Slavery is a debuff or hinderance in every strategy/GSG/econ sim.
>Victoria
Untaxable pops
>Eu4
A literal trade good. Non existent mechanic.
>Stellaris
Unhappy pops
>Imperator
Very strong
>Civilization
A 1 pop trade for production. Considered overpowered.
>Kenshi
Slaves run away from you or you can be enslaved.
>Rimworld
Roleplay?
>Distant Worlds, Space Empires
???
How do we improve this mechanic?

>>2074611 (OP)
Gee, it's almost like slavery works best when you haven't invented anything more complicated than the wheel.

don't mind me just forming the fundamental core of every single high-level strategy

>considered overpowered
>considered
lmao

>>2074611 (OP)
eh, it should be a trade off, not better, not worse
slavery decreases job upkeep but increases unemployment

Being a slave owner might be a win for an individual — who doesn't like passive income? — but it's a deadweight loss for the overall economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zt6_IaJVJ2o

How do we improve the mechanic that is realistically nothing but a malus?
Dunno, you can spice it up with events like Servile Wars, or add culling of the helots minigame, or just play Slave Maker.

>>2074611 (OP)
>Slavery is a debuff or hinderance in every strategy/GSG/econ sim.
>Very strong
>Considered overpowered.
nice thread retard

>>2074611 (OP)
>>Victoria
>Untaxable pops
but you get tax from aristocrats so it shouldnt matter

>>2074611 (OP)
>Factorio
Sex slaves

>Play as Dark Elves in Total War Warhammer
>slavery is awesome

>>2074611 (OP)
It should be good short term then eventually bad long term for a variety of reasons that could happen independentlt"

I guess if i could think of some it could be something like.
>Unsupressed slaves lead mass rebellion, crashes economy

>too many slaves means less innovation and reliance on unpaid labor and not real craftsmen or something and also crashes the economy

>>2074611 (OP)
If you think about it, slaves only enrich the elite or slave owners since they don't have to pay wages. It doesn't help the overall economy that much. Since slaves can't really interact with the economy. I can only see it being useful for resource extraction.

>>2075109
>slave maker
kino ui

>>2074611 (OP)
Wdym, Slavery is both good in Stellaris and Rimworld.

rimworld slavery is bad? the fuck u smoking
>dont require recreation
>perform tasks they wouldnt perform as colonists
>easy to get
>easy to get rid of in exchange for honor
>gives bonus to happiness if ideology set up
>dying causes drop in wealth which means smaller raids
>beating them up not only increases your melee skill but also supression which decreases chances of slave rebellion

>>2074611 (OP)
>civ 4
>a strongest civic which allows you to rush production for population

>>2075043
lol yeah whipping is so important in civ iv that the other labor civics are special case only until very late game

Old World has revamped Freedom multiple times but for all the time I've played it, Slavery just feels like the obvious pick to me. I have never really had actual problems with lack of workers or settlers in early game bottlenecking me and the passive flat stone and iron bonus from slavery is always useful.
No idea if Freedom is more useful in higher difficulties though since the rebels might be more of a problem sooner with increased discontent, I have never played above The Strong.

>>2075043
>>2077050
Maybe Soren Johnson is trying to tell us something with his design principles.

>>2074611 (OP)
Slaves are not part of the eternal dragons body & thus should not be allowed to exist.

>>2074611 (OP)
>Why does Slavery suck?
In the modern age slavery has to carry negative connotations for fear the devs will be seen as racist. Never mind that it's an essential rung on the ladders of both social and economic development for every thriving civilization.

It would actually be interesting to see a GSG with more focus on using slavery in the starting era and abolishing slavery (early) makes the game more difficult. Abolition chicken if you will.

>>2077005
Meh, i can see the appeal in Rimworld but i normally just keep like 1 or 2 sometimes for shit like cleaning the base. I think gameplay wise it's basically just a workaround against Unwavering Loyalty.

