Why the new job system -feels- wrong

[FleetingRain]

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 you can have 50 planets but can't budget yourself to upgrade buildings and have pops temporarily abandoning worker-level jobs?

What are those 50 planets for? Amenities?

 

[sylanna]

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.

When I upgrade my labs from 5 to 10 jobs, I want my unemployed guy and the following four newborns to take the jobs. Not my unemployed guy and four technicians. I want full control over who does what and when, as I had before 2.2.

In my opinion pop management wasn't bad before 2.2. The building and upgrade system was. I'd prefer to freely move pops inside their and into higher strata.

 

[FoolishOwl]

Taking away control from the player is a bad thing. Making the player feel punished for building a building or upgrading a building is a bad thing. The system is good, the implementation is not the best from a gameplay experience point of view.

People seem to keep skipping over this point, a *fundamental* point about game design.

Prior to 2.2, there was a fairly straightforward gameplay loop. Generally, if you had a red flag on something, that was a crisis, and you needed to fix that right away: you had a resource shortfall, or you had ships or stations or colonies over your cap. Most of the time, everything was in the green, and, you were deciding what you were going to spend your resources on: more ships, more territorial expansion, more planetary upgrades. In other words, most of the time, you were choosing which positive benefit you wanted.

The gameplay loop is radically different now; look at the advice people are offering. Empire size over the cap? That's expected. Resource production in the red? Just trade something else on the market. Unemployment? That's when you construct new structures, and not before; some unemployment is a good thing. You've got positive and negative modifiers all over the place, and you have to do the math in your head to figure out what bad news is actually bad news.

It's *bad design*.

 

[SpectralShade]

How about this, then:

Add a policy option called "job handling" (or something to that effect).
some options I can think of for this new policy:
a) population always seek higher placement, reluctant to go down (as it is now)
b) population always fill lowest placements up, reluctant to go up
c) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of lowest hierachy first
d) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of highest hierachy first

Oh, and let us drag and drop pops between tiles again so we don't need to sit and do a million clicks on plus/minus buttons to achieve the same effect.

 

[anamiac]

How about this, then:

Add a policy option called "job handling" (or something to that effect).
some options I can think of for this new policy:
a) population always seek higher placement, reluctant to go down (as it is now)
b) population always fill lowest placements up, reluctant to go up
c) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of lowest hierachy first
d) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of highest hierachy first

Oh, and let us drag and drop pops between tiles again so we don't need to sit and do a million clicks on plus/minus buttons to achieve the same effect.

This would be fine. I'd take option d, and the people who want to go micro fifty planets every six months while fighting the contingency can take option a.

You could simplify it to two options if we had the ability to raise and lower jobs in the priority list.

 

[Kent_Lang]

How about this, then:

Add a policy option called "job handling" (or something to that effect).
some options I can think of for this new policy:
a) population always seek higher placement, reluctant to go down (as it is now)
b) population always fill lowest placements up, reluctant to go up
c) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of lowest hierachy first
d) Population never change jobs unless ordered to, new populations take empty jobs of highest hierachy first

Oh, and let us drag and drop pops between tiles again so we don't need to sit and do a million clicks on plus/minus buttons to achieve the same effect.

I think all of these you suggest can be easily modded.

Personally I would like an education system where you start the game with a certain amount of educated pops and pops have to fill a pop's education meter to promote to a higher strata. This would mean that all pops would start at the bottom and work their way up. This education meter could be filled by decisions, race, ethics, traits, buildings, living standard, pops working at a lower strata for a time or even what faction they're in with higher bonuses given to factions that have a lot of support.

Depending on how much vacancies there are in the free jobs, the less the amount of education the pops require to be promoted to a higher strata. Heck you could even include average pop job experience in the mix, giving players bonuses for pops that stay at their job for a long time and making them less malleable to change strata.
It would reflect real societies and you'd realize the demographic consequences of societies changing their economy from a resource based economy to a enhancement based economy.

