What would be nice is if the 'unenployment' and 'Housing' icons were always visable
Green: You have room to fill.
Amber: exactly full
Red: out of housing/jobs
Can we get rid of pops auto-promoting?
- Thread starter AlazkanAssassin
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What would be nice is if the 'unenployment' and 'Housing' icons were always visable
Green: You have room to fill.
Amber: exactly full
Red: out of housing/jobs
There is a simple solution: New buildings have their job slots closed by default.
I can't believe there are people against this. Why invest upgrade when I don't want to fill it now? Silly! What, do you guys actually wait until there are 3 unemployed pop to upgrade your research lab? Stupid! As it is right now, I have to keep tabs on when a building will be completed and temporarily disable jobs from the specialist strata until that building gets completed, the unemployed specialist fills the new job, THEN i disable some of that new jobs and put the rest of the specialist back in their old building. Otherwise, the game randomly pulls my workers to fill in those specialist job.
Here's an example: I have 2 Colonists specialist, 1 Clerk, and 2 Technicians in a colony, and I am building a Holo Theater. When that building is done, if I just leave it then 2 workers will be pulled up leaving me with just 1 technician, while the setup I want is 2 Colonist, 1 Entertainer, and 2 Technicians. The new building will suck 2 jobs to specialist strata immediately upon completion and I can't put the specialist back down to Technician without it sitting useless for a long time. So what do I need to do? I have to disable 1 Clerk and 1 Colonist job so there are 2 unemployed pop that the new building will prioritize sucking in, so after I have 2 Entertainer, I can then safely disable 1 slot of that job without ruining the worker job set up. But unemployed pop are useless pop so I need to do this as close to the building completion as possible, and when there are multiple colonies or lots of other stuffs to do, I will occasionally forget to check and then missed my chance.
If the new job slots are closed by default, then I can use the "building complete" notice to then manually adjust my new job set up making that notice actually useful instead of a noisy useless pop up.
I can't believe there are people against this. Why invest upgrade when I don't want to fill it now? Silly! What, do you guys actually wait until there are 3 unemployed pop to upgrade your research lab? Stupid! As it is right now, I have to keep tabs on when a building will be completed and temporarily disable jobs from the specialist strata until that building gets completed, the unemployed specialist fills the new job, THEN i disable some of that new jobs and put the rest of the specialist back in their old building. Otherwise, the game randomly pulls my workers to fill in those specialist job.
Here's an example: I have 2 Colonists specialist, 1 Clerk, and 2 Technicians in a colony, and I am building a Holo Theater. When that building is done, if I just leave it then 2 workers will be pulled up leaving me with just 1 technician, while the setup I want is 2 Colonist, 1 Entertainer, and 2 Technicians. The new building will suck 2 jobs to specialist strata immediately upon completion and I can't put the specialist back down to Technician without it sitting useless for a long time. So what do I need to do? I have to disable 1 Clerk and 1 Colonist job so there are 2 unemployed pop that the new building will prioritize sucking in, so after I have 2 Entertainer, I can then safely disable 1 slot of that job without ruining the worker job set up. But unemployed pop are useless pop so I need to do this as close to the building completion as possible, and when there are multiple colonies or lots of other stuffs to do, I will occasionally forget to check and then missed my chance.
If the new job slots are closed by default, then I can use the "building complete" notice to then manually adjust my new job set up making that notice actually useful instead of a noisy useless pop up.
So now every time you build a building you have to go in and micro the jobs to open. That is just introducing a HUGE amount of unneeded micro.
It's not micro, it's empire management. Proper Paradox Style Empire Management. If this is too much micro for you then you are not fit to play paradox games. Go play Total War or something.
When management requires lots of unnecessary steps (i.e. extra micro) to accomplish an objective, it’s not really a management problem, it is a UI problem. I’m not using my time to make additional, meaningful decisions, which is the point and fun of 4x/GSG. I’m using my time fighting the UI to implement those decisions.
We do have a problem though. I just explained to you all the steps I do to manage my colonies. What are your solutions then? I'd like to hear if you have better ideas.
My fixes:
1) Add ability to disable auto promote on a per planet basis. New pops promote as normal. Ideally this is a checkbox or part of the decision interface.
2) Allow player to assign relative priority of jobs within a strata on a per planet basis, perhaps as up/down arrows next to existing +/-. Cross strata management is done with fix 1 and existing systems.
The goal is to help players ‘set and forget’ a build queue by letting them make worker decisions in advance and minimize how much they need to keep checking back and micromanaging pops as a planet’s population grows.
1) Add ability to disable auto promote on a per planet basis. New pops promote as normal. Ideally this is a checkbox or part of the decision interface.
2) Allow player to assign relative priority of jobs within a strata on a per planet basis, perhaps as up/down arrows next to existing +/-. Cross strata management is done with fix 1 and existing systems.
The goal is to help players ‘set and forget’ a build queue by letting them make worker decisions in advance and minimize how much they need to keep checking back and micromanaging pops as a planet’s population grows.
That seems like a somewhat dubious example to me
(Miners vs Clerks? Miners definitely win. Technicians vs Clerks? That can easily be a per-planet situational matter.)
