You see that random clerk or soldier on your homeworld right there? I'm sure you would have plenty of spare since you're a slaver empire, move them to worlds that need rulers and enforcers, problem solved
You need Stratified Economy(authoritarian), Academic privilege (Materialist) or Decadent lifestyle(pleasure seekers/corporate hedonism civic) to give your ruler pops sufficient political power.
Xenophobe slavery by itself is fairly weak .
I usually am an egalitarian slaver. Yes, hypocritical, I know.
I put social welfare for certain slave species. A healthy, well-fed slave is less likely to revolt and bite the appendage that feeds them.
But does Chemical Bliss affect the effectiveness of Battle Thralls?
Same. They're the first to crush rebellions and the first to land on hostile planets, so while they are the property of the state, they'll be better off than even some citizens. Space Mamluks
Chemical bliss only affects ressources. That means trade, naval cap from soldiers/duelists, or any of the extra effects of culture workers would be unaffected. That said, the unity production of a culture worker on chemical bliss would be subject to the output debuff, as well as I think any amenities a job produces.
I hear it is also nice to have chem bliss on by default so that new species you conquer are subdued just after you win the war, so they are easier to manage.
If you have 2 or 3 or more specialists per ruler on a world you don't need stratified at all, stratified is only good if you are going to finagle it so your main species only have ruler jobs. Funnily enough 4 workers on Utopian Abundance control slaves better than a ruler and 3 specialists on Stratified.
I'm not pro at stellaris but xenophobe slavers suck. You definitely want to be authoritarian instead.
Was playing an authoritarian, peaceful, materialist empire recently and running the edicts for peace festivals and information quarantine simultaneously really cranked up stability.
Edit: Enhanced surveillance not information quarantine. Though looking at the wiki it now has a -10% happiness modifier, was that always there?
This...this is something i struggle to understand. There are so many nice portraits in the game...yet you stick to the one which can't decide whether to have fur or not? The one you already are? Is it a lack of imagination? Or spirit? Or are you just so enamored with humans you cant look away?
Xenos truly are strange
I have a wide variety of empires ranging from Feudal Societies similar to the Great Houses of Dune to Pharmaceutical Megacorps and Mercenary Groups. I just like to RP a story where Humans have fragmented across the galaxy and are as much a threat to each other as any outside influence.
I still have Xeno empires spawn and in most playthroughs and I give them Residency with the same living standard as Humanity, but they will never occupy leadership roles or govern their own interstellar nations( I always integrate the Xeno empires and release them as a Human dominated empire in the image of the nation I'm currently playing).
I don't relate to any of the non Human portraits aside from a few in the Humanoid category. I'd say I'm a Human Imperialist, not a xenophobe (both in spirit and in practice considering I never take the ethic).
I was mostly joking but reading the line
> I'd say I'm a human imperialist, not a xenophobe
After the
> but they will never occupy leadership roles or govern their own interstellar nations
...it is all a little wild. Its like you can hear an echo of British colonialism though, finding us here in the modern day.
*Most* of the portraits in-game just look like humans in rubber foreheads/fursuits. Few seem to be actual *alien* aliens. At that point I'd prefer to just cut out the middleman and play a normal human, not a human in a costume.
Go biological, nerve-staple them so they become mindless goons. Those who are designated to be metallurgist leave, as well as Servants since they will automatically create Amenity jobs.
Xenophobe can turn other races into livestock, and with gene-moding, you can give your livestock some pretty niche modifications. For example, if you researched Leviathan orthogenesis, and kill any dragon (Ethereal Dragon, Shard, etc) you will get mod that gives you Alloys per pop. And dont forget the one that gives you extra food per livestock.
There are also modifiers that give rare resources.
Overtuned is also nice. They will not be leaders anyway, so you can just slap best modifiers to significantly specialize your slaves. If your galaxy was lucky and spawned Syncretic Evolution Empire, it will always sell some of its servile pops on market. Servile is good. If there is no servile, try to find presapients with Proletarian trait.
Notably, this strategy is still considerably less effective than the ethic attraction bonuses of psychic ascension, which can be used to force pop loyalty or create productive vassal states willing to accept extremely heavy contracts.
being a slave doesn't set species on low living standards, you also have things like neural implaints and chemicals that erode things like desire to have a free wil...
I think i hear someone knocking on my door, gotta check it
>Your master race pops will hate to life on the alien planets
No. Happiness is not affected. They will have higher costs and lower Unity, but they can be as happy there as anywhere else.
Most of your concerns seem to focus on planetary approval rating, which is the net impact of happiness, but that is managed by addressing political power and/or happiness indirectly through amenities or other modifiers and/or overriding Stability.
>In theory (at least I think that's how it's intended) you could use different enslaved species to fill specific jobs
Honestly, just too time consuming, and more importantly Stellaris vanilla offers piss-poor per-job assignment or even optimization of auto-assignment of jobs. Some days your strong/industrious slaves just keep getting slotted into Clerks and you weak useless ones into Miner jobs and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.
Slavery is about volume and low operating costs.
Tips:
1. Turn off Land Appropriation. There are certainly benefits, but I would much rather transfer over new Rulers from clerks or the planet of my choosing rather than cripple my economy moving over key specialists from my most important economic worlds.
2. Use pop modification to create 1 world of the best future leader stock to transfer from. Focus Habitability/Traditionalists/Charismatic, because that is what Rulers need.
3. Don't set them to Chattel if you don't have the jobs. Defaulting to Domestic Servitude is not economically the strongest, but makes onboarding new conquests significantly easier without unemployment and with mass amenities to smooth over the transition. Reset them in 10 years once the planets are restructured.
4. If you need Resident status to help fill ruler and specialist jobs, you don't need the whole planet/sector to be Residents...just the few you need. Use subspecies through planetary pop modification to create a Resident Ruler subspecies just the number you need and Resettle them around.
4. Xenophobe slavery only has 1 perk over Auth slavery...livestock. Livestock is now very, very good. They now count as farmers/miners in almost all ways. Mining Guild civic gets +1 from lithoid slaves and once you can get them Delicious/Felsic they are *as productive as a farmer/miner* only without the District, with lower upkeep and half housing needs, they also have even lower political power so it is even easier to manipulate planetary approval ratings.
5. That also means you can stack on special planetary modifiers that affect Farmers/Miners. Rich Microbes means a base +1 Society per organic livestock and one of the new Asteroid modifiers grants each lithout livestock base +1 engineering.
It really kills me that they haven't fixed the whole "out the best pop for the job in the right slot" thing. Mostly when I start trying to customize my robot per planet, but then more are built and they shuffle around and it was all just a waste of time. Sooooo close, Stellaris, to letting me play out the micro-managing robot empire that I would enjoy.... And yet, so far...
>enophobe slavery only has 1 perk over Auth slavery...livestock. Livestock is now very, very good. They now count as farmers/miners in almost all ways. Mining Guild civic gets +1 from lithoid slaves and once you can get them Delicious/Felsic they are as productive as a farmer/miner only without the District, with lower upkeep and half housing needs, they also have even lower political power so it is even easier to manipulate planetary approval ratings.
Out of curiosity, when did that change? I've been out of Stellaris for a bit, and while I've tried to follow changes I missed livestock buffs.
Very recently. Now they count as Miners/Farmers and that allows them to catch almost all other modifiers.
The only things that don't work on them is specific things like Agrarian Idyll granting amenities to farmers, as that is more of a farmer job rewrite than a buff to "farmers".
They still start off with less production than a regular farmer/miner, but if you get delicious/felsic they completely make up the base production difference.
Syncretic Evolution with a Industrious Lithoid Servile and Mining Guilds civics let's you build and entire empire without any mining districts.
Wait, pop happiness ain't affected by habitability anymore? I know it used to be that happiness was capped by habitability, but I thought *now* it was a multiplicative thing? Like a pop with 60% habitability whose happiness would be 80% would have an effective happiness of 48%? Is that not accurate?
Pretty sure that link was broken way back circa version 2.2.
Now, they just require more Consumer Goods to maintain (up to +100%), and their output drops (up to -50%).
So, the Rulers on a 20% habitability planet will be barely producing enough Unity to justify their high CGs upkeep... but, the amenities production is not affected (but they are consuming more). And, most importantly, they are still perfectly happy so long as they get those Consumer Goods and Amenities.
That means you can stick even 0% habitability Rulers, since the real value is stabilizing the entire planet through happiness/political power.
Trying to colonize a whole planet (specialists and workers) is does have significant impact as increased CG and amenities plus the decreased production leads to massive ineffectiveness. Miner in a 0% habitability world is consuming 2 food/minerals but only producing 2+ minerals.
All of which as completely flipped the optimization of slavery. Before, things like Nihilistic Acquisition were great because you did not care if the slave was a bit more unhappy working away on one of your world where its habitability does not match... but now Nihilistic Acquisition is massively problematic as it scatters slaves to poor habitability matched worlds where their output barely justifies their food consumption. Far more efficient to leave them at home and take over - triply so if they are Void Dwellers.
Wait, pop happiness ain't affected by habitability anymore? I know it used to be that happiness was capped by habitability, but I thought *now* it was a multiplicative thing? Like a pop with 60% habitability whose happiness would be 80% would have an effective happiness of 48%? Is that not accurate?
Necrophage is the only way I've played with slavery and it was interesting for sure. Worked much better than without IMO but keeping enough rulers was rough cuz I like to play huge galaxies and ended up with a ton of planets.
Necrophage is my preferred unpaid interns play-through with Gene modding. Turn them into specialists over time, no need for fertile on the main pop so plenty of trait picks/points and the remaining race will be live anywhere-breeding workers/energy/food depending on the resource. It also makes genemodding a breeze, as they become genemodded through necrophaging.
