Clerks need something

[Nakkivene]

They were worthless before, but you'd have so many pops you stopped caring if some of them clerk.

Now a technician at a base value outputs triple of what a clerk provides in energy, but has cheap tech to increase his output (also I think the infrastructure tech increases technician output but not trade value) + a much better planetary specification and building. In a synth ascended empire his base is quadruple to that of a clerk too. They're the same strata worker with 0 input.

Clerk also provides as much as 2 amenities. A basic entertainer outputs 5 times this while also making 2 unity. He costs 1 CG more though + however much more your specialist costs. Just a housing building provides 2.5 times as much amenities as clerk. It's not like massively overproducing amenities is worth it either.

It's not good that there's this automatic trap within the game that you have to micro away, and it also screws with the AI harshly because they don't know to stop allowing clerks to exist. The capital planet even starts with a clerkbuilding! Why!

In the same vein, merchants suck too, but because of the strata demotion mechanic it's harder to get rid of them.

 

[Cymsdale]

At this point I'll consider it a major win if the word "clerk" even appears in tomorrow's dev diary at all.

 

[John MacWhat]

I had this idea, but it's a bit radical. I think clerks, instead of doing anything with trade value or local amenities, should impact the output efficiency of mining stations. Instead of producing local resources, they'd effect an empire wide station efficiency statistic

 

[LWE]

It's not good that there's this automatic trap within the game that you have to micro away, and it also screws with the AI harshly because they don't know to stop allowing clerks to exist. The capital planet even starts with a clerkbuilding! Why!

I have half a mind that automatic traps like this ensure that the AI remains competitive with the new players and those who primarily focus on roleplaying. By no means I think it's an intentional effect on part of the developers, yet it probably still prevents some AI complaints from taking place.

 

[Jamaican Castle]

They used to be a decent buffer between productive employment and unemployment - they weren't as good as "real" jobs, but they kept pawns from getting unhappy and they contributed some amenities to help planets that were getting close to the top of their capacity and might have dubious stability.

But now you don't want planets to even approach the top of their capacity, and while pop numbers have gone down, jobs have mostly held steady or increased, so unemployment is never an empire-wide condition, and with the automigration it's rarely a local condition for long enough to matter. Add to that that people pre-build city districts (for job slots and to drive up carrying capacity and thus growth) and that minerals still rain from the sky, and you get a situation where their niche has just evaporated.

I would consider giving pops a chance to automigrate not only if they're unemployed, but if they could reach a higher stratum by doing so - so clerks would preferentially fill into researcher, metallurgist, artisan, etc. jobs on other planets. That would reduce the impetus to keep them turned off, since the difference in production between a clerk and a worker is lower than a clerk and a specialist. (The main reason I could see for not doing this is if it's a big resource hog.) They would continue to serve their purpose of being a buffer for pops that otherwise would be idle.

Longer-term, I think the discrepancy between pop counts and job counts needs to be addressed. In my latest galaxy-conquering spree, I hardly ever encountered a situation where a planet couldn't be provided with far more jobs than it would ever get pops. I didn't even really need to build a lot of higher-tier buildings. If it was harder to fill planets up with as many jobs as you want, maybe their niche would reemerge.

 

[LughC]

Aren't clerk jobs just so you don't have unemployment when you build city districts?

 

[Derp]

what clerks need is the old yeller treatment

 

[Cymsdale]

Aren't clerk jobs just so you don't have unemployment when you build city districts?

They had more of a purpose when building slots were attached to population. You needed pops to exist so you could get your next building slot, and clerks provided a 'filler' job to give them something to do.

But now you don't need them to get the building slot, you get it for the city district itself, and can use it right away no matter what your population is. So anyone filling a clerk job is effectively being wasted because auto-migration will allow them to go fill a more useful job on a different planet if they were simply unemployed.

Most of the time your empire's economy is going to be better if you simply turn off every clerk job that gets created. The only real exception to this is the very very beginning of the game when you might not have the better job slots built yet (this phase goes away very quickly).

 

[Brael]

They were worthless before, but you'd have so many pops you stopped caring if some of them clerk.

