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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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I'm "hoping" slave trade from Africa to Asia will also be incentivized. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) held 75000 slaves in 1750 vs only 64000 held by the Dutch West India Company. Many older dutch history books put all the blame for slave trade on the western company (which was very much involved in the trade), but whitewash the keeping/trade of slaves by the VOC.

Slaves were instrumental in the building of fortresses, harbours and working in shipwrights/docks and the associated industries in Batavia and other trade posts. At least a quarter of the population of Batavia consisted of slaves. Slaves were also used as supplementary security forces and later on "freed" to become soldier in the KNIL (royal dutch indian army). Slaves were transported by the VOC from South/East Africa/Madagascar and other Indonesian islands.

So I hope the military/naval/naval production use of slaves won't be too restricted to Mameluks/Ottomans or just galleys.
You'd probably need a "slave construction" building that employs slaves and boosts construction efficiency in a location to model that.
 
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Can you cause a slave revolt in another country?
 
Really cool!

Lets say I've got some slave markets in my Balkan country - how does the game keep track of what slave POPs to import? Will I end up with a broad mix of POPs of every kind of cultural and religious variety that's in my local market area, or will the game try to minimize the amount of POPs by importing a type which already exists in my country?
 
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At the start of the game the usage of slaves is mostly gone from Europe [...]
I am sorry, but this is false, a very common myth that permeates the popular culture of the late Middle Ages. There was slavery in the Roman Catholic West during all the Middle Ages, and it was common and almost ubiquitous. Of course, it was much less in total number than how it would be later, in the massive slave farms of the New World, and most probably also lesser than in the Muslim world at that time, but it existed, and it shouldn't be ignored or removed.

Because of my education I mostly know about the matter in the Crown of Aragon, but I know slavery existed outside the Iberian Peninsula, in northern, southern, central and eastern Europe. In Aragon, during all the Middle Ages, many Muslims, both Iberian and from beyond the seas were taken captive, sold, bought and used as slaves. In the time of the start of the game, the Christian kingdoms did "razzias" in Granada and in the North African coast, taking slaves for forced labor, mostly for cash crops like almonds and sugar cane, in which slavery was far more efficient than typical feudal work. These "razzias" were essentialy the same thing the North Africans did too, so I don't think they should be the only ones that are allowed to "provateer". During the so called "Reconquista", many iberian muslims were sold as slaves in France. During the crusades, many Muslims from Palestine and Syria were sold in European markets.

Take, for example, these excerpts of the article "Esclavos moros en Aragón", from Manuel Gómez de Valenzuela:

1729696501466.png
1729696602109.png


I recommend to the Spanish-speaking devs to take a look at the article. And I encourage other users of these forums to enrich this thread with proves of medieval slaver for other parts of Europe.

I know it might be kind of late for these changes, but I think it is worth it and also just to show the world as it truly was, debunking common myths which also happen to whitewash European history.

Note: Mudejars were NOT slaves, not as a whole at least, I'm not confounding two phenomena. Many (probably most) of the andalusis of conquered areas in Spain and Portugal remained as something akin to serfs or second class subjects. Some slaves were andalusis, mainly taken from razzias or great conquests, but most were from beyond the sea, mainly North Africans. Some were black, too, but a minority. By the late Middle Ages I think the Slav slave trade (meaning, Slavs taken and sold by Italians and Germans) in the west had dwindled, though I'm not positive it had wholly disappeared, but earlier it was present, no doubt.
 
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no. a soldier is a soldier.

Technically the Mamluks were a society relying entirely on a slave soldier caste.
If a "Soldier" was a Slave from Syria and now its fighting:
- A slave revolt from Syria or
- A country with very happy (accepted pops) from the same culture as the slave.

do they defect/get a morale decrease?
 
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Is the Venetian slave trade somehow modelled in game? It was an important part of their economy before the Ottomans took over and the Iberians began to import people from Africa.
 
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You'd probably need a "slave construction" building that employs slaves and boosts construction efficiency in a location to model that.
I'm not sure what buildings exist, but Docks/Shipwrights/Trade Offices/Naval Fortresses/Naval industries should all allow (partial) slave labour, to simulate the constant maintenance of fortifications and enslaved dockworkers and such.
 
Why are slaves exclusively limited to military buildings and sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations? What's the reason behind me not being able to replace unskilled laborers on a wheat farm or iron mine with slaves?

Why can a slave pick cotton, but not swing a scythe to harvest wheat, or swing a pickaxe in an iron mine? There should be production methods in certain buildings that require manual labour, which replace some percentage of the workforce with slaves. These PM could be locked behind certain laws that allow slavery.

That's something that bothers me in Victoria 3 too, btw. The fact that a slave can replace "labourer" jobs in coal mines, but not in factories. Why can a slave carry coal from A to B in a coal mine, but not in a factory?
 
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Will there be different form of slavery abolition? I can think of a few different ways slavery might get abolished and they’d all have different impacts/mechanics.

  • A slave revolt leading to either a emancipation without slave owner compensation or enslaved people forming their own nation (Haiti style)
  • A government mandated emancipation without slave owner compensation that may or may not trigger a violent revolt from the slave owners (USA style, kinda)
  • A ban on new people being enslaved where existing enslaved people stay and sales but future generations are free, represented as a gradual conversation of slave pops to peasant pops (this would also work as a way to represent society’s where slavery isn’t hereditary, have slave pops convert to peasants as people are born free).
  • A ban on people being enslaved combined with the compensated nationalisation of existing enslaved people by a government that sets them free, represented by the government directly buying all the slave goods and slave pops in the nation and converting them to peasants while paying relevant estates large sums of money (British Empire style).
There are potential interesting gameplay choices when it comes to slavery. Do you fight your estates to avoid slavery becoming widespread in the first place? Do you emancipated enslaved people by force and suffer the wrath of angry estates? Do you take on massive debt to emancipated enslaved people while keeping the estates on side?

