2.2.4 Amenities Jobs Priority Oversight?

[Siu-King**]

well, this is on 2.2.4, instead of 2.2.3 so i'm not sure where to drop this so i'll just drop this here.

Apparently as far as i read, the dev decreased the job filling priority for amenities jobs (or is it clerks? but either way for Hive Mind they are the same thing), and it ends up being like THIS in the video.

Nobody is producing amenities anymore on the planet, and tanking stability, unless there is no other job available.
And obviously the fix is to micro the jobs manually but this is gonna drive me nuts.

 

[Astax]

They went from one extreme to another. It's still a total PITA to micro.

 

[Siu-King**]

I wonder if this will get changed soon enough? or at least reverted? because currently this is unplayable

 

[SeekingEtermity]

The sad thing is, the correct default behavior is pretty obvious (put enough maintenance drones / other amenity-providers to keep amenities above 0, then fill other jobs, then fill the remaining amenity jobs) but the way the jobs system is coded right now I'm not sure if it's possible to make highly-conditional rules like that.

There's a lot of things like that you could do (if CGs start to drop into a less-than-12-months supply, prioritize jobs that produce them; if you are going to reach your food cap soon then deprioritize jobs that produce it, etc.), with enforcers being perhaps the clearest example - you basically never want enforcers unless there's crime for them to clear - but the AI is seemingly incapable of such subtleties. It makes some sense in situations where there jobs are specialist-or-higher and you can't meaningfully de-prioritize jobs since everybody wants to move up a strata if given a chance (and can't close them because people get sad), but it's really lame that the AI can't handle workers / slaves correctly, and also can't handle drones (which will calmly downgrade or upgrade as needed).

 

[Chthon]

I'm going to have to disagree here. Unless it's a specific bug for hive minds, this is not my experience with 2.2.4. I've had them fill amenities just as SeekingEtermity (SeekingEternity) said they should do as Machine Empire and Normal race. I've not encountered a negative amenities effect unless the game couldn't produce them somehow.

To be clear, I've had my menial jobs at:
2/6 Maintenance drones
1/4 Mining drones
16/16 Tech-drones (I actually needed all of these)

As you can see here, the game automatically gave me the two Maintenance drones I needed for my pop first, then started filling mining drones. It kept filling mining drones too, till it hit 4/4 and the next pop needed another amenity. Only then did I go 3/6 Maintenance drones.

So, as I said, unless this is Hive Mind specific bug with the Maintenance drone, this is not how it actually works in 2.2.4.

 

[SeekingEtermity]

I was just playing a hive mind and the AI was constantly under-assigning maintenance drones unless I forced pops into the job (I'd build a new agri district for a pop that was about to spawn, and immediately three maintenance drones would move into it even though that dropped my amenities from +2 to -7). The difference may be that my species was Repugnant. Maybe the AI just looks at how many Amenities you "ought" to have from a given number of jobs, instead of being smart and looking at how many there actually are? That would explain why it's so bad at prioritizing certain pops with obscure (or modded) traits; it's not looking at actual yields, but rather at some overly-simplified algorithm that doesn't take real conditions (either traits or other modifiers) into consideration.

 

[TheDeadlyShoe]

I was just playing a hive mind and the AI was constantly under-assigning maintenance drones unless I forced pops into the job (I'd build a new agri district for a pop that was about to spawn, and immediately three maintenance drones would move into it even though that dropped my amenities from +2 to -7). The difference may be that my species was Repugnant. Maybe the AI just looks at how many Amenities you "ought" to have from a given number of jobs, instead of being smart and looking at how many there actually are? That would explain why it's so bad at prioritizing certain pops with obscure (or modded) traits; it's not looking at actual yields, but rather at some overly-simplified algorithm that doesn't take real conditions (either traits or other modifiers) into consideration.

From my toying with the jobs system, typically its that positive traits give extra positive weight and negative traits give extra negative weight. The extra negative weight from repugnant is probably causing them to pick other jobs first.

 

[C0ldSn4p]

From my toying with the jobs system, typically its that positive traits give extra positive weight and negative traits give extra negative weight. The extra negative weight from repugnant is probably causing them to pick other jobs first.

That seems to be it. I play hive mind with specialized planet and mono-specie on them. In my resource worlds where the pop have the respective good trait I had problem with maintenance but in my forge/science worlds the menial drones with no special bonus where correctly distributed

 

[roman566]

Welcome to reality where pops are placed in jobs based on weight system. Hope you enjoy it. It's here to stay. Drag and drop? That's so 90', we are well past that hype. +/- keys are the future!

