Slave armies?

[Noyyau]

Playing Gremak and I'm at the point when I have excess population and want to reduce the numbers of some species, particularly the Enfi (annexed the Yoral and obtained a Marauder planet with Teros, so I have plenty of 3-labor population that also make some coin and science).
Forced Labor (and upgraded with Chattel Pharmaceuticals) is nice and useful, though it needs to be used sparingly to avoid accumulation of excessive unhappiness).
Coincidentally I'm also ready to invade a neighbour or two, so I thought that those masses of Enfi could be conveniently expended as shock troops... but apparently not?
Normal populations do participate in combat, I must have missed that slaves do not?
I had an entire fleet of transports full of Enfi over a planet and only the few tanks in my capture-carriers were listed in the planet invasion window.

As a side note, I haven't gone full slavery on every alien due to the impossibility of enslaving the minors like Pell and Spicemongers. Nice balance decision but certainly annoying for a traditionalist Gremak! Good thing "my" Glitok is more pragmatic.
Enslaving everyone would make these useful critters completely and permanently angry and therefore useless. Also Pell is providing almost half of my total science output...

P.S. Not being able to "utilize" the Enfi, I guess I'll have to use the soon-to-be-conquered Humans as my expendable shock troops, I certainly don't want those pests on my future real estate!

[emky]

Yeah... This is a case of "put them on trade ships in the corner of your empire and forget about them. Or disband the ships while they're populated just to get rid of them. Gremak's really hard to play because you can only barely use their slavery mechanics.

[zenopath]

You realize you can just force labor or experiment on your slaves right? Best solution is to grab a big planet like Tyr and just ship all the slaves there. Make it nice, maybe, like lot of markets, (so they don't rebel while waiting their turn) and then just systematically experiment on the slaves one by one, turn by turn.

The best thing is that the forced labor or experiment penalties fall off over time so you only need to put up with the consequences 30 turns or so.

[Noyyau]

Yeah... This is a case of "put them on trade ships in the corner of your empire and forget about them. Or disband the ships while they're populated just to get rid of them. Gremak's really hard to play because you can only barely use their slavery mechanics.

I do indeed have a couple dozen transports filled with Enfi, parked in an uncolonized system (mainly to avoid messing up the ship selection on systems with actual useful ships passing through), waiting to decide what to do with them. What is this, Mass Effect and the Quarians?
I don't really intend to disband them, that would be a total waste (of metal for the ships, and my time doing it).

You realize you can just force labor or experiment on your slaves right? Best solution is to grab a big planet like Tyr and just ship all the slaves there. Make it nice, maybe, like lot of markets, (so they don't rebel while waiting their turn) and then just systematically experiment on the slaves one by one, turn by turn.

The best thing is that the forced labor or experiment penalties fall off over time so you only need to put up with the consequences 30 turns or so.

I know and do use the forced labor, it is very useful!
In the early game, it's the game mechanic that defines the Gremak and allows them to survive against the other races with better base populations.
In the beginning I had pondered going full-slavery, but my first colony happened to be Pell, and those pesky non-enslavable plants were (and still are) quite important for my total science output. Then I also found Waterless and the SpiceMongers, also non-enslavable and quite useful.
By using forced labor on other aliens, these guys do get quite upset, and while the SpiceMongers I put on Market-planets and probably will have enough happiness to not notice, the Pell, science being the only useful thing they do, are on a Labs planet (and a few Farms, Pell happened to have Supergrain too) and that lone Market isn't enough to compensate empire-wide forced labor.

Now I'm about in the middle of the tech tree, with more population that my neighbours though slightly behind in tech, fighting a constant border war against those neighbours.
Annexed the Yorals and have available enough Teros and Haduir populations, attempted to make them work non-enslaved to get the maximum of their stats.
Gaia (Tyr) I have found and colonized, though it has only one market (all planets get one) and the rest is factories! Worked by Yoral and Teros, who replaced the original Enfi, it's my best shipyard (there's two other factory planets, though with fewer maximum pop and therefore slightly less productive).
Those replaced Enfis are the ones now in the refugee fleet, which I thought I could use as expendable shock troops.

