But... they do generate energy credits. 2 each on Wealth Creation, 1 each if you're running another trade policy.
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Clerks need something
- Thread starter Nakkivene
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Then maybe it needs a small buff. I'm mainly interested in boosting the AI enemies, since they build city districts versus something useful.
It's even worse for void dweller starts; there's three trade districts, one per starting hab, that you need to get rid of and replace with a district that actually supplies something.
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So... they are just there for a filler job and if you don't need it you can shut it off.
Since there’s far more jobs available right now though than there are pops to fill them, that leaves little reason to ever run clerks. Without any rare resources you can run 28 specialist jobs on a planet and then other slots to basic jobs. For a very small resource drain you can boost that with building tiers that add jobs to districts. And then you can run other slots as districts.
It’s really hard to run out of jobs, and as such there’s no reason to run inefficient jobs.
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I think that as long as we buff clerks such that they don't directly replace jobs, we can go wild. People keep talking about giving them the behind the woodshed treatment, or just barely tweaking them so they suck less. Why? Are we forgetting that some of the most successful and prosperous empires in human history have centered around trade directly? Are we forgetting that a huge number of first world countries have been transitioning to a much more service based economy, rather than resource extraction? Clerks aren't required to be bad forever, just because they have been in the past.
There are a lot of ways that clerks can be buffed to be good, and a legitimate option. They can also be buffed to the point of becoming meta for a patch or two. Lets throw around some examples.
Example 1:This comes from earlier in the thread, but give clerks a .5% or .25% empirewide bonus to space resources. It would be a poor choice for someone going tall, but someone going wide might legitimately get more resources from running enough clerks to boost his space income than having them all be planetary jobs. It would reward having a wide territory, and make systems without habitable worlds more valuable.
Example 2:Boost trade power to 4 for clerks, and give them a 1% bonus to all specialist pop production on the planet. If you are running 20 clerks and five metallurgists, getting an additional 20% alloy production is pretty good, especially if you are running the consumer goods trade policy, and are able to use the energy and CG from trade to sustain the planet. You won't be swimming in CGs, but you also won't be spending minerals on it that could be going to alloy production.
Example 3:Make clerks a niche pick. Give them a planetary trade value modifier that increases with the proportion of pops employed as clerks. They would still be shit if you focus miners and technitions, but a purely clerk planet would get quite good.
Example 4:Boost trade power to 4 for clerks, give them techs to increase trade value much like how energy and mineral production gets increased, and leave it at that. Maybe still a bit weak, but better for low eco situations since they have no mineral upkeep, and aren't affected by habitability.
Example 5: This one is a bit of a stretch, but change trade routes to be interesting. Make it so that each system the trade route goes through would give bonus resources based on how much trade flows through it. For example, you have a planet with 50 trade value. So every system the trade route goes through that has exploited resources, like energy stations, mineral stations, etc, would give 50% of those base resources on top of what is already being mined. Note that this would count seperately, and would not be affected by technician production techs for example. So if a system gives 6 base energy, then having a trade planet beyond it and sending 50 trade value through would give a free 3 energy, which could possibly be increased by trade value increase techs like suggested before.
Example 6: Add inflation. You can make stupid amounts of money by late game, but all costs remain the same. You are just magically making energy/money pop out of the ether. If technicians are infinite gold mines, add an inflation mechanic that increases upkeep costs of all expenses across your empire (job upkeep, fleet upkeep, pop upkeep) the more you rely on technicians only. You make more money with technicians, but unless you mix in clerks, you fuck your economy in the long run.
There are a lot of ways that clerks can be buffed to be good, and a legitimate option. They can also be buffed to the point of becoming meta for a patch or two. Lets throw around some examples.
Example 1:This comes from earlier in the thread, but give clerks a .5% or .25% empirewide bonus to space resources. It would be a poor choice for someone going tall, but someone going wide might legitimately get more resources from running enough clerks to boost his space income than having them all be planetary jobs. It would reward having a wide territory, and make systems without habitable worlds more valuable.