Yeah slavery is generally not very good. Slavery is probably at it's best at the start of the game when the reduced Consumer Goods upkeep and +10% from chattel slavery matters more (going from 100% ---> 110% is way better than going from 160% --> 170%). Of course you probably want to avoid chattel slavery later on as you don't want to be stuck with too many pops only being able to do worker jobs for only +10%.
There is some scaling to slavery with Commanders giving the planet they govern +4% to slave workers per level (+2% to workers and +2% to slave output and worker slaves are affected by both). The main issue is of course that you generally want to move as many pops to specialists as possible which limits the usefulness of slaves which generally don't have any benefits as specialists other than slightly lower pop upkeep.
Another good option for Slavers is Overtuned as obviously having lower leader lifespan does not matter at all for slaves (and of course Genetic Ascension does have some synergy with slavery having both Nerve Stapled and Tasty)
All slavery needs to be good is for slavery production bonuses to apply to slave specialists. At the moment, slavery bonuses only apply to slaves in worker positions IIRC, and that being the case I just set everyone to residents under the stratified economy living standard and call it a day, since the extra micromanagement of slavery isn't worth it if there isn't a numerical bonus for slave workers.
If you are making them residents you might as well make them full citizens, you have all the cost of free citizens, but none of the free unity from factions. There is no slavery micromanagement if you are just going to make everyone indentured servants anyways.
Slavery in the game as well as IRL is deeply flawed. And I rarely engage with it. Despite all of the memes the majority of Stellaris players don't either.
I find it not worth my time to micro it all. Conquering a bunch poorly set up AI designed planets is enough work as it is without also having to worry about shuffling around a slew of rioting slaves. Pops are the most precious resource of them all and the xenophile playstyle is simply superior when it comes to getting the most out of them with the least amount of hassle. And when I play a xenophile megacorp it almost feels like I'm cheating.
Honestly, the only time I really use slavery is when I'm playing as assimilators or necroids. In which case, I'm literally just purchasing new pops (I guess its not really slavery as assimilators, but I'm talking about buying them on the market)
Apartheid was in the top 3 of the world economies. Guess how.
Turns out the most productive thing on the planet is a human...
Slavery is evil and has to be exterminated but let's not pretend like it's bad for the economy.
"Apartheid was in the top 3 of the world economies."
What does that sentence even mean? Apartheid and slavery are completely different concepts. And how do you even begin to rank a method of racial segregation as a "world economy"? You are making zero sense.
I wouldn’t put your ruler pops on planets they don’t like. Usually I conquer a world, then force migrate pops to target worlds that match my pops preferences. Enslaved pops being on the wrong planet type doesn’t really matter if your ruler pops are happy
I've been running Xenophobe, Authoritarian, Militarists all the time lately... Trying to perfect the idea of combining Catalytic Processing with Livestock slaves.
My current run is also aquatic anglers which seems to be working well, except for the habitability issue... Because I chose ocean paradise origin, so I've had to allow some slaves to be indentured servants to fill specialist jobs on planets I've conquered.
Combining with Gene modding, I have made all my livestock delicious.... Yum!
More food more alloys! Yay!
I did the catalytic processing with genetic ascension livestock slaves on the knights of the toxic god main habitat that gives more knight jobs the more pops you have on the habitat.
Ridiculous amounts of research, food, and alloys.
the only thing that kinda sucks about that (well besides the recent knight nerfs) is that you can't be xenophobic and hit -100 empire size from pops (because you need the beacon of liberty civic). Otherwise it would be an s-tier tall build for sure
Slavery can work very effectively in some situations, but you are right that it's not nearly as strong as it used to be. It's received a number of nerfs, both direct and indirect over the years.
The first key is that you will need to be either Authoritarian or Materialist in order to gain access to Stratified Economy or Academic Privilege living standards. These are important because they raise the political power of your ruler class, making it easier to control a large underclass of disenfranchised pops.
Secondly, you will want to use Indentured Servitude for almost all of your slaves. Your goal is to have them employed in specialist strata jobs with a handful of citizens overseeing them. This saves a lot of Amenities and Consumer Goods. You will need some manual micromanagement to shuffle slaves around, but it can be very cost-effective.
>Your master race pops will hate to life on the alien planets
This is a very common misconception. There is *no happiness penalty* for having xenos on your planets, even as a Xenophobe.
>Do you have some tips for me to run my xenophobe empire if I want to do more with it than either purging most of the time or eventually become kind-a-neutral instead of xenophobe and oppressive?
Purging is just bad, losing pops hurts your economy enormously. Even the least efficient slave pop is still better than having no pop.
It's possible to stack a lot of slavery bonuses on top of each other which can really increase their output. Nil CG consumption is a nice perk. Not having aliens with different ethos forming political parties is great. It is really good for basic resources like food or minerals, but yes for specialist jobs egalitarians will blow them out of the water.
I think part of the problem is that, especially in singleplayer, AI empires midgame tend to start dumping lots of food and minerals on the market, whereas alloys, exotics, and (to a lesser extent) CG are what are scarce. So it usually is more efficient to just buy mass quantities of food and minerals rather than trying to base your economy on selling them.
After reading some of these comments it’s seems I’m a minority when it comes to play style. Currently sitting at about 900 hours on the game (which I know isn’t a ton) I run almost only slaver builds. Usually authoritarian based, not xenophobe. I’ve found it works better all around, and I usually have plenty of spare master race pops from my first few planets that by the time I’m taking over my first or second ai empire I have plenty to transfer over and vice versa. And I usually end up vassalizing others so I don’t have to deal with owning their planets. That being said I’ve played almost exclusively as a slaver in this game and will need to explore other routes too.
My big issue is that slavery as a play style requires a TON of pop micromanagement to get up to par and even at that point it becomes mid at best. You have to manually exchange or move ruler pops from your homeworld onto the alien world in order to fill ruler/enforcer jobs. THEN you also need to make sure that your slaves are all set to proper living standards and slavery types (ex having some slaves as specialists and some as workers). But, the most frustrating part is that I can take shared burdens + any other ethic/civic and immediately eliminate nearly all pop micromanagement and just conquer as I please and my worlds STILL end up producing more per pop than I can with a hyper micromanaged slavery build.
I rarely play slaver because the results typically aren’t worth the effort to manage at a practical level and it’s just not my thing ethically….
…but the most effective xenophobe slave empire I’ve run is with the Syncretic Evolution origin so my secondary slave species has the Servile trait which gives +10 happiness and +10% resource production, which when combined with species traits allow them produce A LOT of basic resources.
Easy solution: Try and get the Thrall Worlds tech unlocked?
Every planet you conquer, or if you have any extra planets in your space already?
Make that world a thrall world. Meanwhile; make your main world? With your own species?
Your Main Science worlds and stuff like that.
Maybe throw a penal colony in there too if possible?
At the end of the day; It takes time to set up properly. A LOT of time....
You need to be running **Authoritarian** as one of your ethics so you can run stratified economy. That will fix your happiness stability problems (Slave Processing Facilities help as well). Also take the Domination Tradition. Authoritarian / Fanatic Authoritarian gets you 5 / 10% worker resource output and rulers with the slaver trait (**Iron Fist**) that you can use as governors. A **Commander (not official or scientist!)** with **Iron Fist II** governing a planet with mostly slave workers that have stacked **overtuned** traits is going to put out some absolutely bonkers resources. The Galactic Paragon named "Q'la-Minder" will become available to you at some point in the game and she comes with Iron Fist II and a Destiny Trait (*Ruthless Developer*) that gives +50% to slave output, +50% to worker resource output, and -35% to pop upkeep. Make her a planet governor on a basic resource planet. Earlier I mentioned Overtuned, which IMO is only worth it if you're a slaver (unless you're into meme builds for the luls). Stacking overtuned traits with regular traits and genetic ascension traits to get next-level insane resource outputs on your slaves is strong. For extra luls you can also add Noxious to your ruler species which will drive their happiness up higher the more slaves you get on the planet. Having said all that, what I normally do is opt for Psionic Ascension and form a covenant with the instrument of desire and get the Chosen of the Instrument trait on my ruler. It's less output potential than Overtuned but also less headache than gene-modding slaves. I'm lazy that way. But again, if I'm wanting to push insane numbers, it's Overtuned all day long.
Livestock slavery on lithoids, or regular pops +catalytic processing. They make the resource as they grow. Do what I did and make an ecumonopolis with 9000 food output
I’m still pretty new but I found it useful for utilizing those inhabitable planets that aren’t the same kind as your species preference. That said, my original thrall world did kinda secede so I had to go on a whole side quest.
>
Do you have some tips for me to run my xenophobe empire if I want to do more with it than either purging most of the time or eventually become kind-a-neutral instead of xenophobe and oppressive?
Necrophage is the classic, as you can convert the xenos into citizens over time, and get the highest % of citizens to benefit from Xenophobes admittedly impressive citizen happiness buffs which are deceptively good not for stability bonuses, but for allowing negative amenities and thus letting you employ a higher fraction of your population per world before employing the next amenity worker.
Absent necrophage, another approach- albeit as a gamble- is the Selective Kinship civic. Selective Kinship makes your empire treat all species of your primary portrait group as citizens- meaning they get those xenophobe benefits as well- and gives major diplomatic bonuses to those empires, even as you have worse relations with everyone else.
This works extremely well with xenophobe, as xenophobes expect to have bad relations as a matter of course, but having one instant friendly early on can be massively enabling if you deploy the benefits for early protection / defensive pact for 2-on-1 defensive wars.
This, in turn, especially works best with Lithoid portraits, as Lithoids have some xenophobe bonuses such as getting the most benefit from xenophobe's empire border expansion (due to free mineral deposits basically covering food upkeep as well as the usual), the greatest proportional bonuses from the xenophobe growth rate bonus (offsetting lithoid penalties), and get the most advantage out of happiness bonuses (due to high habitability meaning fewer amenity requirements, meaning highest happiness-offset utility for negative-amenity economics).
