4.0 was the final nail in the coffin for slavery.

[Toby-wan_Strife]

Slavery to me is a key system in Stellaris. For me it adds a lot to the immersion. What's the point in fighting a liberation war against an authoritarian empire if they treat their pops the exact same as you do but their leader wears a shiny hat? I enjoy playing as authoritarian and xenophobic empires conquering and enslaving the galaxy. But now slavery in Stellaris feels entirely useless and just bad. Already in 3.14 it was bad and suboptimal, but now it just feels like shooting yourself in the foot and reducing stability on worlds. Not only do slaves just flat out reduce stability on worlds, but they'll all become civilians if there are no jobs available (this is a problem for syncretic evolution empires too as the serviles will become civilians and your normal pops will be workers instead). Not only that but slaves cannot join factions and produce unity and their general low happiness kills their resource output (which has always been a problem ever since 3.0). Remember back in 2.0 when slave based bonuses and worker based bonuses stacked and this led to everyone playing some degree of slaver guild? That was how overpowered slavery once was. I however have some solutions on how Paradox can bring slavery up to scuff and make it at least viable and balanced.

1. Make worker and slave bonuses stackable again. They wouldn't be as powerful as they were in 2.0, but slavery bonuses would stack up to half as much as worker bonuses, and would be fully stackable with worker bonuses on thrall worlds.
2. Slaves would have reduced empire size penalties. Chattel slaves would have no empire size from pops whatsoever (if they don't have the unruly trait), whilst indentured servants would have half as much empire size penalties as would battle thralls. Domestic servants would have 75% less empire size from pops.
3. Add in trait based AI slavery autoassigning. With automodding traits added in with the Machine Age DLC, I think automodding slavery would be doable. The AI would automatically assign pops to a certain kind of slavery based on their positive and negative traits without player intervention. Strong and very strong would get assigned to chattel slavery automatically as would any basic resource trait, resilient would get battle thralls, weak would get domestic servitude as would charismatic, and decadent, traditional, and natural machinists would get indentured servitude. Pops with the vocational genomics trait would be left out of this and would still be up to player discretion. This would make slavery have much less micromanagement and reduce the workload on players consigning pops to a kind of slavery. It makes no sense to me that all AI empires from the most bigoted from xenophobes to the most despotic of tyrants prefer to simply shackle xenos to debt.

Now all of this sounds like I'm simply wanting to buff slavery. Which is technically true, but I think it should still be balanced and not overpowered. Along with these, slavery should have several downsides.

1. Slaves would almost always have 0% happiness. Effectively they would function like pops in an oppressive autocracy. People don't like being treated as property. Why? They wrote about it! Extensively! Only through special happiness bonuses (labor magistrate, gaia world, comet, etc) would they actually have happiness. Additionally they would never be authoritarian and would be more attracted towards egalitarianism, militarism, or xenophobia. This would make nerve stapling your slaves very useful when you have the chance to.
2. Slaves can never be civilians. This to me feels like a positive and a negative. Slaves would have to actually fill worker jobs and can never trickle down and become civilians. You will have to actually build districts and buildings for your slaves to fill jobs. Otherwise bad things will happen.
3. Unemployed slaves will become picket marchers. This would be a new job equivalent to criminals slaves that have been unemployed for over a year will fill. Picket marchers are professional protesters that march through the streets as they have nothing else to do. Every 100 picket marcher reduces stability by 5 and adds 10% crime as well as reducing resources from employed slaves by 1%. Idle hands find the devil's work.
4. Occasional mass strikes can occur. A planet that has slaves and a base stability of 50% has a 1% chance every month of a mass strike occurring. This is an event chain where slaves walk out of their jobs and go on strike, cutting resource output in half planetwide and reducing stability by 30%. You can have the option to either listen to the slave's demands or crackdown and send in the tanks. If you listen to the slaves' demands, the most prevalent kind of slave on the planet will give their demands. Chattel slaves will demand the complete abolition of slavery and the removal of certain traits (oppressive autocracy, slaver guilds, selective kinship, police state, etc), domestic servants will demand that they get their own housing and to no longer be able to take servant jobs, meaning domestic servants now consume more amenities, housing, and can be unemployed. Battle thralls will demand that they are given full citizenship or residence status and for the removal of civics like slaver guilds or police state. And lastly indentured servants have the most unique demands. Indentured servants will demand that ALL slaves empirewide would be allowed to form their own factions and unionize. This would very likely spawn a particularly nasty egalitarian faction and may put you down the path towards egalitarianism. To crack down on these dissenters, your garrison and assault armies should roughly equal or exceed the number of slave pops striking. If you fail to meet these demands or fail to bring in enough armies or if stability drops below 25%, then a special planetary revolt will start, one with 25% progress already added and with the potential for special events. Planets with the mass strike event ongoing will automatically join this event as will surrounding systems, meaning a mass strike can very easily get out of hand and devolve into widespread mass uprisings. Do note that this is only for planets with 50% stability. Planets with 60% or above stability will have a 0.5% chance of a strike occurring, and planets with a 75% or above will not have strikes happen at all. Likewise a planet with 40% or below stability will have a 2% monthly chance of a strike occurring and planets with a tyrannical or ruthless development governor such as Qu'la Mindler will have a 1% added chance of a mass strike occurring.

