Theory: specialised Agri/Gen/Mine worlds aren't actually such a good idea for Xenophile Egalitarians

[aprogressivist]

So a thought occured to me the other day as I was playing Xenophile Egalitarians. I was there, having specialised my Rural planets for +5% Agri-Worlds, +5% Generator Worlds, +5% Mining Worlds, etc. This makes some sense when you have only one species type -- or when you're an Authoritarian that can control Pop growth and resettle.

But if you're a Xeno-loving Egalitarian, you may quickly end up in the situation where you quickly have a wide array of Industrious, Ingenuous, Thrifty, etc. pops. And you can't control how they grow or where they'll migrate to -- at least not without pissing off your factions.

So your rural planets may end up with a spread of pops with these Traits. You can hope that the job prioritisatiion may plug in the Industrious pops into free mining jobs, etc.; but you can't hope that there will be enough of a concentration of Industrious pops on a mining world that the majority of mining jobs will be occupied with Industrious pops.

Now consider a thought experiment: let's say you have three planets, each with 3 districts, each with 2 pops with Industrious, 2 pops Agrarian, and 2 pops Ingenuous.

If you've specialised all three worlds into one Agri world, one Gen world, and one Mine world, then the average bonus for each pop is +5% -- two pops will be at +15%, four pops will be at +0%. Add to that the +5% for a specialised planet and you get +10%.

If instead all three planets have 1 Agri, 1 Gen and 1 Mine, then you can hopefully shuffle the pops into "perfect" efficiency so that each have +15% output. Add on top of that the +2% for a generic Rural world and you have +17% -- 7% more.

Of course that thought experiment is a highly specialised case; it assumes perfect diffusion of pops and a perfect match up of pops to jobs. So in practice -- anyone tried this out? Was it too impractical to do?

 

[dreese55]

I would think with a small empire, like at game start this is very doable, but you also wouldnt have many different races then either. I think it would be just too difficult to manage all the different bonus on different worlds with the different races. Will try a game tonight and try this, but in my previous games i didnt bother.

 

[Alastor]

There is no guarantee the right pop will get the right job even if all of them are available on the planet though is there? Unfortunately seeing how defective the whole pop growth/migration/assignment system is I have little faith it will happen. Besides given a big enough number of districts hopefully I'll get some pop bonus here and there. Nothing too reliable to make me really care in the grand scheme of things. I focus my planets because, besides RP reasons, a generator world for instance will allow me to build an energy nexus and that will cost me only one building slot. Mining worlds, a mineral purification facility, 1 slot, etc. These are powerful and reliable. If I have to waste 3 slots on all my rural worlds instead that is a more significant loss.

Besides a multi-species xenophile egalitarian state has a much bigger problem to contend with. Namely habitability.

 

[aprogressivist]

There is no guarantee the right pop will get the right job even if all of them are available on the planet though is there?

In theory, certain jobs do prioritise certain traits, and jobs of the same strata can easily be re-shuffled by de-prioritising jobs. (Obviously cross-strata re-shuffling is not really possible.)

You're right on the other two points though. Generalised Rural words will definitely be far less efficient in terms of specialised buildings and that's a major blow to the strategy.

 

[Derp]

another problem with this is that it ends up necessitating the usage of 2 or 3 resource bonus buildings per planet instead of 1. if you don't, you've just negated your gains and then some

 

[Alastor]

In theory, certain jobs do prioritise certain traits, and jobs of the same strata can easily be re-shuffled by de-prioritising jobs. (Obviously cross-strata re-shuffling is not really possible.)

In theory is the key here. I don't recall it actually happening on its own. Or if it did it was definitely not reliable. Trying to do it by hand would be simply an exercise in frustration.

 

[Urza1234]

In theory is the key here. I don't recall it actually happening on its own. Or if it did it was definitely not reliable. Trying to do it by hand would be simply an exercise in frustration.