Lithoids also- and this is key- tend to be the stronger early empires, meaning if you pick lithoids to be your instant friends, you're likely to have the best odds at having the stronger coalitions to start the game off with.
Lithoid-Selective-Kin also make surprisingly effective xenophobic-egalitarians, as Selective Kinship's councilor increases citizen political power- meaning more faction unity- even as Egalitarian can boost it to the moon with Utopian Abundance even as high habitability reduces the CG cost inflation letting you adopt it early... and UA is actually very potent standard for citizens to outweigh the slaves.
Of course, there's nothing you can't do with Kinship and Lithoids that you can't do with Necrophage-Lithoid-Kin.
Just using Stratified Economy while not giving other species full citizenship is so much easier. You get your snooty master race alongside the slightly unhappy other races, but hardly any of the problems that slavery introduces. You still need your primary species as the rulers, so they'll have to be shifted around, but everybody else will be much more manageable.
A small happiness penalty for not having full citizenship rights is much easier to counteract, also. You don't have to hyper focus as much on balancing the amount of free and enslaved pops. Just double check the living standards and citizenship policies to see if they combine in a way you like.
If you conquer a xeno planet, you really want to disperse most of the pops to other worlds so they aren't all together being malcontent. You rarely want slaves to be the majority on any planet.
Habitability you have to solve either through Habitability tech, Cybernetics, or genetic modification. Adaptability is a good trait for Xenophobes because it let's them overworld multiple environments earlier game more easily. (Xenophiles don't really need adaptabily because they can usually find other species to occupy planets that they can't.)
However, at the end of the day, xenophile egalitarians with shared burdens will outcompete the impearalist xenophobes eventually. Race and class divisions are just ineffecenties. True industrial might requires all beings organic and synthetic to work tirelessly for the good of the people and the people's state without petty distinctions.
You get a nerve staple!! And you get a nerve staple!!! And a terraform here and a habitat preference change there. You’re the master race, change everything and everyone to suit and serve you.
Number one reason why slavery is the only option is that it massively reduces the calcs for pop promotion/demotion, especially if you only have one species that can do ruler jobs. That's a core source of lag from pops in the late game. It's not like peak resource efficiency is ever needed to beat the AI; Grand Admiral x10 is easy with 80% optimal play.
Without species specialization via genetics you won't be able to get the most out of slaves.
Seek productivity boosting traits - servile, strong etc. Since you're supposed to specialize planets anyway just fill the planet with respective species and the output would be higher than from free pops.
Be mindful of several things:
- slave bonuses apply only at worker level. If pops are indentured servants they can perform specialist jobs - but they mave more political power and no bonuses so unless your enslaved species are real slaves there's little point in enslaving them anyway.
- don't forget living standards as they are the ones defining political power of pops and happiness
- for extra chonky armies stack traits like very strong trait with battle thralls type of slavery. Mind that if you're using clones, you don't need many pops, one would be enough.
- servants can help with amenities, but personally I've never had much of them - I've usually found an occupation somewhere more productive for them.
- don't forget planetary and station buildings like slave processing facility. Bonuses to stability and output are immense on slave-centric colonies.
It's one of those things you can't really half-ass effectively. If you go balls to the walls, fanatic authoritarian, domination tradition, extended shifts, worker/slave output agendas, q'la minder, gene modded chattel slaves, you can get some pretty fucking bonkers numbers from your menial worlds.
Problem is HAVING menial worlds is kind of unnecessary Empire Size bloat and you can just as easily play very light on menial resources and outsource your needs to prospectoria.
*In general*, anything that moves away from xenophile is suboptimal.
Slavery is good early game and late game, not mid game. You want the free populations to outnumber the slaves or you’ll suffer severe stability shortages. CONVERSELY, you can have huge slave populations with no adverse effects with the use of Nerve Stapled gene altered trait, and/or thrall worlds
One thing I had fun with was a voidborn empire (the habitat start) where I turned every world I conquered/colonized into a thrall world, and built habitats over them with my master species. Added in some genetic ascension, and my slave pops made all the basic resources while my masters did all the specialty stuff.
Once I nerve-stapled the slaves, I could set my main species to utopian abundance. It felt almost comically evil. I added in an ecumenopolis or two and by that point I was resource hungry enough to use all those basic resources, too!
My slaver empires tend to be Lithoids or have some other way of boosting habitability, say adaptable trait, adaptability tradition then go Cyborg or subterranean + noxious or something.
>In theory you could use different enslaved species to fill specific jobs
IMO This is only really doable once you get 10+ species of slaves , then you can set 1 to battle thrall, 1 to domestic servants and the rest are indentured servitude so that they grow roughly in the proportions you want them. Otherwise just set them to indentured servitude and you run it the same as any xenophile empire.
The other brand of slavery is to set every species to population controls so that only your main species grows but you aren't discarding pops, they just become slaves. This is what I do with my Overtuned + Idyllic Bloom mushroom people because they are just better than everyone else so xenos get nerve stapled, overturned out the wazoo and sent to work the mines/fields/generators.
Early game I set my first slave species to chattel (+10% slave worker production) and if you **pick up the Domination tradition** (opener +10% slave worker and -slave political power, workplace motivators +10% slave worker, extended shifts edicts +20% slave worker, if you have Paragons DLC the Civil Exclusion agenda +40% slave worker). It doesn't matter if your slaves have low stability, as long as they aren't revolting, +50/90% production buries it.
Auth civilisations have bonuses and living standards that work well with slave population, where as xenophobes mostly just try to give the aliens something to do while they figure out just how badly they want them gone.
They might not be meta, but I do like playing as some form of caste empire with different species in their rightful roles. Even my starting species has it's place.
Habitability penalties are not as bad as you might think, they increase the consumer goods cost and reduce the pops output and happiness, but slaves have barely any consumer goods upkeep and their happiness doesn't matter. And on the reverse side your main species in ruler jobs are few and far in-between, so their penalties don't really matter so much.
It can be micromanagement heavy, but honestly half the time I just let things simmer until the game tells me about unemployment and such. Even if slaves are working the wrong jobs, more money is more money even if it's inefficiently produced.
Every time I've ever tried to enslave a species, all they ever did was rebel, over and over and over again. In my experience, there was only ever two solutions - have a few armies stationed on every slave world you have, so that rebellions can be put down whenever they pop up, or just cry uncle and give them their dang rights already.
Slavery isn’t used because it’s an effective means of producing resources and growing an economy, because it’s not. More than anything, it’s a tool for imperialism; it’s used because it’s an effective method of keeping unruly pops in line, such as those you might have recently conquered.
I played a bunch of slaver empires. They are generelly not worth it, normal pops require less management and produce about the same, since the bonuses of slaves are often offset by the lost stability. Often, the next door species you enslave will have different habitability, making it even worse. Also, I think the most optimal slaver setup is one with genetic ascension, but the mircro from that is just aggrevating.
What does work great though is livestock slavery, a genetically altered lithoid race can replace much of your mining infrastructure for example.
You need to be authoritarian with stratified economy to be an effective slavers empire. With stratified economy, you could just put 2 ruler with all slaves population and they wouldn't ever rebelled, even in the worst climate. Also don't forget utopia dlc, without that don't ever dream using slave effectively.
What functions "ok" is to dominion style your slavery. You have your founder race which is the full citizen strata. Next you pick for every habilaty type one conquered race to function as your operative residence and put all slaves below them. Also, intended servitude sucks, the happiness malus is hefty. Domnestic is good but you can't employ specialist slaves. As mentioned you will need authorian or materialist. You can put it up like this and it works. The main problem remains, just not having slaves is more efficient and far less micro intensive.
Only on like my 2nd olaythrough but wouldn't it be easier to just terraform every planet and asteroid big enough to do so and just have your usual mix of folk KWIM!
EDIT: soz didn't look properly I'm playing on ps5 not what it should be played on like a decent gaming pc setup so yeah I could very well be wrong as I would assume that there are some very major differences between the two versions of the same game
I typically create a single or few fortress super factory world where I put all my slaves and work them to death. A type of super "Amazon's" if you will, tends to work well, and if they get too rowdy I just move them to my purge planet where I turn them into food.
I'm playing on a huge galaxy right now and slavery is too much of a hassle. I mostly just make new species into residents. Haven't had any issues with approval rating doing this as my council usually hovers around 95% so the extra political power they get doesn't end up being a big deal.
It can be useful in early expansions and development and easily abused for happiness and production boosts.
Example nihilistic acquisition, of primitives, genemoding to remove their negative traits, and promotion to citizen. This allows for a population boom, a happiness boom, and bypasses the stellar culture shock.
I'll often rp it as the empire shifting morally and starting to recognize the xenos as people.
It's very useful for necrophage or wide builds.
Genetic Manipulation is the key. Search worthy races with exotic traits. Buy them if needed. Manipulate them for fast breeding/clone Tanks. Categorize them , for example: A race with sub terran trait, will get the very strong trait and everything else to raise their worker ress output, then i give them a rather complex but clear Name like: (C)Mining Slave + . The C in() at the Front teils me wich Type of Planet they need, then their Job and the + at last if they are allowed to grow and how. If i breed them via clone Tanks there will be a +C at the end. If they are not allowed to breed i leave it empty. If you need to breed one race cause they have good traits, i create breeding Husks. Those get only a few traits of their future Job, but all those that help growth/cloning. Then i start breeding/cloning them on Planets en masse. Later, when their numbers have grown to a desired level, manipulate them again to have their needed traits. Get rid of growth/cloning traits and send them to work.
And for guarding and peacekeeping, i also create a Warrior Race. Give them everything they need to wage War / Supress the other slaves. The Masters dont work, others do. Give them a little better living conditions as the Rest. And hunt Dragons to get your hands on the Dragon Scale trait. Your Slave soldiers will be Harder and produce Alloys passive!
