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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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So, if I understand correctly, we can 'purge' individual Pops rather than entire population of the planet?

I like the resettlement mechanics. Space Gulag confirmed.
 
Don't know if it has been askd or answered yet but will pops crew starships? Or will the captains of said star ships have the various ethos' associated with them?

I am wondering if there is a slave revolt will there be some captains who side with the slaves while others stay loyal?
 
so.....We're creating an unrealistic, overly simplistic mechanic... based upon the movie "The Purge" and not calling it what it is, Xenocide/Genocide/Massacre... to which some of said peoples should remain to either later cause trouble or form their own realm on another world or flee to a sympathetic space empire/nation.... or uses it as the word actually meant to. which is Banishment (unless you count from the game... which from the 2 sentence phrase is exactly how it sounds...(part of what bugs me about "Purging"))... after all when you purge things from your stomach, you're not destroying them, you're just removing them from your stomach (which to me is what the Word Purge should refer to... removing a population from your space empire/nation, which sends it to either a sympathetic neighbor space nation, or to settle in some random world not yet colonize (possibly only within a given chance... but still)
 
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celethiel:
When "purge" was originally used by the Soviets, it was a euphemism. The term was already in common parlance in political circles meaning "to revoke the party memberships of those who hold contrary views", but hadn't yet been applied to mass murder.

Therefore you're right, but blame Joseph Stalin and Genrikh Yagoda.
 
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There's nothing saying a pop needs to be highly intelligent. An empire could very well consist of genetic "castes" with specialized subspecies doing various tasks.

But that was not the point. Dogs and Cats won't (hopefully) build their own space empires, it was just for comparison between collectivist and individualist behavior between species.

Let's just assume that some kind of intelligence is needed to build space empire, even for a worker. Taking that every POP has a trait and some kind of happiness I suppose we can assume hive mind isn't implemented (not that it would represent collectivist ethos). Now for the kittens and puppies, they work on hard coded instinct and although it is true that to some extent even humans have one presenting them as an examples of behaviour in species kind of misses the point. We are talking about societies of intelligent species.

Strong collectivist social codes can, and have brought on some really weird behavior in human populations with millions of soldiers and civilians sacrificing their very lives for the collective or living their lives basically in a forced-labor role. Species with even stronger genetic traits for collectivism than humans would probably be even more susceptible if properly "motivated".

We are dominating species on the planet because in our earliest days we were (and still are) collectivist in nature. That allowed us to survive pretty much anything planet had to offer so far including some very strong predators because even the strongest one fears the superior numbers. What you call "weird" is the sole reason we exist and is often referred to as heroism.

Now there's no one saying that collectivists can't be unruly nor that individualists can't collectively cooperate but generally species with collectivist behavior have been domesticated time and time again while species with individualistic traits haven't. It's pretty natural so the distinction in-game isn't that strange.

By accident "species with individualistic traits" are predators rarely working together. You can keep tiger in your house, but its normal mode of operation is solitude existence interrupted only for mating purposes. Try to build space empire around that. Kingdom of animals is really bad example in discussion about civilizations.
 
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celethiel:
When "purge" was originally used by the Soviets, it was a euphemism. The term was already in common parlance in political circles meaning "to revoke the party memberships of those who hold contrary views", but hadn't yet been applied to mass murder.

Therefore you're right, but blame Joseph Stalin and Genrikh Yagoda.

Yeah, and "The final solution" is a bit vague.


What about... well "extermination"? Holocaust would probably be a NO from obvious reasons.
 
I really hope open migration between races will be developed in more depth, at least in a DLC if not on launch. There's a lot of possibilities as open migration usually encourages scientific exchange, more efficient trade, etc. Allowing migration as a tool to reduce warscore cost for future conquest seems very... unrealistic and counter-intuitive.
 
  1. Are the POPs absolute "1" per tile as represented? Does it have any numbers or integrity that supports each of the represented POPs?
  2. For immersion's sake, will the icons have any cityscape later on?
 
Why use slaves? Well, reprehensible as it is, enslaved Pops are harder workers (but poorer scientists.)
That's not historically right - slave workers tend to work less hard because they have less incentive to produce more. Slaves do as little work as they can get away with; hired workers do as much as work as they can. Slavery is a very inefficient economic system.
 
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Will it be possible at some point to "give" or relocate some of the slave pops you have taken back to their ethnic "owner", if that owner is an independent empire (or vassalized/federated into one), say as part of a peace treaty or an event-based decision(s) to improve diplomatic relations?

Also, can you take slaves from defeated planetary armies in the after-battle, or only the civilian pops of the planet once it has been fully annexed?
 
That's not historically right - slave workers tend to work less hard because they have less incentive to produce more. Slaves do as little work as they can get away with; hired workers do as much as work as they can. Slavery is a very inefficient economic system.

However, slaves can be worked much harder than free workers would tolerate, and made to do work that's too unpleasant or dangerous for free workers to accept. This means that while each individual may slack off, the overall value of the work done could go up.

Historically, a good example of this was the Haitian sugar crop: prior to the slave rebellion Haiti exported immense amounts of sugar. After they won their freedom, sugar rapidly became replaced with less-profitable food crops and the overall GDP declined. Farmers simply couldn't pay the now-free Haitians enough to make them willing to do the extremely unpleasant work of sugar cultivation.
 
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It's true that slaves typically don't work as hard as free workers, but their labor is cheaper to maintain, especially in a modern society where a free worker expects holiday time, pensions, proper working conditions etc.
 
It's true that slaves typically don't work as hard as free workers, but their labor is cheaper to maintain, especially in a modern society where a free worker expects holiday time, pensions, proper working conditions etc.
Exactly - they should be low cost and low production. But the DD said they're going to be high production. Not a big thing, but a thing nonetheless.
 
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However, slaves can be worked much harder than free workers would tolerate, and made to do work that's too unpleasant or dangerous for free workers to accept. This means that while each individual may slack off, the overall value of the work done could go up.

Historically, a good example of this was the Haitian sugar crop: prior to the slave rebellion Haiti exported immense amounts of sugar. After they won their freedom, sugar rapidly became replaced with less-profitable food crops and the overall GDP declined. Farmers simply couldn't pay the now-free Haitians enough to make them willing to do the extremely unpleasant work of sugar cultivation.
Productivity went up after Haitian independence - it just wasn't focussed on exportable cash crops. This scheme is suggesting that slave economies' productivity is higher than non-slave economies'. That is simply not the case.
 
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Productivity went up after Haitian independence - it just wasn't focussed on exportable cash crops. This scheme is suggesting that slave economies' productivity is higher than non-slave economies'. That is simply not the case.

Realism only goes so far though. What's the real need for slavery in a Space Age nation? Automation would do almost all menial and hard work.

Though I guess in the world of Stellaris, AI isn't really that much better than today, in fact in some ways it's worse. AI on ships can only improve efficiency, but biological crew members are still needed and fleets without admirals fare badly. I kind of like this break with realism for the sake of game play.

In terms of slaves, I think the problem is that it's hard to portray the low *costs* of slavery, and thus the burden is put on the output instead. This being a space age time, it's also likely harder to make free workers work very hard at all.
 
We are dominating species on the planet because in our earliest days we were (and still are) collectivist in nature. That allowed us to survive pretty much anything planet had to offer so far including some very strong predators because even the strongest one fears the superior numbers.

Farcry Primal. Hunter gatherer societies were interesting to research. Since those habits have died out but the DNA potential for specialization is still there in some people. Animals also feared fire, especially given how much fur they have.