Slavery’s economic bonuses should be negated or overwritten by late game technologies.

As of right now, any economy that wants to make full use of rubber plantations and have enough domestic consumer goods production (coffee, tea, sugar, etc.) is forced to either allow slavery to prevent a dependence on consumer goods imports or to create an African colony for the same.

While I agree with the devs that slavery needs some sort of bonus for less technologically-developed societies with large populations, I don’t agree that it should be the optimal option for any part of the globe in the long run. In particular, rubber plantations using slavery in the likes of the Congo Free State starter rapidly depleting the number of rubber trees due to overharvesting to meet quotas, while Malaysian rubber plantations in the same time period that relied more on organized, specialized labor produced higher total output per acre and avoided most of the bloodshed associated with the brutal African rubber trade.

The simplest solution to this problem is to do the same thing done for tobacco plantations: make violent treatment and exploitative practices increase the number of laborers required to get the same output, and give labor methods unlocked by technologies or certain laws like commercialized agriculture that increase output to be on-par with slave production methods.

This change would be extremely beneficial in particular for nations in South America, Africa, Indochina, and Oceania who have significant access to rubber, coffee, dye, and tea plantations but can’t make full use of them unless they gut themselves by using slavery.