>>2077060
Really? For me it's the opposite. Freedom gives global happiness early, which is hard to come by, early and the slavery events which pop up can be at best annoying and at worst devastating. If I need metal and stone(well everyone does) I can just make more mines and quarries. One mine/quarry provides at a minimum two cities worth of slavery. I think it's only worth taking if you are on a map with absolutely zero mountains or hills or you get a free civic event since you can switch later?

>>2077060
>>2077171
Wait when the fuck did they change the global happiness to just growth? And slavery is just a bonus with maybe bad events now? Shit, they really gutted freedom.

Ok checking history they changed it in February 2025, so I'm not retarded, I just haven't played that recently. Also at one point slavery was -1 global happiness, though it gave a huge mine and quarry bonus at that time.

>>2074611 (OP)
IRL, slavery has three selling points, from the perspective of the state:
It gets you working hands where you might otherwise have none; it scales up your economy, feeding resources back to your country and giving your country's merchants an advantage; and it creates a new lower class you can threaten to reduce the average citizen to.
For a state with a market economy, the first two reasons don't matter. You can deal with point one by just paying extra for resource extraction, and point two by exploiting the gaps in currencies, even within your own country, via colonies.
For point three, that's the main reason it's still tolerated today.
Slavery comes with risks to the state and general public, market disruptions, changes in the social order, unique discourse that can potentially lead to revolution. If you're a slave exporter, this worsens.

>>2075503
IRL slavery was like an early equivalent of rich boomers and Blackrock buying up real estate as a pure investment, letting the places stay vacant while there are housing crises etc.
Basically before stock markets, slavery was the safest way for richfags to park their money in a way that was risk averse, regulated by the state and earned you some incremental passive income on the side.
If you invested in slaves you could resell them later in case of emergencies kind of like selling your stocks. Their actual productivity was second place to their use as a store of value and investment. In societies with widespread slavery like Rome they were a major source of contention between free commoners and the aristocrats, because slaves took away paying jobs and let latifunda owners outcompete and buy out homesteaders

In Distant Worlds the spider dudes, Dhayuts, get an empire wide bonus for enslaving other races

>>2075109
>but it's a deadweight loss for the overall economy.
lol instead we will just abandon cities and call it progress

It's good in Dominions since it just means half pay
Unfortunately the vast majority of slave units and commanders suck

>>2075109
I understand that's the case for modern economies, but does the same go for premodern ones as well?
t. knows nothing of economics

>>2079266
>I understand that's the case for modern economies, but does the same go for premodern ones as well?
It doesn't. In an agrarian economy, unfree labor, whether that's slavery, serfdom, or some cultural equivalent, has advantages.
As an example, Mark Elvin's proposed that, among other reasons of course, it was part of why China didn't have a native industrial revolution. China's move from serfdom to peasant cottage industry in textiles prevented the management of the process by the educated upper classes, whose counterparts in Europe drove a lot of innovation.
Once society is rich enough to offer more or less universal education, that doesn't matter obviously. But there absolutely are benefits to having a leisured class with an economic interest in their properties becoming more productive.

>>2079266
It does, even serfdom is order of magnitudes superior to slavery. For one private slave holders have to either absorb the cost of making sure their slaves don't rebel or pass it on to the state, which is an obvious market inefficiency.

Image related is fine but it specifies Volunteers as an option in its title. Why they then kept the ball and chain I don't know.
It's mandatory for money empires as it increases the value of gold in hurrying production.

>>2074611 (OP)
>>Civilization
>A 1 pop trade for production. Considered overpowered.
It also fixes unhappiness.
>>2077084
>In the modern age slavery has to carry negative connotations
I find even this is taboo because depicting slavery is the worst taboo possible. Even implied rape in story games is less taboo and that's saying something.

>>2077187
>slavery comes with potential revolution
>exporting slaves makes this worse
Africa is still slaving today but exports less to the new world and Arab world. Exporting is perhaps the best choice... if you had a higher intelligence to exploit this wealth like some kind of prescient view into the future.
Remember that the other selling point of slavery, perhaps THE point, is it deals with overpopulation.

