I always found it funny this seems to be hard baked into the game. Even if you never touch the race content, what pops up in brothels always stuck out. "Your citizens prefer white girls like x," which by default means your white slaves will always preform better than any other race. If you wanted to min max, you'd just have every slave be white. I wonder if the original dev did that.
Yup, the innate 2-point bonus for white girls is FCDev's original work. So is the innate bonus for redheads with freckles, so I guess we know what his type was...
The answer to most of this besides the events that play where it's sometimes unavoidable, the player can always just opt into Paternalism, which seems to be pretty easy to get if all of your slaves are educated and happy. [...] Being a slave is actually better than fending for yourself out in the slowly dying world.
It's possible to play a paternalist slave owner as "not quite evil" if you are very careful (accepting only voluntary enslavement, setting rules to prohibit slave on slave rape, skipping the few events that have no true consensual option, and so on)...but the world around you remains pretty screwy regardless of your actions. If you take paternalism, your rival will take degrationism, so you'll always have your neighbors' behavior to remind you just how bad things are. It's a dark game...there's no avoiding that.
I feel like I should also point out that you
could play with a low minimum slave age and children who you don't abuse too. Keep them around, dress them modestly, educate them, but wait until they're whatever age of consent your society prefers before you have sexual contact with them, like any respectable person would. But that's not going to keep folks from freaking out from the fact that the game will totally let you fuck them if you want to play as a kiddie diddler. The Free Cities are all about freedom of choice (for the slaveowner).
Mix that with Paternalism, and you basically have slavery as little more than a formality, with the slave-owner being basically just an anchor point for the slaves to safely return to in their daily lives.
I mean, this basically reads as "I am the leader of a literal sex cult, but I'm nice to my sex slaves once I brainwash them, so it's ok." Not trying to diss your idea of fun (Chattel Religionism is a terrific FS with a ton of great flavor content...one of the best in the game), but that's
also pretty fucking creepy and dark, even if it is an awesome power fantasy.
This is turning into a game of Stellaris with playing around with traits and edicts.
I'm going to go ahead and take that as a huge complement for the game. The FS and policy system is great, and it really lets you play with how you want your arcology to look, feel, and act.