Now a technician at a base value outputs triple of what a clerk provides in energy, but has cheap tech to increase his output (also I think the infrastructure tech increases technician output but not trade value) + a much better planetary specification and building. In a synth ascended empire his base is quadruple to that of a clerk too. They're the same strata worker with 0 input.

Clerk also provides as much as 2 amenities. A basic entertainer outputs 5 times this while also making 2 unity. He costs 1 CG more though + however much more your specialist costs. Just a housing building provides 2.5 times as much amenities as clerk. It's not like massively overproducing amenities is worth it either.

It's not good that there's this automatic trap within the game that you have to micro away, and it also screws with the AI harshly because they don't know to stop allowing clerks to exist. The capital planet even starts with a clerkbuilding! Why!

In the same vein, merchants suck too, but because of the strata demotion mechanic it's harder to get rid of them.

I disagree they need something, they are bad to be sure, but I think they should probably just not exist as a job instead. The problem here is twofold. If their outputs are increased, they'll replace one of the other worker jobs, in which case that's the job that's now obsolete. Alternatively, they remain less than those outputs in which case they're useless. Unless the job is providing a new resource, there's simply no reason to use the least efficient form of any sort of job.

Instead, I think that clerk jobs should be removed and that clerks which represent menial labor positions like cashiers and such are turned into a form of unemployment along with possibly being attached to some living conditions (basic subsitence, maybe decent conditions?) that give their current outputs, or similar outputs with some unhappy attached since those jobs aren't fulfilling.

This doesn’t require rebalancing output, and gets handled by existing systems to promote and move them as jobs open up all over your empire. Another advantage to this is that it creates an actual niche for them, where they provide something rather than any role that requires it being a job simply encourages closing one job or another to either eliminate clerks or the job it's better than.

It also removes micromanagement for jobs which would be great because it all gets handled automatically in living conditions you're already setting. And avoids the issue that with some living conditions unemployment is already better output than clerks, which makes clerks actively bad even without the current pop/job changes.

 

[Iosue Yu]

I think Clerk Jobs should just have the lowest possible Priority and it will just resolve a lot of problems.

This is the world's source of corruption, right there.

 

[Brael]

I think Clerk Jobs should just have the lowest possible Priority and it will just resolve a lot of problems.

View attachment 715054

This is the world's source of corruption, right there.

This would still prevent them from resettling if employed though right? Thus, it would still be advantageous to close all clerk jobs.

 

[Cymsdale]

I think Clerk Jobs should just have the lowest possible Priority and it will just resolve a lot of problems.

This only really works if pops can look at other planets for a better job.

 

[Ludaire]

I feel like the biggest issue isn't clerks. The issue is that we have so many things increasing other worker jobs' output to such ridiculous degrees. Even if clerks were roughly balanced with base level miners and technicians (they aren't, but they could be with some tweaks), once techs and such come online that increase other workers' output by like 200% while leaving amenities and trade untouched, clerks don't stand a chance.

Rather than go the direction of giving clerks a base buff plus similar technologies, I'd much rather see a major reduction of all the tech-based bonuses. Even before 3.0, I was always swimming in minerals and energy to the point where I got modded out all those "free resource" techs just so economic expansion was a challenge past 2230. Now in 3.0.3, the problem is just as bad or maybe worse. In my current game, I'm at something like +4k energy credits per month, constantly at my cap. I did get super lucky and sectioned off about a quarter of the galaxy so I had to myself to develop, but still. I'm only at 2370 or so. The economy shouldn't already be trivialized.

I also really dislike how meaningless most individual bonuses like pop traits become after all those enormous tech bonuses are in place. When you're already getting +100% from techs and +50% from various other sources, the 10% from the pop trait ends up being more like a 3% increase vs what you'd have without it. Which makes the empire customization or event-based improvements that are such an enjoyable part of Stellaris feel much less meaningful.

Reign in those crazy tech bonuses, and clerks won't need as much help to keep up.

 

[Jarolleon]

I disagree they need something, they are bad to be sure, but I think they should probably just not exist as a job instead. The problem here is twofold. If their outputs are increased, they'll replace one of the other worker jobs, in which case that's the job that's now obsolete. Alternatively, they remain less than those outputs in which case they're useless. Unless the job is providing a new resource, there's simply no reason to use the least efficient form of any sort of job.