Example 2:Boost trade power to 4 for clerks, and give them a 1% bonus to all specialist pop production on the planet. If you are running 20 clerks and five metallurgists, getting an additional 20% alloy production is pretty good, especially if you are running the consumer goods trade policy, and are able to use the energy and CG from trade to sustain the planet. You won't be swimming in CGs, but you also won't be spending minerals on it that could be going to alloy production.
Example 3:Make clerks a niche pick. Give them a planetary trade value modifier that increases with the proportion of pops employed as clerks. They would still be shit if you focus miners and technitions, but a purely clerk planet would get quite good.
Example 4:Boost trade power to 4 for clerks, give them techs to increase trade value much like how energy and mineral production gets increased, and leave it at that. Maybe still a bit weak, but better for low eco situations since they have no mineral upkeep, and aren't affected by habitability.
Example 5: This one is a bit of a stretch, but change trade routes to be interesting. Make it so that each system the trade route goes through would give bonus resources based on how much trade flows through it. For example, you have a planet with 50 trade value. So every system the trade route goes through that has exploited resources, like energy stations, mineral stations, etc, would give 50% of those base resources on top of what is already being mined. Note that this would count seperately, and would not be affected by technician production techs for example. So if a system gives 6 base energy, then having a trade planet beyond it and sending 50 trade value through would give a free 3 energy, which could possibly be increased by trade value increase techs like suggested before.
Example 6: Add inflation. You can make stupid amounts of money by late game, but all costs remain the same. You are just magically making energy/money pop out of the ether. If technicians are infinite gold mines, add an inflation mechanic that increases upkeep costs of all expenses across your empire (job upkeep, fleet upkeep, pop upkeep) the more you rely on technicians only. You make more money with technicians, but unless you mix in clerks, you fuck your economy in the long run.
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I think the issue with all of these isn’t that clerks have to be bad. It’s that because there’s more jobs than pops, every clerk you run comes at the cost of something else. Thus, in order to use it it needs to provide something that you want more than the next worst job.
But, since clerks are a bad source of everything right now, that’s just not the case. How much trade would they need to produce to match the other district values?
Answer that and you start to get to a baseline of what yields they need. But, since trade is most comparable to energy, would you ever run a generator district if trade is better? Or would you ever run a clerk if a technician is better?
This is where the issue arises and why I think they should just be a possible type of unemployment. Weaker than egalitarian but better than just being unemployed.
This makes them into something the game can understand too since existing mechanics would shift them to jobs as available.
Trade focused empires instead probably need a completely different sort of economy, one they intended with corps but has largely become obsolete.
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Because extra districts require bureaucrats and EC to maintain... but because all yields have been buffed this patch it's not nearly enough to compensate.
I mean, I still think clerks are redeemable. And frankly, the issue they have with technicians in particular isn't exclusive to them. IIRC, Technicians produce enough energy to make it more efficient to just buy minerals off the market rather than run miners. Partially because miners didn't get the buffs technicians did in the patch, but arguably you should only be running technicians as workers, and then just cover your mineral deficit with space mines and food deficit with hydroponics. What is the point of having them be unemployed? That is basically already what happens, since its so rare to reach the unemployment state. Sure, unemployment for the sake of making it easier to handle pops moving around is an argument, but regardless, I really don't like the idea of clerks being just a shitty species policy on par with academic privilege for all you care about it. Press a single button and forget it exists.
Like, heres a hot take. I think that clerks should be good. I think that they should be better than technicians, and they always should have been better than technicians. It should be technicians in the hot seat, trying to justify their existence against a much more versatile job type. But the root of the problem, is that energy equals money. Its like every other province in EU4 being a gold mine. Why is there no inflation in stellaris? There should be, the amount of resources you command by game end is staggering. Maybe add a new mechanic, so that the more energy produced by technicians proportionally in your empire, the more global inflation grows, increasing costs of buildings, of pops, of job upkeep, of fleet upkeep. Sure you get far more money running energy only, but that will fuck over your economy in the long run, and make it worth it to diversify energy production with clerks and trade.
