Class Promotion/Demotion feature is Annoying

[Blummenfaust]

Demotion is a crucial part of the unemployment mechanic and was made this way on purpose. It allows for a higher degree of economic warfare and makes living standards matter more. Consider for example that you have specialized your planets and have only 1 main producer of minerals. When this planet gets temporarily occupied a war, you quickly lose the ability to keep your alloy foundries open, leading to a great deal of unemployed specialist forcing you to come to term earlier or suffer low stability on the planet.

High living standards allows you to mitigate this by haven lower unemployed unhappiness and quicker demoting times, all at a higher upkeep cost.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Wow, just attempted assimilation for psionic ascension and crashed my economy.
Absolutely no means of recovery.

1) Set species to assimilate
2) As part of the assimilation process 'some' pops become unemployed each year, as they get their trait upgrade.
For worker strata this isn't a problem,; for specialist/ruler strata.... not so much.
3) workers get auto-promoted into the newly vacant specialists/ruler jobs.
4) 1st batch finish their assimilation, and..... have no jobs to go back to.
5) go to 2).

I now have 94 unemployed Specialist/Ruler pops out of a total empire population of 226. (all of which have +2 Consumer Goods consumption due to that stupid 'excess unemployment' event that has a far too frequent MTTF)

I even did the upgrades incrementally, a few species at a time; don't know what more I could have done to mitigate this disaster =/

This auto-promotion system definitely wasn't tested with ascension; it seems flat out broken.

 

[Jiav]

Wow, just attempted assimilation for psionic ascension and crashed my economy.
Absolutely no means of recovery.

1) Set species to assimilate
2) As part of the assimilation process 'some' pops become unemployed each year, as they get their trait upgrade.
For worker strata this isn't a problem,; specialist/ruler strata.... not so much.
3) workers get auto-promoted into the newly vacant specialists/ruler jobs.
4) 1st batch finish their assimilation, and..... have no jobs to go back to.
5) go to 2).

I now have 94 unemployed Specialist/Ruler pops out of a total empire population of 226. (all of which have +2 Consumer Goods consumption due to that stupid 'excess unemployment' event that has a far too frequent MTTF)

I even did the upgrades incrementally, a few species at a time; don't know what more I could have done to mitigate this disaster =/

This auto-promotion system definitely wasn't tested with ascension; it seems flat out broken.

another fun story. on the beta branch i had a massive robot workforce, once i researched droids they suddenly all took ruler/specialist jobs, leaving the previous rulers/specialists unemployed crashing my empire which no longer had a workforce.

yup, the system is far from optimized

 

[Less2]

I agree that this is in theory a problem, but I'm honestly wondering how people are ending up with so many unemployed specialists.

Build a colony. Get two pops. Notice that those pops provide nothing useful, try to demote them to farmers so they actually feed themselves. Watch them starve rather than feed themselves. Too busy being high class to do anything useful. Obviously a Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy reference.

 

[The Boz]

Lower happiness and higher amenities need would have been enough to simulate the reluctance of self-demoting pops. The lag is just a painful game mechanic.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

and how many sacked bankers did we see lining up to work in an amazon warehouse in 2008? The Demotion lag is wholly apt, and completly avoidable.
Just, don't build more specalists than you can sustain.

"But Eled I want-"
"I want to fend off an angry fallen empire with the 3 starter corvettes, but you dont see me complaining about warfare micro do you?*"
* Yes, once, sarcasticly, to make this exact point.

Look I have sympathy the first time you crashed your econ but after that if you insist on playing 2.2 by 2.1's rules you deserve everything you get. Adapt, learn and overcome.
If you really want to avoid the issue of over promotion play a slaver or syncrete, or slaver-syncrete and maintain an unpromotable underclass, or go fanatic eglatarianand take shared burdens and the civic to reduce demotion time. Its not like the game's not handing you tools to avoid it. But by all means keep smashing into that wall insisting that there should be a door right there, instead of looking about to see where they are.

 

[nestorius]

This happens on conquared worlds where you take control of it but suddenly dont want to be using so many specialists rather want to get raw materials out of the world.

 

[tinculin]

Why does it take longer for a specialist to accept becoming a worker than it does for a miner to train to become a cutting edge scientist?

 

[EvilTom]

Maybe in all empires with free pops should automatically demote after a much shorter time if there is a lower ranking job available, but there are resource and happiness penalties? This would show that pops are willing to take lower tier jobs, but won't be as good at it and will be pretty annoyed for a while... until it's beaten out of them.
I can imagine 6 months for unemployement to force someone to take a new job, but around 2-5 years.

