Robomodding and Pop Management

[iNFERnozz]

I noticed some issues with pop management while playing as a machine empire. I haven't tested on organics but this might hold true especially for biological ascension. IMO pop micromanagement in 2.2 has become more tedious.

I robomodded my robots to specialize in one of the following jobs: minerals, energy, research, amenities, and advanced goods. I have no issues with assigning the appropriate robots to work on the first three jobs (minerals, energy, and research). However, I had problems assigning the latter two (amenities and advanced goods) to work on the right jobs.

For instance, if I have two unemployed robots (1 energy, 1 amenities) and assign one to work on amenities, there is an equal chance either one gets the job. If I assign to work on energy, it's always the former robot.

I have tried rotating which robot to assemble on each planet but it becomes too tedious as you create more jobs on all the planets. The only solution I thought of so far is to only create 1 type of robot on each planet and then resettle accordingly.

For those who are into pop micromanagement and specialization like me, please share your thoughts and solutions on this.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I am severely dissapointed by the current pop management system. Its new and shiny and eye-candy and you got noble jobs and all that.

I created a thread myself which suggests solutions to the problem. Here are my thoughts copied from the thread. I described the same problems as you, so I would be happy if you could read and give your thoughts.

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...op-system-to-surpass-the-tile-system.1139859/

Give us the option to queue up different Robot pops to assemble, so that we no longer have to check every planet, habitat etc in intervals. Make the AI smarter when it comes to assigning pops to jobs OR allow us to assign them manually (atleast for Robots). By doing this, you effectively remove the tedious upgrading of buildings and the insane micromanagement we are forced to do currently and you end up with a superiour, more immersive and beautiful management screen.


Sadly my thread got almost no attention so I hope by posting here we can get Paradox to listen.

Below this is mostly me venting. Feel free to ignore it but I would be happy if you would comment on whether you agree or not.


When you want to utilize pop traits correctly, you gotta ask yourself why even bother. Does Paradox not want us to make specializes pops anymore? I would not hope so, after all we still retain traits like +15% mineral/food/energy output. The execution however is - as you say it - "tedious" and this is putting it lightly.

The current system makes proper pop management for maximum efficiency impossible by design. You don't give us the ability to assign pops normally, fine. I guess they are organics and they would rather work as a noble than inside a mineral mine. However when it comes to Robots it maxes no sense whatsoever.

In the past, we queued up 4 different Robots on energy, unity, science, mineral buildings. This is what Robots are designed for: Slower growth but efficient at their tasks, along with full control. You took this control away from us, left us with slower growth speed and gave us nothing in return.

The current system works as follows: Instead of queuing exactly the right Robot types for each job, you choose which Robot pop grows until you change it again. If you fill up your miner jobs, you have to come back and change the Robot type that gets build - at the cost of 50% current growth process?

And when you do that, you are at the mercy of the stupid AI which assigns non- mineral bonus Robots into the mines anyway. Its a huge step back in terms of efficiency which was not mentioned anywhere.

Also the fact that bonus growth or assembly speed is a mandatory trait does not exactly help to create more interesting playstyles. It just means everyone has 2 less trait points to play with and limits pop design. It should simply be removed and everyone gains a flat pop growth bonus since everybody is taking that trait anyway.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

On the topic of pop management: I recently played a Synth Ascension game but had to stop because the game is no longer playable due to the update that destroyed performance.

I ended up creating 3 types of Robots: Unity and Science (since im a Technocracy), Minerals and a "general bot" with simple 5% bonus output to everything because I was too lazy.

Synths and Robots not migrating is a huge issue. Please allow Robots and Synths to migrate. We do get a very nice growth bonus once we unlock 80+ pops. However, to fully make use of this you have to play resettlement simulator. In my recent game I ended up with 50+ planets. I had to constantly resettle from around 15 of them which were full with pops to my new planets. This is tedious and unessesary and made me eventually disable roboticist jobs because I could not take it anymore. Just give Robots the ability to migrate on their own PLEASE.

Thanks to having cheaper Robomodding, you could in theory simply Robomod your pops on each planet to specialize into exactly what the planet itself is specialized into. Have a tech world? Specialize all Robots for science and unity. It does help somewhat mitigate the terrible AI assigning pops incorrectly, but its still just a band-aid to a broken system.

 

[Mutineer]

I actually have a simple problem, maybe I am just blind. How to switch robot construction to a new type of robot? Apply template is rather expensive and constructor continue to make basic robot. I did not found a way to switch .

 

[Less2]

Robot traits should just be global, it makes zero sense that you can't detach a mining drill from a robot to give them whatever attachment makes them good at energy. There's basically zero difference between global and individual pop traits except the latter requires ridiculous amounts of micro in order to immediately reassign each pop the correct traits as its being constructed.

 

[Mutineer]

I think I understand what is going on. I have population control prohibited policy, which in past effected only organic species. That now does not let me control when robot to produce and resulting in robot assembly produce a random robot from available templates. Basically, removing this part of the game.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I actually have a simple problem, maybe I am just blind. How to switch robot construction to a new type of robot? Apply template is rather expensive and constructor continue to make basic robot. I did not found a way to switch .

