Thread 2074611

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…

it's superfluous labor too brought on by overcivilization (when there's nothing left to own but human freedom as a display of decadent wealth/power/opulence).
for example, you don't needs slaves to live off the land as a peasant subsistence farmer. theoretically, every person on Earth could go back to tending a garden for themselves and the world would still turn and we'd all self-sustain.
slavery is an unnatural class formed by civilizational overspecialization/imperialism (what do we do with conquored outsiders and their children?)

>>2104859
and think about it: you don't enslave your own people.
you don't/can't enslave kin.
it's as absurd as hearing about a son enslaving his father (you've just heard it for the first time, it's that absurd a concept). that slavery is impossible as it's just a form of interfamilial cruelty (like patricide))

>>2104862
>that slavery is impossible as it's just a form of interfamilial cruelty (like patricide))
De facto enslavement of relatives is a thing in some cultures, complete with cruel punishments and social conditioning.

>>2104898
Is that sustainable?
Seems up there cultural Family Annihilation.

>>2104907
that was an mkultra experiment though

>>2104911
that's what I mean.
just because people/cultures behave a certain way, doesn't make them optimal or desired or even make sense.
for example, those cannibal tribes should be wiped out.

>>2104915
in strategy games, it gives the player moral justification (meta casus belli)

>>2104907
>Is that sustainable?
Yes, for generations.
You should understand that I'm talking about abuse of relatives and control of their living circumstances. It's not that the state recognizes them as the property of the family head; they just overlook abuses and help reunite family members if one of them goes missing. If some of them aren't prepared to quite live on their own, it's no big deal. Just send them home until they are. Complaints? Suits? If they even know how to file those, they can be talked away from those ledges, and there are no guarantees of anything.

>>2104915
>for example, those cannibal tribes should be wiped out.
Cannibalism is typically a response to a dietary insufficiency. They're not cannibals as some inherent quality; they're cannibals because they need either a reliable source of calories or a backup source of protein, and humans are just the most efficient option available. It's the reason cannibalism is most commonly associated with jungles and tropical islands.

>>2102093
Call to Power was fucking weird and I loved it.

>>2104959
complete nonsense, you have no clue what you're talking about

>>2104862
People do and did enslave their own kind, like the not insignificant percentage of southerner's slave owners who didn't seem to care about their own mixed children and treated them as any other slave.

>>2105022
They do, then they have no kind outside of slavers.
If you were to enslave your own family, then you have no family.

>>2105022
>mixed
>own kind

>>2105071
Romantic notions aren't the rules of life.

>>2105083
Their offspring would literally share a higher degree of kinship than any random white person minus their parents, only evil retards - such as some southerners -would enslave them.

>>2105346
anyone can observe that the neighbor's kid will behave more like the oildriller than the mulatto

>>2074611 (OP)
>This thread once more
Go play Imperator Rome and masturbate while doing so. It will help

>>2074611 (OP)

There was a mod called "we the people" for colonization. There was a time where slavery was a good short term strategy. You could sail to african coast. Maybe sell guns or tools there, buy slaves and base resources (ore/lumber). And then use the slaves in the new world, who would get a +1 bonus working the land (farming, lumberjacking, gathering) and a -2 bonus working in a house (which is all statesman/clergy/craftman type stuff).

There was a very small chance of slaves escaping (sometimes stealing your guns as well) and becoming a nuisance as a kind of barbarian unit or even building his own city.

There was also a chance for a slave to level up (like all units can). In the case of a slave it became a freed man, now giving +2 instead of +1 working the land. (only experts were better at it, as they get x2 in their specific profession).

Slaves were almost identical to the indentured servants that you could get from europe. Which are a kind of slave. They also got the -2 for indoor jobs, but no bonus for land jobs. If they leveled up they became a normal colonist.

But what happened? People complained. WAH WAH SLAVERY IS BAD, IT SHOULD BE BAD IN GAME. So it was nerfed into the ground. Now slaves rebel almost every turn. Even if they don't, they cause so much unhappiness that everyone is less productive.

You saw the same in old world. Slavery was one of the 24 civics you could activate (You could have 12 civics and each was a choice between 2 different civics. Each was unlocked by a technology).

You could either have freedom, which gave extra money from specialists, or you could have slavery which gives you 5 extra orders each turn at the cost of extra unhappiness. Slavery was something that was quite good in the early game and became a liability in the later game, probably something you wanted to switch away from. Even if you did, unhappiness is cumulative so you would have to deal with the legacy unhappiness you had created. 1/2

>>2106208
But slavery was fucking worth it, because 5 orders is very very good. But again. People crying in the discord. Why is slavery so good? Slavery is bad!

Also got nerfed into the dirt. Instead now it gives a 15% bonus to gathering stone, wood and iron from the land.

You've got people that have gone to school and learned that slavery is the worst thing ever morally and think that because it is morally bad, it should punish players that choose it in game.

Just no understanding of the value of slavery, and how especially in the old world (compared to say, age of colonization) slavery was a mercy because the alternative was just killing everyone.

>>2074611 (OP)
>Why does Slavery suck?
Because exploiting people, animals and the land is wrong.
We need a game that would portray the inescapable and inevitable doom spiral of civilization just like real life. The closest we got was endless legend.

>>2090079
>>humanity advances and wages rise
i think you skipped at least one point before this, what are you doing with all of you unemployed low skill workers? does your list look worse if you include things like mass homelessness, starvation, or genocide?

>>2093877
That's why it collapsed.

also, these games are played from the perspective of a more-or-less absolute central authority concerned with perfecting broad (and usually long-term) efficiency and resource allocation over everything else. Such a perspective or reasoning didn't properly exist before technological society and the modern state, so the incentives for adopting other models were lesser in reality.

