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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.

galley_barracks.png

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.

slave_raiding.png

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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Welcome peasants ! as a north african me and my friend here as you see in the portait are doing some "tourism" in the maghreb , land of the sunset ? ever heard of it ? its pretty nice this time of the year so i would ask you lots here kindly to get on board of my ship for a trip to Salé or algier or tripoli or Tunise you chose . you take all your familly members even your pets but my brother hate snakes and crocodiles and big felines after last experience in the swamps they call the florides so if you have those please release them on the wild around your town and they wont be hungry for too long i assure you .
the offer is free ! and last till the ship is full
please peoples calm down no need for a Rush and pushing and fighting everyone will get on board as long you get in a queue and be "civilised".
1729690174664.png
 
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Not sure how a nation with only slaves would work.
What about one where 90% of commoners are slaves, and only the clergy, aristocrats and burghers are free? One where there is essentially the majority of the population are slaves instead of peasants?
 
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Will slavery also be intertwined with the disease mechanic?

Contractual labour from same-country Europeans was apparently roughly 3 times cheaper than buying a slave in the early 1600s. However, the Europeans they were not very Malaria resistant and died rather quickly.

This is considered to be one of the reasons why the North-South divide had such a large difference in slave presence: the slaves simply outlived the Europeans (malaria-wise). North of Chesapeake bay Malaria couldn't thrive due to the lower temperatures. Same is true for tropical America.

The malaria was obviously also detrimental to native populations, as it traveled along with the slave trade from Africa.

Source: '1493' by Charles C. Mann.
If disease resilience is tracked based on culture, even though it would be a quite big abstraction, it would allow for what you are proposing
 
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Not atm, we had a system earlier but it was micromanagy and AI didnt understand it.
Maybe rather than an "active" raiding mechanic, something more passive that propagates out from the border of a country that does border raids? Where building specific border fortification buildings can block the propagation, or something along those lines.
 
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Is there a way for Europeans to get a monopoly on the slave trade like how the Dutch and Portuguese did? Will control over the West African markets influence this?
Great point, due to some high level hypocresy the spanish empire employed the "asiento de negros" a system in which monopoly over the slave trade was given to a foreign power (usually Portugal) so that spanish authorities could "keep their hands clean".
Would be great if there was a way this could work in game, perhaps a country gains more prestige if it doesn't do the enslaving itself and delegates it on a third party.
 
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.
Can you also add the ability to sack the entire province? it was really painful to run around in Imperator Rome to sack everything
 
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Are you worried about the implications of incentivising players to conduct slavery, expand slavery, capture more slaves? It's a topic that's a bit closer to home than things like war and intrigue.
 
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Could you please elaborate a little more on how slaves-as-pops and slaves-as-goods related to each other mechanically? Because, based on how I understood the Talk, it sounds like there's "double dipping."

As I understand it, a building that uses slave labor is both employing slave pops AND has a constant continuous demand for consumable slave goods. So it's demanding the constant import of new goods, which also drags pops along proportionately, but meanwhile it may well still be fully "staffed" by slave pops. Shouldn't the rate of consumption of slave goods be tied to how many "employed" slave pops are in need of replacing?

Like, for one thing, that rate of slave pop replacement would be variable anyway, I would hope - different jobs will work enslaved people to death at different rates, scarcity might cause more starvation etc, maybe different slavery laws will result in more or less mortality, and of course slave soldier pops will die at the rate they're killed in battle, right? And even if those rates aren't variable enough to make a difference, it just seems (based on my understanding so far) that having that layer of demand for "slave goods" not be tied to the actual demand for the pops themselves is an abstraction that's going to cause mechanical problems.

Happy to be told so if I'm understanding it wrong! I'd just like more detail.
 
Will the game include the Ottoman practice of Devshirme? If so, how would the mechanics related to slavery interact with it? The Devshirme system involved the enslavement of a significant number of Christian boys, but it also allowed for social mobility, with some rising to positions as high as grand vizier. A simple binary interpretation of slavery might not capture the nuances of this system.
 
Is there something stopping early game Christian nations from building slave markets, or will for example Sweden be able to enslave and sell off the finno-ugric pagans from day one?
There is slavery in Christian Nations, for Sweden for ex iirc Sweden and Northern Germany had a modest influx of slaves through the Teutonic Orders.

Then Eastern Europe and Southern Europe even more so as they have contact with Non-Christians
 
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Interesting. Glad to see this horror represented. Some questions, Johan.

1.) How will the development of African Diasporic religions be handled such as for example Vodou.

2.) How will Slave-soldiers work. If I have my own bunch of slave soldiers could they try and take over, ala the Mamelukes of Egypt?
 
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Are you worried about the implications of incentivising players to conduct slavery, expand slavery, capture more slaves? It's a topic that's a bit closer to home than things like war and intrigue.
Why? We can see on the war panel the number of casualties, where the numbers can be counted in hundreds of thousands, how is slavery worse than war and murder?
 
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Will the game include the Ottoman practice of Devshirme? If so, how would the mechanics related to slavery interact with it? The Devshirme system involved the enslavement of a significant number of Christian boys, but it also allowed for social mobility, with some rising to positions as high as grand vizier. A simple binary interpretation of slavery might not capture the nuances of this system.
The devshirme did not make a significant number of christian boys, and later to a large number if not mostly muslims, to slaves but to (forced and converted) conscripts. Janissaries should simply be tied to the population itself, not any slave pops and they should be an estate by themselves.
 
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How will slavery interact with SoP's? Will slaver states be able to fight SoP's to acquire slaves as well, or maybe set up like a "raiding camp" building allowing them to passively generate slaves from them(hostilely). Same would apply for bands and kin groups I guess, not just SoP's(though i presume SoP's would be able to actually resist, in theory and have a war of some sort.)
 
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