Instead, I think that clerk jobs should be removed and that clerks which represent menial labor positions like cashiers and such are turned into a form of unemployment along with possibly being attached to some living conditions (basic subsitence, maybe decent conditions?) that give their current outputs, or similar outputs with some unhappy attached since those jobs aren't fulfilling.

This doesn’t require rebalancing output, and gets handled by existing systems to promote and move them as jobs open up all over your empire. Another advantage to this is that it creates an actual niche for them, where they provide something rather than any role that requires it being a job simply encourages closing one job or another to either eliminate clerks or the job it's better than.

It also removes micromanagement for jobs which would be great because it all gets handled automatically in living conditions you're already setting. And avoids the issue that with some living conditions unemployment is already better output than clerks, which makes clerks actively bad even without the current pop/job changes.

You can buff them without making them eclipse the other jobs.. Clerks should be slightly weaker than other jobs because city districts give more housing & building slots, while farms, mines, and energy districts only give the jobs and 2 housing. Maybe trade value value should scale with the productivity of nearby planets, or just buff their amenities to cement them as a support profession when you don't want to spend building slots on theatres.

 

[opath]

Maybe it would be a good solution to have clerks buff trade value by percentage, not in absolute numbers. From a Role play Perspective: If they fulfill a needed Job on a planet/ for the empire it would not be wise to remove them. In my organic empire I need food, so I need agricultural districts, so I need farmers. If I do not build them because of me thinking miners are more effective everybody dies :-(

So if they would have some real use, like a democracy gets wild bonuses if 30% of Pops are clerks (or some other fixed percentage) it could be fun to build trade habitats/ Mega Mall Planets or other stuff. Or one could tie the bureaucrats job to the clerk position... Or something else

 

[wundergoat]

Nerf or restrict bureaucrats, give clerks a modicum of admin.

Admin is way too easy to get so sprawl is a non-issue. If you couldn’t easily cover your admin needs with bureaucrats and had to resort to less efficient clerks, high sprawl empires would need to dedicate a higher proportion of pops to admin needs or actually take penalties.

 

[Millbot]

I had this idea, but it's a bit radical. I think clerks, instead of doing anything with trade value or local amenities, should impact the output efficiency of mining stations. Instead of producing local resources, they'd effect an empire wide station efficiency statistic

I'd rather not turn them into yet another job that feels largely invisible on benefits. Bureaucrats, enforcers, coordinators and hunter-seeker drones all feel like garbage jobs because what they do is mostly invisible. I mean, bureaucrats & coordinators essentially already do this in regards to research and traditions, but just about everyone hates those jobs.

Sure there are a few civics that make some of those jobs less awful, but IMO if the player has to use a civic or even a perk to make a base game job not awful. Well the design of that job is awful and should be fixed at the base level. Like synapse drone jobs don't suck because it doesn't feel like a largely invisible benefit job that sucks away pops. You get unity in addition to the admin capacity.

Devs are probably better off doing another pass on jobs. The change in the growth system was needed both for performance and to cut down on micro in the late game. That said though, it really highlights that the the devs need to rethink some of the jobs because they feel largely worthless and unrewarding. This in turn results in some additional micro, like having to manually shut off jobs because there are better things for those pops to do.

Just going to say, this is probably also an area where a proper internal politics setup could help.

 

[AlknicTeos]

my idea would be, that clerks could provide ressource storage ( also for influence storage )

 

[Shark7]

Clerks are the filler job that you use when all other jobs are filled and you have unemployed pops and no where else to send them. And clerk jobs are by far the worst.

The only reasonable thing I can come up with to improve them from the completely useless to slightly less than horrible status would be to allow them to generate a tiny amount of energy credits per clerk job. And I mean tiny: IE 0.05 to 0.1 energy each, similar to the Lithoid rare resource bonus. That might at least give the AI something useful out of it, being that the AI is so fond of creating City Districts.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

Give them +1% bonus to planetary production output.

It's thematically appropriate, and it satisfies the need to fill up these jobs when you've filled your primary roles without being OP