Again, these are just my ideas on how slavery could be balanced and reworked. Let me know some additional ideas on how it can be balanced below! Why is it that I like playing authoritarians?

 

[Adaman5280]

Well first they need to make slaves actually usable in 4.0, they're currently not really working at all.. Cant even play my necrophage empire (super sad).


And also to proposed change 2 section 2, Slaves should never ever be civilians, its actually what's causing them to be broken right now, and also it doesn't make sense anyways.. They're not unemployed civilians just chilling, they're slaves and the only time they should be spending unemployed is while their in transit to their next job, i agree with this. However, Slaves need their own category similar to civilians but its really just a waiting room where they sit while awaiting resettlement. They should produce nothing while not employed. Mostly just because its kind of a micro nightmare trying to resettle them all the time manually. They should also get huge buffs to resettlement needless to say.

 

[DelphineasSD]

Well first they need to make slaves actually usable in 4.0, they're currently not really working at all.. Cant even play my necrophage empire (super sad).


And also to proposed change 2 section 2, Slaves should never ever be civilians, its actually what's causing them to be broken right now, and also it doesn't make sense anyways.. They're not unemployed civilians just chilling, they're slaves and the only time they should be spending unemployed is while their in transit to their next job, i agree with this. However, Slaves need their own category similar to civilians but its really just a waiting room where they sit while awaiting resettlement. They should produce nothing while not employed. Mostly just because its kind of a micro nightmare trying to resettle them all the time manually. They should also get huge buffs to resettlement needless to say.

They never resettle without a Slave Hub on planet. Do wonder if this penalize colonization though. Actually, that probably is a triple nerf to slave empires, and Necrophage in particular.


Heck, if Paradox can bump Necromancer jobs to worker class(Now they are Soldier replacements) why not Necrophytes? Was VERY disappointed to find out that Nerve Stapling or setting another species to be unable to work Specialist jobs...can't work the Necrophyte job. My Necroids are Decadent for a reason, why do they keep working the peon jobs while the Slaves take up the Specialist jobs!? (Decadent does not inflict a malus for working the Necromancer Worker job though, so small mercies there.)

 

[Kava]

Yeah, I've noticed that slaves become unemployed easily and the way I want to run things is to have slaves look for appropriate worker jobs based on their traits while my main species sticks to elite/specialist jobs. I even put the Decadent trait on my main species to discourage them from taking worker jobs but they still seem to want to take worker jobs away from slaves. In the end I'm forced to move around my main species with manual resettlement a lot.

I think the 4.0 changes have made slaver empires feel good, though. I like that I have to use smuggle population or war to get more slaves rather than just telling my cloning vats to make as many as I want from zero. I also like that I have to use some oppressive measures like Artistocratic Elite civic, Noxious trait, Domination tradition, so on.