It certainly does happen, but the weights are a little weird.
I think a big part of their new pop and job design thats really holding them back is the Strata. They literally cannot allow for much flexibility in their jobs system simply because of how much unemployment would result.
Unemployment needs to be removed, nerfed, or fundamentally changed, it bottlenecks the rest of the pop/job design from actually being good.

 

[Vanhal]

In this scenario, pop bonuses are probably omittable comparing to planet specialization and builing slots, especially that xenophile egalitarians will most probably have most of pops without bonuses anyway. Plus, since the bonuses are additive, it's not that big deal in the first place, to fret over them much.

 

[Ryika]

It certainly does happen, but the weights are a little weird.
I think a big part of their new pop and job design thats really holding them back is the Strata. They literally cannot allow for much flexibility in their jobs system simply because of how much unemployment would result.

It actually works pretty well for the worker strata. Pops will take jobs according to their traits pretty much immediately if they're available and filled with pops that don't have fitting traits.

Above the worker strata, the devs have pretty much "locked" pops into place by adding weight-bonuses to the jobs that pops are currently working.

As far as I can tell, this even works great with promotions: If a new specialist job pops up, and there are two pops that can take the job, both of which get no bonus in that job, then the system seems to compare the current job weight to the new job weight and prefer the one with the bigger difference. This means that, if my observations are correct, the pop that has no yield bonus will move up if the jobs they're working are treated as equivalent (which the base worker jobs are).

Overall, the only "flaw" is that pops that have moved up can't move down to fill jobs they have a bonus for to swap with a pop that has a bonus for that other job. That doesn't happen too often, only in the early phases of planet development when there' not much pop diversity yet.

 

[Urza1234]

Overall, the only "flaw" is that pops that have moved up can't move down to fill jobs they have a bonus for to swap with a pop that has a bonus for that other job. That doesn't happen too often, only in the early phases of planet development when there' not much pop diversity yet.

Yep, and there is the issue with unemployment I mentioned.
You saw that each high-level job weights what they're already doing extremely heavily even if they would be better somewhere else?
Most ruler jobs for instance have a +1.25 weight for pops that are Charismatic. Nice! That means you'll get more amenities, and its cool for RP, but wait, that job also has a +5 weight simply for already working the job, the highest weight I have seen anywhere so far.
This is extremely high barrier to job swapping is obviously mainly to prevent massive unemployment as your Strong pops try to move down Strata and your Charismatic pops try to move up.
Its very problematic. Someone on the design team is obviously too married to the idea of unemployment to see that its stalling the functionality of the entire job system.

 

[AlanC9]

In some cases, it might be easier to shuffle districts to match the pops rather than the other way around.

 

[Chilango2]

What might be useful here also is a planetary decision that influenced the weight of the attractiveness of jobs to pops with the appropriate bonuses. Something like "encourage mining" and "encourage farming" which would attract migrants with the appropriate bonuses, discourage immigration from ones that don;t. If you applied these decision to each of your specialized planets, eventually the pops would sort themselves out without much micromanagement. This even has the benefit of simulating the way that governments actually do encourage centers of specific kinds of industry in various locales.

 

[pieman]

What might be useful here also is a planetary decision that influenced the weight of the attractiveness of jobs to pops with the appropriate bonuses. Something like "encourage mining" and "encourage farming" which would attract migrants with the appropriate bonuses, discourage immigration from ones that don;t. If you applied these decision to each of your specialized planets, eventually the pops would sort themselves out without much micromanagement. This even has the benefit of simulating the way that governments actually do encourage centers of specific kinds of industry in various locales.

They should just be doing that by default though.

 

[Chilango2]

They should just be doing that by default though.

I mean, they should, yes, and they don't, or maybe they do but very slowly. Perhaps the general churn of pops of a xenophile empire makes efficient sorting by the AI difficult? But a planetary decision that speeds it up would still be nice.

 

[Badesumofu]

You should also consider the buildings that give +15/25% output. Of course you can build all 3 on your rural world, though. Another significant consideration is that mining districts can become scarce. When that starts to happen I find I am loathe to not make use of them where they are available.