Are clerks and merchants still garbage?

[Greykrest]

Clerks were always the absolute worst job a pop could have, and sometimes it was straight up better to be unemployed than be a clerk. With all the recent changes to clerks and merchants, I'm testing out a Merchants Guild build, with Pleasure Seekers for Decadent Lifestyle. Normal empire, not a megacorp. On the Shoulders of Giants origin.

It's 2265 and so far this seems far from bad. I've formed a Trade League and trade value is basically providing for everything. All my planets are around 90% stability. I've unlocked 5/7 Ascension Trees and am over 1200 research. I've got more energy and consumer goods than I know what to do with. Any consumer goods I don't need, I trade away or just sell for even more energy. I don't build farms, mines, or generators. Anything I need, I just buy. Apart from Commercial Zones, the only buildings I really need are research labs. Almost all my Industrial Districts focus exclusively on alloys. I've got a permanently militarized economy, which still barely puts a dent in my massive CG production, which boosts my alloys even further. In an emergency, I'll just buy even more, because even after purchasing food and minerals, I've still got enough money left over, and this is before I get my designated agri-world and mining world up and running.

I wouldn't describe myself as great at this game, but I feel like people say clerks and merchants are trash because they just compare the flat energy production per-capita versus technicians, but I feel like there's a large opportunity bonus for basically having lots of pops who don't have to be employed in mining, farming, culture, or consumer goods jobs.

This isn't a meta-build by any means. I didn't go Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers. I'm not trying to compete with people who have a ringworld by 2250, and I didn't focus particularly on tech. But is this going to slow down as I move into the mid- and late-game and the inefficiencies will start to show? I'm not claiming this is an awesome build. I genuinely want to know where trade value, clerks, and merchants stand in 3.1.

 

[Arrnea]

Merchants are great, Clerks are still garbage.

 

[sillyrobot]

Merchants are quite good. Clerks are fine if you've reverted the pop growth mechanics and have pop to spare. Otherwise, they have cooled off and are just garbage as opposed to hot garbage.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Clerks are the thing you put a couple of pops per planet in to keep just positive amenities.

 

[SaintD]

If you're playing with limited pop growth, clerks are garbage. You need maximum efficiency for every pop you have, because they're limited.

If you turned that garbage off.....meh. If you're playing a trade empire that's optimized to do so, it may not be super efficient but it's easy to actually play by just letting pops pile into merchant and clerk jobs to produce all your energy and most of your consumer goods.

 

[Greykrest]

If you're playing with limited pop growth, clerks are garbage. You need maximum efficiency for every pop you have, because they're limited.

If you turned that garbage off.....meh. If you're playing a trade empire that's optimized to do so, it may not be super efficient but it's easy to actually play by just letting pops pile into merchant and clerk jobs to produce all your energy and most of your consumer goods.

So clerks and merchants are still always worse than employing pops separately in mines, farms, generators, culture, and consumer goods production?

 

[drawar]

The clerk is basically good: +4 energy +2 amenities.
A basic technician produces 6 energies.

Depending on its trade policies, the clerks can also produce unity and/or consumer good. He is therefore very versatile and he does not need any resources for his work.
It is also useful for absorbing new pops while waiting to find them a job.

The real problem is that there are no technologies to increase the production of "trade value" and that few bonuses increase the amenities.

Afterwards, I think the trade value system needs a little overhaul, I find it very annoying and frustrating, especially as the pirate that can appear are just ridiculously weak.
It is not a really useful and pleasant mechanic. Especially since it makes business empires less interesting, because during a war you can easily lose a lot of income if an important road is cut.

Afterwards, this is also due to the absence of a logistics system all planets and structures must be connected by a stargate, except that galactic laws prohibit the transport of trade value by stargate ... XD

 

[evilcat]

Merchants are ok. Especially early game. And if you fallow the path Trade Federation, Mercantile Tradition, Trade Guild Civic, Habitats you will have a lot of Unity, unlock tradition and then switch to something more output oriented.

However with capacity overload edict and Energy nexus your Technicans will produce 15 energy or maybe 30 (depends how many repeatable techs)
From Clerk you can have 5TV and 2ameti and possibly +140% mod if you spec for it. But specing in TV is much harder than energy.
For example +30% from President of level 5 Trade Federation is much harder than 1 edict.

But... it could be more interesting to use Master Artificiers, Merchant Guilds, Utopian Abundance (or Decand lifestyle) and instead of TV from clerks, get from everything else.

 

[Surimi]

So clerks and merchants are still always worse than employing pops separately in mines, farms, generators, culture, and consumer goods production?

A merchant has a base production of 12 trade and 5 amenities. Stacking easily obtainable bonuses can easily get that up to 20 trade.

With the trade league policy, that translates into 10 energy, 5 consumer goods, 5 unity (7 with merchant guilds) and 5 amenities from a single job.

