I'm going to go ahead and call these bugs, because I can't believe this can be described as a feature working as intended.
I've finished one game as a despotic slaver empire, and I'm in the early stages of a second as high-tech utopians, so I'll deal with them in that order.
As the slavers, I had the slaver guilds civic, and here's where the first issue comes in. There is a 40% slavery rate, which is vague in the description, and potentially buggy in implementation. I enslaved some primitives mid-game and built a thrall world. I started moving them to other worlds and that's where things got weird. On most worlds they became the majority of slaves, and I started to see a lot of unemployed worker pops, and unworked specialist jobs. The aliens were reproducing and there was a glut of slaves.
So, firstly, surely native pops who no longer need to be enslaved to keep up the 40% ratio should be freed if alternatives are available.
Secondly, that ratio doesn't seem to be applied properly. On most worlds I was able to address the problem by only allowing my founder species to grow. However on some worlds this didn't solve the problem. On one I even had 60% enslaved pops, and even when I forced only the founder species to grow new pops still became slaves rather than workers. It seemed that, arbitrarily, on some of worlds the 40% ratio was only counting founder species pops, rather than all pops on the planet.
Thirdly, there's the tedious micromanagement. Even on worlds where the demography worked out fine, I still had unemployed worker pops and unfilled specialist jobs. New pops were assigned to the worker strata; because they were free, they were assigned a job and a slave was made unemployed; because the slave can't be a specialist, they remained unemployed and jobs went unfilled. I regularly had to go through each of my worlds to check their pop distribution. I'd have to drop the priority of all worker jobs to force everyone into unemployment, allowing the free workers to promote and fill specialist slots, then reactivate all the worker jobs to be filled by the slaves. How on earth is that not managed automatically?
So onto the utopian empire I'm currently playing, and specifically the robot pops. I've designed some specialised tasks - farmer, miner, servant, etc. - and I simply can't control which type of robots are built. I have an egalitarian ethic and a strong egalitarian faction, so I can't turn on the population control policy (required to force a preferred species' growth) without a big problem, which means that for some reason, I can't specify which robots are built on which worlds.
Obviously, I know the reason. I'm just saying it's bloody stupid. The "Assembling" option should never have been programmed to work like "Growing".
Robots and droids should simply be exempt from the population control criteria - they're tools, not pops (incidentally, "robotic" shouldn't be treated like other species anyway - I'm sick of those events where xenophobe pops attack "alien" robot workers, and I assume this still happens in 2.2. Spiritualist pops, maybe, that would actually make sense.). Arguably even synthetics not under AI servitude should be susceptable to specification - you're not preventing or favouring the breeding of a species, you're requesting that a specific chassis be built for the synthetic mind to inhabit.
A compromise might be to make the upgrade from droid to synthetic optional once the tech in researched - so cybernetic empires could have the option to build themselves new machine bodies, whilst keeping specialised, dumb droids for certain tasks.
(Basically: please let the game distinguish between "robotic" pops that are actually a species that has uploaded their consciousnesses into machines, and synthetic creations of that species. It should be conceivably possible to have AI servitude enabled, even though the organic pops of an empire have traded flesh for metal. Ideally a system of (organic) Species-; (sapient) AI-; and Robotic-pops.)
Regardless, in my current position I have a planet where the game's AI keeps trying to build farmer bots. There are already 12 on the planet, and only 12 farmer jobs available. Now, perhaps there's a reason, because not all those jobs are occupied by farmer bots so it still thinks it makes sense to build some more to replace the organics doing those jobs. But that is only the case because of a second bug related to the new pop management system.
Now that I have the droids tech certain specialist jobs can be taken by robotic pops. Since my organics have the "weak" trait, the AI keeps trying to keep them out of the enforcer jobs. So it's moving farmer bots into the enforcer jobs.
This is stupid for several reasons.
