Slave population balancing

[Galrun]

In my games as a Patrician of Volantis I often figured out that after the first ~20 years the house slave trade is collapsing. This is due to the fact that quite some slaves die either by natural death, lashing, sickness etc., or they just escape slavery.

On the other hand the slave trader of the world 1. do not breed a lot of new slaves and 2. do not always inherit the slave trader trait (some heirs just decide to not be a slave trader anymore) which would courage them to breed slaves.

Slave raids are performed but cannot stop the collaps of the slave trade system on a long term.

As a result the slave population is decreasing a lot and from a certain point you just cannot buy any slaves while slave trader send you offers to buy your slaves every few seconds.

To conter this, here a few balancing suggestions:

• Increase probability of slave trader to breed new slaves (e.g. decrease downtimes).
• Increase success ratio of breeding.
• Decrease probability of slave trader to lash slaves without good reason (especially female slaves)
• Increase the start amount of female slaves (currently only 1 per slave trader)
• Decrease success ratio of slaves escaping.

I modded some of the actions mentioned above in my GoT installation and increased the yearly birthrate from ~1-2 slaves per year to 5-6 newborn slaves per year.
I have no current numbers on deaths by lashing and escaped slaves, but in theory it should decrease.

The target should be to get a steady state where the slave population at least stays constant.

 

[Lexo]

A simple answer might be to have a option where slaves are concubined together by command and the keep producing at a higher rate than marrige. cut down on effort and make them breedquicker with a cut out at 30 in court so the fertility of trade houses dont drop to hard.

 

[knuckey]

You raise some good points about the slave population, I think what lexo and others have suggested in the past to have slaves form breeding pairs would be a good remedy to start with. It would make breeding much less cumbersome. Will definitely look at tweaking escapes and lashing as well.

 

[Galrun]

Breeding pairs would be a very elegant solution for this issue

This should also be much easier for the AI to handle than the current complex slave management + breeding mechanic.
Although what I saw in the slave_events this mechanic is very well developed.

The reasons for an AI slave trader to stick 2 slaves together as breeding pair could be quite similar to the current bred_candidate selection.....but it only needs to be done once and then nature takes over

 

[L Lawliet]

You could have slavers start with more random slaves and if they run low (under 3?) a random event with low meantime (modified by slave camps size?) to happen spawns random slaves for them if their slave camp level is above 0.
Seems absurd a state that can drag thousands of slaves into war can't get a few worth selling individually.

 

[Galrun]

Goog point, probably this is a good factor to influence the slave population. The current meantimetohappen for the event is 240 months which seems quite high.

One problem in the beginning of a game is that there are only as many female slaves as there are slave traders. If some of these die early the basement of a healthy population is crashed.
With the randomly spawned-from-slave-camps event it is possible to refresh the amount of potential slave mothers again. Plus it totaly makes sense to get more potential house slaves out of the thousands inhabitants of a slave camp.