Granted, that one job requires an entire building slot but it's still an incredibly impressive job, and you can get to these numbers almost immediately (within a few years of the game starting) without having to research any tech.

Long term, the specific jobs will benefit more from tech and edicts and the advantages of merchants start to diminish. But they're still extremely pop-efficient and since you can create them all on the same planet with a single planet specialization it makes for a very streamlined economy. I'd also add that having a strong early game is, in and of itself, a huge advantage, as it means you'll inevitably be in a better position come mid-game.

If you're playing void dwellers (or just using a lot of habitats with the voidborne perk) it's also very efficient use of habitats since they can't support a big population anyway.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Merchants are great, they will put out a lot more than an energy worker and they will give you amenties.

If you are running slaves they count as leaders which means they have a LOT LOT more political power than an energy worker.

Clerks are excellent early game and get worse later on.

In a standard game you get 3 planets.

You should be running science on ALL 3 planets, not just on your capital. Clerks help here as to run science on all 3 worlds you will be building housing districts.
You don't have any other jobs, no mining, no energy workers, no farmers because you NEVER build those districts.

At this stage of the Game you get all your food from starbases and all your minerals from mining bases and all your energy from Trade.

Since your only building housing + industry on those worlds you are ready to create 3 arcology as soon as you hit the tech.

You run Merchants on all the lower Habitat worlds and settle everyone back to our three planets.

They can sit as clerks because we don't want to create other jobs for them.

Then you can move them into other jobs once the arcology rush is complete.

 

[Ryika]

Merchants are great, they will put out a lot more than an energy worker and they will give you amenties.

If you are running slaves they count as leaders which means they have a LOT LOT more political power than an energy worker.

Clerks are excellent early game and get worse later on.

In a standard game you get 3 planets.

You should be running science on ALL 3 planets, not just on your capital. Clerks help here as to run science on all 3 worlds you will be building housing districts.
You don't have any other jobs, no mining, no energy workers, no farmers because you NEVER build those districts.

At this stage of the Game you get all your food from starbases and all your minerals from mining bases and all your energy from Trade.

Since your only building housing + industry on those worlds you are ready to create 3 arcology as soon as you hit the tech.

You run Merchants on all the lower Habitat worlds and settle everyone back to our three planets.

They can sit as clerks because we don't want to create other jobs for them.

Then you can move them into other jobs once the arcology rush is complete.

This seems quite unsustainable to me. It's already difficult to get enough minerals to spam the infrastructure required for merchants on the guaranteed expansions, and you want to spam laboratories and use clerks instead? While saving 60k minerals for 3 Ecus? How's that supposed to work? Where are all those minerals coming from?

 

[blahmaster6k]

One of the great parts about merchants is that trade value is not a resource, and is not affected by habitability. As a merchant empire, you can colonize low habitability worlds and just fill them with commercial zones (or administrative offices, they don't care about habitability either) and have these otherwise poor planets be very productive as well as giving additional growth. Remember to turn off the clerk jobs though, they're still inefficient.

 

[Dragatus]

In the early game Merchants are superb. With +12 TV they produce double the Energy of Technician and on top they provide 5 Amenities. Very much worth it, even at the increased CG upkeep. If you go the Mercentile route you can get 9 Energy and 1.5 CG out of them, so they pay for themselves and two workers/one specialist. Later they fall off as a Technician goes up from 6 to 11.2 Energy, but they're still better. Especially if you have Merchant Guilds and they give you Unity on top of everything else. I know Unity gets a bad rep as "useless", but that's a midgame thing. In the early game Unity, particularly bonus Unity, is great for either getting Supremacy before everyone else or for getting another tradition first without causing you to lag too far behind on Supremacy.

Clerks on the other hand are almost worth it at the very start of the game and then become increasingly bad over time. Use them only if you really need the Amenities they provide.

 

[Millbot]

Merchants are pretty good for the same reason that entertainers are good. You need amenities and unity anyways and it's a job that does both. Need to go and check everything, but I want to say you still get one or two merchants on the planets of most empires but Lem has changes some things. Anyways, they are also useful in that habitability doesn't matter and if you can keep them happy, that can be a good boost to your stability. Funnily enough, with a merchant build they will often be your sole rulers because it ends up not really being worth having administrators when you have a buttload of merchants cranking out unity and amenities.

Clerks are kind of meh. You almost always have a better use for the pops in them. So usually they are placeholders to keep a fresh pop (be that refugee, bought or created) happy and employed until you can get a better job up and running. I say this because you're going to have those jobs on hand and usually unfilled if you go for optimizing things.

I'll admit clerk really suffers as the game goes on and you get more and more techs to make alternative jobs just a better deal.

Honestly, I'm hoping the custodians team takes a crack at the various trade mechanics because we probably should have something that boost trade value at a similar rate as raw resource output. Clerks should be the preferred worker strata job for megacorps and be on par with other worker jobs for normal empires that have merchant guilds civic (well maybe even be the preferred worker job).