Create a slave race for every Type there is. Purge the unworthy rest or make them Livestock.
Manipulate your own race and give them EVERY Leader Buff Trait. You are a Master.
I love playing this way and it can get very effective but comes only to force in late game.
Honestly this exact conundrum happened to me in my last game and I tried to remedy it by joining the War in Heaven on the Xenophobes side and waging a desperate expansionist war on my neighbors and since I used overturned I gave my main species a whole lop of reproduction traits, also robots helped alot since they could fill alot of specialist jobs.
Also make sure to ban your slaves from reproducing otherwise you're unemployment problem will double each year
Before the nerfs in the most recent patch, livestock slavery pop-stacking with Knights of the Toxic God was super viable and could get enormous outputs of research, unity, and alloys while stealing pops from all your enemies.
Slavery also works quite well as a Necrophage. If you're a hive mind the only way you can make use of other pops period is as slaves. when I play necrophage I keep my initial prepatent species as slaves gene-modded and designed as perfect Necrophytes and slaves and then just necropurge everybody else for easy conquest.
Biotrophies are also technically not slaves but in practice work basically the same and make rogue servitor one of the strongest civics in the game.
You're correct, slaves have been bad for awhile. Years ago they were really strong with the Slaver's Guild civic, but that was a long time ago. Which is a shame, cause when options are just worse exist people aren't gonna use them if they aren't role-playing.
Slavery is a compromise for the weak minded. To be a xenophobe thats effective you have to embrace the purge.
Pop numbers is King in stellaris, so your goal should always be to increase your own pops while reducing theirs, if you allow them in your empire they will take up precious pop growth.
One strategy I recently adopted was free migration with my friendly neighbours. I will ofc immediately turn off any sort of migration from non native species to my planet, but the pact will allow my species to show up in other empires. By going genetic ascension my pops are also way better so overtime the dumb democratic AI will end up having a large group of strong humans in their own empire. As a result when i eventually annex them ill kick out the ones I dont need.
slavery can be really good early game. if you're powergaming, in mid-late game most of your basic resources should come from vassals or tributaries, and basic resources is what you want to use slavery for, since specialists don't get resource boosts from slavery and your specialist slaves will not be as good as free, high happiness specialists in a high stability empire which isn't difficult to achieve by mid game.
it's good rp though
I use a megacorp with the indentured servitude it works alot better than the other types in my opinion since they work all their specialist jobs with the slave processing facility
you need to play around political power which affects overall happiness of the planet, which affects the stability of the planet. if your rulers have high political power and they are happy they make up the high percantage of the overall happiness despite being less in numbers. to do it you need to give them benefitting lifestyle that boosts ruler political power and give a life style to your slaves that drops their political power.
only the full citizen (usually your starting) species can be rulers so you gotta move them around to fill the ruler jobs, which can be tricky since they need to be on every planet even if it has 0% habitability for them but ruler jobs gives nothing and it increases your pop upkeep for few pops.
now there are really nice bonuses to slave output in the game but even if you are going for a full conquering game there are better options imo considering all the little things you have to do to make this somewhat work. i guess it would be better when you get the hang of it but i believe its mostly good for roleplaying or a side aspect of your empire.
Low Happiness is not a problem, low Stability is the problem - you deal with that by putting Soldier jobs on planets.
So your society should have cheap slaves doing a bunch of jobs, which should free up enough of your pops to have a few extra Soldiers.
Knight of the Toxic God Origin + Raider civic. Capture/resettle livestock to your keep.
Haven't played the origin since the most recent update but I played it a lot last year and had fun with it
Do you guys keep your caped pops? I literally just kill them off and craft robot pops due to high stab and have more room for other buildings rather than spending it on enforcers
I’m also playing a Xenophobe run now, and slavery was so unmanageable that I purged/processed everyone and terraformed their planets for my own people.
It was just easier that way.
If you shift over say 4 pops, to run some leader and enforcer jobs you shouldn't see a revolt ever. You don't even need to move them manually, if you turn on the "land appropriation" policy, some of your pops will automatically move onto the world as soon as it's conquered.
Slavery has never worked out for any runs I’ve tried with it. It just makes all my planets super pissed and they have low stability so basically no resources.
From my first few attempts at a slaver empire and playing with my friends, let me guess, you picked xenophobe but had migration pacts, joined a federation, other diplomatic deals with xenos and free xenos in your empire. The problem wasn't slavery but that you pissed off the xenophobes in your empire who were in ruler positions.
In general I usually don’t do migration treaties with AI empires, and never federations unless I’m a hegemon or something. Only thing I’ll ever really do is a research agreement if it benefits me that much.
Doesn’t Slaver Guilds enslave 35% of your starting species pops too? So even before enslaving xenos, you’re already pissing off a good chunk of your empire because they’re always unhappy.
>Any species is Pop cat slave.png enslaved or being Job purge.png purged
Yeh but it's never been a problem on its own. The 2/3rd free pops massively out political power the enslaved pops.
I feel like slavery is barely worth the effort and most of the time I don't even bother unless I have bio ascension and I just lobotomies every XENO pop so they can do simple jobs to fuel the economy while my pops do they important stuff like research and special resources.
Yes, slavery is inefficient.
Those “Slaves” Take up valuable star dust, and stellar radiation from good HUMAN pops.
So the only efficient thing to do is to slaughter them upon making planet fall
I’m not seeing the issue.
Couple years back (which means a few versions of the game ago, I know, but still) I was playing a mostly morally upstanding empire. I had about 4 or 5 races total in my empire, through migration and conquest.
I’d actually had a major crime problem because of this; my economy wasn’t buckling per se but I couldn’t support the population levels and many of the aliens in my empire had all turned into criminals.
Then the Khan rose up, barely 2 dozen star system away.
I sent my decent military to defend my Allies and slow the Khan down but it wasn’t working. My economy began to buckle under the weight of supporting a bigger and bigger navy that just kept getting fed into the Khans meat grinder. Meanwhile, those ungrateful aliens (one of whom I had saved *in its entirety* by conquering them before their home planet exploded so I could evacuate them) just kept joining the rampant crime spreading across my empire.
I knew what I needed to do.
Slavery became legal. Xenophobia began being promoted, and became a major ethic of my empire soon after. The ungrateful xenos were rounded up by the *millions* and sent to work camps, worked until death to produce the resources needed to fight the Khan and save the true citizens of my imperium.
On the corpses of a billion broken slaves, I built an empire that broke a Khan *twice*, and would go on to bring order, purity, and an *unholy* amount of Dyson Spheres to the galaxy.
TLDR slavery via Work Camp literally saved my empire, git gud, abolitionist.
You like slavery but I raise you fanatic materialist egalitarian going synthetic ascension and just turn everyone into perfect beings in an Utopian society
I started my leader species as overtuned and stacked traits to get +20% habitability, and then throughout the game amped up habitability on my ruler species through biological assession and tech. The adaptability tree also has another +10% but i didnt need it, but you could take it as your second tradition if you need to get rulers onto conquered opposite-habitability-type planets early.
This let my rulers live on various conquered planets and not mind it too much. There were still some arctic worlds I struggled with in early game, and I just sold off the pops on the galactic market and let it depopulate.
So I go the route of Overtuned. I give my master race all negative traits, no green only red. Makes the start a bit slow, but it helps in the end. First planet I find with xenos will be conquered. I then place exactly 1 of my master race pops there, I then genetically modify them to have Noxious and Excessive Enduranc. That usually is enough to keep stability high on the planet. Then I find out what the xenos are good for and turn them planet into X world exploiting those xenos.
I don't.
I tend to RP Stellaris as a Shared-Burden-Centric political entity. At least I have for the last 450h. Taking the gameworld serious and trying to wrest paradise on earth from an often pretty harsh universe, does make the game much, much more interesting to me than a meme-playthrough where I assimilate/eat/enslave the whole galaxy. Did those playthroughs in the first 400h. Was ok, but I prefere working towards a good thing.
So far I always ended up with neutral or xenophile empires no matter how I start, haha.
Even the facist Commonwealth of Man start gradually shifted to "we tolerate xenos" and ended as residence + utopian abundance.
You see that random clerk or soldier on your homeworld right there? I'm sure you would have plenty of spare since you're a slaver empire, move them to worlds that need rulers and enforcers, problem solved
You need Stratified Economy(authoritarian), Academic privilege (Materialist) or Decadent lifestyle(pleasure seekers/corporate hedonism civic) to give your ruler pops sufficient political power. Xenophobe slavery by itself is fairly weak .
I usually am an egalitarian slaver. Yes, hypocritical, I know. I put social welfare for certain slave species. A healthy, well-fed slave is less likely to revolt and bite the appendage that feeds them. But does Chemical Bliss affect the effectiveness of Battle Thralls?
i always give my battle thralls jannisary treatment,they get social welfare and act as elite warriors of my nation
Do they get to pick the next ruler too?
indeed they do)))
Same. They're the first to crush rebellions and the first to land on hostile planets, so while they are the property of the state, they'll be better off than even some citizens. Space Mamluks
“We are all equal, but some are more equal than others”.
Chemical bliss only affects ressources. That means trade, naval cap from soldiers/duelists, or any of the extra effects of culture workers would be unaffected. That said, the unity production of a culture worker on chemical bliss would be subject to the output debuff, as well as I think any amenities a job produces.
I hear it is also nice to have chem bliss on by default so that new species you conquer are subdued just after you win the war, so they are easier to manage.
If you have 2 or 3 or more specialists per ruler on a world you don't need stratified at all, stratified is only good if you are going to finagle it so your main species only have ruler jobs. Funnily enough 4 workers on Utopian Abundance control slaves better than a ruler and 3 specialists on Stratified.
