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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.


slaves_cairo.png

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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Mmm not very happy with that to be honest. It was the exception that slaves were on par in quality. In general someone who is their because an owner forces him should have a penality to morale and discipline.
The Mamluks themselves were an upper class with more rights than regular people even though they were originally brought to Egypt as child slaves.

They're kind of their own thing, as with other Islamic slave soldiers. Even though they were technically slave soldiers, they should actually be both very loyal and elite from what I've read on them.
 
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Am i correct in understanding that:

1 Slave Trade Good = 200 Pops

Additionally:

1. Also are there laws to distinguish between “ethnicity”, “religion” and “debt” based slavery?

2. If I outlaw slavery, but my neighbor doesn’t. How exactly would I interact with the slave trade good in the market interface? Just ignore it?

3. As someone else mentioned. Is there a mechanic for federal governments like the USA to represent the slave-state/ free-state power struggle.

4. Is there a way to stop the slave trade between markets but keep it within markets?
 
The various Anatolian beyliks should also have coastal raiding from day 1, as those "maritime beyliks" definitely put a lot of pressure on the Byzantines through constant coastal raiding.

true, worth looking into.
 
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And something I forgot to ask, will there be SOPs for communities of escaped slaves? The are tons of examples in PC's timeframe. From the Jamaican maroons, to brazillian mocambos and quilombos, and even in the modern US there was The Great Dismal Swamp.
 
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So how do you plan on representing the rise of Moscow and the Ottomans other than just giving them unique modifiers and events to empower them over everyone else?

It was non-warfare raiding over land that made those states exist, either directly (by being able to profit off of that raiding, e.g. the Ottomans) or indirectly (weakening everyone else around them who were getting raided while they weren't, e.g. Moscow).

Like, you need something here.

I am not sure what your implications are, but the Ottomans had an elaborate tax system, run up by loyal and efficent governors. They also had a huge trade income, especially after the conquest of the Mamluks, but even centuries before that. Bursa was on the silk road and cut on the silk trade in Constantinople. Later on pilgrimage roads were also secured by the Ottomans, which surely brought additional tax. The maghreb region was de facto independent and has little to do with the rise of the Ottomans or the power they maintained for centuries.
 
Can you go full Victoria 3 and emancipate slaves in locations you own? If so, what happens to the buildings? Do they switch from Slave Input to Population Input or do they have disabled and/or destroyed and you need to build from ground up?

If you can't have slaves in a location due to laws/etc, then they become peasants, and their buildings useless.
 
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Why is 1 Slave Good = 200 Slave Pops? Couldn't the game deal with 200 Goods = 200 Pops?

scale, and then we'de need to multiply everything else by 200
 
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I agree to some extent. They were certainly not slaves in the most narrow definition of the word. But I would argue that it's okay to model their recruitement as slaves as long as there is also a steady outflow of retiring janissaries who do have relevance (independent of janissaries characters being spawned). I'm not sure what the best way to implement that is.
The recruitment of the janissary was in no form or shape tied to the presence of slaves. By this logic there should be no janissaries, if I decide to abolish slavery early on, which would not have been the case. The Janissaries are entirely tied to christian minorities within the Empire and along the 1600s on the christian and Balkan + Anatolian Muslim population.


Connecting it to slaves only works for the Mamluks, since they were recurited from a slave pool. Not the Janissary.
 
In the final version, will all portraits be of European looking people or will there be different portraits for pops from different regions?

for pop types, perhaps.

for characters no, there are lots of variants
 
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Does the slave market described in the diary generate slaves out of nowhere, or are they enslaved from other social classes, such as farmers?

They convert peasants , clergy, tribesmen etc into slaves.
 
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Should sugar plantations require slaves as an input to reflect that they were in areas less hospitable to white settlement. Fewer families settling in an area mean fewer female slaves as domestics and thus a less sustainable slave population.
 
