will see the triangular trade between Europe, West Africa & Americas, which will reduce the Trans Saharan trade volumes.

There is also another market system, as the Mongol States have access to taking slaves when conquering land, and they created the greatest slave trading network the world has ever seen. Since Muslim states could not keep muslim slaves, and christians did not want christian slaves, the Mongols traded the muslims to the christians and the christians to the muslim countries. The trade links from India goes to central asia as well, as Delhi trades their slaves to other markets, while they get the slaves they require for their mamluk-style armies.



Stay tuned as next week we’ll talk about Great Powers and Hegemonies..
 
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It sounds like it's you who bias, or maybe lack of insight into how serfdom worked, can be attributed to.

European serfdom is a system that became entrenched as many free farmers looked for a suitable lord to intentionally become unfree serfs. Why would they do that?
Well, it's the same principle as in any society: people trade their freedom for security. Being unfree meant that you didn't have to serve in the military and you enjoyed various 'services' provided by your lord, such as law enforcement. Typically, a lord also had an obligation to provide for his subjects in times of need, such as famines. On the other hand, you had to pay taxes (less so than we today), you had to do a certain amount of free work for your lord and you were bound to work the land that you lived on.
For many people in the early and high middle ages, this was a pretty good deal, but of course there is (among others) one big drawback: once you became an unfree serf, your decedents would be as well. This is how you end up with a large percentage of the population "stuck" in this system. In the late middle ages, it did start to crumble as serfs were able to negotiate more rights and freedoms ('freedoms' in a feudal society is not the same concept as 'freedom' today) for themselves.
Inheritance also brought another issue, since, at least in some countries, land was split between all sons, so eventually peasants ended up with very little land to work on and became poorer while still being bound to that land.

In any case, all of this was a reciprocal system that knew rights and duties on both sides. Today, we generally support essential freedom that every human deserves, but these societies simply didn't have that concept, so the fact that you had to buy yourself free or at least ask your lord for permission before you could leave your home was viewed as normal.
Even today, you're not allowed to move without first asking your bureaucratic "lord" for permission, which can be quite a hassle. Like I said, there's always a trade-off between freedom and security in societies, and feudal serfdom simply made different kinds of trade-offs compared to the ones that we make today.

Slavery, on the other hand, is something completely different. A slave is property and has no societal leverage of his own. There is no negotiating for rights, and any benefits a slave receives are simply the product of his master's good will. A slave could be moved around to wherever he is needed, this includes soldiers.
I think you're making very valid points that I broadly agree with, the problem is not that serfs are treated as slaves but that they're not consistent with their standars for others forms of servitude around the world and I fear outside Europe every slave is gonna be treated the same without representing how complicated this issue was.

But for serfdom we cannot say it was all the same anyway, in places like Russia it pretty much became slavery, so then are we gonna represent that at some point or is it just because they have the european term of "serf" just in name these won't be classified as slaves later into the game.

And for the Janissaries for example, they had no slave market for them so it doesn't make any sense that these are part of the same global system for slaves in the game.

I just hope they just represent this issue correctly, adressing issues like serf-slavery development in Eastern Europe with a gradual abolition of rights, and the complexity of the institution for different societies. Something like certain laws for slavery would be suficient imo.

And btw I don't wanna see serfs as slaves in the game, I just want that we use the same standards for the rest of the world.
 
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But for serfdom we cannot say it was all the same anyway, in places like Russia it pretty much became slavery, so then are we gonna represent that at some point or is it just because they have the european term of "serf" just in name these won't be classified as slaves later into the game.
[...]
I just hope they just represent this issue correctly, adressing issues like serf-slavery development in Eastern Europe with a gradual abolition of rights, and the complexity of the institution for different societies. Something like certain laws for slavery would be suficient imo.

Yes, surely the second serfdom in Eastern Europe is going to be somewhat different from the serfdom the game starts with, and the game does have ways to simulate different rights for serfs.
There is a "free subjects vs. serfdom" societal value for example, and there are policies that can give serfs rights. Presumably, historical Russia in the later game would be on the extreme pro-serfdom side of this.
 
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Yes, surely the second serfdom in Eastern Europe is going to be somewhat different from the serfdom the game starts with, and the game does have ways to simulate different rights for serfs.
There is a "free subjects vs. serfdom" societal value for example, and there are policies that can give serfs rights. Presumably, historical Russia in the later game would be on the extreme pro-serfdom side of this.
Yeah I just wish the slavery system can be properly portrayed and not treat them all the same, slaves in some states were high ranking officials and administrators, some had property, and so on. I wish that there could be some policy that prohibits the export or import of slaves, and certain policies which allows for slave states aswell to represent how these had a different position in society by not being truly free but at the same time very powerful and privileged in some "countries" compared to other opressed pops and unlike the cliché slave archetype
 
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I think you're making very valid points that I broadly agree with, the problem is not that serfs are treated as slaves but that they're not consistent with their standars for others forms of servitude around the world and I fear outside Europe every slave is gonna be treated the same without representing how complicated this issue was.

But for serfdom we cannot say it was all the same anyway, in places like Russia it pretty much became slavery, so then are we gonna represent that at some point or is it just because they have the european term of "serf" just in name these won't be classified as slaves later into the game.