Would it be better if:
In Authoritarian Empires you could forcibly demote rulers and specialists, but with a penalty to both happiness and resource production.

This would also have a nice roleplaying aspect as if you annex a planet and forced alien rulers and specialist to be workers you would upset them!

I wonder if this even could be a species trait. Almost like decadent you could have a trait which means that they only like being rulers, or specialists, or workers... or even one where they have transferable skills and don't mind being chucked from one job to another (maybe super helpful with authoritarian empires, hives, or even egalitarians with shared burden).

 

[PanzerMan7]

Comrades, I come bearing solution! Adopt civic "Shared Burden" and pop will demote in manner of months!

But really it's a nice edge for communist societies. Presumably the prestige and conditions of upper strata jobs are higher, so pops are a little reluctant to dip, but workers are so celebrated and people are so equal that it's not a big deal.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

This happens on conquared worlds where you take control of it but suddenly dont want to be using so many specialists rather want to get raw materials out of the world.

If you are conquering words you should have a stockpile to lastyou, or this in turn shows how a too rapid advance poses issues in consolidating territory. Because showing up out of the void and changing a planets whole social order should be a big deal. Theres no point winning the war only to loose the peace.

 

[KingAlamar]

I agree that this is in theory a problem, but I'm honestly wondering how people are ending up with so many unemployed specialists.

PSI Assimilation makes an entire species go unemployed at a time. If you assimilate one species at a time the species towards the end would have promoted themselves into higher ranking jobs [when the prior species went unemployed]. Thus you can have large numbers of unemployed specialists & rulers.

 

[KingAlamar]

I'm fine with it being punishing for people who build haphazardly.

If it's a free pop you got from a refugee event either wait out the timer or resettle it somewhere that you want to create a certain job strata. Acting like a pop or two being unemployed is ruining the entire empire is just dishonest.

This is the exact same rehash of that certain segment of the population that couldn't handle putting planets in sectors because they'd miss 0.6% of a mineral.

It's not one or two IF you want to assimilate species. In my current playthrough [Xenofile, Egalatarian] my main species is less than 10% of my empire. So when you ascend it's hard to find rulers that are also ascended. If you assimilate other species so they also ascend the ENTIRE species goes unemployed. During assimilation [one species at a time] it's common to see a dozen or two dozen unemployed specialists on some planets.

Realistic or not it's not particularly fun to try to micro this sort of thing.

 

[Jman5]

Update: For anyone who doesn't enjoy the multi-year demotion system, I found a mod on steam that reduces it to 1/10 the time.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1584571997

Enjoy.

 

[Bridger15]

Immigrants retain their strata? How? Immigration is handled via a growth modifier now. New pops can jump straight to specialist when they finish growing? I've always seem them start as workers.

 

[Derp]

Build a colony. Get two pops. Notice that those pops provide nothing useful, try to demote them to farmers so they actually feed themselves. Watch them starve rather than feed themselves. Too busy being high class to do anything useful. Obviously a Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy reference.

or you could just go the 90 IQ master race route and buy the two food you need from the market

 

[Pragmatic]

If there's an unemployment mechanism, why isn't there an education mechanism? People talk about how many bankers preferred unemployment rather than work as a migrant farmer, but how about all those farmers who immediately fill the open banker jobs without any issues?

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Leaving that aside, how quickly do pops find their equilibrium, re:species bonus and malus?

For instance, if my founder species is Intelligent, will they fill open researcher jobs? And, more importantly, take those jobs from pops with lower bonuses?

I don't want Intelligent pops working on a farm, nor Drones working in ruler jobs. I can see it as a temp stopgap (the job just opened up), but I'd like a good end point.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

If there's an unemployment mechanism, why isn't there an education mechanism? People talk about how many bankers preferred unemployment rather than work as a migrant farmer, but how about all those farmers who immediately fill the open banker jobs without any issues?

Given you sited the example I used, I will say I've said in more than 1 thread that I think promotion should if anything be a bigger issue than demotion and skilled pops an asset to be cultivated and courted to such an extent that we see theads complaining about how hard it is to skill up ones populace.

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

I want them to move immediately, just not be very productive yet. And moving back should be clean.

Promoted pop should start at half production and scale up to full after a year.
Demoted pops should be unhappy and have a reduction on productivity, but that too should scale down to zero after a time. Most importantly, if a pop is still in the introduction period, there should be no malus if switched back to the original tier.

 

[Objulen]

A simple way to fix this would be an option that makes it so that jobs from new/upgraded buildings start off by default. Then you can manually enable the ones you want as your pops grow to fill them.