Forced Labour Mechanic

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

I am playing around with this and the more I use it the more I think it should be changed.

So this post starts with the following assumption so please keep them in mind: I have conquered a world and I have a bunch of pops I want to enslave or I have an existing world with billions of people I want to enslave and make them useful. Both worlds don't have minerals and therefore there are no construction factories.

Now I am okay with the camp itself to use minerals to be built and so with the construction factories, but there should be another mechanic added in my opinion.

If you do have Forced Labour only with no function just consuming the 100,000 people and then maybe some wealth but no BP you could then transport this to the relevant world and convert it to Labour Mine or Construction for the cost of minerals and relative BP and time same as you do with conventional industries.

The above is because I don't think you should deal with the unrest on your good colonies benefitting from the slaves while the ones you are getting them from obviously are pi**ed.

You don't enslave your own population (well unless...) you most likely doing it to another and then transport it to your country. There are unfortunately plenty of examples on this matter.

Ultimately would be also nice a mechanic to dismantle the camp amd free the population. So the camp could give you back let's say 50% of the pop? 50,000.

[nuclearslurpee]

Why do I suspect that Political Story is about to take a dark turn...

I admit, I do like the mechanic as it is, in the sense that it supports RPing the concept of taking slaves from a conquered population to work in the shining lights of your core worlds. However it does make sense that a small amount of continuing unrest due to the presence of forced labor camps representing the need to have a garrison in place to contain the slave revolts and such in addition.

[Froggiest1982 (OP)]

I admit, I do like the mechanic as it is, in the sense that it supports RPing the concept of taking slaves from a conquered population to work in the shining lights of your core worlds. However it does make sense that a small amount of continuing unrest due to the presence of forced labor camps representing the need to have a garrison in place to contain the slave revolts and such in addition.

To my experience, the problem with the current mechanic is that once I went all the lengths out of transporting a production factory and minerals to a location just to make a labour camp to then transport it elsewhere to let's say mine some minerals has little no sense to me. I could just bring the slaves and then use the resources on-site to build what I need. Which what was done historically. If I could build the pyramids in the first place what do I need the slaves for?

You shouldn't need a factory to build a factory if you know what I mean.

I could easily just transport more colonist let's say on Earth and "make the camps there". The problem is that the game does not recognize me taking x persons from x colony and just add unrest to Earth while let's say Epsylon Eridani it's a happy chappy. Not a problem if we have taken their women and children and transformed them into slaves for our pitty glory, isn't it?

I think slavery should be race-related and spread across the whole empire. This should also balance possible exploitation where a player could "farm" slaves on Luna and then convert them into cheap labour on Earth without any repercussions as my model would allow you to potentially do that easily and fast.

[Droll]

I've been doing some of this involuntary labour stuff in my game with some conquered NPRs and have built up to 6000 mining camps over the course of a year on one planet. 20 well trained police group of 1737 units was able to somehow control the entire 3bn population - the lowest point being 85% stability.

You can then ship these with impunity (thanks to civilian shipping) all around the empire without any further consequence. It seems weird that the presence of people being "reeducated" isn't really seen as an issue to the rest of the populace or even the victims themselves.

I think it should be handled race-wide, species to species basis. Species with high xenophobia care less when camps built from other species in the empire are present while xenophilic species should care exponentially more that some are being pushed into work camps. Of course like with how policing requirements are tracked militancy should also matter.

Right now these camps are incredibly strong, especially in the mining context - you can have 10 times the mining with camps as opposed to paid miners and this ignores the 1/3 building cost/time.
The draw back of transportation makes sense and helps but somewhat dissipates endgame when like in my game you have around 300 civilian transports meandering about.

I do like to ship out 1000s of construction camps to build artificial moons though .

[Garfunkel]

t somewhat dissipates endgame

Everything dissipates in the end game - your tech and resources and empire size are just too huge. Even the biggest Invader armadas are swatted away like flies. There's not much to be done about that - all strategy games suffer from the end game syndrome.

I think slavery should be race-related and spread across the whole empire.

I think it should be handled race-wide, species to species basis. Species with high xenophobia care less when camps built from other species in the empire are present while xenophilic species should care exponentially more that some are being pushed into work camps. Of course like with how policing requirements are tracked militancy should also matter.

Agreed but we're not at Stellaris level of population tracking/simulation yet nor are we ever likely to head that direction.

Until there is at least a bunch of different governments that affect things on a macro level, it's kinda pointless to say that species A is upset or happy about X while species B is the opposite. And populations are not monolithic blocs either, so there would need to be a way to separate populations that are happy about Y from the population that is unhappy about Y.

I completely agree that getting more love and features into the empire/government side of things would be great but it's also a can of worms to open - stuff needs to be carefully considered. As they are, the forced labour is basically an RP tool for storytelling and the other effects are negligible enough.

[Steve Walmsley]

t somewhat dissipates endgame

Everything dissipates in the end game - your tech and resources and empire size are just too huge. Even the biggest Invader armadas are swatted away like flies. There's not much to be done about that - all strategy games suffer from the end game syndrome.

I probably should do something about it, but I never get to that point before a new campaign idea takes over

[RougeNPS]

Honestly i think it works fine. But that is just me. I dont believe in slavery, not even for RP purposes. Nukes exist for a reason. Humans are just better.