And for the Janissaries for example, they had no slave market for them so it doesn't make any sense that these are part of the same global system for slaves in the game.

I just hope they just represent this issue correctly, adressing issues like serf-slavery development in Eastern Europe with a gradual abolition of rights, and the complexity of the institution for different societies. Something like certain laws for slavery would be suficient imo.

And btw I don't wanna see serfs as slaves in the game, I just want that we use the same standards for the rest of the world.
Just wanted to add to this, the way the "feudal" system operated outside of Europe was very different, there were no serfs in most of West Africa for example, free subjects were often the ones farming for the empire, their wasn't the same interaction between lord and serf, and lord and King as there was between Farba, Tigi and Horon in Mali for example. Most farmers farmed in collectives with their families, with the head of each family forming the political basis for the leadership in that village/town/area. If serfs are going to be based on European mechanics there should be other ways for them to exist, or a dynamic of rigths afforded to the peasant majority of states in that period. Same could be said for parts of Asia as well, and the Americas depending on the area.
 
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Just wanted to add to this, the way the "feudal" system operated outside of Europe was very different, there were no serfs in most of West Africa for example, free subjects were often the ones farming for the empire, their wasn't the same interaction between lord and serf, and lord and King as there was between Farba, Tigi and Horon in Mali for example. Most farmers farmed in collectives with their families, with the head of each family forming the political basis for the leadership in that village/town/area. If serfs are going to be based on European mechanics there should be other ways for them to exist, or a dynamic of rigths afforded to the peasant majority of states in that period. Same could be said for parts of Asia as well, and the Americas depending on the area.
I think this will ultimately add a lot of flavour to the replayability of PC making for some interesting and unique interaction inside one's own tag and the different cultures that we would interact with. At least slavery for me atm seems way too simplistic and uniform across the game and the responses from the devs so far bring me to suspicion of maybe a slight bias, idk if they're even gonna tackle the issue with the second serfdom with the same rigor and criteria as with other slaves (I've not seen any serious academic that does not equate this practice as slavery unlike serfdom in other parts of Europe) and not just present them as generic-ish peasants just because they have the term "serfs" attached to them. When Johan says stuff like "Serfs had some rights aswell", well, so did a lot of slaves in other parts of the world and at different levels of society.

As I said, I don't want serfs to be cataloged as slaves but I just hope for some "nuance" and depth for the system.
 
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No, not really.

We are not simulating the societies where slaves were castrated either.
This seems like an oversight since some slave societies banned the slave trade within the game's timeline and shifted to growing their enslaved populations through inheritance. Pretty much the definitional feature of how European slavery in the Americas differed from other types was that the slaves inherited the status of being legal chattel.

If you look at studies like this one in the US, enslaved populations continued to grow after the 1794 Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves took effect in 1808. The same study mentions that by the US Civil War 5 decades later imported persons (mostly through smuggling) were less than 1/8th of the total enslaved population.
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America's enslaved population actually grew naturally by large enough margins that exporting slaves, mostly to Cuba, was a viable economic profession for many smugglers. Spain technically banned the importation of slaves in 1820, but it went largely unenforced. In the 1830s about 63% of Cuba's slave imports came from the US (I'm pulling from page 92 of Cuba: an American History).
 
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there is said that slaves will not grow but with like the arabic ore aztec are different situatens can you make laws in your countrie that affects how slaves grow or decline(like slaves getting castraded)
 
"There are three types of plantations, for sugar, tobacco and cotton.."
Will there be coffee and cocoa plantations too or not?

idk if anyone asked this before, but i think its worth mentioning that slave labour was pretty much historically used for coffee and cocoa plantations in countries like Brazil, Central America, Colombia, etc (Latin America in general), so i think it should be represented in some way, considering that by the 1700s and 1800s, for an example, coffee was an important part of Brazilian (and some other Latin American countries') economies, and this was basically all made through slave labour.

afaik, the British also used slaves in their tea plantations, though that is likely later in time and maybe out of scope, gotta check more on this.
 
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No, not really.

We are not simulating the societies where slaves were castrated either.
What if you made slavery type a law, so you could simulate different types of slavery. As well as having the type of slavery where slave pops would naturally grow. As opposed to harsher slavery or castratation slavery where the amount of slave would decline.
 
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christians did not want christian slaves
Historically, this is something that was changed due to plantation slavery in the Americas. With so many African slaves either converting to Christianity or being born into it, the justification for keeping other human beings in bondage changed from a religious one (they're heathens) to a racial one (they're inferior). That's a cultural development the game would have to simulate - including allowing for the possibility of it not happening.

Will there be slave rebellions or communities of escaped slaves? Perhaps quilombos would be a new country type, if it's too difficult to integrate them into the Settled Country mechanic.

Also, will the player have the option of adjusting the treatment of slaves to favor either productivity or population growth? A slave population that's made up mostly of men in their physical prime being worked to death isn't going to behave the same way as one made up of men and women who'll probably live long enough to be grandparents.
 
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So, will that be possible for not-slavery countries to buy slaves and release them to increase immigration? Would that be possible somehow to sort / find out slaves on the market from my primary or accepted cultures? If not in vanilla, then would that all be possible to mod in?