>>2079266
Depends what is a dead weight or loss for an economy. It might surprise you to find out a lot of people are dead weight.
If it has been studied, Africa and Asia would have examples in various stages of economies relative to western ones.

>>2074611 (OP)
The real redpill is tha modern day cheap third-world labour essentially performs the same function as slavery. All civilisations need a form of very cheap labour to keep itself functioning and keep prices relatively low. The purpose of cheap labour is essentially the same, but cheap labour can be paid JUST a little more than straight up slavery due to machines helping with labour and balancing the minor costs.

>>2074611 (OP)
because they mostly portray it as human cattle in the american way of slavery, when romans slaves were part of society and could get good positions and be more productive than just a human tractor for picking cotton

>>2074611 (OP)
Because it's realistic.
>Security risk
>Quantity over quality
>Depresses wages for locals, lowering social cohesion and increasing class tension
>You have to deport the third worlders when the system is proven to be unprofitable and suboptimal, which will end up costing more than the meager extra profits that you made from slavery

>>2081060
A lower class is necessary, but using slavery to replace lower class workers just pushes them into competition for middle class jobs, increasing unemployment and reducing wages.

I like how endless space 2 handles slavery as cravers.
Cravers pop give a lot of resources but they deplete planets, any pop in a planet where there's at least one craver pop is considered enslaved and will output twice the resources at the cost of unhappiness.
So you can ship cravers to newly conquered systems to make sure everyone's is enslaved or completely fill healthy planets with cravers and ship the original populator to depleted system to be slaves on depleted planets.

>>2079266
Slaves used to be conquered people and would give early societies a lot of manpower that they wouldn't otherwise have. To a degree it was also a mercy because ancient people had no problems with exterminating their enemies.
They say the pyramids were "actually built by paid laborers" but not only the evidence for laborers being volunteers is shaky, there's no evidence that slave labor was not used in any capacity.
Modern slavery was a private enterprise that enriched slave owners and to a degree the state because of taxes, but it stifled growth because non-slave businesses would not be able to be competitive. If modern states need forced labors they use felons which are more convenient because you don't have to buy them.

>>2080257
>Africa is still slaving today
"Africa", as a polity, does not exist, and none of the states (that I'm aware of) tolerate the practice.
>Exporting is perhaps the best choice... if you had a higher intelligence to exploit this wealth like some kind of prescient view into the future.
No, it's pretty undesirable. Social control sounds well and good until you're faced with a peer power. Both Benin and Kongo tried to limit the trade, and they only fed demand due to monetary circumstance (Benin) and regime change (Kongo).
>Remember that the other selling point of slavery, perhaps THE point, is it deals with overpopulation.
You're thinking of resettlement initiatives and agricultural colonies. Overpopulation typically leads to militarism an expansion, not a monarch selling off his own subjects.

>>2074611 (OP)
Slaves can't pay taxes or consoom products.
They also rebel all the time.

So is the dev of crimeamod dead or what?

>>2081814
>and none of the states (that I'm aware of) tolerate the practice.
Depending on the study and measure (gross/per capita), Mauritania or Nigeria win first place in African slavery.
>No, it's pretty undesirable
>peer power
I don't really understand your point.
>You're thinking of resettlement and colonies
I'm thinking of Roman mining endeavours

>>2084689
>Walk Free Foundation
What an interesting choice of countries to show, since they list USA at 1.1 million slaves.

>>2084689
I didn't know Best Korea's population is only 2.6 million.

>>2074611 (OP)
People think that slavery was an alternative to being a free man, and if you ran away from a master that put you in shackles you would be a self sustaining individual. In reality having a good master allowed them a secure employment and place to stay. And successful slaves did that by maintaining a good relationship with their former master and simply earning their way up. If you ran away from your master you would need to beg or steal or simply find a better master that didn't abuse you. Applying modern values to past always fails.