>>2106320
actually, all games about economical development portray it perfectly

>>2074611 (OP)
unhappy humans are not producitve, this is a simple fact of life

>>2074611 (OP)
also
>stellaris
slaves in stellaris get a production boost don't they? and you can just nerve stable them
of course slaves are going to be unhappy what do you mean?
>kenshi
yes? do you think slaves don't want freedom?

>>2106597
i'm sure the african child mining the rare metals for the phone i'm posting from and the asian sweatshop worker making my single-season 0.1€ production cost clothes were all ecstatic for the opportunity to work and earn in such a free system. surely happier and more satisfied than any of the greek mentors could have been

happiness not really caused by our employment/labour system and is basically completely accidental to it.

>>2106632
1 for 1, happy workers are more productive
those sweatshop workers are not more productive, there is just so many of them and they work long hours
it's not a very efficient system

>>2106635
Probably. I mean that that's not a slavery / wage employment distinction

It's a thing for jobs that fucking suck
Rowing a boat in the Mediterranean sucks, it's hot with no water breaks and the pay is shit. Harvesting sugar is the same but sticky and with snakes everywhere. Deep pit resource extraction is terrible period. But if you can just yoink some randoms to do it for you problem solved.

people overestimate the amount of slaves most societies had, it was always a tiny fraction

>>2106787
tell them how many negro slaves were imported to north america in total and they won't believe you

>>2074611 (OP)
Slavery have always been inefficient. You need guards, and any slave capable of doing a good job would also be capable of escaping slavery.
It was economical when you needed slaves for a fucktons of dumb menial work, but not once you need smart individual capable of improvising.

"Modern" slavery is more a figure of speech for people who are free, but cannot afford to leave shitty job.

>>2106597
>machine needs oil
>put oil in machine
>machine unhappy - doesn't matter
>oil unhappy - doesn't matter
>me unhappy - doesn't matter, job is done either way
Oh yea, I'm a slave btw
>had 20 minutes to do the work because massa thinks me unhappy (correct thinking of smart massa)
>did it in 15 minutes after all the procrastinations I can think of
Damn you smart massa for giving me simple but physically exhausting menial jobs that do not depend on my mood levels. What do you take me for? A woman?

>>2105364
>anyone can observe that the neighbor's kid will behave more like the oildriller than the mulatto
>caring more about your neighbour's children than your own due to some nonsensical fear of your genes and child caring being insufficient to raise your offspring as you would prefer.
This is some cuck tier mentality, lmao.

>>2106212
It's not just about a playerbase that can't distinguish between something being morally bad and something being actually bad. There's a distinct dogma that seeks to claim that slavery is inefficient and bad for an economy, disregarding the obvious benefits for a labor-scarce economy (i.e. basically all on-modern economies).

>>2105083
nigger its their fucking child

>>2106635
that's just because you're counting their misery into your equation, as long as you ignore their happiness and wellbeing then slavery is extremely efficient

>>2106884
i'm not going to pretend your shitskin halfbreed is even vaguely a part of my tribe

>>2107017
We are talking about parents that enslaved their own offspring here, not the reaction of their neighbours, nigga. Not caring about your own blood because "what will the neighbours think?" and reducing them to an object to be sold and bought, thus diminishing the probability of propagating your own genes, is cuckold af.

>>2106208
>and a -2 bonus working in a house (which is all statesman/clergy/craftman type stuff).
This is the issue here.
People on both sides of this topic don't want to see abolitionism as a political issue, and purely as a moral cause. Because both treat it this way, and because game developers make dumb restrictions like these, the conflict continues in perpetuity.
If you want accurate slave dynamics, you have to simulate internal and external markets. Slaves lower wages in every trade, and they're actually better for domestic or skilled work than they are as farmhands (as Muslims know well). In a capitalist framework, they're a powerful investment that can dominate any market they sell to, at the cost of their own home market's prosperity and scale. This leads to a stratified society, an aristocracy dependent on slavery to function, and the growth of the slave class.
If the slaves must legally be of a certain race, they'll be bred or imported en masse, until their numbers are great enough to break this impoverished society with an act of rebellion. This is what happened in Haiti, and what would've happened in America had there not been significant immigration between the years of 1820 and 1860 (in response to the German Revolution and the Irish potato famine).
Abolitionists don't like competing with slave labor.

>>2107164
The Zanj Slave revolt pretty much signalled the Abassid Caliphate was on its last legs because it couldn’t quash a black slave/poor underclass revolt without spending more than a decade of policing a heartland region.

>>2105346
/pol/ said mixed people are less related to their parents than a random white person

>>2074611 (OP)
Probably some babysitting mechanic where you have to constantly get new slaves and feed and shelter them and encourage their breeding and staying healthy. While also not making life too good for them else they outnumber you and will revolt. Everything you are building depends on them so if you even take your eyes off it for a moment and they start dying too quickly than you can maintain than you cant get shit done.

So it would be some annoying see saw mini game that keeps sucking up your time while youre trying to do other actual cool shit.


Shit literally sounds like driving a car with the worse alignment ever and no cruise control down one stretch of road that lasts for hours. Cant take your eyes off else your empire veers to the left or right and you get stuck in a ditch.
Slavery truly was the desert bus of life

>>2106448
No it's not

>>2093898
2-10 millions means Italy would have to contain the overwhelming majority of the empire's slaves to be majority slaves.
Which is beyond implausible because the east was where fleshmarkets were, and north africa was where the biggest industrial slavery locations were.
Slaves were the majority of the population nowhere ever.