Disabling auto-promote is good, I like that idea, but I don't get the "new pops promote as normal" part, particularly how it meshes together with disabling auto-promote at the same time. Can you explain further on this?
I think this will only work when you can set the priority of jobs before the actual building providing that job gets built. That will clutter the already small, cluttered UI.
Could we at least stop employed workers from auto-promoting before unemployed specialists can take the jobs that I built for the unemployed specialists?
It's not clear to me that having two entertainers and one technician rather than two technicians and one entertainer for a little while is worth my time to care about.
(Actually, I'm not convinced that holo-theaters are worth building at all, but that's another topic.)
This is micro. If you want to do it, there are fiddly ways around it like disabling existing jobs just before the building completes. However, adjusting your decision making can eliminate all need for micro here. Make sure you have a strong worker base so losing 2-5 on one planet won't tank your whole economy, and if you're looking at a resource near 0 income, go out of your way to establish a stockpile so you can absorb these moments. Put some real thought into your overall plan and adjust how you play and set up your plans so the automation works for you instead of fighting it.
The pops and planets finally feel like they're alive and have needs and behaviors that impact high level empire decisions. Adding micro to control these smaller details isn't the answer.
As I said above, most problems can be solved by making more intelligent macro level decisions. Introducing more micro so that you don't have to put more thought into your worker/specialist balance and job/pop balance isn't the answer.
I think this is too simplistic. I'd want a priority system to be a bit more nuanced, like sliders for each stratum, indicating the relative weight between jobs in the stratum. For example, I may decide I want to keep 2x as many pops in miner and farmer jobs than the number in clerks. So the assignment system attempts to keep the percentage of miners/farmers double the percentage of clerk jobs filled. Pretty similar to wundergoat's idea, just with different UI.
I actually really like this idea... Would you mind if I steal it and maybe someday put it into a mod if it's possible?
The check box idea is good so people who do not want to bother to micro can still have their way to play while not denying micro to those like me who like to do it. Maybe even reintroduce sectors keeping a percentage of their resources so you can have even less micro, but I like the (almost) total control we have right now, and I want even more.
That and slavery. If you're preventing a pop from moving up in social strata, they're basically enslaved. If you have slave guilds, you don't even need xenos for this. I think I recall seeing a few people complaining about the slavery ratio causing issues, since they didn't have enough non-enslaved pops to move upwards into specialist jobs.
That kind of thing is a good demonstration of how these systems can make different empires play so different.
I agree with pretty much everyone that seems to have an unpopular opinion at the moment.
Here is my somewhat unique take in extension to that:
The biggest problem i see with this is that i find myself waiting for the red jobless icon and then going to that planet and constantly going up once on the clerk section of my low level workers section. It should realize that if no jobs are available because its removed in quantity to lowest priority, always take the last job no matter what.
What way you are setting actual priorities, presently you are not setting a priority, you are setting a max/min value that pretends to be a priority. In reality its not at a priority at all.
I think its so you can allow unemployed pops to research and stay away from your clerk or other jobs if you desire by setting a max. That is the reasoning. Most people including myself wont use it that way very often. What this needs to be is a mix of both systems.
min/max values on each bar.
with a priority for fill over pops.
And the ability to define always Y jobs as unassigned.
I bet the logic for the computer would run quicker also for the Ai driven empires.. which is one of the reasons why later game empires presently just crash and burn badly. I have a state of the art intel processor designed for this exact wall type computation the software requires and even i cant get past 300 years into the game presently, it just lags to badly. (this is on an 800 star galaxy).
Here is my somewhat unique take in extension to that:
The biggest problem i see with this is that i find myself waiting for the red jobless icon and then going to that planet and constantly going up once on the clerk section of my low level workers section. It should realize that if no jobs are available because its removed in quantity to lowest priority, always take the last job no matter what.
What way you are setting actual priorities, presently you are not setting a priority, you are setting a max/min value that pretends to be a priority. In reality its not at a priority at all.
I think its so you can allow unemployed pops to research and stay away from your clerk or other jobs if you desire by setting a max. That is the reasoning. Most people including myself wont use it that way very often. What this needs to be is a mix of both systems.
min/max values on each bar.
with a priority for fill over pops.
And the ability to define always Y jobs as unassigned.
I bet the logic for the computer would run quicker also for the Ai driven empires.. which is one of the reasons why later game empires presently just crash and burn badly. I have a state of the art intel processor designed for this exact wall type computation the software requires and even i cant get past 300 years into the game presently, it just lags to badly. (this is on an 800 star galaxy).
Go for it oh person of perspicacity and taste, drop me a note if you get the mod working?
I agree with you but my point was that you can get around this mecanic if it doesn't fit your play style, and your can be egalitarian with syncretic evolution and having you main spicies being workers too.
It can be a way to adapt to the new mecanic too.
The game give you the solution, it depends on people to use it.
It may be a while. There's lots of areas in the game that I want to make tweaks to, and UI is lower on the list than stuff that's more gameplay-focused. But I have a link back to this thread in my notes, so I can send you a pm or something if/when I do something like that.
this isn't correct, soldier jobs are worker level but higher priority than specialist. also priest jobs appear to be lower priority than worker jobs even though they're specialist. each job seems to have a present priority for being filled... (at least they were for my last organic empire)