Firstly, and most glaringly, these are not the only droids on that planet. There are at least 3 built for generic use, which would be much more useful as they have the efficient processors trait which would increase the unity they produce as enforcers, whilst the farmer bots are only good at increasing farm yield.
Secondly, because I disabled the robot assembly plant building and there is no other job available, I have an unemployed pop that isn't being assigned a job.
Thirdly, when I try to fix the situation by turning jobs on and off, as I did with slavery before, it doesn't work, and the AI keeps putting these farmer bots into enforcer jobs. Again, even if it is going to forcibly make a pop unemployed and used robotic pops instead, there is a better variant to use. Worse, after trying to fix the issue by disabling all specialist and worker jobs, then re-enabling them, the system had promoted some worker organics - I now have three unemployed specialists rather than one, because it promoted the pops, then at some point in the process replaced them with droids.
Clearly, pop management is badly optimised and the AI's priorities are just wrong. It needs to prioritise on ensuring jobs are filled, reducing unemployment (whilst maintaining higher strata level), and THEN work out how to optimally assign pops to jobs based on traits.
Also, whatever's wrong with the slaver guilds civic needs to be worked out.
(One, last, thing - and here I'm afraid I am going to sound like those pissy children moaning about everything that's changed in the new patch - how do you selectively purge or disassemble a specific pop? If I did have population controls (policy), I'm not sure if I even could disassemble the offending droids. And when it comes to organics, the "population controls" right is now just a yes/no option of whether, globally, they can reproduce, not something that governs what decisions can be made about pops of that species on a case-by-case basis.
It seems like a lot of specific decisions have been removed and made more abstract, applying only to whole species or categories of things/events, whilst gameplay has been added which is incredibly tedious without access to those decisions.
Did you just give us a lot of busywork to do on planets, whilst simultaneously removing the ability to fine tune certain things that would facilitate said busywork? I can't remove an excess pop that doesn't have a function, to make room for one that is better suited to the available jobs. Nor can I now simply move a pop from one job to the next, I have to fiddle with several prioritisation settings to shuffle everyone around. Was this even playtested?)
I've finished one game as a despotic slaver empire, and I'm in the early stages of a second as high-tech utopians, so I'll deal with them in that order.
As the slavers, I had the slaver guilds civic, and here's where the first issue comes in. There is a 40% slavery rate, which is vague in the description, and potentially buggy in implementation. I enslaved some primitives mid-game and built a thrall world. I started moving them to other worlds and that's where things got weird. On most worlds they became the majority of slaves, and I started to see a lot of unemployed worker pops, and unworked specialist jobs. The aliens were reproducing and there was a glut of slaves.
So, firstly, surely native pops who no longer need to be enslaved to keep up the 40% ratio should be freed if alternatives are available.
Secondly, that ratio doesn't seem to be applied properly. On most worlds I was able to address the problem by only allowing my founder species to grow. However on some worlds this didn't solve the problem. On one I even had 60% enslaved pops, and even when I forced only the founder species to grow new pops still became slaves rather than workers. It seemed that, arbitrarily, on some of worlds the 40% ratio was only counting founder species pops, rather than all pops on the planet.
Thirdly, there's the tedious micromanagement. Even on worlds where the demography worked out fine, I still had unemployed worker pops and unfilled specialist jobs. New pops were assigned to the worker strata; because they were free, they were assigned a job and a slave was made unemployed; because the slave can't be a specialist, they remained unemployed and jobs went unfilled. I regularly had to go through each of my worlds to check their pop distribution. I'd have to drop the priority of all worker jobs to force everyone into unemployment, allowing the free workers to promote and fill specialist slots, then reactivate all the worker jobs to be filled by the slaves. How on earth is that not managed automatically?
So onto the utopian empire I'm currently playing, and specifically the robot pops. I've designed some specialised tasks - farmer, miner, servant, etc. - and I simply can't control which type of robots are built. I have an egalitarian ethic and a strong egalitarian faction, so I can't turn on the population control policy (required to force a preferred species' growth) without a big problem, which means that for some reason, I can't specify which robots are built on which worlds.
