Construction and unemployment.

[Lothmar]

Was playing Stellaris the other day and I saw someone was unemployed. I know this probably belongs in the 'suggestions' forum but I haven't registered yet so that's invis to me at the moment.

So anyway, you know what I would like to see from stellaris?
That pops that are on a tile that doesn't have a resource, but has a building under construction don’t count as 'unemployed' and instead that pop becomes a 'construction' pop and lowers the time needed to construct that building if it’s the current one in que to produce.

Cause yeah I get why that pop would be considered 'unemployed' under current build circumstances if the building wasn't under construction.

Admittedly I do kind of wish there was tech as well that expanded the number of buildings / bots that could be built at the same time cause que management can be annoying at times. Either that or would allow all pops who were on tiles with buildings qued but no resources to be considered employed for construction.

Then again maybe the various engineers and construction workers etc that are a part of society aren't represented by the 'pops' and they're effectively background element and pops represent all the labor that is skilled in other things or doesn't want to work/learn construction etc. *shrug*

 

[DukeLeto42]

I'd kind of like it if simply all unemployed pops sped construction - with emigration, pops can quickly fill a planet before you have built so much as a 0th- level facility on each tile. Perhaps a diminishing return on the rate of build time reduction would be appropriate here.

As I conceive of it, each pop is a population group of varying size, as colonies don't just spawn with hundreds of millions from the get go, but the pop reflects the population group designated for a share of the landmass. Most importantly the pop icon represents the government- employed workforce of that pop. This helps to explain why pops in colonies make sense - at the start, most of the populace will be employed by the government (I.e. sector/empire workforce, not local government or economy) until local production takes up the remainder of the growing workforce. Most of the population is thus doing their own thing in the background, but that isn't something we get to see. The tile game, therefore, is an abstract for how government workforces are deployed across the planet's surface. Instead of being paid monetarily, it is abstracted as the pop being fed and supported in the form of the soon-to-be-implemented consumer goods.

So, getting back to the matter at hand. A new pop without a building in this way of understanding the situation is a government workforce that is basically "paid" to sit around don't nothing. There is no reason a moderately intelligent government wouldn't put them to work building their future workplace.