![]() The cost to purchase said goods is simply added as a building expense and is virtually always going to be cheaper than employing paid labor, which translates into lower costs, higher profits and increased dividends for the building owners. This target SoL may not always be at the level of outright starvation but is never going to be anything but a very basic existence. Instead of paying wages, each building decides a standard of living based on factors such as laws and profitability and purchases the ‘necessary’ goods for that target standard of living. So what are those economic benefits? Well, first, it should be understood that said economic benefits are mostly for the owners of the building, meaning a bunch of wealthy aristocrats in the case of Cotton Plantations. Generally buildings will prefer acquiring slaves over hiring free laborers whenever possible for the economic benefits it brings. As an example, a Cotton Plantation in a slave state that has the capacity to employ 4000 laborers could fill that capacity with 2240 slaves and 1760 laborers, 4000 laborers and 0 slaves, or any other combination of the two less or equal to 4000. The gist of how this works is that in a state that has slaves, certain buildings (for example plantations) that employ laborers or peasants can fill each available position for those Professions with either a laborer/peasant or a slave. Slaves also aren’t just able to stop being slaves by switching their Profession to one that does offer a wage and freedom of movement.īuildings that ‘employ’ slaves also do so in a way that differs from the way they employ other Professions. For one, slaves do not get hired with the enticement of a wage and do not have the freedom to choose the place they work. With that said, let’s get into the actual mechanics of how slavery and slave pops function in Victoria 3.Īs was mentioned in the Employment and Qualifications dev diary, slaves are what Victoria 2 would have called a ‘Pop Type‘ and Victoria 3 calls a ‘Profession‘, but function in a significantly different way from other Pops. We simply believe this to be the most respectful way for us to handle this topic, as well as the way that’s most true to the game Victoria 3 aspires to be. Instead, our aim is to try and represent the institution, systems and causes of slavery, as well as the people who lived under and fought against it, as close to history as we can get it. The other, and most important reason, is that through our Pop system we are trying to represent every individual human on the planet from 1836, so what statement would we be making if we simply wrote all enslaved individuals out of history, or reduced them into an abstract set of modifiers? ![]() The first reason is that as I mentioned before, it was an important political issue of the day and was a major catalyst for several significant conflicts, most notably the American Civil War which would be bizarrely contextless if slavery did not play a significant role in the game. For Victoria 3, we don’t think these options work for us for two main reasons. Slavery is, obviously, a horrific crime against humanity and precisely for this reason, many games that have a slavery-related setting or mechanics will either leave it out of the game or abstract it into something that’s less ‘on the nose’ (for example by simply applying some form of economic bonus at the expense of decreased stability). For this reason, before I start getting into the mechanics of slavery I want to briefly explain our philosophy behind its representation in Victoria 3. Today’s subject of slavery is a rather heavy one, being both one of the most significant political issues of the Victorian era as well a story of untold suffering on a human level. ![]() ![]() It’s Thursday again, which means it’s time for another Victoria 3 development diary.
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