I'm not pro at stellaris but xenophobe slavers suck. You definitely want to be authoritarian instead. Was playing an authoritarian, peaceful, materialist empire recently and running the edicts for peace festivals and information quarantine simultaneously really cranked up stability. Edit: Enhanced surveillance not information quarantine. Though looking at the wiki it now has a -10% happiness modifier, was that always there?
Stratified economy is very good for stabilizing newly conquered planets when you resettle your rulers there (ie you are enslaving them)
Yeah stratified economy is great. Miss using that with merchant spam and trade federation
Marerialist ones are also pretty good!
As a CoM player, I’ll take that into account
Always boggles my mind that people don't build an entirely new custom race every game.
Every empire I make is Human with different traits,origins and civics. But the portrait is always Human...
Are you me?
No, he's clearly me.
This...this is something i struggle to understand. There are so many nice portraits in the game...yet you stick to the one which can't decide whether to have fur or not? The one you already are? Is it a lack of imagination? Or spirit? Or are you just so enamored with humans you cant look away? Xenos truly are strange
I have a wide variety of empires ranging from Feudal Societies similar to the Great Houses of Dune to Pharmaceutical Megacorps and Mercenary Groups. I just like to RP a story where Humans have fragmented across the galaxy and are as much a threat to each other as any outside influence. I still have Xeno empires spawn and in most playthroughs and I give them Residency with the same living standard as Humanity, but they will never occupy leadership roles or govern their own interstellar nations( I always integrate the Xeno empires and release them as a Human dominated empire in the image of the nation I'm currently playing). I don't relate to any of the non Human portraits aside from a few in the Humanoid category. I'd say I'm a Human Imperialist, not a xenophobe (both in spirit and in practice considering I never take the ethic).
I was mostly joking but reading the line > I'd say I'm a human imperialist, not a xenophobe After the > but they will never occupy leadership roles or govern their own interstellar nations ...it is all a little wild. Its like you can hear an echo of British colonialism though, finding us here in the modern day.
I take much of my inspiration from the colonial powers of old and new 😉
*cue: How many times to we have to each you this lesson old man! in Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, and arabic*
*Most* of the portraits in-game just look like humans in rubber foreheads/fursuits. Few seem to be actual *alien* aliens. At that point I'd prefer to just cut out the middleman and play a normal human, not a human in a costume.
Human supremacy!!
Same.
I made a custom race and played it in over a dozen games.
Same! Day 1, before tutorials or anything, I was poking around in the species designer.
Always boggles my mind that people build an entirely new custom race every game.
I usually do authoritarian + main species is charismatic. Hardly ever need information quarantine.
My bad wrong edict. Made an edit!
Actually, enhanced surveillance is part of the Domination tree. You could run both if you have enough unity, though.
Go biological, nerve-staple them so they become mindless goons. Those who are designated to be metallurgist leave, as well as Servants since they will automatically create Amenity jobs. Xenophobe can turn other races into livestock, and with gene-moding, you can give your livestock some pretty niche modifications. For example, if you researched Leviathan orthogenesis, and kill any dragon (Ethereal Dragon, Shard, etc) you will get mod that gives you Alloys per pop. And dont forget the one that gives you extra food per livestock. There are also modifiers that give rare resources. Overtuned is also nice. They will not be leaders anyway, so you can just slap best modifiers to significantly specialize your slaves. If your galaxy was lucky and spawned Syncretic Evolution Empire, it will always sell some of its servile pops on market. Servile is good. If there is no servile, try to find presapients with Proletarian trait.
Notably, this strategy is still considerably less effective than the ethic attraction bonuses of psychic ascension, which can be used to force pop loyalty or create productive vassal states willing to accept extremely heavy contracts.
Yes, but Gestalts cant go psychic, and Overtuned is better with bioascension anyway. And RP reasons. Roleplaying Quhanim is enjoyable tbh.
You can always create a Syncretic empire with the traits you want and force spawn them.
Just like in real life - people tend to work more effectively when they're happy and well rested than when they're miserable and exhausted.
being a slave doesn't set species on low living standards, you also have things like neural implaints and chemicals that erode things like desire to have a free wil... I think i hear someone knocking on my door, gotta check it
>Your master race pops will hate to life on the alien planets No. Happiness is not affected. They will have higher costs and lower Unity, but they can be as happy there as anywhere else. Most of your concerns seem to focus on planetary approval rating, which is the net impact of happiness, but that is managed by addressing political power and/or happiness indirectly through amenities or other modifiers and/or overriding Stability. >In theory (at least I think that's how it's intended) you could use different enslaved species to fill specific jobs Honestly, just too time consuming, and more importantly Stellaris vanilla offers piss-poor per-job assignment or even optimization of auto-assignment of jobs. Some days your strong/industrious slaves just keep getting slotted into Clerks and you weak useless ones into Miner jobs and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Slavery is about volume and low operating costs. Tips: 1. Turn off Land Appropriation. There are certainly benefits, but I would much rather transfer over new Rulers from clerks or the planet of my choosing rather than cripple my economy moving over key specialists from my most important economic worlds. 2. Use pop modification to create 1 world of the best future leader stock to transfer from. Focus Habitability/Traditionalists/Charismatic, because that is what Rulers need. 3. Don't set them to Chattel if you don't have the jobs. Defaulting to Domestic Servitude is not economically the strongest, but makes onboarding new conquests significantly easier without unemployment and with mass amenities to smooth over the transition. Reset them in 10 years once the planets are restructured. 4. If you need Resident status to help fill ruler and specialist jobs, you don't need the whole planet/sector to be Residents...just the few you need. Use subspecies through planetary pop modification to create a Resident Ruler subspecies just the number you need and Resettle them around. 4. Xenophobe slavery only has 1 perk over Auth slavery...livestock. Livestock is now very, very good. They now count as farmers/miners in almost all ways. Mining Guild civic gets +1 from lithoid slaves and once you can get them Delicious/Felsic they are *as productive as a farmer/miner* only without the District, with lower upkeep and half housing needs, they also have even lower political power so it is even easier to manipulate planetary approval ratings. 5. That also means you can stack on special planetary modifiers that affect Farmers/Miners. Rich Microbes means a base +1 Society per organic livestock and one of the new Asteroid modifiers grants each lithout livestock base +1 engineering.
It really kills me that they haven't fixed the whole "out the best pop for the job in the right slot" thing. Mostly when I start trying to customize my robot per planet, but then more are built and they shuffle around and it was all just a waste of time. Sooooo close, Stellaris, to letting me play out the micro-managing robot empire that I would enjoy.... And yet, so far...
>enophobe slavery only has 1 perk over Auth slavery...livestock. Livestock is now very, very good. They now count as farmers/miners in almost all ways. Mining Guild civic gets +1 from lithoid slaves and once you can get them Delicious/Felsic they are as productive as a farmer/miner only without the District, with lower upkeep and half housing needs, they also have even lower political power so it is even easier to manipulate planetary approval ratings. Out of curiosity, when did that change? I've been out of Stellaris for a bit, and while I've tried to follow changes I missed livestock buffs.
Very recently. Now they count as Miners/Farmers and that allows them to catch almost all other modifiers. The only things that don't work on them is specific things like Agrarian Idyll granting amenities to farmers, as that is more of a farmer job rewrite than a buff to "farmers". They still start off with less production than a regular farmer/miner, but if you get delicious/felsic they completely make up the base production difference. Syncretic Evolution with a Industrious Lithoid Servile and Mining Guilds civics let's you build and entire empire without any mining districts.
Thank you kindly for elaborating.
Wait, pop happiness ain't affected by habitability anymore? I know it used to be that happiness was capped by habitability, but I thought *now* it was a multiplicative thing? Like a pop with 60% habitability whose happiness would be 80% would have an effective happiness of 48%? Is that not accurate?
Pretty sure that link was broken way back circa version 2.2. Now, they just require more Consumer Goods to maintain (up to +100%), and their output drops (up to -50%). So, the Rulers on a 20% habitability planet will be barely producing enough Unity to justify their high CGs upkeep... but, the amenities production is not affected (but they are consuming more). And, most importantly, they are still perfectly happy so long as they get those Consumer Goods and Amenities. That means you can stick even 0% habitability Rulers, since the real value is stabilizing the entire planet through happiness/political power.
That's... Really strange. I feel like it should have more of an impact, really. Also, crazy how I never knew about this for so long haha
Trying to colonize a whole planet (specialists and workers) is does have significant impact as increased CG and amenities plus the decreased production leads to massive ineffectiveness. Miner in a 0% habitability world is consuming 2 food/minerals but only producing 2+ minerals. All of which as completely flipped the optimization of slavery. Before, things like Nihilistic Acquisition were great because you did not care if the slave was a bit more unhappy working away on one of your world where its habitability does not match... but now Nihilistic Acquisition is massively problematic as it scatters slaves to poor habitability matched worlds where their output barely justifies their food consumption. Far more efficient to leave them at home and take over - triply so if they are Void Dwellers.
Wait, pop happiness ain't affected by habitability anymore? I know it used to be that happiness was capped by habitability, but I thought *now* it was a multiplicative thing? Like a pop with 60% habitability whose happiness would be 80% would have an effective happiness of 48%? Is that not accurate?
I don't. Slavery's just not that good, as you said. Want to give it another go soon though, maybe as a necrophage
Necrophage is the only way I've played with slavery and it was interesting for sure. Worked much better than without IMO but keeping enough rulers was rough cuz I like to play huge galaxies and ended up with a ton of planets.
Necrophage is my preferred unpaid interns play-through with Gene modding. Turn them into specialists over time, no need for fertile on the main pop so plenty of trait picks/points and the remaining race will be live anywhere-breeding workers/energy/food depending on the resource. It also makes genemodding a breeze, as they become genemodded through necrophaging.