 

[Chthon]

From my toying with the jobs system, typically its that positive traits give extra positive weight and negative traits give extra negative weight. The extra negative weight from repugnant is probably causing them to pick other jobs first.

Mystery solved, it's an oversight in their attempt to make populations select jobs that they are good at it seems. Now we just have to help them figure out a good way to fix this without also ruining their work on job placement services.

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

I suggest that they Scale the job selection weighting factor by the difference between the pops’s “goodness” at a specific job and the “goodness” at that job average of the entire population on that planet.

Thus planets with no pop variety have no job biases at all from capabilities. And job biases only show up when there is Actually a reason to prefer one over another.

 

[Sigma 582]

The problem goes away if you have charismatic pops on the planet as they will prefer maintenance jobs. But if you don't - it makes every planet a micro hell where you have to unlock one job every time a pop is born.

This is annoying and I would love to see priority of maintenance jobs increased back to be filled before other worker jobs. We build maintenance jobs only when we need extra amenities anyway, so most of the time we do want them filled.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

The sad thing is, the correct default behavior is pretty obvious (put enough maintenance drones / other amenity-providers to keep amenities above 0, then fill other jobs, then fill the remaining amenity jobs) but the way the jobs system is coded right now I'm not sure if it's possible to make highly-conditional rules like that.

You're not wrong, but at some point you have to ask what the "game" is.

Managing your jobs to ensure that the right things are being produced is simply part of the game, in my view. Your job as a player is to solve these problems not through trusting the game itself to address things for you but instead by managing your build queues so the problems never come up in the first place.

I totally get the impulse to "pre-build", but I got out of the habit and found that most of the job priority problems I've heard about just completely went away afterward. If you wait until you have unemployed pops to start filling your building slots, things get much simpler to manage.

 

[Siu-King**]

From my toying with the jobs system, typically its that positive traits give extra positive weight and negative traits give extra negative weight. The extra negative weight from repugnant is probably causing them to pick other jobs first.

Would like a dev to confirm. Cause this is so obviously not what "Repugnant" is supposed to do...

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

Would like a dev to confirm. Cause this is so obviously not what "Repugnant" is supposed to do...

No need to consult a dev, it's consistent with how all traits affect job weight. Consider a multi-species empire, you definitely don't want Repugnant pops taking Entertainer jobs if there's literally any other job they can take, right?

But even assuming a single-species Repugnant empire, this behaviour causes problems only if you have a lot of available jobs that don't generate Amenities. Pops with a trait penalty will still take a job they have a penalty for if the alternative is unemployment.

So there are two solutions here:

• Get comfy with the "disable job" buttons
• Don't overbuild

 

[Siu-King**]

No need to consult a dev, it's consistent with how all traits affect job weight. Consider a multi-species empire, you definitely don't want Repugnant pops taking Entertainer jobs if there's literally any other job they can take, right?

But even assuming a single-species Repugnant empire, this behaviour causes problems only if you have a lot of available jobs that don't generate Amenities. Pops with a trait penalty will still take a job they have a penalty for if the alternative is unemployment.

So there are two solutions here:

• Get comfy with the "disable job" buttons
• Don't overbuild

LOL Mine was LITERALLY a single specie empire.

What the actual fuck is "overbuild"? 15 jobs, 15 pop, everything gets filled, 16 pop, build a district, Amenities workers get PULLED OUT instead.
Don't be ridiculous

 

[AlanC9]

Only one amenities worker gets pulled out, right? The other slot gets taken by the unemployed pop.

 

[Losttruppen]

So there are two solutions here:

• Get comfy with the "disable job" buttons
• Don't overbuild

I'm curious how the AI empires handle job prioritization. It's all well and good if a human can make sure they have just the right amount of job to pop ratios and open and close slots accordingly but if the AI empires don't know how to deal with this we will have to solve the problem for them even if it never affects how humans play.

 

[Tobasco da Gama]

The AI mostly seems to deal with this by just building exclusively Commercial Zones. If all your jobs are Clerks, you don't have to care about prioritization, I guess. >.>

 

[Siu-King**]

Only one amenities worker gets pulled out, right? The other slot gets taken by the unemployed pop.

No. Amenities job has the lowest priority of all, everything else fills up first, THEN amenities