>>2079266
>does the same go for premodern ones as well
Yes, so long as you're operating with limited land.
Historically, slavery only ever worked well for highly expansionist powers who could just blow all their manpower outwards without harming the freemen at home.
As soon as the expansion slowed down, slavery became actively harmful.

>>2107164
haiti was a freemason coup

>>2114878
>Slaves were the majority of the population nowhere ever.
Sparta and Haiti, American South got pretty close >>2094828

>>2094927
>Caesar incarnate
This is completely true though

>>2114925
Helots being slaves is questionable, but it's not like I can't see why some people would want to count serfs as slaves.

>>2106991
>as long as you ignore their happiness and wellbeing then slavery is extremely efficient
But they don't ignore their own happiness and wellbeing, which makes them less efficient.

>>2114977
Not all slavery is chattel slavery. It is relatively rare historically.

>>2074611 (OP)
Because the only slavery that is ever depicted is the propagandized version of southern plantation workers vs the industrialized north. It is a yes or no question they are either a slave and all slaves are equal or they aren't a slave. Combine this with extremely easy and simplified access to labor and slavery is pointless.
For slavery to be portrayed accurately it must portray laws and rights accurately and all that entails. A slave can have almost the same rights as a normal man or they can be the man in rags and chains that the propagandized version depicts.

>>2074611 (OP)
question: do most of the users on this board just play strategy games to roleplay their personal politics and larp as hitler? i find that kinda boring desu.

>>2106320
Slavery provides cheap labor, but it comes at a cost. When an elite becomes dependent on essentially free, unskilled workers, there’s little economic incentive to invest in new methods or technologies. Why cultivate artisans or innovate when you can rely on a mass of laborers to extract resources for next to nothing? This overreliance on cheap labor can stagnate progress. You see echoes of this in modern economies that rely heavily on sweatshop labor, where growth depends less on innovation and more on sheer manpower and borrowed technology.

>>2119882
it would have to also present slaves living comfortably with things to eat while "free peasants" starve to death

>>2074611 (OP)
Fields of Glory Empires slaves are both a boon and a detriment. Short-term you can really use the labor or sell them, but long-term you can convert the pops to your culture and/or free them. The only problem is that when they're slaves, and foreign culture slaves, they generate decadency which makes your empire decline.

>>2107105
No. The theoretical guy is still going to be pumping his wife.
Gaxyhg

>>2074611 (OP)
>says slavery sucks in every strategy game
>immediately lists a game where it doesn't suck
Okay retard, slaves are the most important resource you have in Imperator, and honestly the primary goal of any war you wage, whether you the player realize it or not.

>>2093877
You of course mean ROMAN citizenship, aka something that was for a really, really long time limited to the population of Latium and a small selection of people who paid through their nose to get it.... right?
You aren't talking post-Lex Iulia Rome, where they granted citizenship to all of Italian population, and thus instantly had more citizens than they ever had slaves.

>>2094785
>This is your brain on being a neet
There are times I wish it was possible to get asshats like you and put you through actual wage slavery in, dunno, a company town or similar.
Or just whip your ass until you stop whining, because God forbid, you had to work a day in your life, the fucking terror!

>>2127355
Counterpoint: once you get big enough, slaves are meaningless, because sheer size of your country is going to outweight any benefit having slaves produce extra goods.
And post-Marius update, trade is a joke anyway, so slaves went from No. 1, 2 and 3 priority to being like... No. 2? You actually want Freemen and Citizens now, with loads of cities with exactly 22 pops each dotting the land. You can usually cram 2 of those per province without much effort.
But yeah, I:R is the game where anything that allows you to enslave more people is a godsent, simply because slaves are the only pops you can move (yes, you can move tribals around, but only as a tribal, and you don't want to be one)

>>2074611 (OP)
Slavery is always bad because it fucks over the local population.
It's the most banal case of short term profits and long term negative consequences.

>>2128588
Slaves are your primary source of money no matter what. your average slave pop generates as much tax as three freeman pops, assuming both pop types are operating at full efficiency, which the slave pop will always be, while the freemen will be subject to the whims of their level of happiness, which will always be in flux and will almost never be at 100%.

>slavery bad in civ
It's OP in 4 to a stupid degree specifically because of its interaction with the granary. If you have a positive net food increase per turn, that amount is added to both the growth bar and the granary so the food is double counted, then when you grow, the growth bar is set to the amount in the granary WITHOUT emptying the granary, meaning that the food is duplicated again. Even worse is that when the city is starving, food is subtracted from the growth bar and the granary when you would expect the granary to provide food for the city so it doesn't starve. Unfortunately you can't fix the double counting of food without making the building unusable since no one would build a building that slows down growth when growth is king.

Rant aside, I've been playing through the mod Pie's Ancient Europe in civ 4 which has slaves as worker units that are periodically created through combat or cities and you can use them to build improvements or hurry production. I think it's a way better representation of slavery and you can end up with an emergent slave trade network which is neat.

>>2114977
>Helots being slaves is questionable
no the fuck it's not?

>>2074611 (OP)
>Slaves run away from you or you can be enslaved.
How this was debuff or hindrance?>>2093453
>rather than, say, the child that made your sneakers.
So basically.. trade off

>>2106208
>>2106212
>There was a mod called "we the people" for colonization. There was a time where slavery was a good short term strategy.
Slavery in civ 4 already good (even overpowered) so why would people need this mod anyway

>>2074669
The Romans had a lot more than just the wheel. But they had no steam machines and needed slave muscles in agriculture, mining, construction. We still can't build robots that are nearly as versatile as humans btw.

