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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.

stellaris_dev_diary_26_01_20160321_policies.jpg


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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Aside from Loyalist, what type of factions are there?

It seems to follow logically with ethos, I think.

Individualists will want democratic reform, collectivists will want to unite government.

Spiritualists will want a religious authority, materialists some sort of technocracy.

Militarists will want military authority, pacifists will want a more benevolent leadership

Xenophobes will want less rights for xenos, xenophiles will want to rebel against any enslavement, even supporting their breakway if necessary.

This + changes to edits maybe?

Say you have an indirect democracy and nominally neutral ethos on the pacifist/militarist ethos. If some individualistic POPs turn fanatical militarist on a faraway colony, while keeping individualism, maybe they'll want to reform the government into a military republic and/or create their own?
 
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Can you decide to enslave a specific species, or are the only choices to enslave your own race, only aliens, or everyone?
 
The misuse of collectivist is even worse than I had feared. Can't you please consider renaming it to hierarchical/autocratical? I'm also quite uncomfortable with the existence of sentient beings that ethically accept their own enslavement.
 
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Superb stuff! Is there a possibility, should you be xenophilic enough democracy and there was a sufficient population of alien pops in your empire, that your leader could be a non-primary race?
 
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fanatic Xenophobes can enact planetary Edicts to strongly discourage xeno immigration.
Wait, so even being ultra xenophobe is not enough to lock down aliens on planets they belong to? And they can migrate freely in moderately xenophobic empires?
 
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You said that having POPS on a planet will make it cheaper in the peace deal, and it won't give the player a CB. But what if your POPS are the slaves? Would I get a CB then?
 
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Wait, so even being ultra xenophobe is not enough to lock down aliens on planets they belong to? And they can migrate freely in moderately xenophobic empires?

I imagine slaves can't move at all. If they're not slaves, they'll just react like suppressed religious minorities leaving for the US.
 
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I'm also quite uncomfortable with the existence of sentient beings that ethically accept their own enslavement.

Not exactly 'sentient', but what about bees & ants ?
 
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I appreciate the fact that you guys don't shy away from these things and don't try to sugar-coat xenocide/slavery. It is what it is, it should be awful and players should have multiple options at their disposal to suit multiple ethos they would want to roleplay, so that if they do choose xenocide, the decision should reflect on the player and gameplay style they have chosen, not the game itself.
You scored many goodwill points with me today. I'm starting to get hyped about this game, it's already looking better than the current competition, I do see this game doing the same for 4x games as Cities Skyline did for the city building sims genre. It's also the 1st Paradox title that I can suggest to my 30+ year-old friends and they seem really excited about this release (suckers! HoI4 will be so much better... :p).
 
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I'm also quite uncomfortable with the existence of sentient beings that ethically accept their own enslavement.
Y-you are aware that humans do that, right?
 
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How does migration work within federations? Is it the case that all members of a federation have free migration within borders, or would you still be setting up bilateral treaties with members of your federation to allow migration between member planets?
 
I really hope you redo the pop screen from scratch because on the stream it looked really confusing. You should make it a lot more transparent and clearer than it currently is.
 
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PURGE THE XENO!!! PURGE THE HERETIC!!! PURGE... ME!? WHY ME?!


*gunshot rings out*
 
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It's also the 1st Paradox title that I can suggest to my 30+ year-old friends and they seem really excited about this release (suckers! HoI4 will be so much better... :p).

Why is that exactly? I know Paradox games are not for everyone, but I hardly see how the age of a person has anything to do with it. Hell I would expect older people to be generally more interested in the historical settings of other paradox games, not less.
Or do you just mean that your friends are just not that into grand strategy games and it's the first game you can recommend them because they like 4x-games set in space?
 
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I'm not convinced about the collectivists accepting slavery either. To take an example from SF, the Narn in Babylon 5 certainly are collectivist, but they are fiercely anti-slavery as well. Historically, one could argue that many slave revolts were built on collectivist ideologies (take, however, dramatized by the sources, Spartacus), as 'individualists' would be happy with personal manumission.
I get the impression that people have read Ayn Rand too much.
 
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