Obviously, I know the reason. I'm just saying it's bloody stupid. The "Assembling" option should never have been programmed to work like "Growing".
Robots and droids should simply be exempt from the population control criteria - they're tools, not pops (incidentally, "robotic" shouldn't be treated like other species anyway - I'm sick of those events where xenophobe pops attack "alien" robot workers, and I assume this still happens in 2.2. Spiritualist pops, maybe, that would actually make sense.). Arguably even synthetics not under AI servitude should be susceptable to specification - you're not preventing or favouring the breeding of a species, you're requesting that a specific chassis be built for the synthetic mind to inhabit.
A compromise might be to make the upgrade from droid to synthetic optional once the tech in researched - so cybernetic empires could have the option to build themselves new machine bodies, whilst keeping specialised, dumb droids for certain tasks.
(Basically: please let the game distinguish between "robotic" pops that are actually a species that has uploaded their consciousnesses into machines, and synthetic creations of that species. It should be conceivably possible to have AI servitude enabled, even though the organic pops of an empire have traded flesh for metal. Ideally a system of (organic) Species-; (sapient) AI-; and Robotic-pops.)
Regardless, in my current position I have a planet where the game's AI keeps trying to build farmer bots. There are already 12 on the planet, and only 12 farmer jobs available. Now, perhaps there's a reason, because not all those jobs are occupied by farmer bots so it still thinks it makes sense to build some more to replace the organics doing those jobs. But that is only the case because of a second bug related to the new pop management system.
Now that I have the droids tech certain specialist jobs can be taken by robotic pops. Since my organics have the "weak" trait, the AI keeps trying to keep them out of the enforcer jobs. So it's moving farmer bots into the enforcer jobs.
This is stupid for several reasons.
Firstly, and most glaringly, these are not the only droids on that planet. There are at least 3 built for generic use, which would be much more useful as they have the efficient processors trait which would increase the unity they produce as enforcers, whilst the farmer bots are only good at increasing farm yield.
Secondly, because I disabled the robot assembly plant building and there is no other job available, I have an unemployed pop that isn't being assigned a job.
Thirdly, when I try to fix the situation by turning jobs on and off, as I did with slavery before, it doesn't work, and the AI keeps putting these farmer bots into enforcer jobs. Again, even if it is going to forcibly make a pop unemployed and used robotic pops instead, there is a better variant to use. Worse, after trying to fix the issue by disabling all specialist and worker jobs, then re-enabling them, the system had promoted some worker organics - I now have three unemployed specialists rather than one, because it promoted the pops, then at some point in the process replaced them with droids.
Clearly, pop management is badly optimised and the AI's priorities are just wrong. It needs to prioritise on ensuring jobs are filled, reducing unemployment (whilst maintaining higher strata level), and THEN work out how to optimally assign pops to jobs based on traits.
Also, whatever's wrong with the slaver guilds civic needs to be worked out.
(One, last, thing - and here I'm afraid I am going to sound like those pissy children moaning about everything that's changed in the new patch - how do you selectively purge or disassemble a specific pop? If I did have population controls (policy), I'm not sure if I even could disassemble the offending droids. And when it comes to organics, the "population controls" right is now just a yes/no option of whether, globally, they can reproduce, not something that governs what decisions can be made about pops of that species on a case-by-case basis.
It seems like a lot of specific decisions have been removed and made more abstract, applying only to whole species or categories of things/events, whilst gameplay has been added which is incredibly tedious without access to those decisions.
Did you just give us a lot of busywork to do on planets, whilst simultaneously removing the ability to fine tune certain things that would facilitate said busywork? I can't remove an excess pop that doesn't have a function, to make room for one that is better suited to the available jobs. Nor can I now simply move a pop from one job to the next, I have to fiddle with several prioritisation settings to shuffle everyone around. Was this even playtested?)
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