Bad Job Priorities

[Jorrhast]

how well the system could adapt to "fixed pops" that the game can't automate until the player removes said "fixed" tag

Simple, it would treat those jobs as under minus sign(i.e. not available) and pops on them would be invisible to job selection algo.
But showing in interface who's fixed and who's not, especially in multispecies empire, would be a nightmare of UI clutter. As if there's not enough of that already...

 

[yerm]

You would have global "default" priorities and then could select specifically for each planet if you wanted to change it. Not too dissimilar to something like species rights.

 

[Atlantis Stuart]

Guys, really, why no one mentioned HOI4's production lines?

It's also basically automatic, or, at least semi-automatic. The difference is, or IMO the most misleading UI design in the current Stellaris job panel is that, you may think the more upwards the jobs are, the more they are prioritized (actually they aren't), while in HOI4 you can drag different production lines to manually set their priorities. You can also set the desired factory cap (correspond to job cap in Stellaris) which determine where the newly-spawned factories/pops go to. I don't understand why devs make the "set priority" option actually "disables" the job slot, sending pops there to other jobs, instead of queuing up or something similar, so that you won't have unemployed pops where there still have vacancies.

 

[slackerpants]

The current priority system is really annoying. If you get more pops than you do "priority jobs", you end up with unemployed pops even when there are "non-priority jobs" unfulfilled.

"Drag and drop" would be the simplest in theory, but I have no idea how well the system could adapt to "fixed pops" that the game can't automate until the player removes said "fixed" tag, which means there's just as much micro as before to managing jobs.

Dynamic job priorities that are weighted by monthly budget concerns and the market value of their produced resource would make more sense.
Maybe allow us to set empire-wide priorities that manage artificial weights for resources. Wartime may increase the market value of alloys, but if you're not participating in the war, you may not want more metallurgists.

I really like the idea of market value controlling the job priorities. Ideally the player should have little control of the jobs, except for the jobs in public sector like police/military or some clerks. Fanatic authoritaritans could have more jobs under direct control, whith even some production jobs in public sector, while some egalitarians have everything privatized. This could make trade warfare really interesting, since a rich nation could control market supply and demand, and thus control other players worker placement to some degree.

 

[kaboomz]

how many mining districts does your planet have?
i have never seen a "high quality minerals" planet with more than 2 districts