When looking at the job menu, you see 3 squares representing growing biological pops, robots being assembled and declining pops. You can click on the squares and choose which Robot pop to manufacture. However doing so comes at the cost of 50% of current build progress. So you can still produce the perfect robot type to fill the jobs, however you have to keep checking and changing robots accordningly since for some reason Paradox took away our ability to queue up different Robot types.

Its incomprehensible to me why they destroyed the pop management system. Robots are supposed to be efficient workers yet the micromanagement to get each Robot to the correct task increased to unbearable levels. We should be able to tell the system to build Robot X for Mining, Robot Y for energy, Robot Z for science/unity and so on or be able to drag the pops around manually.

Another huge issue is Robots not migrating. When you have fully developed planets, you have to manually resettle each new pop. I quit my recent synth ascension game because of this. I ended up with 50+ planets. For some reason Paradox added a planet decision to stop building robots which costs influence. This makes no sense, you can simply disable roboticists jobs for 0 influence and get new workers out of this. They should simply allow Robots to migrate instead of giving us this "decision" which doesn't fix the root of the problem and is obsolete anyway.

 

[iNFERnozz]

I did some further testing on the jobs that robots prioritize. Here's the screenshot on the species of robots and their traits from a game that I recently abandoned:

The 5 species are specialized for the following:

• Mining
• Energy
• Amenities
• Research
• Generic/Leadership

All 5 species have the +5% resource bonus from jobs trait. Minerals, energy, and research species get -20% penalty on amenities from Uncanny trait.

I first unassigned robot pops from all complex and menial jobs. For the first test, I filled up only one job type while leaving the rest empty to see which type of robot pops gets assigned. In order to test out for randomness, I filled up a few slots of other jobs first before assigning robot pops to the job type I am testing (more about this later). Here's what I found.

• Calculator (all 3 research areas): Research robots prioritized. No issue.
  
• Coordinators (unity + society): Random. Research robots are not given any preference in assignment. (Note: Unity bonus might affect this but untested.)
  
• Hunter-Seekers: Random. Not a problem.
  
• Replicators: Amenities robots prioritized. However, bonus on amenities do not apply even though the job gives +5 amenities.
• Dimensional Portal (physics): Research robots prioritized. No issue.
  
• Foundry (alloy): Random. (Note: This is due to all robot species having the +5% bonus resource trait. Further resting with/without Efficient Processors trait needed not only for alloys but also for Strategic Resources.)
• Maintenance (amenities): Robot species with Uncanny trait are never given priority in assignment. Otherwise, it's random between robots with/without the +20% amenities from job trait.
• Mining (minerals): Mining robots prioritized. No issue.
• Tech-Drone (energy): Energy robots prioritized. No issue.

For the next test, I gradually assign all pops to all jobs. This part gets extremely messy but here's a few important things I observed:

• Complex job class will always get precedence in pop assignment over worker job class.
• Within complex/worker job class, pop assignment will shuffle (but not always consistent) based on species traits bonus for the jobs specified above. Even then, the order of which job type to fill up first matters a lot.

Here's my suggested order of job assignment in Machine Empires to ensure (most) of the right pops work on the right jobs.:
Research jobs > Energy jobs > Mining jobs > Amenities > The Rest



Enough on the whole job priority assignment testing. One of the things that make Machine Empires (MEs) appealing to me is the ability to specialize your robot pops via robomodding and control which pops work on which resource to maximize production efficiency. Before patch 2.2, I designate each robot pops to work on which resources and then leave them alone for the rest of the game. Now, the pop assignments keep getting messed up. This whole mess makes MEs unbearable to play in patch 2.2. I haven't played organics on patch 2.2 enough for comparison but I believe my point on job assignment still stands.

Here's a few suggestions I could think of on improving pop assignment to jobs:

• Robot assembly priority when set to "Any" should take into account which robot species are the best for current vacant jobs. This also requires rework on the whole pop assignment priority between complex and worker jobs.
  
• Robot assembly priority when set to manufacture a specific robot type should remain until the player change it otherwise. I noticed that when I set a planet to assemble "Type A", it randomly switches out to produce other robot types.
• Have a slider/spinner that allows a certain number of pops for each robot type to be assigned between complex and worker jobs instead of having worker pops "promoted" every time a new complex job is created.
• Enable the option to assign priorities of job types towards which species.
• Allow robot assembly queuing the same way it is implemented in constructing buildings and armies.
  
• Show pop assembly progress bar and type on the sidebar for each planet. I don't know why this is removed in patch 2.2.

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

Thanks a lot for your testing! I do hope our suggestions get implemented in the future, after much needed performance increase.

 

[Althizor]

This is my "ideal" solution.

Add the ability to select a preferred species/robot for different jobs. If there are open job slots, you will manufacture/grow (with the penalty for manual biological growth) one of your selected preferred pops to fill one of those jobs. If there are no open jobs, it will produce one to displace an existing pop of the "wrong" species working a job. Existing pops will try to arrange themselves according to your preferences as best as possible. If the planet it already "perfect", it will make something random.

Autopromoting non-ideal pops for specialist/ruler jobs could be a checkbox too. Personally I'd rather fill those spots right away a lot of the time than wait to produce the ideal pop. Most of them don't care much about traits anyway.

No, it won't 100% eliminate all micro, but it will drastically reduce it, and solves the problem of "how does the game know you think 5% more output is better than 10% reduced housing/consumer goods usage?" The game doesn't have to make that determination. The player does.