Stellaris – Slavery Tips

Useful Tips for Slavery

There are several techniques to getting the most out of slavery. So first off, everything is based on slaver guilds/indentured assets. Then it depends on how you make the most of that.

One technique, to give a clear example even though it is not current peak meta, is you go syncretic evolution. This immediately gives you access to another racial type, which will be important.

So, some more basic tips on slaves. Indentured slavery is a slavery policy in the species tab that lets slaves become specialists under certain, controllable circumstances. A hassle is indentured slaves like to weight to worker jobs, so if there are tons of worker jobs available, besides a few specialists that will spawn in at start as slaves, almost all your slaves will be workers. Since slaver guilds only turns 40% of populations on all worlds into slaves, if we have slaves being created from another process, it kind of screws with the calculation.

There are two ways species are enslaved: through a species policy, and through the civic. Slaver guilds lets you get slaves of a species that isn’t even enslaved since 40% of everyone is enslaved. It’s also how you get xenophile slavery, since it’s not enslaving on the basis of race. But if you have a species that is racially set to slavery, they will all be slaves, all the time, always. And this pumps up the number, so that 40% of your main species are slaves on top of the auto-slaves.

So with slave species policy type chattel slave slaver guild syncretics, you’ll have a ton of access to specialist slaves from your main species. But don’t forget your syncretics can only ever be workers, so you need tricks to make sure you don’t grow too many syncretics.

Remember, almost all the bonuses of workers apply to slave specialists and very few of the bonuses that specifically apply to “all specialists” such as egalitarian or meritocracy. They don’t help slave specialists work.

You don’t need syncretics if you can steal another species early. It’s great taking another player’s homeworld, then setting their whole species to slavery policy type, indentured servant slaves. When you do this you’ll notice 3 key things: Slaves can’t be rulers, enforcers, or entertainers. Or at least they weight horribly for these jobs. And even if you move main species over, they will, through the powers of slaver guilds, auto become slaves themselves most likely.

So how to fix this? 2 ways. Wait, let me explain something else first. Slaves have no worker rights which is convenient and inconvenient. For instance, say you have an enforcer you want to fire, but no free specialist jobs. Well, if you have a slave specialist, you can fire him, and he instantly becomes a worker again. Then you close enforcer job, and now the specialist will fill the old slave’s job. This can be annoying too where your jobs will get filled by normal specialists, rather than awesome powerful slave specialists. A lot of times you’ll have to close worker jobs to pump slaves up to open specialist jobs too, just a bit of extra micro.

So again, how to fix this in 2 ways:

1. Move non-slave specialists from a world that has them. They keep their old specialist designation, so I don’t think they auto-revert to slaves as likely, so it’s a good way of making sure you get an enforcer, or entertainers on a world that is spiraling into a slave rebellion! Also make sure you have the policy that auto replaces a planet’s rulers with your own species. That helps sooooo much.
2. Use the job focus star. When you click on a job, it gets a gold star, and all workers of that class auto weight towards it heavily. This is great for making sure enforcers and entertainers get filled by free specialists who might weight for researchers instead.

Another thing that you want to watch for is bureaucrats weight heavily for slave jobs but they don’t get helped at all by them, so you’re better off filling them with free specialists. But that’s almost impossible so make a resource world also your bureaucracy world, so you don’t have to worry about wasting slaves on them.

Slave artisans, metallurgists, and researchers, however… Academic privilege works on slave specialists, who also don’t get any consumer goods upkeep. So materialist/fanatic materialist is a shoe-in for slave builds. Slaver guilds/technocracy is probably the new meta. Technocracy maybe not so much, could swap that for barbaric despoiler or something.

Another way to get tons of slave specialists is just have very few worker jobs. This works great with the OP origins like void dwellers and ringworld. Void dweller has at least 1 habitat at start with only 3 worker jobs, and it’s the science one! So you have 3 robots gathering food and everyone else is a scientist, hopefully a slave scientist. Ring worlds eventually get rid of all their food jobs for a bit so that also works.

But the more you warp your strategy around taking advantage of slavery, the more you need to ask certain questions. Like, how much do you want to invest in slave efficiency? You can actually justify fanatic authoritarian, for instance. Or Strong on a pop since that helps specialist slave jobs too. Domination is still a hard sell though, real trash.

For an instance of a complete build: Syncretic, slaver guild/barbaric despoiler, authoritarian/materialist/militarist with a plan to rush tech at start and get a third civic– maybe mining guilds, police state or Aristocratic elite for a 10% stability on all planets. Will help us more than meritocracy and lets us be a dictatorship/imperium which makes it easier to please factions. Being an oligarchy and going slaver guilds/barbaric or technocratic/meritocracy also works, because you’ll never have 100% slave specialists, and 10% is 10%.

But the keys to slaves are:

1. Weighting jobs with stars
2. Controlling which jobs are available
3. Lots of micro pop herding
4. Species rights designations/slavery types

You can get a lot of control with species designations. Make an uplifted strong prole chattel slaves and the intelligent natural engineer war conquest indentured slaves and they will auto stratify, except you might have intelligent workers.

A really key thing is to keep your planets above critical stability because slave riots are death spirals, man. Real bad stuff. So get good at making sure your entertainer and enforcer jobs stay filled. Droids are very helpful.

The current meta strongly encourages going flesh is weak/synth ascension ASAP, and even setting up an ecumenopolis if you can manage it. Nothing can really compete with a slaver synth with an ecumenopolis, unless they have been massively outscaled.

For bio ascension though, I’d suggest this. You can get nerve stapled serviles, and erudite masters, without losing your serviles to synthetic modification. And rapid growing serviles means a huge base economy.

10% from servile, 10% from chattel slavery, 10% from slaver guilds, 5% from very strong (give them repugnant, unruly so you can get very strong + industrious/ingenous), 15% industrious/ingenous, 5% slave processing plant, 10% ironfisted governor, 5% authoritarian, 10% slave optimization leader, 20 – 100% from techs, 10 – 33% stability bonus = A shitload of base resources, more than you can efficiently sell or use very often. And your slave specialists are almost as good. So you can hit like, 5.2 – 5.5 metallurgist output EARLY GAME with slavers. While also being able to afford to buy 12 alloys and 12 consumer goods monthly.

If you know what you’re doing, and plan on early war though, you don’t need syncretic, do prosperous unification, it is better. But with Syncretic you start with 12 auto slaves which makes it much easier to pump up slave specialist numbers.

Also, my trick for making sure I don’t grow too many serviles? I put adaptive/nomadic on main pop. So they weight higher for planetary growth. Nomadic/adaptive/natural engineer/unruly/deviant I think. Obviously erudite/fertile/robust/deviant late game.

Synths with ecumenopolis are still better though, even for a syncretic. You can enslave synths and they get the same slavery bonuses, not for robots/droids though. Enslaved synths are crazy powerful.

I hope the above information was helpful. Happy gaming!