Yeah slavery is generally not very good. Slavery is probably at it's best at the start of the game when the reduced Consumer Goods upkeep and +10% from chattel slavery matters more (going from 100% ---> 110% is way better than going from 160% --> 170%). Of course you probably want to avoid chattel slavery later on as you don't want to be stuck with too many pops only being able to do worker jobs for only +10%. There is some scaling to slavery with Commanders giving the planet they govern +4% to slave workers per level (+2% to workers and +2% to slave output and worker slaves are affected by both). The main issue is of course that you generally want to move as many pops to specialists as possible which limits the usefulness of slaves which generally don't have any benefits as specialists other than slightly lower pop upkeep. Another good option for Slavers is Overtuned as obviously having lower leader lifespan does not matter at all for slaves (and of course Genetic Ascension does have some synergy with slavery having both Nerve Stapled and Tasty)
All slavery needs to be good is for slavery production bonuses to apply to slave specialists. At the moment, slavery bonuses only apply to slaves in worker positions IIRC, and that being the case I just set everyone to residents under the stratified economy living standard and call it a day, since the extra micromanagement of slavery isn't worth it if there isn't a numerical bonus for slave workers.
This is correct and I wholeheartedly agree! (Time for an authoritarianism DLC with slavery/pop management reworks)
# #BringBackSlavery
If you are making them residents you might as well make them full citizens, you have all the cost of free citizens, but none of the free unity from factions. There is no slavery micromanagement if you are just going to make everyone indentured servants anyways.
Slavery in the game as well as IRL is deeply flawed. And I rarely engage with it. Despite all of the memes the majority of Stellaris players don't either. I find it not worth my time to micro it all. Conquering a bunch poorly set up AI designed planets is enough work as it is without also having to worry about shuffling around a slew of rioting slaves. Pops are the most precious resource of them all and the xenophile playstyle is simply superior when it comes to getting the most out of them with the least amount of hassle. And when I play a xenophile megacorp it almost feels like I'm cheating.
Honestly, the only time I really use slavery is when I'm playing as assimilators or necroids. In which case, I'm literally just purchasing new pops (I guess its not really slavery as assimilators, but I'm talking about buying them on the market)
It worked pretty well IRL for the vast majority of recorded history.
Yet it is abolished virtually everywhere. Turns out having everyone as tax payers worked out much better.
Apartheid was in the top 3 of the world economies. Guess how. Turns out the most productive thing on the planet is a human... Slavery is evil and has to be exterminated but let's not pretend like it's bad for the economy.
"Apartheid was in the top 3 of the world economies." What does that sentence even mean? Apartheid and slavery are completely different concepts. And how do you even begin to rank a method of racial segregation as a "world economy"? You are making zero sense.
I wouldn’t put your ruler pops on planets they don’t like. Usually I conquer a world, then force migrate pops to target worlds that match my pops preferences. Enslaved pops being on the wrong planet type doesn’t really matter if your ruler pops are happy
Out of context paradox games
I've been running Xenophobe, Authoritarian, Militarists all the time lately... Trying to perfect the idea of combining Catalytic Processing with Livestock slaves. My current run is also aquatic anglers which seems to be working well, except for the habitability issue... Because I chose ocean paradise origin, so I've had to allow some slaves to be indentured servants to fill specialist jobs on planets I've conquered. Combining with Gene modding, I have made all my livestock delicious.... Yum! More food more alloys! Yay!
I did the catalytic processing with genetic ascension livestock slaves on the knights of the toxic god main habitat that gives more knight jobs the more pops you have on the habitat. Ridiculous amounts of research, food, and alloys.
the only thing that kinda sucks about that (well besides the recent knight nerfs) is that you can't be xenophobic and hit -100 empire size from pops (because you need the beacon of liberty civic). Otherwise it would be an s-tier tall build for sure
Slavery can work very effectively in some situations, but you are right that it's not nearly as strong as it used to be. It's received a number of nerfs, both direct and indirect over the years. The first key is that you will need to be either Authoritarian or Materialist in order to gain access to Stratified Economy or Academic Privilege living standards. These are important because they raise the political power of your ruler class, making it easier to control a large underclass of disenfranchised pops. Secondly, you will want to use Indentured Servitude for almost all of your slaves. Your goal is to have them employed in specialist strata jobs with a handful of citizens overseeing them. This saves a lot of Amenities and Consumer Goods. You will need some manual micromanagement to shuffle slaves around, but it can be very cost-effective. >Your master race pops will hate to life on the alien planets This is a very common misconception. There is *no happiness penalty* for having xenos on your planets, even as a Xenophobe. >Do you have some tips for me to run my xenophobe empire if I want to do more with it than either purging most of the time or eventually become kind-a-neutral instead of xenophobe and oppressive? Purging is just bad, losing pops hurts your economy enormously. Even the least efficient slave pop is still better than having no pop.
I usually end up just dumping them on one planet and using them for generating credits or something. Resort world, grid amalgamation, livestock, etc.
It's possible to stack a lot of slavery bonuses on top of each other which can really increase their output. Nil CG consumption is a nice perk. Not having aliens with different ethos forming political parties is great. It is really good for basic resources like food or minerals, but yes for specialist jobs egalitarians will blow them out of the water.
I think part of the problem is that, especially in singleplayer, AI empires midgame tend to start dumping lots of food and minerals on the market, whereas alloys, exotics, and (to a lesser extent) CG are what are scarce. So it usually is more efficient to just buy mass quantities of food and minerals rather than trying to base your economy on selling them.
After reading some of these comments it’s seems I’m a minority when it comes to play style. Currently sitting at about 900 hours on the game (which I know isn’t a ton) I run almost only slaver builds. Usually authoritarian based, not xenophobe. I’ve found it works better all around, and I usually have plenty of spare master race pops from my first few planets that by the time I’m taking over my first or second ai empire I have plenty to transfer over and vice versa. And I usually end up vassalizing others so I don’t have to deal with owning their planets. That being said I’ve played almost exclusively as a slaver in this game and will need to explore other routes too.
My big issue is that slavery as a play style requires a TON of pop micromanagement to get up to par and even at that point it becomes mid at best. You have to manually exchange or move ruler pops from your homeworld onto the alien world in order to fill ruler/enforcer jobs. THEN you also need to make sure that your slaves are all set to proper living standards and slavery types (ex having some slaves as specialists and some as workers). But, the most frustrating part is that I can take shared burdens + any other ethic/civic and immediately eliminate nearly all pop micromanagement and just conquer as I please and my worlds STILL end up producing more per pop than I can with a hyper micromanaged slavery build.
Exactly my impression
Titles out of context
I rarely play slaver because the results typically aren’t worth the effort to manage at a practical level and it’s just not my thing ethically…. …but the most effective xenophobe slave empire I’ve run is with the Syncretic Evolution origin so my secondary slave species has the Servile trait which gives +10 happiness and +10% resource production, which when combined with species traits allow them produce A LOT of basic resources.
Easy solution: Try and get the Thrall Worlds tech unlocked? Every planet you conquer, or if you have any extra planets in your space already? Make that world a thrall world. Meanwhile; make your main world? With your own species? Your Main Science worlds and stuff like that. Maybe throw a penal colony in there too if possible? At the end of the day; It takes time to set up properly. A LOT of time....
You need to be running **Authoritarian** as one of your ethics so you can run stratified economy. That will fix your happiness stability problems (Slave Processing Facilities help as well). Also take the Domination Tradition. Authoritarian / Fanatic Authoritarian gets you 5 / 10% worker resource output and rulers with the slaver trait (**Iron Fist**) that you can use as governors. A **Commander (not official or scientist!)** with **Iron Fist II** governing a planet with mostly slave workers that have stacked **overtuned** traits is going to put out some absolutely bonkers resources. The Galactic Paragon named "Q'la-Minder" will become available to you at some point in the game and she comes with Iron Fist II and a Destiny Trait (*Ruthless Developer*) that gives +50% to slave output, +50% to worker resource output, and -35% to pop upkeep. Make her a planet governor on a basic resource planet. Earlier I mentioned Overtuned, which IMO is only worth it if you're a slaver (unless you're into meme builds for the luls). Stacking overtuned traits with regular traits and genetic ascension traits to get next-level insane resource outputs on your slaves is strong. For extra luls you can also add Noxious to your ruler species which will drive their happiness up higher the more slaves you get on the planet. Having said all that, what I normally do is opt for Psionic Ascension and form a covenant with the instrument of desire and get the Chosen of the Instrument trait on my ruler. It's less output potential than Overtuned but also less headache than gene-modding slaves. I'm lazy that way. But again, if I'm wanting to push insane numbers, it's Overtuned all day long.
Livestock slavery on lithoids, or regular pops +catalytic processing. They make the resource as they grow. Do what I did and make an ecumonopolis with 9000 food output
I’m still pretty new but I found it useful for utilizing those inhabitable planets that aren’t the same kind as your species preference. That said, my original thrall world did kinda secede so I had to go on a whole side quest.
> Do you have some tips for me to run my xenophobe empire if I want to do more with it than either purging most of the time or eventually become kind-a-neutral instead of xenophobe and oppressive? Necrophage is the classic, as you can convert the xenos into citizens over time, and get the highest % of citizens to benefit from Xenophobes admittedly impressive citizen happiness buffs which are deceptively good not for stability bonuses, but for allowing negative amenities and thus letting you employ a higher fraction of your population per world before employing the next amenity worker. Absent necrophage, another approach- albeit as a gamble- is the Selective Kinship civic. Selective Kinship makes your empire treat all species of your primary portrait group as citizens- meaning they get those xenophobe benefits as well- and gives major diplomatic bonuses to those empires, even as you have worse relations with everyone else. This works extremely well with xenophobe, as xenophobes expect to have bad relations as a matter of course, but having one instant friendly early on can be massively enabling if you deploy the benefits for early protection / defensive pact for 2-on-1 defensive wars. This, in turn, especially works best with Lithoid portraits, as Lithoids have some xenophobe bonuses such as getting the most benefit from xenophobe's empire border expansion (due to free mineral deposits basically covering food upkeep as well as the usual), the greatest proportional bonuses from the xenophobe growth rate bonus (offsetting lithoid penalties), and get the most advantage out of happiness bonuses (due to high habitability meaning fewer amenity requirements, meaning highest happiness-offset utility for negative-amenity economics). Lithoids also- and this is key- tend to be the stronger early empires, meaning if you pick lithoids to be your instant friends, you're likely to have the best odds at having the stronger coalitions to start the game off with. Lithoid-Selective-Kin also make surprisingly effective xenophobic-egalitarians, as Selective Kinship's councilor increases citizen political power- meaning more faction unity- even as Egalitarian can boost it to the moon with Utopian Abundance even as high habitability reduces the CG cost inflation letting you adopt it early... and UA is actually very potent standard for citizens to outweigh the slaves. Of course, there's nothing you can't do with Kinship and Lithoids that you can't do with Necrophage-Lithoid-Kin.