>>2084689
> XY Foundation
Who sponsors them? The usual suspect?

>>2114879
>Historically, slavery only ever worked well for highly expansionist powers
>As soon as the expansion slowed down, slavery became actively harmful.
Damn, I wish there were anything that actually simulated this.

>>2074611 (OP)
It's realistic. It's a security risk, the labour is low-quality, and it lowers the wages of the lower classes. It's only worth it if you want to leech as much wealth as possible from a foreign country and then flee to Israel when shit hits the fan.

>>2135419
Civ4 Colonization and Civilization 4 are two different games anon

>>2074611 (OP)
Silly noob never played civ 4

>>2074611 (OP)
Because your nose isn't long enough to maximize the profits

>>2074611 (OP)
Getting western devs to prioritize the game experience over their sensibilities (or more likely, the sensibilities of their masters) is simply impossible.

>>2114977
Helots were just state-owned slaves anon
hell they were objectively the worst treated slaves in all of Greece!

>>2079466
>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.
Serfdom died in North-Western Europe by the 15th century, centuries before the industrial revolution. It has nothing to do with that.
>>2093719
The Greeks and Romans were nowhere fucking close to any of that.

The industrial revolution was spurred far more by changes in legal and social attitudes towards the economy than by scientific inventions. For the most part the latter followed the former.
Read Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
The industrial revolution was only possible due to the nascent capitalist mentality in England and the Netherlands, brought forward by the social changes that Calvinism brought.

>>2074611 (OP)
Realistically to make slavery make sense you'd have to play as a slaveowner/the slaveowning elite class. Slavery hurts society as a whole by giving slaves no incentive to work hard & preventing them from using their skills in the most effective way but it does benefit the individuals that get the fruits of the slaves' labor.

>>2121572
Let's ignore the cotton jin then which was a demand driver for slavery

>>2121572
Elites never cultivated any of that in the first place

>>2074611 (OP)
Slavery just isn't economically efficient

>>2145029
>The industrial revolution was spurred far more by changes in legal and social attitudes
This but instead of spiritual gibberish it was a concerted effort to encourage innovation, chief of all the invention of the modern form of patents, which for the first time allowed someone to actually reliably profit from invention. An incredible amount of simple tools which anyone could had made at any point in history suddenly started appearing.

Does any games model indentured servitude and incredibly cheap foreign labor with next to no labor laws

>>2074611 (OP)
Because IRL, any kind of mass chattel slavery introduces a constant undercurrent of unrest into a society and requires to devote considerable ressources into keeping slaves in check.

>>2114925
>Sparta
Only worked beccause Spartan citizens devoted every waking minute of their lifes to be the best warriors possible. The fact that a Spartan had to be able to beat about ten Helotes on his own what was enabled their aberrant society. Which didn't last btw, as the Spartans rarely inducted new families into their citizenry they just got slowly attritioned away every time a clan sufferd a full wipe in battle.
>>2144653
>hell they were objectively the worst treated slaves in all of Greece!
Objectively bullshit. As there were so few Spartans around, they were fairly comparable to free peasants in other Greek cities. the only sucky part would be the low, but existent chance of getting randomly murked by a Spartan soldier as part of his training.

>>2156770
>>Only worked beccause Spartan citizens devoted every waking minute of their lifes to be the best warriors possible. The fact that a Spartan had to be able to beat about ten Helotes on his own what was enabled their aberrant society. Which didn't last btw, as the Spartans rarely inducted new families into their citizenry they just got slowly attritioned away every time a clan sufferd a full wipe in battle.
weren't they the target of a pseudo genocide by the other greeks post alexander?

>>2074611 (OP)
Ethically it's usually a bad idea to glorify things like slavery and thus it makes sense to have the barbaric and bad thing (slavery) be inferior to what ever alternative the game presents like free men or capitalism or robots or whatever
Historically slavery was always inefficient as an economical system and generally just bad in multitude of ways, as a system it only survived because it benefits the big men of a given system which happen to be the most relevant people when deciding what system a society uses. Games on the other hand typically represent nations and slavery is pretty universally a disadvantage to a country outside of rare instances where slave raiding and selling happens on a national level but doesn't happen for the country's own population
Third slavery is really old concept and thus it's almost always at the bottom of the tech tree or what ever equivalent your game has. Thus it makes natural sense to make it be weak so you can transition to the more modern system and then become better as you tech up or advance the game

Also not every game has slaves suck, mostly games where there's varied factions or with custom builds where slavers are one of the "arch types"

>>2079266
It does. Wage or self employed workers would be more efficient, if for nothing else because you do not need to have wage workers at the ready to ensure that the slaves do not just fuck off. Instead of efficiency the argument is personal profit. You happen to want to have personal soldiers and you also happen to want very cheap workers working your farm, then slaves suddenly make lot of sense for you personally but economically they are a waste. The concentration of power is very important why the system existed like that. Premodern economies were also just less developed. Why would anyone choose to work in an iron mine for food when you could just make your own food. Force would be required when there's no luxury goods to offer which is often the case

>>2160739
Absolute nonsense, the pre-industrial economy is about the creation and extraction of surplus and nothing to do with your "efficiency". In the context of the ancient/meideval economy where agriculture was the main source of wealth yet labor was rare and scarce in comparison to land, forced labor was the best way of achieving that. Which is why it repeatedly crops up in exactly those contexts (colonial plantations, southern USA) even way past those periods you would expect slavery to be outmoded. Do you think they wouldn't had hired workers if they were cheaper?

