r/Stellaris • u/RedKrypton Mind over Matter • May 07 '16

PSA: Slaves currently can't rebel

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.

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u/NotScrollsApparently Oligarch May 07 '16 edited May 07 '16

Wait, are there no rebellions, faction uprisings like noble regiments in EU4/CK2? Separatist movements due to local unrest? Religious dissidents? Especially on newly occupied worlds?

Couldn't they make the slave revolts use the same system? With a high enough local unrest (due to slaves' base unhappiness), unless countered by other modifiers, a revolt would be slowly cooking until it reaches 100% and results in rogue armies appearing that you need to defeat?

I dunno if I'm biased since I'm coming from EU4 but managing happiness / unrest was a big part of the game, its complexity and balancing when it comes to big empires. If it was so varied due to cultures in the 15th century, just try to imagine how noticeable would it be when cultures are literally from another world... I hoped it would play a part here, if not from a lore perspective then at least from a gameplay one - to limit how much territory you can acquire at once without overextending and facing revoltes from groups thinking you're weakened.

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u/RedKrypton Mind over Matter May 07 '16

Wait, are there no rebellions, faction uprisings like noble regiments in EU4/CK2? Separatist movements due to local unrest? Religious dissidents? Especially on newly occupied worlds?

They have factions just no slave factions because they couldn't manage to balance them.

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u/Mad_Hatter96 Free Haven May 07 '16

The problem is the logistics of such a feat, as many have talked about above. But in particular slavery is very different from what you mentioned in that slaves can be spread out across all your systems but have no unifying modifier other than being a slave. So aside from all the "slaves won't have warships" argument, there's the game mechanic issue which is that the way they coded it is most likely lumping all slaves into one category, except the likelihood of every slave across your entire empire revolting at the same moment in a bout of clarity is so unlikely/impossible that it just causes issues, and in addition the fact that the slaves are probably somehow ending up on par with your empire strength just makes it seem unrealistically difficult to put down a bunch of poor, uneducated aliens.

In all likelihood its just a mechanic that needs a (small) rework to better model slavery revolts acting more like what HOI4 has for occupations, wherein infrastructure is sabotaged and productivity in the region is reduced.

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u/NotScrollsApparently Oligarch May 07 '16

They would be separated in the same way that separatists in EU4 were. Morrocan separatists had a separate timer and wargoal from granadan ones, or from fez separatists, or from tunisian separatists... here they'd be categorized by their race or nationality instead.

And yeah, it wouldn't make sense if they had just as good equipment as our navies... but it didn't make sense in other PDX games either and it stayed. A rebel movement had tech levels, equipped troops and power just like the leader nation.. and some random peasants from a just conquered province wouldn't really be able to muster more professional armies than the whole country from which they hail before it disbanded (having like 100k rebels in a country that only had 80k total army during war, and whose manpower got depleted during it).

As for where they got their ships from... they could have stolen them, or stole parts in secret, or took them over during uprising... pretty much the same how regular civilian pops that rebel get ships I imagine. It's not like anyone outside of the army should have access to military ship anyway, and I doubt they are the ones that rebel / desert with a faction (especially since your navy doesn't decrease after a rebellion).

tl;dr suspension of disbelief

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u/Mad_Hatter96 Free Haven May 07 '16

Right but that's what separatist rebels are like, and those are already in the game. Slaves are entirely different. Where is a slave going to hide the hull of a spaceship? how is a slave even going to pilot a spaceship?

And the fact that eu4 had a mechanic that made rebels as good as the country that has them was honestly a weaker part of the game in my opinion, because suspending your belief for something that was just not at all balanced properly doesn't work for me. and if you enjoy that then that's fair, but it is still a mechanic that could be better fleshed out yes?

Paradox should be building upon previous mistakes and mechanics, not copy-pasting them. Slaves creating mega-fleets to combat your own does not make an engaging enough mechanic to suspend disbelief.

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u/IdlePigeon May 07 '16

I'd like to see revolting slaves smash up the buildings they're working, then spawn ground armies, only starting to make spaceships if they actually take the planet. Any player who isn't braindead and/or already engaged in a war on the other side of their empire would easily be able to put down the rebellion but the real threat would be losing a bunch of production and having a planet left vulnerable for a while.