Like, heres a hot take. I think that clerks should be good. I think that they should be better than technicians, and they always should have been better than technicians. It should be technicians in the hot seat, trying to justify their existence against a much more versatile job type. But the root of the problem, is that energy equals money. Its like every other province in EU4 being a gold mine. Why is there no inflation in stellaris? There should be, the amount of resources you command by game end is staggering. Maybe add a new mechanic, so that the more energy produced by technicians proportionally in your empire, the more global inflation grows, increasing costs of buildings, of pops, of job upkeep, of fleet upkeep. Sure you get far more money running energy only, but that will fuck over your economy in the long run, and make it worth it to diversify energy production with clerks and trade.
That doesn’t change things. It closes the gap between clerks and other jobs but it doesn’t make those other jobs less efficient than a clerk.
I think the market system was meant to do that. Energy only goes through one transaction to buy something though. Maybe that could be fixed by making energy supply and demand based too and rather than using it as money just directly barter goods so that consumer goods for alloys is direct rather than into energy as a method of exchange.
Edit: The idea of turning Clerks into Bureaucrats is a good one too I think. I'm not sure if that's more or less balanced, but if you rename it to something more trade flavored it fits into Corporate Authority mechanics flavorfully, and solves the useless Clerk problem because they're no longer competing on resources but instead provide a new resource. I really like that idea actually, as Administrative centers are honestly just not something I'm a fan of.
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You could triple their energy output and they still would be outdone by tecnician.
Maybe each one could raise trade value by some % in addition to flat value, so a clerktopia could be a viable planet build in some cases. Perhaps clerk should be more desirable for highly developed worlds while technician worked better for smaller fringe planet?
Maybe each one could raise trade value by some % in addition to flat value, so a clerktopia could be a viable planet build in some cases. Perhaps clerk should be more desirable for highly developed worlds while technician worked better for smaller fringe planet?
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I've suggested before the idea of giving a +1% bonus to planetary output. You consolidate clerks once you've 'finished' a planet to make it stronger, but you wouldn't prioritise them immediately.
Plus the AI would benefit by utilising clerks to improve their economies.
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I've toyed with similar ideas, but it raises the question of what it provides in terms of new gameplay. Is there really a point in making clerks that job you turn off until there is nothing more useful to build on a planet? Is that worth the added micro and pop count?
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I guess the benefit with the idea is at least if you're not min/maxing you're steadily accruing net gain on all resources across your planet. If you build a new job, clerks will usually move and go there, so I don't get why you'd need to disable them in this instance.
Sure you could try to maximise jobs across planets by forcing unemployment, but if you had say 15 clerks instead, everything on the planet is getting a 15% bonus on top of stability bonuses.
It at least clerks in their role as a fall back option whilst making them genuinely useful.
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With consumer benefits 4 clerks will supply a researchlab which feels pretty decent at the very beginning when you dont have better districts. Very short time window though.
With the latest change, I think that turning off all clerk jobs will still be the "correct" choice, but not doing so now will be far less damaging to the AI and players that don't know better.
A side benefit of turning off clerks is it makes it easier to manage the whole S-curve growth without thinking about it too hard. In general, you are better off if pops are moved from your more populated worlds to your less populated ones. Turning off clerk jobs provides an organic way of doing this w/o the micro of looking up planet capacity and current growth bonuses on each planet. I still think it's worth turning off clerks for this reason alone.
A side benefit of turning off clerks is it makes it easier to manage the whole S-curve growth without thinking about it too hard. In general, you are better off if pops are moved from your more populated worlds to your less populated ones. Turning off clerk jobs provides an organic way of doing this w/o the micro of looking up planet capacity and current growth bonuses on each planet. I still think it's worth turning off clerks for this reason alone.
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because Stellaris's economy revolves mostly around resources and labour, not money.
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We'll have to see how well the trade league meme builds actually work, now there is finally a trade job once you've run out of Merchant jobs that is not completely trash in terms of output. This is not just in your own empire: if other empires are employing Clerks, branch offices will give significantly better income than before.
As for empires that are not trade-focused, I suspect Cymsdale is right: Clerk jobs still won't be "good", but they'll be sufficiently "OK" that the AI is less likely to go broke, at least assuming the AI can cope with the increased piracy threat.
As for empires that are not trade-focused, I suspect Cymsdale is right: Clerk jobs still won't be "good", but they'll be sufficiently "OK" that the AI is less likely to go broke, at least assuming the AI can cope with the increased piracy threat.
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