Thoughts on Job Promotion and Fragility...

[nweaver]

The problem with the new economy is auto-promoting jobs can make your economy very fragile. EG, if you build a forge on a mining planet, your net mineral income goes down by a huge amount as you both stop producing and start consuming.

A good solution would be to add priority thresholds set by the player:

All new pops start as workers/simple drones if there are such jobs open. For each basic/intermediate item (Minerals, Energy, Food, Consumer Goods, Amenities), the player can specify a threshold stock (N/A for amenities) and an accumulation target.

A worker will only shift away from one of these jobs IF the availability is above the target stock and if shifting away won't reduce below the accumulation threshold.

This behavior wouldn't just help the player but would also probably help the AI considerably,

 

[redharo]

or, you can simply disable an existing building, before constructing a new building, so that the workers that were kicked out of existing building would move to the new one...
or, you can build your buildings as needed, instead of constructing a new building whenever a building slot becomes availible

 

[nweaver]

The problem is that is micromanagement. If you want to reduce micromanagement, provide ways for the computer to micromanage for you. And it should help computer AIs to, they won't fall into death traps.

 

[Delthor]

or, you can build your buildings as needed, instead of constructing a new building whenever a building slot becomes availible

This. Choosing when to build your buildings intelligently is now as important as deploying your fleets intelligently. It's not micro; it's actually part of the macro game, since it has major ramifications for your economy. You can also avoid this problem if you maintain a solid foundation of workers so losing 2-3 doesn't drop you negative. Granted, the building upgrades that give 5 new specialist jobs kinda break this and are overpowered, but that's fixed on the test build.

The problem is that is micromanagement. If you want to reduce micromanagement, provide ways for the computer to micromanage for you. And it should help computer AIs to, they won't fall into death traps.

Again, I don't consider when to build which building a micro decision anymore than moving your fleets to different systems. But in theory, the sector automation should take care of this for you, but I hear it's bad... I haven't tried it yet myself, since fine tuning my economy is my favorite thing about 2.2, so I don't want to hand that over to a sector until I'm doing super aggressive wide play with dozens of colonies.