Livestock are very strong with bioships. The others are weak, though, and probably need a job efficiency bonus or something. Chattel could swap the +10% job resources for +10% job efficiency, Indentured Servitude could have +5% job efficiency, and Domestic Servants could get Entertainer efficiency.

Necrophage just needs a rework for their pop growth mechanics.

 

[Ishyro]

I even put the Decadent trait on my main species to discourage them from taking worker jobs but they still seem to want to take worker jobs away from slaves

I would love to have a pop trait that forbid pops to be workers. That would solve a lot of issues for bio ascended empires.

 

[HFY]

Not only do slaves just flat out reduce stability on worlds, but they'll all become civilians if there are no jobs available (this is a problem for syncretic evolution empires too as the serviles will become civilians and your normal pops will be workers instead).

Same thing happens with 4.0 Mechanist origin -- you have robot workers turning into Civilians but never auto-migrating off to your colonies.

It'd be great if robots kicked founders out of jobs so the founders could auto-migrate as Civilians, and robots with locked stratum (e.g. Robot Workers & Droids) showed up as permanent unemployed instead of demoting to Civilian.

 

[-Marauder-]

Not really a slave problem, it's a 4.0 problem. So much stuff is unfinished and was rushed out. And the rapid patching has stopped it seems. Hell the new pop growth is completely broken. As in Broken Shackles + Xeno Compatibility gives INSANE pop growth. While any non multi species empires are currently massively gimped.

Don't worry, in a year or two it might be fixed.

 

[HFY]

And the rapid patching has stopped it seems.

What?

Didn't we see like 3 patches on Friday?

It's Sunday, they can do 10 more next week on the weekdays.

 

[-Marauder-]

What?

Didn't we see like 3 patches on Friday?

It's Sunday, they can do 10 more next week on the weekdays.

Most of the current changes are minor bugfixes and alterations such as removing a bit of text for example for Augmentation Bazaar. Hardly any of them have addressed the big issues such as balancing, missing stuff, etc. It's equivalent to changing the description on a car for sale, and fixing the paint. While everything else is broken.

 

[Deshiba]

I would love to have a pop trait that forbid pops to be workers. That would solve a lot of issues for bio ascended empires.

That should just be an empire policy in the species tab.

 

[Dexev]

Make worker and slave bonuses stackable again. They wouldn't be as powerful as they were in 2.0, but slavery bonuses would stack up to half as much as worker bonuses, and would be fully stackable with worker bonuses on thrall worlds.

I believe they were still stacking before 4.0. Domination traditions and the edict used to be a huge increase to output. (10% adopting, 10% Workplace Motivators, 20% from Extended Shifts).

In the current version the slavery bonuses don't function at all. You can see this with things such as Chattel Slavery which only gives a slave bonus., but simply does nothing. It's not that they've intentionally changed them to not stack it's just not been implemented to work in the new system.

In the old system the pops themselves produced resources, so it could apply the bonuses per pop. Now the planet produces the resources based on workforce, and the slavery bonuses have not been implemented to impact workforce.

This added to the issue of them not taking jobs and bugs with associated origins makes slavery unplayable, so hopefully it will get some attention from the devs soon.

Even when fixed I would agree slavery is going to be weaker than ever before. I'm not sure if factions are stronger than before or if it's just because we start with more pops (or both), but not being in factions is a huge weakness now. (This isn't something they should change, as it makes total sense).

Slavery has been getting weaker for some time. It used to be overpowered when the bonuses affected specialist jobs too, but I'm glad they fixed that because it was ridiculous. Since then it could still be pretty strong if leverged well in the early game meaning you could have more pops working in specialist jobs (due to reduced CG upkeep and increased output of worker jobs). When you got to middle/late game though you are covering your base resource income through vassals, and slavery just became a hinderance. Serviles especially when you can't remove the trait.

I quite like your two ideas as possible changes. Reduced empire size is an interesting idea & empires treating all slaves of a species the same never really made sense to me. I mean why could an empire not have some slaves working in a mine and some in domestic servitude?

I haven't played with bio ships yet but perhaps there is a place for slavery here, with food being an important resource? (Once the bugs are fixed, of course).