>>2084689
>Depending on the study and measure (gross/per capita), Mauritania or Nigeria win first place in African slavery.
This uses a much more generous definition of "slavery". Worth discussing in a different context, but it contributes nothing here.
>I don't really understand your point.
Exporting slaves harms your own economy , incentivizes revolt, and limits your available manpower. In the worst cases, you get a self-sustaining industry that depopulates your territories and legitimizes your political opponents. Giving your enemies footholds without even requiring them to send an army is just stupid.
>I'm thinking of Roman mining endeavours
If those had any connection to overpopulation, it was likely an excuse. In those times, mining slaves were taken for reason #1 I gave in >>2077187: No one wants to do that kind of labor. It's hard, dangerous work. You just wouldn't have hands in mines, no matter how much you offered.
>>2084830
>If you ran away from your master you would need to beg or steal or simply find a better master that didn't abuse you.
Only applies in cases where slavery is tied to racial/ethnic castes. Without that, it's just a race to the hinterlands.

>>2075191
>Factorio
>Sex slaves
what?

>>2074611 (OP)
Because slavery is a tied into about a thousand other pieces of crimestop underpinning current morality

>>2081060
The real red pill is that modern day cheap third-world labour is why our economies are stagnating and declining. All economic boom periods like the Dutch golden age occurred in cases where labour was scarce and markets were free, pushing up the cost of labour and shifting more wealth into the pockets of the masses, which acted as a driver for increased productivity and innovation due to a motivated population with time & resources available for improvement and progress.

>>2081739
The pyramids were built with corvée labour. That is labour as a tax. They were not paid but were transported to and from and fed.
Skilled craftsmen on the pyramids were paid.

Some Civ4 mods have slavery that can be really fucking good for specialist economy if you can acquire a constant stream of slaves from defeating enemies. But if you don't have a source of slaves better just leave it be.

>>2086057
trvthnvke!!!

>>2086029
Not only that, premature-birth vat-grown juvenile sex slaves with pussy-anus-cloacas.

>>2077136
overrides any traits that prevent certain types of work, gives them a big mood buff since they understand they’re worms who deserve little comfort, and you can sell them to the empire for titles. Quite far from useless, considering prisoners used to be extra mouths to feed with no benefit. Now you can at least get some decent work out of shitty pawns you don’t want to recruit while you wait to sell them.

>>2086057
> which acted as a driver for increased productivity and innovation due to a motivated population
This is ass backwards, it drives productivity and innovation because labor is expensive so you have to do what you can with what you have to minimize the amount of labor needed.

>>2074611 (OP)
EU4 could add a mechanic where colonial nations can import slaves into cotton/tobaco/sugar producing provinces, which greatly improve production, but tank tax and manpower and switch the province culture to some west african one. Later on ¨there would be a possibility of a slave revolt disaster, which would turn slave dependent provinces into a revolutionary republic. I don't think you can do anything better in a game without POPs desu

>>2086656
You're talking about Pie's Ancient Europe? Great mod, for me it's the zenith of the feeling of "civilization building" in a game.

>>2088718
Inventions tend not to come from the upper 1% but rather from a prosperous middle class.

>>2086057
a Truth Nuke i'd been thinking of but never bother to post ever since i watched some business insider video about pizza places becoming automated due to covid ending mass migration for 2 years
>cheap labour drys up
>businesses are forced to innovate, invest in and implement the latest machinery and technology available
>whole process becomes more efficient than before, with less men doing more work
>humanity advances and wages rise

combine this with the fact the median wage when adjusted for inflation has gone no where in 40 YEARS and its looking like mass migration of cheap labour into the west was one of the biggest fuck ups in human history

>>2090002
I don't think that's accurate although it could be a confusion of terms.
For example Eli Whitney was the son of a man who owned a farm and a workshop, was he wealthy or middle class? I'd consider him upper class but I wouldn't be flabbergasted if you considered him middle class.