What I'm now trying to figure out is if it's possible to combine some forced labor with also keeping other populations non-enslaved and not in constant rebellion.
If I were to go the full-enslaving route, what would change?
Pros: no more unhappiness, forced labor and experiments all the time everywhere.
Cons: lose the "native" money and science from the enslaved populations, and their 3rd labor too. Which I guess would be compensated by the boosts of forced labor and experiments. I could scrap a few labs and put up more markets to compensate the money loss.
It would also make every other alien empire hate me, but hey, only the Yorals were friendly and I annexed them, everyone else hates me already!
I would also lose the science from the Pells (the whole planet will eventually be protesting), but I suppose it will be compensated by experiments empire-wide (now that I have the population to do that).
Ironically that means that Enfi are actually more useful as production slaves compared to any other slave alien (3 labor against the capped 2 of slaves). Which means I actually have to enslave and depopulate those Yorals and Teros I worked so hard to spread and keep happy! And replace them with the Enfi I had just evicted.
Also fill up every place with as many Gremak as possible, using the slaves on non-production planets only to fill up what the Gremak can't inhabit.

Pity, I was about to conquer a Phidi planet, but as slaves they're pretty much useless.

Hmm, I guess the hardline conservative Gremak aristocrats are about to stage a palace coup and replace the current Emperor... which is the Gremak way of life and politics, is it not?

[gaerzi]

The morale and diplomatic hits, especially when you have non-enslavable/harmonizable populations, is why I tend not to use this game mechanic when I get the Gremak or the Tinkers. (I like letting the choice of empire random when I start a game, to avoid always falling back on the same few tricks, but I still usually end up doing just that anyway.) The drawbacks just don't seem worth the cost. And I feel like the production and science boosts you can get from sacrificing slaves aren't big enough. In the early game, they're quite significant but that's when you need as much pop as possible the most. In the late game, it's a drop in the ocean. Oh well. I don't really like playing bad guys anyway.

[zenopath]

Honestly the whole slavery thing isn't tremendously useful after early game. It is probably easier to simply not use slaves after you depopulate your Enfi, but, as a challenge mode, full slavery can be done. The best solution is pharma bliss tech... drugged slaves don't feel pain.

Its interesting to note that both the penalty for enslavement/forced labor, and the bonus for liberating slaves is tempory. It sort of means that you can at any time liberate the slaves you had in the early game for a temporary morale boost across all your worlds, this is kind of useful during a war, and once the war is over, and you've properly put markets and shipped population around, re-enslave everyone and start up the experiments.

[Noyyau]

Going full slavery has been painful, morally and economically.
Income has plummeted: loss of productive population, maintenance of extra Marauders on the planets, maintenance of the fleets of transports to ferry around the newly conscripted armies of "former citizens". New Markets are built on the bones and blood of "former citizens".
On the other hand, science has kept up, thanks to the use of "specimens" every turn, warship production has even increased, and the war is going well: the planets I want to conquer are drowned in unending waves of "ablative troops".
So, now I have the answer to the original question: how to create a slave army?
1: be Gremak, enslave everyone
2: bring Transports over your "recruiting" planet(s)
3: "Liberate" your "recruits"
4: load the "freed" population onto the Transports in the same turn
5: re-Enslave those who didn't fit onto the Transports
Bonus: this also works on previously rebelling/protesting populations. Once enslaved, when "liberated" they are, for that brief moment, still docile and "free", to be loaded onto Transports and be counted as "free" for the purposes of planetary invasions.

The Gremak of course don't care in the slightest about Morale issues with slavery. All the other populations are reaching about -1000 in total anger.

...
This is the most evil game of SiS I've ever played. Even the Tinkers, with their Harmonization of anything that moved, I didn't feel as evil, guided as they are by their own set of principles and morality.