|
The Needs of the Dhayut Outweigh the Needs of the Few
The new strident Dhayut Kingdom was popular with the Dhayut citizens, nothing gets young Dhayut fired up like the news of from the front, particularly victories. A spontaneous Dhayut Swarm happened, troop ships turned up at Home loaded with young xenophobic warriors from the edges of the Kingdom desperate to do their part. Luckily we’d just discovered the Zhar system to the North West containing an independent colony of 3 billion Ikkuro, large big eared monkey people. The young warriors of the Righteous Swarm soon crushed them and the Ikkuro were kissing the multiple jackboots of their spider overlords as an enslaved colony.
A few years ago the Dhayut discovered a planet full of hibernating Shandar who’d avoided the ancient upheaval by hiding and sleeping through it, this must have been a common Shandar response as nearby we found another planet (Horgilleom) with “Silent Chambers of the Shandar” artifacts. This bunch weren’t even given time to wake up and collect their thoughts before being invaded, and becoming another slave colony for the glory of the Dhayut Kingdom.
It wasn’t just the Shandar who hid from the invaders though, to the south of Ackdar space a group of abandoned ships were found. On closer inspection it turned out the ships were not abandoned, they were Sluken colony ships in hibernation. When they were revived they requested refuge in the Dhayut Kingdom, a request that was approved as there was a planet in Ackdar space they could have as it blocked all expansion for one of our enemies (the Ackdarian Iskabar Empire). The Sluken ships were treated differently from the other conquered species as they had requested to join the Dhayut, and the Sluken are a comrade insect race (they’re aggresive, short, ant-like creatures), so they were given their planet to colonize (renamed Dhayut Mercy) and allowed to live free with no enslavement, the only non-Dhayut citizens of the Kingdom. They also brought a couple of cruisers with them, so they didn’t even need a System Defense Force. Separate and equal, you could say.
While small conflicts were breaking out on the edges of the Dhayut Kingdom, the heart was still peaceful and prosperous. The Private Sector had built hundreds of freighters; every colony was part of a Kingdom-wide trading network and served by a Space Port with commerce centers. Money was flowing into the Kingdom’s coffers, although tax had crept up in the main colonies to pay for the ever-expanding military. Years of prosperity and high population growth had led to a population explosion in the Dhayut Kingdom (Dhayut only, enslaved populations don’t increase)and some of the main planets were full, no room for new births. Home was up to 15 billion Dhayut, Prodigal Son (slightly larger and more hospitable than home) was now the largest colony at just over 20 billion, a few others topped out in the 5-6 billion range. The Dhayut Kingdom boasted around 80 billion Dhayut, and about 10 billion from lesser races (all enslaved except for the 200 million Sluken on Dhayut Mercy).
The population boom plus the discovery of the technology for Marshy planet colonization led to another round of expansion , five colony ships setting out from Home carrying Dhayut who were prepared to swap overcrowded Home for a new life on a squishy marsh planet. There were also some planets at the heart of the Kingdom that were good quality but not amenable to Dhayut colonization. Races in colony ships can always colonize planets of the type they are native to, so colony ships were built and loaded with Ackdarians to colonize Ocean planets at the center of the Kingdom, and Shandar used to colonize Volcanic planets.
Enslavement in the game comes with positive and negative points. Negatives are colony unhappiness (I guess from the enslaved, I doubt the Dhayut care much about the suffering) and negative diplomacy (empires don’t like you enslaving their cousins), the positive is increased revenue from colonies with slaves. It’s a sliding scale, an enslaved colony gets a 50% revenue bonus, and one that has a smaller percentage of slaves will have less.
This caused problems in the middle sized Dhayut colonies; colonies like Newhome and Junction were 90-95% Dhayut and 5-10% slaves. This was enough to bring the enslavement unhappiness hit but not enough for a revenue bonus. As unhappiness affects the colony’s economy, slavery was costing money on these colonies. (Home and Prodigal Sons were not affected as they were Dhayut-only).
The solution was either to get rid of slavery and free the slaves, or get rid of the slaves. Policies for non-Dhayuts can be set on a planet-by-planet basis, so any Colony that wasn’t benefitting from enslavement updated their policy for non-Dhayut from “enslave” to “exterminate”. As well as removing the enslavement unhappiness it also freed up space for more Dhayut breeding on previously full planets, so it was win-win really. Other than the extermination of 430 million non-Dhayut on 11 planets, I guess.
The Dhayut should really have gone for “relocate” instead of “exterminate”, that would have moved the slaves off the affected colonies to colonies that could still get revenue bonuses from slavery, but you cant make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, i guess.
Once the non-Dhayut were removed, the colonies policies were updated to not accept non-Dhayut. So we can add segregation as well as genocide onto the Dhayut list.
|