I've long found it slightly annoying that the AI only ever seems to assign the "indentured servitude" status to its slaves. Looking through the file at "common/species_types/slavery_types" it wasn't too hard to see why.

The base factor for "indentured servitude" was set to 30 while the base factor for the other types was set to 1. And only a couple of traits were being taken into consideration - if a species doesn't have "trait_very_strong" its factor for becoming a battle thrall was being set to 0. If it wasn't "trait_charismatic" its odds of becoming a domestic servant were set to 0.

So, I spent a little bit of time trying to fix the math. I'm still play-testing it to verify that it works as intended. But here are my thoughts on how I set it out.


So first I evened out the base odds. For each type I set the base factor to 50 (livestock got a base factor of 10 to make them much less likely)

Then I decided to create a framework of baseline modifiers. I figured for each class, there could be "absolute disqualifiers", traits that make an assignment 1/10th as likely, 1/4th, 1/2, 2x, 5x, 10x. Then to keep it kind of random, I decided to batch the traits for each modifier. So the framework for that looks like this:

Then it was just a matter of figuring out whether various traits would make a role assignment more or less likely. Here's my initial sort of most of the basic traits along with a few critical bonus traits like "noxious" or "psionic"

I tried to break things up a bit, so that some combinations of traits would lead to stacking of multipliers, others would cancel themselves outs, and some combinations wouldn't be additive (talented + quick learners are on the same tier, so having both is the same as having either) So, filled out for domestic servants my list would look like this:

It was kind of fun thinking about some of the factors that might be influential. Like I figured both sedentary and nomadic would double the likelihood of being assigned the "livestock" category - since normadic creatures are more easily herded and sedentary ones are more easily farmed. Being docile is a beneficial trait in game terms that'd still make you more likely to get eaten. Though being unruly is a penalty in game terms that'd make you even more likely to get munched. I could see going a different way. Given how frequent cannibalism is in nature, I'm not sure about the assumption that they wouldn't eat their own. But with a framework in place, it'd be easier to tweak. And by "renormalizing" the values I should see more randomness in the assignments: