Thanks frob some good embryos for mechanics there!
@hypester
I understand your point but do you think this about every subject? Most strategy games are about war. But almost all of them completely ignore the themes of refugees, rape, killing of children, ethnic cleansing, some sort of enslavement etc, yet these are part of most wars. Does it mean you cannot make games about wars?
I think a game may include historical slavery, use mechanics and some historical elements of it, while still keeping it fairly respectful. But again this thread is not about that. Also, I'm not making a commercial product, and not one for the American market only, nor about American history specifically (which everyone seems to assume).
There are games that completely ignore these issues, but you don't want to completely ignore slavery, do you? So how is that relevant? This kind of contradiction is really quite revealing, as is your insistence that your take is fairly respectful while avoiding the lists of reasons it is not. But I can understand the aversion. It's a heavy subject, and it's much easier to just stick to your assumptions than to explore how games that put players in the roles of rapists and child killers do so, and how that affects the overall game.
In regards to the specific mechanics, I think you may be on the right track. I suspect you'll need to make larger colonies, who by nature have lower slave populations, somehow in conflict with the mid-game colonies with large slave populations, but that's also getting into the Civil War, in a way, which I suspect is another thing you'd like to avoid.