>>2160765
>cheaper
I said efficient.
3 independent farmers make more food than 1 farmer and 2 workers which makes more food than 1 farmer and 2 slaves but the later makes more money for the farmer which is the measure that actually matters for the farmer who also happens to be a senator or congressman on the side.

>>2160767
The economy doesn't care about your efficiency, it's literally the very first sentence.

>>2160773
I accept your concession and I'm sorry about your disability

>>2160767
3 independent farmers will deliberately exist in a subsistence context and make just enough food for themselves and no more.

>>2160775
? No? Independent farmers will always try to obtain a surplus either to save it up for shitty years or exchange it to obtain essentials they can't fabricate themselves (anything from tools, to alcohol to services).

>>2160775
That is true in certain scenarios where land is extremely abundant and free but most of the time that's just not the case. Even in Roman times the land that was populated was relatively highly utilized. Subsistence households were essentially as large as the land could possibly support which is the root cause of famines. Famines wouldn't really even exists if there was huge amount of "wasted potential" in land under management.
It's certainly true that if a bachelor was given a relatively large plot of land they may not farm it to the maximum capacity but give it 10 years and you have a family with 12 kids, 2 sets of grandparents and one subservient renter farmer with his family living in the corner with the land already being prepared to be split to the sons of the farmer when he passes. At that point the land is being used to it's maximum potential by necessity. Humans are greedy and generally use resources given to them in what is a reasonable maximum, any "laziness" in this regard is more than compensated by "laziness" to not work when you are given no reward for doing so and the inherent inefficiency of having to have people employed as guards and other such personnel required for slavery to work as a system. Farmers still liked stuff and would produce more to sell and thus get stuff they could not farm for themselves and as a hedge against bad harvests and unforeseen circumstances.

I think you are mixing the idea that farmers didn't work much compared to a modern wage slave with farmers didn't just work the land hard enough, when the first comes from the nature of farm labor not from farmers just leaving tons of land untilled for no fucking reason.

>>2160786
>believing in homo economicus
>in 2025
kek

>>2160786
Yes, but no more. They will only produce enough to support a comfortable lifestyle and no more. Working to maximize productivity is a capitalist endeavor. A free farmer will value his free time more than money and only work just enough.

>>2160790
This has nothing to do with modern economic theory, negro. No indepent farmer is able to live forever as the nonsensical concept that is "subsistence farming", either he obtains a surplus through his own work or through government/communal subsidies (or go into debt) otherwise he will sooner rather than later be unable to work due to lack of tools/clothes and starve/freeze.

>>2160792
>subsistence farmer
>comfortable lifestyle
>only work just enough.
Most subsistence farmers trough out history never achieved comfortable lifestyle and were at constant risk of famines and bad harvests leaving them at risk of crippling debt so much so that debt slavery was a thing. For most of them "just enough" was essentially the maximum amount their piece of shit plot of land could possibly support to prevent their kids from staring or a hail mary of moving somewhere else entirely.

>>2160789
There was lots of underutilized and undeveloped land back then. Sure there was starvation, but that's because undeveloped land can't support many people. If everybody wanders off into the forests they'll just eat everything.

>>2160801
>There was lots of underutilized and undeveloped land back then
In areas without people yes or in areas where the farmers were otherwise barred from farming (like land owned by someone else or the state) which is largely irrelevant to the idea given that by definition farmers existing means you are comparing people which requires a populated area. The good bits of Italy for instance were heavily used in Roman times and one of the causes of the bronze age collapse was the fact that people were literally farming the spots where people lived so much that the crop harvests were plummeting from poor soil conditions (sans egypt thanks to Nile). That was 3200 years ago btw when subsistence farming was already capping out the land where people lived.

>>2160800
Yes, subsistence farming is a poor term to describe it since by definition it means not producing much surplus. However it's an easy mistake to make since "much surplus" is relative, especially by modern standards where profit-based farming is the norm (in first world countries anyway). However the general sentiment is correct. An independent farmer family will produce only enough of surplus to support their quality of life. After all, what are they going to do with all that money? Relaxing and enjoying life is worth far more than anything money can buy.

>>2160792
>A free farmer will value his free time more than money and only work just enough.
This is a rosy perspective of independent farming, as >>2160789 mentioned, the 3 farmers won't remain 3 for long and the land will need be exploited as much as possible to sustain the families of each of them. Any lazy time one would observe of an independent farmer would be due to no more work being able to be done to the land at the moment (e.g. because they are waiting for the crops to grow) and any inefficiency would be due to lack of technical knowledge or an inclitination for short term benefits instead of long term ones because independent farming doesn't usually have the luxury of thinking long term due to material needs in the now (like the niggas who don't do crop rotation).

>>2160805
>However the general sentiment is correct
It is not and you have been repeatedly proven wrong on this point.

>An independent farmer family will produce only enough of surplus to support their quality of life
Which is the maximum amount of food their farm could produce. Replace them by slaves of equal number and the production drops.
>After all, what are they going to do with all that money?
Buying stuff, money has been the most sought out thing in every farmers life since it's invention. You are so severely out of touch it's funny.

>Relaxing and enjoying life is worth far more than anything money can buy.
You got blown out of this point already. You are mixing free time from the nature that farm work doesn't take much work with the concept of leaving land untilled. Subsistence farmers tilled all the land they could, thus producing maximum yield because they wanted to do that desperately. They still had more free time than modern workers because that didn't take much time and you can't do much farm work for most of the year. Time they had as "free time" they used for domestic tasks btw such as making handicrafts, clothes, ropes etc. which they often then sold as well.

You are categorically just wrong on this point.

