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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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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?
Because it is closer to home. Death is abstract. Slavery and racism is real in the modern day and relevant to modern politics in a way death is not. There's a difference of current-day political relevance and while you can debate whether warfare "should be" treated more/less negatively than slavery, the reality is that it is popularly considered more sensitively.
 
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How will slave rulers/freed slave rulers work? Specifically in Muslim controlled areas, like the Mamluk Sultante. Or will systems like this be ignored since I can't really think of a way to represent that. Like for instance the Mamluk Sultanate needed slaves for their political system, the next Sultan was a Mamluk (slave soldier) of the previous Sultan. For the Mamluks of Egypt you kinda need this since the rulers were not Arabs but instead Turks and Circassians.

Also would certain estates (like Janissaries/Mamluks) need slaves to function?
 
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A key part of slave armies was indoctrination and religious conversion of the captured slaves. Will Mamluk, Janissary etc. slave soldier pops also automatically converted upon being turned into soldiers/manpower?
 
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- European countries no longer practiced slavery before the discovery of America, will it be possible not to use slaves, or even to officially ban it upon the discovery of the new continent ?

- Can the Pope have an influence on slavery practiced by Catholic countries ?
 
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When you end up abolishing slavery in the late game, what happens to the buildings that employ them? Specifically, what happens with all the plantations in the Americas which rely so heavily on them? Do these buildings just kinda disappear into nothingness? Do they change such that they still produce their good (sugar/tobacco/coffee) but using peasants to work the building instead of slaves and at a higher cost, since well, now you actually have to pay the people working your field? It seems strange that these plantations would just suddenly no longer exist given that the fields and crops themselves would still be there physically (unless a slave revolt manages to destroy them perhaps). Or will there be a later Tinto Talks about the abolition of slavery and its impacts?
 
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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.
I'm really not sure how I feel about this, both from a academic standpoint and from the standpoint of an organic gameplay experience. While many enslaved people around the world perhaps performed tasks that over time allowed for somewhat better efficiency, in many cases the original impetus to utilize slave labor/military/etc. at all in the early parts of this period was to fill gaps in a population's capabilities. I am very hesitant about the game communicating the idea, however implicitly, that slave-based labor is more effective than other forms of labor. If there's more to your approach or how it's been implemented than we can see here, please let me know.

An economic example that comes to mind are African slaves in the American south. Environmental conditions and diseases there prevented white Europeans from maintaining a large, healthy population to work plantations growing labor intensive cash crops, while sub-Saharan African peoples had built up a better natural resistance to malaria. Enslaving African people provided a small European population with the means to effectively and profitably grow these cash crops in large quantities, a system that arguably became less (relatively) effective and relevant over time with the advent of medical, agricultural, and industrial technologies. Theoretically if people better suited to the conditions of the American south had colonized the region, there may well have been no impetus to utilize slave labor in the first place.

In other words, I would much prefer to see the game's systems present the choice of whether to utilize slave labor based also on conditions rooted in the game world, such as terrain/climate, demographic strengths and weaknesses, and political opportunity, alongside clearly defined dynamics of race that developed over the course of this period. At the moment, the current explanation of the system implies that enslaving people will always grant one access to greater profits, which is made worse by the fact that this efficacy may well be entirely artificial.
 
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1 - no
2 - yes
3 - no
4 - its out of the time frame
5 - yes
6 - yes
7 - not sure about your question?
8 - yes, no more slavery
9 - before industrialisation, slavery was not exaclty non-competetive.
10 - we talked about this, and one day we will have ethnic differences on poptype icons.
Afaik only Northern France/England had abolished slaves in 1337 and such, there should be an amount even if small in other places - will they be represented or will slavery be represented only in the big commercial cities like Venice and Genoa?
 
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A key part of slave armies was indoctrination and religious conversion of the captured slaves. Will Mamluk, Janissary etc. slave soldier pops also automatically converted upon being turned into soldiers/manpower?
They were freed after they converted, since Muslims did not keep other Muslims as slaves. I don't think this will be tracked in the pop system, unless like they moved from lets say "Greek - Orthodox - Slave" working at a barracks to then become "Greek - Sunni - Soldier".
 
Because it is closer to home. Death is abstract. Slavery and racism is real in the modern day and relevant to modern politics in a way death is not. There's a difference of current-day political relevance and while you can debate whether warfare "should be" treated more/less negatively than slavery, the reality is that it is popularly considered more sensitively.
Well, it depends on where you live. I live in a very interesting Eastern European country and I know very well what war is, but I have almost never encountered racism in my life because I live in an ethno-national state.
 
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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.

Oh please. Because killing millions in war during centuries is so much better than slaving a few people xd. The whole premise of PDX ganes is to incentive people to commite mass death. I think we'll be fine, thank you mum.

Can we please be adults?
 
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They were freed after they converted, since Muslims did not keep other Muslims as slaves. I don't think this will be tracked in the pop system, unless like they moved from lets say "Greek - Orthodox - Slave" working at a barracks to then become "Greek - Sunni - Soldier".
I do think this would be the proper representation of this system btw
 
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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.
If you are not bothered by being incentivised to conquer and "convert" cultures, what's different about slavery?

If anything, war hits closer to home, as most of as are far more likely to experience war than to be taken into slavery. For most of us playing these games, slavery is a thing of the past, while war is still pretty much a thing.
 
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Not sure how a nation with only slaves would work.
Maybe in similar manner, like how pirates nations work?
I guess it could give some challenge, because of slaves not giving any income, then there must be some other way to make income. Like Pirates would do some bit of pirating, then Slaves would do some bit of slaving(? or mechanics like Pirates have) or something similar. Including having extra stuff to do, like promoting slave uprising in other nations and either free(?) the slaves there or invite them to their own nation and/or demand from that nation money/war reps/taxes or something like that? And other stuff, that I can't think of currently but would make gameplay very unique.
 
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I would like to give some proposition concerning the Maghreb slavery system.

For the Maghreb, the population of slaves should be shrinking if there is no new slave input from raids and transaharian trade, since males were castrated, and the childs of the women slaves were free.

And I would also like to ask if we'll have mecanics of "New Culture" from slaves that live in a place for too long, like the Gnawa culture in Morocco for exemple.

Male slaves in Islamic countries were not castrated, since castration is forbidden by Islam. Muslim societies bought castrated black slaves from Horn of Africa primarily and castrated European slaves were an extreme rarity.

Barbary slave population remained stable mostly because 1. Mortality (Galley slavery and certain agricultural slavery), 2. Ransoming which was an economic backbone for the barbary corsairs, 3. manumission since slavery status was not inherited by children of slaves.

Regardless, Dev Diary clearly states that slave population will either be stable or downtrend. Perhaps the rate of mortality and reduction could be adjusted by type of buildings slave POPs are used, mortality being high in galleys and plantations, and ransoming and manumission being accounted for corsair and raider slave captives.
 
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