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What incentives are there to end slavery around the end of the game ? Will it be somewhat linked to some estates demands, or institution such as the enlightment spreading through your land ?

Enlightenment primarily.
 
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I will say that I would prefer if pop type icons were slightly more colour coded or other wise easier to tell apart at a glance (Vicky 2 did a great job at that, it was very easy to tell which pop was which) as it stands they look good but are a tad too samey.
 
Y'know, other than privateering or the "slave raiding" building. Think more like something along the lines of what the Ottos were doing in the Balkans when not immediately at war with someone else, or the Golden Horde against the various Russian principalities that were immediately bordering them. Or the Crimean Khanate later on.

Not atm, we had a system earlier but it was micromanagy and AI didnt understand it.
 
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So, seeing as you explicitly stated that slave buildings are far more productive, what's the downside? The way I interpreted the diary is that the biggest problem with slavery would be unrest if they get literate and having to do a bit of micromanagement/wars to constantly capture more if you don't have access to passive enslavement. And lets be real, unrest has been a joke to manage difficulty-wise in every PDX GSG with the exception of maybe Victoria 2 where hundreds of thousands of rebels (if not millions) is a normal sight. Perhaps the-totally-not-EU5 will change that, but even then, so far slave buildings seem straight up better. IIRC Project Caesar doesn't model building ownership directly, so I don't see tax-free Aristocrat ownership of these highly profitable plantations being a problem for the player. Is there any reason you would want to abolish slavery or not engage in it?
 
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If you wish to fight this in your territories, you need to go to war and forcefully expel them.
Instead of having to go to war, I think it would be better to have a decision to take down the foreign slave centers and in the decision you can choose which nation's slave center you can destroy.
If you take the decision you decrease reletaions with the target country and they get a casus belli to rebuild the slave center and get reparations.

I don't think you should need to go to war just to take down a building and if you have to I don't know how warscore would work if, for example, benin declares war on france, since they for sure can't rech them and they wold just be stuck in a war for years.

Another thing is that having to declare war, i think, would discourage the AI from doing it, but if it's a decision they could take it if the target is in a vulnerable situation and wouldn't have the time and resources to respond.
 
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They convert peasants , clergy, tribesmen etc into slaves.
Will class of slave be tracked? Or is it basically "erased" when they are enslaves. The Aztecs for example really valued the capture of noble warrior sacrifices, so being able to specifically sacrifice them would be cool. But maybe it'd just be abstracted(since I figure it's a given that the previously mentioned Flower Wars cassus belli will involve capturing enemy armies). Still I'd be interested to know if its tracked.
 
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1 - yes they keep their culture + religion
2 - you can conquer the territory, but yeah, a peace treaty to get all slaves of your primary culture back home would be good to have. lets add.
It should also be possible to try to "ransom" your own pops back (by paying money) as that certainly happened in the context of the iberian peninsula (that's how cervantes got back from algiers).
I would also extend the freeing to accepted cultures in general, aragon would also free aragonese pops and not just catalan ones.
 
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So, seeing as you explicitly stated that slave buildings are far more productive, what's the downside? The way I interpreted the diary is that the biggest problem with slavery would be unrest if they get literate and having to do a bit of micromanagement/wars to constantly capture more if you don't have access to passive enslavement. And lets be real, unrest has been a joke to manage difficulty-wise in every PDX GSG with the exception of maybe Victoria 2 where hundreds of thousands of rebels (if not millions) is a normal sight. Perhaps the-totally-not-EU5 will change that, but even then, so far slave buildings seem straight up better. IIRC Project Caesar doesn't model building ownership directly, so I don't see tax-free Aristocrat ownership of these highly profitable plantations being a problem for the player. Is there any reason you would want to abolish slavery or not engage in it?
AFAIK estates do build buildings with their own money. Ideally, some of these buildings(especially for Nobles, but also other pops) would use slave labor. So ideally abolishing slavery would be good if you wanted to weaken your estates if your own state did not rely on slaves itself.