>>2160803
The various populist politicans over the ages were able to distribute the Ager Publicus repeatedly and freely, even when they claimed to have given it to as many citizens as possible, so there was clearly a lot of free space that was decent agricultural land available. The problem as ever, is that all that free land is owned by someone else who doesn't want to let go of it (apart form the aforementioned populares).

>>2160810
>The various populist politicans over the ages were able to distribute the Ager Publicus repeatedly and freely, even when they claimed to have given it to as many citizens as possible, so there was clearly a lot of free space that was decent agricultural land available.
Which was not accessible to the farmers, which is demonstrated by the fact that the state had to redistribute it for the farmers to access it. If the farmers had access to it they wouldn't have to redistribute the land and then the land would have already been farmer to it's maximum efficiency by the farmers.
This is yet again the same irrelevant point. Free farmer with no farm produces as much food as slave farmer with no farm. In fact he will produce more because he at least has the freedom (and thus demand) to feed himself trough some means. Slave could at least rely on being fed (until he was killed) and thus was a net drain in this specific scenario.

>>2160809
You're deliberately conflating subsistence farmers with your free farmers now. If you're defining your free farmers as subsistence farmers, then what difference does it make if they are slaves? Slaves wouldn't work in the same sort of land density that subsistence farmers would work in. Neither would produce any sort of surplus at all.

>>2160814
>conflating subsistence farmers with your free farmers now
They are the same thing. All free farmers are subsistence farmers categorically because they farm for their subsistence

>then what difference does it make if they are slaves?
Because a slave doesn't work for his own benefit, a slave farmer isn't a subsistence farmer because he doesn't farm for his subsistence.

>Slaves wouldn't work in the same sort of land density that subsistence farmers would work in.
Which is irrelevant for how efficient they are for the farming economy.

>>2160801
>There was lots of underutilized and undeveloped land back then.
The usual two issues of said land are that:
1. It is usually owned by someone else.
2. It requires way more than individual efforts to make it productive and thus needs the entire group of independent farmers to decide how to divide said efforts and rewards amongst themselves.

>>2160816
>All free farmers are subsistence farmers
So they're not producing a surplus?

>>2160817
Both points just mean that it is more efficient in both starting and the end result for said forest-owning elite to get some slaves and assart that land instead of trying to get some independent farmers to do it.

>>2160819
You are being purposefully retarded. Farmers did produce a surplus even though they were subsistence farmers which is irrelevant to the central point that free farmers produce more food than slaves because they do exactly that.
You are confusing a modern economic term with pre industrial lifestyle. All or nearly all preindustrial farmers were subsistence farmers because they mostly focused on feeding their families instead of producing an economic surplus which is a modern term not suitable for the period. They did produce more food than they ate which they then sold or exchanged for items they needed from others and when this happened a lot they exchanged it for population growth until the land was used to it's maximum potential. As farmers they produced more products than slaves did. They did not run their farms as primarily economic engines which is what modern non subsistence farmers did.

>>2160826
>efficient
If the land owner just freed the slaves and distributed the land among them, the production would increase at the cost of personal loss for the land owner. That makes slavery an inefficient economic system which is what makes you wrong.

>>2160826
No, it would literally be more efficient of said elites to rent the land to the farmers (as they, or more likely their land managers, usually did), if they can pay good, if they can't you can burden them with debt which is also good (for you that is). Making using of slaves to exploit said land would be incredibly burdensome in comparison.

>>2160828
>If the land owner just freed the slaves and distributed the land among them, the production would increase at the cost of personal loss for the land owner.

Except, as you said in >>2160817
>>2. It requires way more than individual efforts to make it productive and thus needs the entire group of independent farmers to decide how to divide said efforts and rewards amongst themselves
Which never happened in real life. Even your ideal scenario still requires the elite to do the distribution.

>>2160833
>Even your ideal scenario still requires the elite to do the distribution.
Which is irrelevant. Slave owners didn't do swamp clearing and levy work. That was mostly done by independent farmers on a local scale or the state as a collective on the large scale. Slave farms mostly operated large farms they simply purchased from destitute farmers (which were hit by bad times when they literally could not grow enough food on their plots of land to survive) or got trough other means such as inheritance or corruption in the state. Public works for instance in Rome were a big deal for this reason, because it created lot of good land that could be redistributed to the peasants to create more Romans.
The fact that the process may require elites is also irrelevant because again the situation would always improve economically simply by immediately freeing the slaves and having them work the land they currently work as free farmers which increases efficiency. You have been blown out on this multiple times already. The fact that elites personally benefit from slavery doesn't mean it's an efficient system any more than me robbing you for my personal benefit doesn't make crime an efficient system for building wealth.

>>2160828
>You are being purposefully retarded. (etc)
All that text and you're basically just admitting that they didn't produce much or even no surplus.

>>2160841
They produced more surplus than an equivalent number of slaves working the same land.

>>2160833
He didn't say the second point, that would be me, nevertheless
>Which never happened in real life.
Of course it did happen in real life, that's how villages grew (though yes, they would need ask the local elites, if they were the ones who owned the under exploited land, or said local elites would need ask other ones for confirmation - usually after the fact, lol). In other words, the elites were seldom needed for the distribution, though their participation would help a lot to solve conflicts, but were required to confirm said distribution (and the exploitation of the land itself) was alright with them or other elites.

>>2160843
It should also be noted that elites existence isn't dependent on slavery so that just flies out the window anyways. Free farming villages had their own elites for various reasons too, Rome had elites when it was using the least slaves and was at it's most powerful. Modern world has elites despite generally having no slaves at least in the sense of this discussion and elites really have never been this powerful.