>>2090351
He had to work as a farm labourer & teacher for money, definitely not upper class. He was a successful middle class man.

The upper class does not have to work.

>>2090351
The upper class mostly just contributes capital (and ph*losophers)..

>>2090430
>He had to work as a farm labourer & teacher for money
Because his family refused to pay for what he wanted (Yale)
>>2090439
And Natural Philosophers like Newton

>>2081060
>The real redpill is tha modern day cheap third-world labour essentially performs the same function as slavery.
Yes.
>All civilisations need a form of very cheap labour to keep itself functioning and keep prices relatively low.
Hmm... I don't believe this. The world would be less mercantile but I don't believe plastic, computer parts and industrial goods are why civilisation is functioning.

>>2077059
doesn't help that serfdom is complete ass

>>2074611 (OP)
Because modern slavery is better.

>>2074611 (OP)
You're just bringing in potential enemies into your civilization just so you don't have to pay your poors for basic labor. The more of these retards you have, the more you depend on them, the more you have to waste to keep them in check. In ancient Sparta, the wordt example, where the slave to master ratio was 7 or 8 to one, the people had to turn their society into an armed camp, open 24/7, 365 days a year, we never close "because everyday someone somewhere deserves a beating", in order to retain a semblance of stability and control over things. It was a liability, not a benefit. You're always better off having your own people doing all the work and making the sure they happy and invested into the nation so they never rebel or need any heavy surveillance.

>>2092772
>You're just bringing in potential enemies into your civilization just so you don't have to pay your poors for basic labor. The more of these retards you have, the more you depend on them, the more you have to waste to keep them in check
Oh boy I'm sure glad we've progressed past this bullshit and we don't have petty, short-sighted retards in incomprehensibly lofty positions of power who would sell out their own people and irreparably damage the fabric of society to make a quick buck.

>>2074611 (OP)
>victoria
>slaves
>untaxable
Ya that's the whole fucking point retard, they're slaves

>>2075046
That's not what slavery did irl. Pre-industrial societies relied on mass labor, and that's exactly what slavery is. The problem is when you say "slavery" in the modern context, your mind immediately goes to blacks picking cotton in the field rather than, say, the child that made your sneakers.

>>2093453
>Pre-industrial societies relied on mass labor
You don't need to rely on shitty slavery for that, pre-industrial societies had serfdom and now we just let market forces "guide" poorfags into either working from childhood or starving to death (like the thai kid who made your sneakers). Way more efficient and smoother than literally using force to tell people what to do and technically not slavery, because they are "free" to stop working and start starving.

>>2074611 (OP)
Slavery is often too good in games and needs to be nerfed. Stellaris and Civ both ran into that

>>2079466
It is also argued why Greeks and Roman’s didn’t develop their steam engines for anything beyond toys or gimmicks because they used heavy slaves labor instead (along with not having developed the metallurgy well enough for scaling up with higher pressures). Machines of meat instead of metal were used for laboring.

>>2084830
So you would be okay being a slave for a "good master"?

>>2074669
The Roman empire had more slaves than citizens at the height of the Empire's power.

>>2093877
that was only true for a limited time POSSIBLY in Italia, not the entire empire
>The peak of the Roman Empire's population is estimated to be around 60–70 million, with estimates of the slave population ranging from 2 to 10 million.

>>2093288
>redditramble
Your post is right, but that's an awful format.

>>2074611 (OP)
slavery is only good when afterwards you do not give rights to the slaves except for the ones that actually deserve it
america is one example

>>2093461
Serfdom is just slavery with a few more extra rights.

>>2074611 (OP)
Wage labour is slavery, in fact its worse becuase at least under chattel slavery your owner pays for your housing and food

>>2091675
I've been toying with a mod to make slavery generate more income and serfdom generate more food. It seems to work conceptually.
Unfortunately the whole damn game is built around being able to rush basic infrastructure. Whip it through most of the game, buy it late game.
The pain of that zero production cottage city needing like 40 turns to build a library or marketplace is real.