Fundamentally the estates need to be deeply integrated into slavery as a mechanic, slavery was far from just a state instruction (though it often was) it was also a private institution by groups who sought state approval for their actions and state protection against the consequences of their actions (slave revolts). Earlier this year the Institute of Economic Affairs (a British think tank) published a report on the role of slavery in the growth of the British economy and concluded that it may have actually had a negative impact on the overall economy because while it made tons of money for people trading and owning slaves it put a massive burden on the British state in the form of the military and administrative costs of carrying out imperialism and suppressing slave revolts.
 
Why are slaves exclusively limited to military buildings and sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations? What's the reason behind me not being able to replace unskilled laborers on a wheat farm or iron mine with slaves?

Why can a slave pick cotton, but not swing a scythe to harvest wheat, or swing a pickaxe in an iron mine? There should be production methods in certain buildings that require manual labour, which replace some percentage of the workforce with slaves. These PM could be locked behind certain laws that allow slavery.

That's something that bothers me in Victoria 3 too, btw. The fact that a slave can replace "labourer" jobs in coal mines, but not in factories. Why can a slave carry coal from A to B in a coal mine, but not in a factory?
You can replace peasants with slaves on RGOs.

You can't for "farm" buildings because the game is evidently designed to only let you employ exactly one pop type per building. So a building that employs peasants, can't employ slaves, and vice versa.
 
I am sorry, but this is false, a very common myth that permeates the popular culture of the late Middle Ages. There was slavery in the Roman Catholic West during all the Middle Ages, and it was common and almost ubiquitous. Of course, it was much less in total number than how it would be later, in the massive slave farms of the New World, and most probably also lesser than in the Muslim world at that time, but it existed, and it shouldn't be ignored or removed.

Because of my education I mostly know about the matter in the Crown of Aragon, but I know slavery existed outside the Iberian Peninsula, in northern, southern, central and eastern Europe. In Aragon, during all the Middle Ages, many Muslims, both Iberian and from beyond the seas were taken captive, sold, bought and used as slaves. In the time of the start of the game, the Christian kingdoms did "razzias" in Granada and in the North African coast, taking slaves for forced labor, mostly for cash crops like almonds and sugar cane, in which slavery was far more efficient than typical feudal work. These "razzias" were essentialy the same thing the North Africans did too, so I don't think they should be the only ones that are allowed to "provateer". During the so called "Reconquista", many iberian muslims were sold as slaves in France. During the crusades, many Muslims from Palestine and Syria were sold in European markets.

Take, for example, these excerpts of the article "Esclavos moros en Aragón", from Manuel Gómez de Valenzuela:

View attachment 1205897View attachment 1205898

I recommend to the Spanish-speaking devs to take a look at the article. And I encourage other users of these forums to enrich this thread with proves of medieval slaver for other parts of Europe.

I know it might be kind of late for these changes, but I think it is worth it and also just to show the world as it truly was, debunking common myths which also happen to whitewash European history.

Note: Mudejars were NOT slaves, not as a whole at least, I'm not confounding two phenomena. Many (probably most) of the andalusis of conquered areas in Spain and Portugal remained as something akin to serfs or second class subjects. Some slaves were andalusis, mainly taken from razzias or great conquests, but most were from beyond the sea, mainly North Africans. Some were black, too, but a minority. By the late Middle Ages I think the Slav slave trade (meaning, Slavs taken and sold by Italians and Germans) in the west had dwindled, though I'm not positive it had wholly disappeared, but earlier it was present, no doubt.
Slav slave trade was done by Slavs. Sold to Italians and Byzantines.

And what you wrote made me think, when does a prisoner of war in a working camp becomes a slave?
 
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How is the political influence and rise of slave-soldiers like the Janissaries and the Mamluks represented? Surely they had more wealth, quality of life and political power than slave workers, while remaining a different estate than, say, traditional nobility (that were similarly a warrior class).
 
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Do Slaves remember their former pop type like peasant or tribesman?

What decides which type slaves will convert when slavery is abolished I mean?

For example, as a exploit can someone enslave tribesman pops then abolish slavery to make them productive peasants?
 
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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.
Venice, Genoa, the ERE, the Rus, the Hospitallers and friends, Aragon, Naples, and co aren't in Europe anymore? Interesting

It seems the Indian ocean slave trading route isn't noted either, it should use a similar method to the trans Saharan one though iirc it intensifies later in the timeline. On intensity is there any difference in the average quantity of slaves traded between fx the Haudenosaunee vs Triple Alliance or trans Saharan vs transatlantic trades?

Otherwise this system looks good, manumission isn't noted anywhere though?
 
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The way the game is designed (given this TT and a reply that Johan made on a previous one) doesn't really allow manpower-providing buildings to be built in non-cores. Hence the elaborate one-two where you first need to build a building to convert Christian pops to slaves, and then turn those slaves into soldiers.

Also worth noting that we still know nothing about buildings actually being able to limit employment based on, say, faith, so with this system you end up with any slave pop being able to be turned into a janissary.

It also makes me think, given the way that slave markets work, that buildings really can't limit employment based on religion. Meaning you can't even change this model to be something else that employs Christian pops directly, because you can't make a building that only employs Christian pops.
Just make a janissary special building that can for a period of time only be built in non-state religion provinces that give let's say +100 janissaries. I dont see the issue with coring and what not. The representation of janissaries is factually wrong. We might as well pretend european peasents to be slaves and make them all slaves. They had by far less education, political power and wealth than any given janissary.
 
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