>>2160842
Yeah, that's the whole crux of the argument in >>2160765 isn't it? If you're not bloatmaxxing out your population to the point of subsistence and everybody is only just producing enough to feed themselves then slavery is obviously more productive and produces a surplus.

>>2160847
Yes, that post is wrong which is the crux of the discussion.
>If you're not bloatmaxxing out your population to the point of subsistence and everybody is only just producing enough to feed themselves then slavery is obviously more productive and produces a surplus.
This has been proven wrong several times already.

>>2160843
Okay, but you still have to point out a situation where
> entire group of independent farmers to decide how to divide said efforts and rewards amongst themselves
happened.

>>2160854
Nearly every farming village in history did exactly this to clear out the surroundings of their farming villages. Most land was cleared this way.

>>2160856
Except it was the elites who handled the distribution and assignment of land because a group of independent farmers could never coordinate like that.

>>2160858
Again that is wrong and irrelevant.

>>2160847
But that is wrong, even if slave exploited land were actually to produce more surplus than an equivalent free farm exploited land (which it usually didn't). It would create an unstable society (due to the nature of slavery) and an incredibly unbalanced economy (due to most wealth and thus most services being concentrated in the hands of a slave-owning elite) unable to compete with other economies or nations and ready to be toppled by them (free-men, unlike most slaves, can be trusted to fight).

>>2160858
I think the confusion is arising due to not defining elites (which could be anything from a relatively well-off farmer to the representative of the king), what do you understand by that word?

>>2160809
>>2160852
>>2160860
All you do is scream that it's been proven wrong every time you meet a point you can't counter.

>>2160872
It was countered already, you just repeated it again, it being proven wrong is perfectly sufficient counter for repetition.

>>2160870
I agree on the point that slaves are dangerous and degenerate. However slaves clearly produce a surplus, that's the entire point. Subsistence farmers produce negligible surplus, that's their definition. I don't really see the argument there. The only way free farmers can produce a surplus is if they weren't subsistence farmers.

>>2160877
Your post is wrong, you keep repeating it as if that makes it true.

>>2160877
"Subsistence" farmers most often than not (except for bad years) produce as much surplus as possible which is how they can continue to be alive and most nations have been able to tax them (from the first sumerian city states to nowadays).

>>2160882
Not really, indeed they produce as much as they can but they consume most of what they produce. What little extra they produce mostly has to be stored to keep them alive for the bad years. Can you even find a definition of subsistence farming that implies they produce a relevant level of surplus? Meanwhile I can just look up any definition anywhere and they all emphasize how little surplus they make. No one is denying that subsistence farmers can make a little surplus.

>>2160886
>Not really, indeed they produce as much as they can but they consume most of what they produce.
This is wrong.

>>2160886
What is a "relevant" level of surplus? Again most "subsistence" farmers throughout history produced the maximum short-term amount of surplus possible, otherwise you wouldn't have them starving when they had a relatively bad year (because they should still have possible surplus to obtain) or risking their lives by rebelling when they were taxed too heavily (because again they should still have some extra unexploited surplus and plenty of "lazy" time to use).

>>2160892
So your argument is that subsistence farmers produce short-term surplus but no/negligible long-term surplus and that's how you're going to win this surplus argument in your head.
Alright then.
LMAO.

>>2160904
>So your argument is that subsistence farmers produce short-term surplus but no/negligible long-term surplus
This is wrong again

>>2160892
>"subsistence" farmers throughout history produced the maximum short-term amount of surplus possible
Because they produced so little surplus. But someone producing a lot of surplus wouldn't be doing this short-term nonsense. They would already have produced enough surplus to ride out the bad years.

>>2160913
Food doesn't keep. Last years surplus is useless for next years famine. That's yet another post that is wrong.

>>2160904
When I speak about short-term surplus I mean it the same way when corporations (like slave farms here) speak about short-term profit (in detriment of long term profits, like how slave cotton farms often overexploited their lands), sure theoretically farmers could focus on years long augmentations in productivity in temporary detriment of their current yearly yields, but their present material needs would obviously be more pressing.

>>2160925
Yeah, but what's your argument here? Saying all this is just repeating what the guy you're replying to is saying but explicitly this time, and just confirms that subsistence farmers don't produce much surplus.

>>2160927
>just confirms that subsistence farmers don't produce much surplus.
This is wrong, you have been proven wrong several times on this

>>2160913
>But someone producing a lot of surplus wouldn't be doing this short-term nonsense.
I wish this was true, even enormous private owned land which should in theory be able to think long-term very often overexploits through monoculture and other shitty practices ("thankfully" nowadays we got pesticides and fertilizers to avoid the bad consequences of it - as long as we continue to use them that is). The rare cases of long-term planning I have seen were more often than not state administered or communal initiatives.

>>2160927
Well, the original point of the thread is that slavery is shitty for the economy and society as a whole compared to free farming, which it is.

>>2160931
It should be noted that prudence was simply less rewarding in age of chaos that was pre industrial times. Even well prepared person may not survive a particularly bad famine (while I can pretty comfortably be certain that I will never die of starvation even if I never work again) simply because the variance between particularly bad and average harvest was just that severe. And such preparedness may simply be washed away at any point be it literally in a flood, pestilence or other such natural disaster or more indirectly by an angry mob burning your place down when you are the only place with food in a famine. The reward for long term investing was lot lower because of that. Ventures that didn't pay off immediately during the next year or two max would be immensely risky as a result. Doubly true for a rich investor with little skin in the game. If his farm gets raped by a famine he will personally be fine in a villa in an entire different part of the country with different weather conditions.