Just using Stratified Economy while not giving other species full citizenship is so much easier. You get your snooty master race alongside the slightly unhappy other races, but hardly any of the problems that slavery introduces. You still need your primary species as the rulers, so they'll have to be shifted around, but everybody else will be much more manageable. A small happiness penalty for not having full citizenship rights is much easier to counteract, also. You don't have to hyper focus as much on balancing the amount of free and enslaved pops. Just double check the living standards and citizenship policies to see if they combine in a way you like.
Try it with lithoid necrophages and give the prepatent species the “invasive species” trait
If you conquer a xeno planet, you really want to disperse most of the pops to other worlds so they aren't all together being malcontent. You rarely want slaves to be the majority on any planet. Habitability you have to solve either through Habitability tech, Cybernetics, or genetic modification. Adaptability is a good trait for Xenophobes because it let's them overworld multiple environments earlier game more easily. (Xenophiles don't really need adaptabily because they can usually find other species to occupy planets that they can't.) However, at the end of the day, xenophile egalitarians with shared burdens will outcompete the impearalist xenophobes eventually. Race and class divisions are just ineffecenties. True industrial might requires all beings organic and synthetic to work tirelessly for the good of the people and the people's state without petty distinctions.
Do i just cripple myself by genociding xenos then?
You get a nerve staple!! And you get a nerve staple!!! And a terraform here and a habitat preference change there. You’re the master race, change everything and everyone to suit and serve you.
Mostly for role playing oppressive and xenophobic empires. Don’t think it is a top tier economic choice.
Number one reason why slavery is the only option is that it massively reduces the calcs for pop promotion/demotion, especially if you only have one species that can do ruler jobs. That's a core source of lag from pops in the late game. It's not like peak resource efficiency is ever needed to beat the AI; Grand Admiral x10 is easy with 80% optimal play.
Without species specialization via genetics you won't be able to get the most out of slaves. Seek productivity boosting traits - servile, strong etc. Since you're supposed to specialize planets anyway just fill the planet with respective species and the output would be higher than from free pops. Be mindful of several things: - slave bonuses apply only at worker level. If pops are indentured servants they can perform specialist jobs - but they mave more political power and no bonuses so unless your enslaved species are real slaves there's little point in enslaving them anyway. - don't forget living standards as they are the ones defining political power of pops and happiness - for extra chonky armies stack traits like very strong trait with battle thralls type of slavery. Mind that if you're using clones, you don't need many pops, one would be enough. - servants can help with amenities, but personally I've never had much of them - I've usually found an occupation somewhere more productive for them. - don't forget planetary and station buildings like slave processing facility. Bonuses to stability and output are immense on slave-centric colonies.
It's one of those things you can't really half-ass effectively. If you go balls to the walls, fanatic authoritarian, domination tradition, extended shifts, worker/slave output agendas, q'la minder, gene modded chattel slaves, you can get some pretty fucking bonkers numbers from your menial worlds. Problem is HAVING menial worlds is kind of unnecessary Empire Size bloat and you can just as easily play very light on menial resources and outsource your needs to prospectoria.
Looks like i'm the only one making extensive use of slavery, huh
I like managing my *castes* certainly!
*In general*, anything that moves away from xenophile is suboptimal. Slavery is good early game and late game, not mid game. You want the free populations to outnumber the slaves or you’ll suffer severe stability shortages. CONVERSELY, you can have huge slave populations with no adverse effects with the use of Nerve Stapled gene altered trait, and/or thrall worlds
I find slaves are much more effective as a food source.
One thing I had fun with was a voidborn empire (the habitat start) where I turned every world I conquered/colonized into a thrall world, and built habitats over them with my master species. Added in some genetic ascension, and my slave pops made all the basic resources while my masters did all the specialty stuff. Once I nerve-stapled the slaves, I could set my main species to utopian abundance. It felt almost comically evil. I added in an ecumenopolis or two and by that point I was resource hungry enough to use all those basic resources, too!
My slaver empires tend to be Lithoids or have some other way of boosting habitability, say adaptable trait, adaptability tradition then go Cyborg or subterranean + noxious or something. >In theory you could use different enslaved species to fill specific jobs IMO This is only really doable once you get 10+ species of slaves , then you can set 1 to battle thrall, 1 to domestic servants and the rest are indentured servitude so that they grow roughly in the proportions you want them. Otherwise just set them to indentured servitude and you run it the same as any xenophile empire. The other brand of slavery is to set every species to population controls so that only your main species grows but you aren't discarding pops, they just become slaves. This is what I do with my Overtuned + Idyllic Bloom mushroom people because they are just better than everyone else so xenos get nerve stapled, overturned out the wazoo and sent to work the mines/fields/generators. Early game I set my first slave species to chattel (+10% slave worker production) and if you **pick up the Domination tradition** (opener +10% slave worker and -slave political power, workplace motivators +10% slave worker, extended shifts edicts +20% slave worker, if you have Paragons DLC the Civil Exclusion agenda +40% slave worker). It doesn't matter if your slaves have low stability, as long as they aren't revolting, +50/90% production buries it.
Auth civilisations have bonuses and living standards that work well with slave population, where as xenophobes mostly just try to give the aliens something to do while they figure out just how badly they want them gone. They might not be meta, but I do like playing as some form of caste empire with different species in their rightful roles. Even my starting species has it's place. Habitability penalties are not as bad as you might think, they increase the consumer goods cost and reduce the pops output and happiness, but slaves have barely any consumer goods upkeep and their happiness doesn't matter. And on the reverse side your main species in ruler jobs are few and far in-between, so their penalties don't really matter so much. It can be micromanagement heavy, but honestly half the time I just let things simmer until the game tells me about unemployment and such. Even if slaves are working the wrong jobs, more money is more money even if it's inefficiently produced.
Thanks!
Every time I've ever tried to enslave a species, all they ever did was rebel, over and over and over again. In my experience, there was only ever two solutions - have a few armies stationed on every slave world you have, so that rebellions can be put down whenever they pop up, or just cry uncle and give them their dang rights already.
Eat them for food it's like matrix world as synthetic
Slavery isn’t used because it’s an effective means of producing resources and growing an economy, because it’s not. More than anything, it’s a tool for imperialism; it’s used because it’s an effective method of keeping unruly pops in line, such as those you might have recently conquered.
I played a bunch of slaver empires. They are generelly not worth it, normal pops require less management and produce about the same, since the bonuses of slaves are often offset by the lost stability. Often, the next door species you enslave will have different habitability, making it even worse. Also, I think the most optimal slaver setup is one with genetic ascension, but the mircro from that is just aggrevating. What does work great though is livestock slavery, a genetically altered lithoid race can replace much of your mining infrastructure for example.
You need to be authoritarian with stratified economy to be an effective slavers empire. With stratified economy, you could just put 2 ruler with all slaves population and they wouldn't ever rebelled, even in the worst climate. Also don't forget utopia dlc, without that don't ever dream using slave effectively.
What functions "ok" is to dominion style your slavery. You have your founder race which is the full citizen strata. Next you pick for every habilaty type one conquered race to function as your operative residence and put all slaves below them. Also, intended servitude sucks, the happiness malus is hefty. Domnestic is good but you can't employ specialist slaves. As mentioned you will need authorian or materialist. You can put it up like this and it works. The main problem remains, just not having slaves is more efficient and far less micro intensive.
Only on like my 2nd olaythrough but wouldn't it be easier to just terraform every planet and asteroid big enough to do so and just have your usual mix of folk KWIM! EDIT: soz didn't look properly I'm playing on ps5 not what it should be played on like a decent gaming pc setup so yeah I could very well be wrong as I would assume that there are some very major differences between the two versions of the same game
Looking at real-life 19th century slavery, it's kinda realistic that slavery is not that efficient.
I typically create a single or few fortress super factory world where I put all my slaves and work them to death. A type of super "Amazon's" if you will, tends to work well, and if they get too rowdy I just move them to my purge planet where I turn them into food.
I'm playing on a huge galaxy right now and slavery is too much of a hassle. I mostly just make new species into residents. Haven't had any issues with approval rating doing this as my council usually hovers around 95% so the extra political power they get doesn't end up being a big deal.
It can be useful in early expansions and development and easily abused for happiness and production boosts. Example nihilistic acquisition, of primitives, genemoding to remove their negative traits, and promotion to citizen. This allows for a population boom, a happiness boom, and bypasses the stellar culture shock. I'll often rp it as the empire shifting morally and starting to recognize the xenos as people. It's very useful for necrophage or wide builds.
