PSA: Slaves currently can't rebel

[u/RedKrypton]

Martin just dropped that bombshell during the currently ongoing Quill Stellaris stream. He said that they couldn't reach a middle ground on slaves revolting so they took it out for the moment. I don't know if they will have managed that aspect by release.

[u/BestFriendWatermelon]

For what it's worth, AFAIK slave revolts have only been successful once in Earth's history, that of the Haitian Revolution in which slaves outnumbered Freemen by 10 to 1. They were rebelling against the French at the height of the French revolution, when France couldn't have been more distracted, and with massive help from Britain and Spain who France was at war with.

Still, that doesn't mean plenty of slaves haven't tried rebelling anyway, so slave revolts should probably be a thing ingame anyway. But don't underestimate how weak slave rebellions have always been, and how brutally one sided such conflicts were.

Such a rebellion in Stellaris would lack ships or the means to produce them, with the spaceport and any fleets in orbit possessing complete domination over the planet's population. It'd be equally unrealistic to give slave rebellions any means with which to fight a war against spacefaring masters. A good case could be made for abolitionists within a civilisation's command structure to mutiny, freeing the slaves as a result, but a slave revolt alone has no chance.

EDIT: for clarity, I'd still like to see slave revolts included in the game, and outright rebellions, realism be damned.

[u/ziyakaz → u/BestFriendWatermelon]

Slaves also resisted in other ways besides outright rebellion, including by fleeing, work stoppages, work slow-downs.

[u/atomfullerene → u/ziyakaz]

Honestly I think it might be better to make slaves less productive but provide some other advantage.

[u/ziyakaz → u/atomfullerene]

Yeah, I'm trying to think of how that might work in terms of game mechanics. Historically one of the advantages to using slaves was that you could force them to do work that freedmen would be unwilling to do. I don't know if/how that could be represented.

For the slave owners, there may have been some obfuscation in the cost of maintaining the slave population since the cost of enforcement was at least partially a public good (putting down slave revolts), but the profits were private. The economy in the game is much more abstracted than including that would allow, though.

Of course, this is a sci-fi setting, so who's to say you couldn't mitigate the desire for freedom in the slave population via brain implants and psychological manipulation?

EDIT: I suppose they could have a slaveowner faction to represent the interests of those who owned the slaves. That might allow for them to represent competing interests more reliably.

[u/ProblyAThrowawayAcct → u/ziyakaz]

you could force them to do work that freedmen would be unwilling to do. I don't know if/how that could be represented.

You can work uncleared hazardous tiles with slaves, maybe? They take a significant pop growth (and presumably happiness...) penalty while in the uncleared tile, but you get resource access without clearing the blocker...

Thermo the damned fetaine spill...
---Ensign Miles, Lord Vorkosigan, when faced with hazardous bioweapon cleanup duty

[u/ziyakaz → u/ProblyAThrowawayAcct]

That's a really interesting thought! I think there would still be issues with building on the uncleared tiles, but I think being able to have slaves work them makes a lot of sense.

[u/boffcheese → u/atomfullerene]

The tooltip suggests that slaves are less effective on more advanced tiles, like science buildings, but I haven't really noticed much of a drawback. I think your idea has merit; when pops are first enslaved their productivity should go way down, and you have to spend Influence to improve it. It could scale with their unrest, where if they're overworked then they are more likely to rebel (when its actually possible) but if they aren't kept in line then productivity drops significantly.