Why the new job system -feels- wrong

[Tim_Ward]

For what it's worth I've found it useful to have to have a role in mind for the planets before I colonise them. In the early game, I aim to get an alloy world, a consumer goods world, research on my homeworld (for RP reasons mainly), and the other colonies will generally support those with raw resources.

It's usually better to have your two high habitability worlds focus on specialists (so one for alloys, one for consumer goods in my case), because you don't get hit with the consumer goods penalty on pops that already have high consumer goods usage.

Not only does this allow you to take full advantage of the world type bonuses, it also saves you a lot of mental pick and shovel work in deciding where to building and upgrade things, and what to add to a world when it has unemployment.

So for, example, if I decide I need an new alloy refinery I put it on my designated forge world, or upgrade an existing one there. This means I know it's not going to take any workers from critical farming or mining jobs. If I have spare jobs on those worlds, I make them into clerks or whatever - they support the production of the specialists with their amenities, add a bit of trade value but they won't break anything when they promote. On primary economy worlds I just build either more districts, or amenities buildings.

This is for the early game. When you get to the late game, it's a bit less of an issue you have a lot more leeway in your economy due to higher resources overall so a couple of miners promoting to specialists shouldn't make too much difference so you can just build whatever you want wherever you want.

I honestly have no idea why you're being downvoted so heavily, as all these posts saying that you should just wait until your planets are overrun with the homeless and jobless before building anything is just stupid to me. Even if you have equal the number of pops and jobs, building more jobs will still take away from older jobs, potentially leaving you in the negative on a resouce. Just waiting until after an adequate number of unemployed people have taken to the streets demanding jobs before you build anymore is definitely not how I envision my empire, nor is it how I prefer to play my game, and if I get punished for trying to take a more proactive approach instead of just a reactive one, then that's bad game design in my grand strategy game. People play this game differently, and I prefer to plan ahead and build before I need a building, taking a more proactive approach in the growth of my empire rather than just a reactive one. Perhaps another solution would be to proactively set job priorities on a planet, instead of just reacting to pops and telling them that no one can work in the new lab, why not encourage them to work on the farms instead.

You don't have to wait till unemployment stacks up, just wait till you see the little red suitcase and go build a thing there. Build whatever suits the worlds purpose the best. Don't have a massive mining world that's supplying all your minerals, then suddenly spam a load of research labs or refiners on it.

This really isn't that difficult.

 

[AlanC9]

I honestly have no idea why you're being downvoted so heavily, as all these posts saying that you should just wait until your planets are overrun with the homeless and jobless before building anything is just stupid to me.

Overrun? If we're going to discuss strategy seriously, hysterical overstatement isn't the way.

 

[AlanC9]

When you have dozens of different planets needing different plans, I shouldn't need to keep track of the plan for every planet in my head. As a PLANNER I am supposed to figure out what needs to be done, and then telling the system about it and letting it happen according to what I ordered.

What you are talking about is the day to day overseeing work of a mid-level executive. There's nothing "grand" about being forced to keep being needed to make mid-level adjustments because the system prevents you from setting up the plan for grand-/top-level planning.

Especially as this isn't supposed to be a colony management game, but a game where the growth of your colonies is only a small part of it. Now, it's the majority of your game time spent doing what you should have been able to delegate to the computer that you wanted to get done. If my old phone from a few years ago would be able to keep track of small plans ahead of time, why is it seemingly impossible for a galaxy-spanning empire to delegate plans ahead of time when the technology should have improved compared to my old phone?

OK, so it really is that you don't want to keep your future building plans in your head.

I haven't had that issue myself, but that's probably because my rig won't run fast enough for my tastes on anything larger than a 600-star galaxy, and I don't have DLC. So you're managing more planets and whatnot than I am. Delegating would make my game worse, since now I'd be sitting there with nothing to do and nothing to think about while waiting for something to happen.

Edit: but, again, actually building the building is executing the plan rather than merely having the game remember the plan. You're paying the minerals now, not in the future.

 

[Pyoro]

I feel a lot of this is similar to the Admin Cap problem. Even though it doesn't matter, just by how its named people react oddly to it ...

Maybe "Upgrade" should be changed to "Expand" and empty slots should be, I don't know, filled with a placeholder park building that gives +1 amenities, so people are less tempted to fill up every slot and upgrade every building.

< not entirely serious ^^

 

[Tim_Ward]

When you have dozens of different planets needing different plans, I shouldn't need to keep track of the plan for every planet in my head.

You don't need to keep track of plans in your head, just look at the planet screen and see what suits it best. It really isn't that hard, though it does take some getting used to.

Farming world, no housing left, low amenities, one unemployment = build a city district. Boom. Easy.

"oh look, a colony with 9 mining districts supplying a 1/3 of my empires minerals, I'll build 5 alloy refiners oh shit now I'm running a mineral deficit" is you being bad at the game, not a flaw in the design.

Which is fine, by the way, we all made the same mistakes when we first tried 2.2.

What isn't fine is refusing to figure out how the new system works, and instead coming on the forums to demand the devs change the game to suit your personal play style of relentlessly spamming buildings everywhere.

 

[anamiac]

I agree strongly with the OP. I've had two games in 2.2 and on both of them I've ended up with about 50 planets. All these people suggesting that I go through all of them every 6 months just to queue up a single building clearly haven't played the game as I have. I need a system that allows me to make decisions once every 10 years without punishing me for planning ahead.

 

[Nussor]

@OP
I get you, the new system requires an entirely different mindset. Its a bit less of a clicker game now and became somewhat of an economy RTS instead.

 

[Brian Bóroimhe]

Your wrong.