 

[mial42]

Merchants with a focused build (mercantile traditions/merchant guilds/thrifty/commercial zone spam) are extremely strong right now. Unlimited energy/CGs/unity as soon as you get a trade federation. Clerks... may as well have a couple if you're min-maxed for merchants anyways and have all those commercial zones I guess. I use a mod that removes them from city districts.

 

[Strangedane]

Clerks were always the absolute worst job a pop could have, and sometimes it was straight up better to be unemployed than be a clerk. With all the recent changes to clerks and merchants, I'm testing out a Merchants Guild build, with Pleasure Seekers for Decadent Lifestyle. Normal empire, not a megacorp. On the Shoulders of Giants origin.

It's 2265 and so far this seems far from bad. I've formed a Trade League and trade value is basically providing for everything. All my planets are around 90% stability. I've unlocked 5/7 Ascension Trees and am over 1200 research. I've got more energy and consumer goods than I know what to do with. Any consumer goods I don't need, I trade away or just sell for even more energy. I don't build farms, mines, or generators. Anything I need, I just buy. Apart from Commercial Zones, the only buildings I really need are research labs. Almost all my Industrial Districts focus exclusively on alloys. I've got a permanently militarized economy, which still barely puts a dent in my massive CG production, which boosts my alloys even further. In an emergency, I'll just buy even more, because even after purchasing food and minerals, I've still got enough money left over, and this is before I get my designated agri-world and mining world up and running.

I wouldn't describe myself as great at this game, but I feel like people say clerks and merchants are trash because they just compare the flat energy production per-capita versus technicians, but I feel like there's a large opportunity bonus for basically having lots of pops who don't have to be employed in mining, farming, culture, or consumer goods jobs.

This isn't a meta-build by any means. I didn't go Shattered Ring or Void Dwellers. I'm not trying to compete with people who have a ringworld by 2250, and I didn't focus particularly on tech. But is this going to slow down as I move into the mid- and late-game and the inefficiencies will start to show? I'm not claiming this is an awesome build. I genuinely want to know where trade value, clerks, and merchants stand in 3.1.

Whoever told you merchants are bad have been drinking heavily.
Merchants have never been bad, and clerks are still shit.

 

[Greykrest]

Especially if you have Merchant Guilds and they give you Unity on top of everything else. I know Unity gets a bad rep as "useless", but that's a midgame thing. In the early game Unity, particularly bonus Unity, is great for either getting Supremacy before everyone else or for getting another tradition first without causing you to lag too far behind on Supremacy.

When people say unity and ascension perks are "useless," is that because we're talking about a competitive multiplayer meta?

 

[Ryika]

I don't think Unity has a rep as being useless in general, but rather a rep as not being worth focusing on through conventional means. As a generic non-gestalt empire, you already get a lot of unity passively through Entertainers and Administrators, and your best bet to add more would be culture workers, which are really weak, and require you to work fewer researchers which ultimately just give you more bang for your buck.

But when you have access to high-throughput generators that don't require too many sacrifices, such as forming a trade league or the old technocracy civic, or if you're aiming for a specific timing attack, that's a very different situation.

Of course, the "dead end" problem is still there in either case.

 

[GuardianGI]

Saying that merchants produce +12 TV is weird since thrifty is such a mandatory perk for a trade run. Most species perks are useless since they add a small percentage that stack additively with other modifier so for example that +10% intelligence perk actually boosts research by less than ~5% in the mid game when you have +100% research bonus modifiers. Even less when you have a large multi-species empire.

Thrifty on the other hand is always +25% bonus to trade since it adds a flat +3 TV to merchants which gets increased with trade modifiers.

 

[theBigTurnip385]

Saying that merchants produce +12 TV is weird since thrifty is such a mandatory perk for a trade run. Most species perks are useless since they add a small percentage that stack additively with other modifier so for example that +10% intelligence perk actually boosts research by less than ~5% in the mid game when you have +100% research bonus modifiers. Even less when you have a large multi-species empire.

Thrifty on the other hand is always +25% bonus to trade since it adds a flat +3 TV to merchants which gets increased with trade modifiers.

agreed a Merchant produces 15.5 base
you are forgetting the base 0.5 that leaders produce.

However its more because there are guaranteed trade bonus that you get basically right away.

You could start the game with a 40% boost.
You finish the merch tradition tree 20% boost.
You designate the planet the 20% boost
Stability another 15% -> 30% boost depending on what you have taken.

that means your merchant is producing 30 trade.

It takes a lot of tech for an energy worker to get to that.

In co-op multiplayer the Trade output of the merchant goes even higher.

Since if 3 of you running trade form a trade fed.

10% of that merchants trade is given to every other member in the trade fed via the free commercial pacts.

so in the case of a 3 person trade federation.

The Merchant is now producing 30 trade plus another 6 trade being given to the federation partners, for a total trade output of 36.