>>2160931
Alright, but subsistence farming isn't about profit in the first place, it's about survival. And it's about survival because it doesn't produce much surplus. Also, subsistence farmers are equally prone to fucking over their own land. We only have to see every case of foreign enviromental catastrophe in every third world country where subsistence farming dominates. Not that first world countries are any better. Remember the dust bowl?

>>2160941
> And it's about survival because it doesn't produce much surplus
This is wrong
>We only have to see every case of foreign enviromental catastrophe in every third world country where subsistence farming dominates.
And this is irrelevant

>>2160936
Slavery is clearly not shit for the economy if it produces a big surplus.

>>2160945
Which it doesn't which is why that is wrong

>>2160945
Slavery is shit to the economy because even if it were to produce a big surplus (which again, it often didn't when compared to normal free farming), it would be accumulated in the hands of a small slave-owning elites, thus creating an unbalanced economic system and society as a whole, prone to internal instability (from the slaves themselves through uprisings or from the free farmers increasingly pressed by latifundia)

>>2160956
Yeah, slavery is bad on a societal level, no one is arguing otherwise. But the original argument about this was that it was bad for the economy because it was claimed that free farmers would always produce more food.

>>2160960
>But the original argument about this was that it was bad for the economy because it was claimed that free farmers would always produce more food.
Which they do

>>2160961
Subsistence farmers barely produce enough food to reliably cover the bad years.

>>2160963
Yes and slaves would produce less. You have repeated this point that you keep getting blown out on for dozen times now. I do not understand why.

>>2160965
If slaves produce less then what's the point? Where's the profit if all they do is produce just enough for their own maintenance?

>>2160973
>If slaves produce less then what's the point?
You have been told several times during this thread. Read the thread.

This entire thread

>>2161247
lol, the nerve of this guy. It's clear what happened here, he just simply stopped replying back because you're dumb, not because you won the argument.

>>2161267
The "point" of slaves is a system for elites to enable extraction, control, and status to the detriment of the rest of society. I don't know what's left to say.

This isn't an argument, it's an explanation of common knowledge

>>2161276
That wasn't the argument though, no one was denying that.

>>2161437
>Proceeds to not state what "the argument" was

>>2161463
Can you point to a post that claimed slavery was morally good? Yeah I didn't think so.

>>2161463
You really shouldn't feed him, it has to be intentional at this point.

>>2074669
Then why does the modern world have more of them than ever
and I'm not even talking about wage slaves though there's a fair argument for that

>>2162852
>Then why does the modern world have more of them than ever
population went up slightly since BC my brother

>>2074611 (OP)
you can make slavery work in victoria and stellaris (even though it's not the optimal choice) if you manage their drawbacks. anyway, what exactly do you want from a slavery system in a game?

>>2075117
The big downside of slaves in vicky is tht you can't conscript them/turn them into soldier pops and they can only work in RGOs.
Slaves would be way more worthwhile if you could force them into regiments and factories.

Because it sucked historically as well, stupid. The only use for chattel slavery was to increase volume of labor, not decrease its price. And that is how it is represented in these games. Nobody took slaves because they wanted cheap labor, they took slaves because they needed to do shit and there weren't enough people to do it, usually due to lack of population.

Personal bondage (a la Romans) was more of a personal thing and didn't really warp the economics of their societies. Just the way societies functioned.

>>2079266
Slaves are good and useful when you're a king trying to do large-scale infrastructure projects year-round, where making your peasantry drop everything to help you would cause the collapse of society from famine and making illiterate retards who don't know how to survive off the 5 square miles they grew up in cross the kingdom. You can buy or take them when you need them, then sell or free them when you don't anymore. Remember that this is an era where you can't exactly put an ad in the newspaper that you need 3000 adult men who can swing a pickaxe at rocks for six months.

>>2081739
The best explanation I've seen is that Egypt's peasantry were paid the equivalent of minimum wage and "encouraged" to contribute to the construction of infrastructure during the times of year that they otherwise wouldn't have any productive work to do.

>>2163971
If that's true that would be a better deal than a lot of medieval serfs. Cottagers were given a plot of land that wasn't enough for sustenance, and in exchange only had a correspondingly small amount of labor obligation. Giving them the "choice" to not work on the lord's demesne to earn just enough wages to not starve.

>>2163971
Didn't they have a system where you can pay "tax" with labour?

>>2160805
>After all, what are they going to do with all that money?
Pay their taxes, which are levied based on the assessed value of the land.

>>2162852
The places that have problems with actual slavery tend to be the worst off in just about any aspect you can imagine. Just because it's a bad idea in the long term doesn't mean people don't do it. Look at infinite growth drives in modern business.

>>2166658
And once that's done you cannot force any additional labor out of them.

>>2156880
No, the Spartan citizenry was mostly forced into a lower strata of second-class citizenship as the clique of big landowners that ruled Sparta gradually gobbled up all the land and made it impossible for normal citizens to continue meeting the wealth requirement for membership in the Spartiate class. Their famous system decayed away and was replaced by a reliance on mercenaries as a result. The Spartan army did get wiped out on several occasions during the successor wars, but these armies were composed of mercenaries and freed helots because actual Spartans had already mostly gone extinct due to economic pressures during peacetime. By the time the Achaean league finally put them down for good, Sparta was essentially just a few dozen wealthy families and their army of hired enforcers.

>>2106597
This is a half truth.
Because it's not that people like that aren't productive, it's just that people going about their daily lives and fixing problems as they come up tends to create more stable societies which are, at large, more productive.

>>2106597
Not really, they're unhappy precisely because they're working more, which means they're producing more.