>>2093898
>The Roman Empire at its height encompassed around 45 million people, with about 4 million citizens
Citizenship was very exclusive and the inhabitants were divided into several tiers. Not every free man in Rome was a citizen but that doesn't mean that they were slaves either.

>>2094206
Only the south had a large amount of slaves and the south was generally poorer and less developed than the north.

>>2094206
Only the south had a large amount of slaves and the south was generally poorer and less developed than the north.

>>2074611 (OP)
Aristotle was talking in the context of ancient greece. The greek aristocracy had trouble exploiting the free citizens of their communities through the archiac age. They wanted to enforce tryranny and dominance and often came close - both economically and politically, but the reality of archaic greek warfare meant that they eventually had to accomodate the free citizenry to be militatily competetive with their neighboring poleis. Hence, with the free men strong enough to resist them the elite turned to the other potential resource for exploitation - slaves.

tl;dr the greek elite couldn't enforce serfdom, so they turned to slavery instead

So the game could reflect something like that: politically free, unitary and strong citizenry makes widespread foreign slavery more likely. And vice versa.

>>2094857
>politically free, unitary and strong citizenry makes widespread foreign slavery more likely
Only up to a certain point, and then it all comes crashing down. Rome is an excellent example of this.

>>2074611 (OP)
Slavery makes you a fuckload of money in Anbennar.

>>2077187
The first reason absolutely does matter. Labor is finite and money is also just a means of representing finite resources. You can't just buy your way out of that. Unless your "market economy" is just a very bad euphemism for the modern state with fiat currency.

In any case, the main economic rationale for slavery is that it cheapens or provides labor. Some (idiots) might claim that slavery is always more expensive than constructing and then hiring a class composed of a massive horde of poor laborers, but this is a situation that historically is quite rare and only common in modern times. Historically, labor was scarce with respect to land. A landowner could have plenty of land and no one to work it, figuratively speaking. A slave or serf was cheaper than a free man. This is why slavery was e.g. a big deal in Southern plantations, because the labor to work them was not available and so they imported that labor by buying slaves. And why the pressure for enforcing serfdom disappeared (and forced emancipation happened en masse) in Europe when new technologies and methods meant you didn't need so much labor for agriculture.

>>2074611 (OP)
Using slaves in Kenshi realistically can only be done with mods, and selling people into slavery isn't highly profitable without modding the price. Overall though having slaves or having regular workers changes nothing it is not like you pay them wages either way but it is fun to sell your enemies into slavery.

Conan Exiles which really isn't a /vst/ type of game did slavery alright but it isn't complex.

>>2074611 (OP)
Its the opposite of evolution.

>>2096026
>The first reason absolutely does matter. Labor is finite and money is also just a means of representing finite resources. You can't just buy your way out of that. Unless your "market economy" is just a very bad euphemism for the modern state with fiat currency.
Fair. Still, as demand scales with population size, the need for people to work would increase with the number of people working.
There is no need to "work land" if there are no people, and if there are only few, then there's little need. It's only when population grows in excess of means that this becomes an issue, and slave drivers have every reason to desire this.
We skip over this by focusing on individual countries, but a single country practicing enslavement while contributing to a broader market is really just part of an enslavement-permissive market.
We shift the burden of demand onto slaves as a matter of convenience, not necessity.

>>2074611 (OP)
In Distant Worlds 2, slavery keeps pops from migrating, and provides a huge bonus to economic output and planetary facility building. If you have a couple of ground troops on the planet, it prevents them from revolting, and the happiness penalty slowly goes away(I think.)
The only real penalty is a slight hit to your empire's diplomacy.
I haven't played DW:U in a while, but I think it's roughly the same: Large buff to a planet's economy with a slight hit to your Empire's diplomatic relations.

>>2074611 (OP)
future generations pay for the slavery

>>2094791
you don't actually need it. just keep working those cottages.

Hehe~heh…