No, *you're* wrong.

 

[Tim_Ward]

It's worth noting that you can queue up all the worker jobs you like in advance, if that's really something you insist on doing.

 

[wundergoat]

I agree strongly with the OP. I've had two games in 2.2 and on both of them I've ended up with about 50 planets. All these people suggesting that I go through all of them every 6 months just to queue up a single building clearly haven't played the game as I have. I need a system that allows me to make decisions once every 10 years without punishing me for planning ahead.

So much this.

When you get to this point of the game, you can’t spend the time to manage planets. You have enough other things to be doing that your options are to queue up buildings and take the econ hit or just say your econ is good enough and take a more reactive approach.

It’s also a bigger deal when playing with other people, where you can’t hit the pause button to rearrange pops/jobs.

There are ways to manage the economy around it for sure, like slowly adding jobs to developed worlds (and you should do that regardless) or specializing planets, but some of this feels like the gameplay choices are being motivated by UI and not by strategy.

 

[Tim_Ward]

There are ways to manage the economy around it for sure, like slowly adding jobs to developed worlds (and you should do that regardless) or specializing planets, but some of this feels like the gameplay choices are being motivated by UI and not by strategy.

'Only add specialist jobs when you need them, and decide where carefully' - you can spam all the districts you like, and a couple of commercial complexes is good for like 10 clerk jobs.

but some of this feels like the gameplay choices are being motivated by UI and not by strategy.

I will never disagree with adding better UI to a game, but short of full on development plans ("at 10 pops, build an X") it's hard to see how UI is going to help your issue without changing mechanics.

At some point, you've got to make the decision that you want more specialists in your empire, then tell the game about it and I fail to see how that can be achieve any easier than simply going and building the corresponding building somewhere.

 

[AlphaAsh]

When playing singleplayer I NEED to pause the game every now and then because things I need to respond to happen too often if I just let time tick away.

Erm. You're supposed to. That's what pause is for.

 

[evilcat]

My two issues:

• No top screan pop up "unemployment"
• No empire policy for unemploield benefit "Public Work, Trade Contracts, Biological experiments, Welfare, Food production..."
  
• Cripped mobility. 10 years to move froms strata specialist->workers. 1 year would be enought.

Each time i overzeolous build one research lab too far it is a disaster, cant produce science since run out of minerals for civic good, but cant demote scientist back to mines .

 

[ruryop]

Simple way to fix that - make changing strata upwards also take time, therefore the building will be slowly filled instead of instachanging 3+ pops from one job to another.

 

[wundergoat]

It's worth noting that you can queue up all the worker jobs you like in advance, if that's really something you insist on doing.

Some jobs have silly high priority, like maintenance drones. If you build a hub you get 3+ worker jobs that will immediate pull producers. Super annoying when you only need a little more amenities.

'Only add specialist jobs when you need them, and decide where carefully' - you can spam all the districts you like, and a couple of commercial complexes is good for like 10 clerk jobs.

This works if you have a few planets well enough, but gets progressively difficult and time consuming the more planets you have. Incidentally, this also tends to occur around the time when even more things are screaming for your attention.

 

[PedroLuiz]

No, *you're* wrong.

Literally

 

[Tim_Ward]

Some jobs have silly high priority, like maintenance drones. If you build a hub you get 3+ worker jobs that will immediate pull producers. Super annoying when you only need a little more amenities.

Sounds like a bug, since clerks are quite low priority.

This works if you have a few planets well enough, but gets progressively difficult and time consuming the more planets you have. Incidentally, this also tends to occur around the time when even more things are screaming for your attention.

Is it really that hard to queue up a few districts on a planet when you see a red suitcase? I mean, the outliner is a pain in the ass when you get a decent number of planets and they need to rework the planets screen to be Not Garbage, but that's not really an issue with the economy system.

 

[sylanna]

I also feel uncomfortable with the new system. It feels inefficient to me.

There are essentially two extremes with a dissatisfactory middle ground.

1) You build the building early and your workers will jump it, even if you don't want them to.
2) Wait for unemployed guys that fill the jobs and you lose months if not years of production.

A mix of them doesn't feel great either, especially when you jump from 5 to 10 jobs.

Also I really dislike the priority system. It's a tedious click fest to get pops into the right jobs.

I wish I could manually assign jobs and lock them like in Civilization 5. This would fix every issue I currently have with pop management.

 

[Delthor]

In order for the economic changes to be meaningful, it has to punish you for playing poorly. Otherwise it really would be meaningless micro. But choosing when and how to construct buildings is now more of a macro decision on the same level as deciding where to deploy your fleet, since it has real consequences. When mismanaging your economy can lose you the game as surely as mismanaging your fleets, you know they succeeded with their overall vision.

And if you have 50 planets and don't have a large enough surplus/stockpile/money for the market to handle building and upgrading buildings, what are you even doing with all your planets? I get to the point where I can easily absorb the shifts of creating a few specialist jobs around planet 5. Also, learn to know when a planet is "done." Not every planet needs to be built up to 80 pops. After a certain point, you should be willing to stop growth so that a planet can just do what is supposed to do and not need additional information input except occasional resettlement.

 

[Tim_Ward]

I honestly don't understand why you would build a building if you don't want pops to take the jobs.

Do you want the game to magically know when you want those jobs taken? Otherwise, even if you have the building pre-built (and you can disable buildings or their jobs, fyi) you still have to go and tell the game you now want those jobs taken. which is basically the same amount of interaction as just going and building the building.

I do agree the priority system is bad, though. It should let you order the priority of the jobs, with the most important showing at the top of the UI and the game should then fill those jobs in order of priority.