Clerks - worse then unemployment in 3.0

[The Founder]

The Clerk job is for me less usefull and more a micro management annoyance.

It was already pretty useless back when it was introduced. But in 3.0 it took a turn for the worse.
The fact is, that 95% of the time I prefer a pop to be unemployed as opposed ot being a clerk!
At least unemployed pops can use the new migration mechanic to go someplace where they can do some real work or get me to build some proper jobs for them. Unemployed pops at least have a chance to become usefull. But given how it works right now, I have to manually turn the jobs on and off.

The core is the production and them being that common:

• It produces 2 Amenities. The pop also uses 1 Amenity, so you got a net +1. I guess the idea was to use it to offset the Amenity useage of a fully populated city district. But that runs into issues:
  • I very rarely use some clerk jobs to birdge a tempoary gap in dedicated Amenty production (Holotheathers). But for that I need a handfull, not the masses I am provided
  • Every Entertainer produces 10 Amenities base. Meaning 9 are left over for the rest of the population. And if you got a lot of cities, the one thing you are not hurting for is building slots
  • It is also a lot less wastefull to overproduce Amenities with Citiy worlds, as the population will "grow into" the provided Amenities
• It produces 2 Trade value. 2 Trade value can translated to:
  • 2 Energy
  • 1 Energy, +0.5 of Consmer Goods and/or Unity
  • This was already bad before, but now where the base production is 4 to 6 in the other Worker Jobs? It is worse then useless
• There is just too many of them
  • I get 1-2 from every city district. I rarely need more then 2-4 on the entire planet
  • I could get 5 more from a Comemrcial Zone, but why would I ever do that?
  • I may be tempted to build a upgraded Commercial Zone for the Merchant job - but for that the 10 Clerks are just annoying noise. And for 1 Merchant the price seems a bit steep
• There is never enough when I need them
  • Yes, it ocassionally happens that I need them. And in that case, there are never enouvh
  • The place I would need them the most would be on Rural worlds and similar worlds without a lot of city districts. Both for Amenities (given that I have barely any building slots). But they are also the place where they are the hardest to get

Clerks need to change. I had a bunch of ideas for this, not mutually exclusive:
Automanage how many jobs are enabeled
There is a rare case where the Clerk is usefull - and that is if I do not have the Amenities from higher Tier producers (Entertainers, Ruler Stratum) to actually make do.
There is a pretty steep penalty for being below 0. Avoiding that, is a case where even Clerks can do way more good then their paltry Amenity production would indicate
Longterm I propably want to go for a proper Amenity source (Holotheater), but until that happens they are better then nothing

You already have some limited Auto-management of this kind with the Necrophages - Necrophyte Job slots start at 1 and enable up to the limit, based on how many people were born since the last conversion.
You could do something similar. If there is no unfilled Clerk slot and Amenitiesa are below 0, better turn on one more Clerk slot.
Longterm I still want to build a proper Amenity building - that would free up quite a bit of workforce after all.

However ocassionally I may want to maximize them. So maybe give me a option to manually overwrite this/disable the automatic?

Move them to the non-city districts
I just realized it when writing post:

In 3.0, City Districts are the last place where you need a lot of Clerks.
If you got City districts, you are swimming in Building slots. Building slots you can use for the proper Amenity building.
Meanwhile for the other districts (Industrial, the 3 Rural ones), you are severely hurting for Building slots. That is a case where Clerks might be usefull as "building slot free neutral" Amenity Source and I could also use extra Jobs to gather enough Population for a Capitol Upgrade

Hence the change:
Cities loose Clerk slots, but can get some direct Tradegood bonus. Maybe just a passive +1 Trade Value per unused housign slot (representing Luxury living and Tourism)
While non-city districts (not 100% sure about Industrial for this) would get the clerk jobs.

You already somewhat realized this:
Machine Empires get the "Industrial maintenance" Edict in as part of the Harmony Finisher
"Industrial Maintenance" adds +1 Maintenance Drone to industrial districts, for +2 Upkeep
You just need to make this a base feature, rather then a Edict

 

[trybald]

Clerks should provide some other resource (IDK, perhaps administrative efficiency) or there should be more ways to utilize trade value.

 

[The Founder]

Clerks should provide some other resource (IDK, perhaps administrative efficiency) or there should be more ways to utilize trade value.

I am not sure increasing their production would realy help. At least right now, Clerks produce so little you can just turn them off entirely without ruining your Economy.
This is a lot harder to do with Maintenace Drones. You need to have some working all the time, meaning you have to micro manage how many there are enabeled.

And "Administrative Efficiency" sounds like it might be a percentile bonus. And a Stackable percentile bonus.
Those are the exploiters favourite tools and something you must guard against very carefully.