Sluken Refugee Ship

[Dereck]

I have a refugee ship full of Slukens. I read in the Galactopedia where it made it sound like the Sluken and Boskara should be avoided.

Should I use that refugee ship to include Slukens in my empire or stay clear of them?

Thanks

[johanwanderer]

In my experience, adding a race's traits into your own (by using refugee ships, conquering, etc.) only has positive effects.

[Retreat1970]

You can, but (depending on your race) Slukins will hate you. You will have a large negative happiness modifier wherever Slukins are the majority. I think they have troop and war weariness race specials (there's better), and their troop strength is 130 (out of 200 so that's not so great). They can however unlock the marshy swamp worlds if you need that. They have to be the majority on the planet though.

[Aeson]

The problem with Sluken is that they really don't like being citizens or subjects of an empire which wasn't founded by their own species, and they really don't like it if the founding species is outside their family group (i.e. insectoids). This translates to a penalty to the happiness of any colony upon which they are found, with the magnitude of the penalty being at least partly dependent upon the relative size of the Sluken and other populations.

That being said, such colonies, even if populated exclusively by Sluken, are manageable. They're a bit more likely to rebel (refuse to pay taxes) or revolt (go independent or join another empire) because they're a bit less happy than anyone else, and you're probably not going to be able to tax such colonies quite as heavily as you would have taxed a colony populated by species which were less unhappy at being part of your empire, but they are not usually much of an issue.

If you're concerned about it, you can use the Sluken colony ship to colonize a world, let some of your own people immigrate (some probably will, especially if it's a high-quality colony near your own developed worlds), and then set your empire's population policy so that the Sluken colony is set to exterminate or resettle members of the Insectoid species family elsewhere and all your other colonies are resettling, exterminating, or not accepting members of the Insectoid species family, which will force the Sluken to move to some other empire (note: it's possible that you might end up stuck with 1 million Sluken who will not leave on any colony that had a Sluken population; I tend not to resettle populations, but it's been reported, and was for a while a feature, that populations of species could not be reduced below 1 million by means of the exterminate or resettle policy so as to prevent colony loss due to careless policy settings). You could also set the Sluken colony to exterminate members of the insectoid species family, though be warned that this will damage your empire's reputation and thus your relations with the other empires in the galaxy, especially those founded by the species which you're exterminating.

Be advised that population policy does not apply to your empire's founding species and that the policy options are rather more limited than might be desired - you can only set the policy for two groups: the species family that your empire's founding species is in, and everyone else. I would therefore suggest that if you want to remove Sluken from your empire, you set your empire policy to "do not accept" whichever group includes the Insectoid family, which will prevent immigrants of species in this group from being permitted to settle on your worlds but not remove existing populations of these species from your worlds or prevent the existing populations from growing naturally, and then go to the colony or colonies with Sluken populations and change the local policy to "resettle" or "exterminate," rather than setting the empire policy as a whole to "resettle" or "exterminate."


Now, as far as whether or not you should use the colony ship and include Sluken in your empire, that's really up to you. I personally would go for it, but then I like having multi-species empires despite the potential revolutionary headache that that can cause if things become too unsettled or populations become too unhappy. You may feel differently. You may also be trying to role-play the species of your founding empire, in which case whether or not you should accept the Sluken into your empire is a question to answer by consulting your empire's default population policies - Sluken are in the Insectoid family, so if your default empire policy is to accept members of species in that family, then to role-play your founding empire's species you would probably want to colonize a world using the ship (you may also want to do so if the policy is set to enslave; after all, a colony ship of a species that your empire enslaves is a free 30 million slaves who you didn't have to conquer; exterminate would most likely result in you intentionally destroying the ship with all the Sluken on it, while not accepting them would probably mean giving the colony ship to another empire or to a pirate faction).

[stuart3]

In my experience, adding a race's traits into your own (by using refugee ships, conquering, etc.) only has positive effects.

I recall a thread some time ago in which someone wanted to commit in game genocide against Atuuks on the grounds that their effects are negative. I have tried to avoid colonising Atuuk worlds since then. Am I wrong?

[Aeson]

I recall a thread some time ago in which someone wanted to commit in game genocide against Atuuks on the grounds that their effects are negative. I have tried to avoid colonising Atuuk worlds since then. Am I wrong?

There are no species in the game whose effects are, strictly speaking, negative. However, there are species with bonuses which are more or less valuable than the bonuses of other species. The empire-wide bonuses (ship maintenance reduction, research speed bonus, espionage, mining, and maybe colony income) are granted assuming that a high enough fraction of your empire population is made up of a species which offers one or more of those bonuses (I think it's something like 20% of your empire population must be of that species in order to get the full bonus from that species). Atuuk do not offer any of the empire-wide bonuses and instead have a colony happiness bonus, which will apply to any colony upon which sufficient numbers of Atuuk reside whether or not any large fraction of the empire population is made up of Atuuk. Atuuk also have a very high population growth rate (+28%), which means that they can crowd out those species that might offer useful empire bonuses, and it is this which most likely caused whoever decided to commit in-game genocide against the Atuuk to do so. The Atuuk colony happiness bonus being less than that of the Shandar and Securan colony happiness bonuses and not a whole lot more than the Zenox colony happiness bonus probably also didn't help, nor would the fact that Atuuk troops are among the worst in the game.

Still, a high-happiness species can be taxed heavily, and a fast-growing population is useful for increasing the tax base rapidly. Despite their lack of useful empire-wide bonuses and the low quality of their troops, Atuuk have their uses.

[stuart3]

Thanks.

[Retreat1970]

something like 20% of your empire population must be of that species in order to get the full bonus

Yep and it starts at 1%.

Don't hate too much about the Atuuk. I'd rather have them than the Sluken any day, but I'm biased.