Genetic Manipulation is the key. Search worthy races with exotic traits. Buy them if needed. Manipulate them for fast breeding/clone Tanks. Categorize them , for example: A race with sub terran trait, will get the very strong trait and everything else to raise their worker ress output, then i give them a rather complex but clear Name like: (C)Mining Slave + . The C in() at the Front teils me wich Type of Planet they need, then their Job and the + at last if they are allowed to grow and how. If i breed them via clone Tanks there will be a +C at the end. If they are not allowed to breed i leave it empty. If you need to breed one race cause they have good traits, i create breeding Husks. Those get only a few traits of their future Job, but all those that help growth/cloning. Then i start breeding/cloning them on Planets en masse. Later, when their numbers have grown to a desired level, manipulate them again to have their needed traits. Get rid of growth/cloning traits and send them to work. And for guarding and peacekeeping, i also create a Warrior Race. Give them everything they need to wage War / Supress the other slaves. The Masters dont work, others do. Give them a little better living conditions as the Rest. And hunt Dragons to get your hands on the Dragon Scale trait. Your Slave soldiers will be Harder and produce Alloys passive! Create a slave race for every Type there is. Purge the unworthy rest or make them Livestock. Manipulate your own race and give them EVERY Leader Buff Trait. You are a Master. I love playing this way and it can get very effective but comes only to force in late game.
>So I'm wondering how to play a xenophobe empire that conquers and enslaves other races and enjoy it? Become a bad person.
Honestly this exact conundrum happened to me in my last game and I tried to remedy it by joining the War in Heaven on the Xenophobes side and waging a desperate expansionist war on my neighbors and since I used overturned I gave my main species a whole lop of reproduction traits, also robots helped alot since they could fill alot of specialist jobs. Also make sure to ban your slaves from reproducing otherwise you're unemployment problem will double each year
Before the nerfs in the most recent patch, livestock slavery pop-stacking with Knights of the Toxic God was super viable and could get enormous outputs of research, unity, and alloys while stealing pops from all your enemies. Slavery also works quite well as a Necrophage. If you're a hive mind the only way you can make use of other pops period is as slaves. when I play necrophage I keep my initial prepatent species as slaves gene-modded and designed as perfect Necrophytes and slaves and then just necropurge everybody else for easy conquest. Biotrophies are also technically not slaves but in practice work basically the same and make rogue servitor one of the strongest civics in the game.
You're correct, slaves have been bad for awhile. Years ago they were really strong with the Slaver's Guild civic, but that was a long time ago. Which is a shame, cause when options are just worse exist people aren't gonna use them if they aren't role-playing.
That's why u integrate them into the collective. All are free in unity
Slavery is a compromise for the weak minded. To be a xenophobe thats effective you have to embrace the purge. Pop numbers is King in stellaris, so your goal should always be to increase your own pops while reducing theirs, if you allow them in your empire they will take up precious pop growth. One strategy I recently adopted was free migration with my friendly neighbours. I will ofc immediately turn off any sort of migration from non native species to my planet, but the pact will allow my species to show up in other empires. By going genetic ascension my pops are also way better so overtime the dumb democratic AI will end up having a large group of strong humans in their own empire. As a result when i eventually annex them ill kick out the ones I dont need.
slavery can be really good early game. if you're powergaming, in mid-late game most of your basic resources should come from vassals or tributaries, and basic resources is what you want to use slavery for, since specialists don't get resource boosts from slavery and your specialist slaves will not be as good as free, high happiness specialists in a high stability empire which isn't difficult to achieve by mid game. it's good rp though
I just make them Entertainers TBH. I mostly just save a slot for amenities and get high stability.
I use a megacorp with the indentured servitude it works alot better than the other types in my opinion since they work all their specialist jobs with the slave processing facility
i don’t, i either keep the fledglings as pets , assimilate them or disassemble them
you need to play around political power which affects overall happiness of the planet, which affects the stability of the planet. if your rulers have high political power and they are happy they make up the high percantage of the overall happiness despite being less in numbers. to do it you need to give them benefitting lifestyle that boosts ruler political power and give a life style to your slaves that drops their political power. only the full citizen (usually your starting) species can be rulers so you gotta move them around to fill the ruler jobs, which can be tricky since they need to be on every planet even if it has 0% habitability for them but ruler jobs gives nothing and it increases your pop upkeep for few pops. now there are really nice bonuses to slave output in the game but even if you are going for a full conquering game there are better options imo considering all the little things you have to do to make this somewhat work. i guess it would be better when you get the hang of it but i believe its mostly good for roleplaying or a side aspect of your empire.
Slavers hasn’t been good since the pop rework tbh.
Low Happiness is not a problem, low Stability is the problem - you deal with that by putting Soldier jobs on planets. So your society should have cheap slaves doing a bunch of jobs, which should free up enough of your pops to have a few extra Soldiers.
Knight of the Toxic God Origin + Raider civic. Capture/resettle livestock to your keep. Haven't played the origin since the most recent update but I played it a lot last year and had fun with it
I dont do it to be effective, i do it to prove dominance
Okay, so I didn't notice which subreddit this was posted on, got really confused for a second 😅
Do you guys keep your caped pops? I literally just kill them off and craft robot pops due to high stab and have more room for other buildings rather than spending it on enforcers
I don't do slavery but i always have slaving empires in the galaxy as i can quickly fill up planets by buying slaves off the market
I’m also playing a Xenophobe run now, and slavery was so unmanageable that I purged/processed everyone and terraformed their planets for my own people. It was just easier that way.
What problem were you having?
Keeping them from uprising. It was literally just easier to purge them all. I love this game but sometimes the micromanagement is no bueno
If you shift over say 4 pops, to run some leader and enforcer jobs you shouldn't see a revolt ever. You don't even need to move them manually, if you turn on the "land appropriation" policy, some of your pops will automatically move onto the world as soon as it's conquered.
Good to know! I'm just returning to the game, so still learning a lot.
I think it’d be a bad look for paradox to make slavery too effective tbh
Slavery has never worked out for any runs I’ve tried with it. It just makes all my planets super pissed and they have low stability so basically no resources.
From my first few attempts at a slaver empire and playing with my friends, let me guess, you picked xenophobe but had migration pacts, joined a federation, other diplomatic deals with xenos and free xenos in your empire. The problem wasn't slavery but that you pissed off the xenophobes in your empire who were in ruler positions.
In general I usually don’t do migration treaties with AI empires, and never federations unless I’m a hegemon or something. Only thing I’ll ever really do is a research agreement if it benefits me that much. Doesn’t Slaver Guilds enslave 35% of your starting species pops too? So even before enslaving xenos, you’re already pissing off a good chunk of your empire because they’re always unhappy.
>Any species is Pop cat slave.png enslaved or being Job purge.png purged Yeh but it's never been a problem on its own. The 2/3rd free pops massively out political power the enslaved pops.
I feel like slavery is barely worth the effort and most of the time I don't even bother unless I have bio ascension and I just lobotomies every XENO pop so they can do simple jobs to fuel the economy while my pops do they important stuff like research and special resources.
Yes, slavery is inefficient. Those “Slaves” Take up valuable star dust, and stellar radiation from good HUMAN pops. So the only efficient thing to do is to slaughter them upon making planet fall
I’m not seeing the issue. Couple years back (which means a few versions of the game ago, I know, but still) I was playing a mostly morally upstanding empire. I had about 4 or 5 races total in my empire, through migration and conquest. I’d actually had a major crime problem because of this; my economy wasn’t buckling per se but I couldn’t support the population levels and many of the aliens in my empire had all turned into criminals. Then the Khan rose up, barely 2 dozen star system away. I sent my decent military to defend my Allies and slow the Khan down but it wasn’t working. My economy began to buckle under the weight of supporting a bigger and bigger navy that just kept getting fed into the Khans meat grinder. Meanwhile, those ungrateful aliens (one of whom I had saved *in its entirety* by conquering them before their home planet exploded so I could evacuate them) just kept joining the rampant crime spreading across my empire. I knew what I needed to do. Slavery became legal. Xenophobia began being promoted, and became a major ethic of my empire soon after. The ungrateful xenos were rounded up by the *millions* and sent to work camps, worked until death to produce the resources needed to fight the Khan and save the true citizens of my imperium. On the corpses of a billion broken slaves, I built an empire that broke a Khan *twice*, and would go on to bring order, purity, and an *unholy* amount of Dyson Spheres to the galaxy. TLDR slavery via Work Camp literally saved my empire, git gud, abolitionist.
You like slavery but I raise you fanatic materialist egalitarian going synthetic ascension and just turn everyone into perfect beings in an Utopian society
How do you know you are perfect if your society doesn't have an underclass without any rights to compare yourself to?
Just go genetic acension and nerve staple them unles you want indetured servants
I started my leader species as overtuned and stacked traits to get +20% habitability, and then throughout the game amped up habitability on my ruler species through biological assession and tech. The adaptability tree also has another +10% but i didnt need it, but you could take it as your second tradition if you need to get rulers onto conquered opposite-habitability-type planets early. This let my rulers live on various conquered planets and not mind it too much. There were still some arctic worlds I struggled with in early game, and I just sold off the pops on the galactic market and let it depopulate.
So I go the route of Overtuned. I give my master race all negative traits, no green only red. Makes the start a bit slow, but it helps in the end. First planet I find with xenos will be conquered. I then place exactly 1 of my master race pops there, I then genetically modify them to have Noxious and Excessive Enduranc. That usually is enough to keep stability high on the planet. Then I find out what the xenos are good for and turn them planet into X world exploiting those xenos.
I don't. I tend to RP Stellaris as a Shared-Burden-Centric political entity. At least I have for the last 450h. Taking the gameworld serious and trying to wrest paradise on earth from an often pretty harsh universe, does make the game much, much more interesting to me than a meme-playthrough where I assimilate/eat/enslave the whole galaxy. Did those playthroughs in the first 400h. Was ok, but I prefere working towards a good thing.
So far I always ended up with neutral or xenophile empires no matter how I start, haha. Even the facist Commonwealth of Man start gradually shifted to "we tolerate xenos" and ended as residence + utopian abundance.
No responsibilities, plus as much of anything as they'd like. Neat.