Or you could just use slaver guilds. It forces a lot of your pops to stay at worker strata.

 

[The Grumpy Buddha]

So, I like that auto-upgrades don't automatically make sense, and I like there being some worker management/timing (as I said in another thread, clerks = time for more specialists).

HOWEVER, I agree with the OP that even so, it's weird that your whole populace is ready, able, and willing to hop into a specialist role as soon as the building gets built, even if it means they crash your economy by doing so. So while it's strategically interesting, this new mechanic, it's still kinda frustrating to have to keep an eye on every planet and not build an upgraded building until you have 3+ clerks (or whatever). And god forbid you build 2 by mistake.

Kind of like the Market -- it's really interesting, and definitely a step forward, but it's broken/dumb/unrealistic in a lot of ways as well. It'd be nice to set up a system where at least it would be less likely for some worker roles to autopromote to specialist, or certain buildings don't open their doors until there's X% of worker roles filled, or something.

 

[AlanC9]

People seem to keep skipping over this point, a *fundamental* point about game design.

Prior to 2.2, there was a fairly straightforward gameplay loop. Generally, if you had a red flag on something, that was a crisis, and you needed to fix that right away: you had a resource shortfall, or you had ships or stations or colonies over your cap. Most of the time, everything was in the green, and, you were deciding what you were going to spend your resources on: more ships, more territorial expansion, more planetary upgrades. In other words, most of the time, you were choosing which positive benefit you wanted.

The gameplay loop is radically different now; look at the advice people are offering. Empire size over the cap? That's expected. Resource production in the red? Just trade something else on the market. Unemployment? That's when you construct new structures, and not before; some unemployment is a good thing. You've got positive and negative modifiers all over the place, and you have to do the math in your head to figure out what bad news is actually bad news.

It's *bad design*.

I don't see how you got to the conclusion there. It works if different gameplay loop= bad design, but I presume you're not making that argument.

 

[Hyomoto]

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?

I agree with you right up until this. Planning is not a function of technology. It can facilitate it, but having a really sweet day planner doesn't mean you'll actually get to the gym.

That said, I think you touch on an important characteristic. The tools to deal with planets did not evolve with planets, and some sort of planner to help you see a high-level overview and make decisions without checking each individual planet would be highly welcome.

 

[FoolishOwl]

I don't see how you got to the conclusion there. It works if different gameplay loop= bad design, but I presume you're not making that argument.

Poor structuring of my post, maybe. The contrast of the gameplay loops was supposed to highlight how confusing the signals given in the current gameplay loop are.

 

[KingAlamar]

I'm in between what seems to be the two camps. Personally I don't mind the system TOO much -- it's quite micro heavy to constantly cycle through planets looking for the right thing to build at exactly the right time. On the other side some other systems were NOT adjusted to the new realities so it's too easy to break things if you don't go into ultra-micro-mode. While I won't say the game is unplayable it's not as good as it could be -- some systems to help lessen the micro BUT still have you make the same decisions would be nice.

For example setting real priorities on jobs would be nice. I'd like to prioritize my mining, farming, clerical, etc. workers so that when I do build specialist buildings I know where I will be drawing people from. I realize I can manually go in and remove everyone from every worker job and then manually readd them in the ratio I want HOWEVER setting up "job priorities" would help eliminate a lot of that sort of back & forth.

The above could also apply to promotions for ruler jobs.

Changes to assimilation / ascension to work WITH the new systems as opposed to against them would also be quite welcome. I'm a big believer in the idea if you completely revamp part of the game ALL OTHER PARTS need to be examined and ALSO changed to work with the new system. While you CAN work with things currently there's a whole lot of micro involved with these pieces that would be better utilized elsewhere.

 

[AlanC9]

Poor structuring of my post, maybe. The contrast of the gameplay loops was supposed to highlight how confusing the signals given in the current gameplay loop are.

OK, but I'm not sure I see it. We still have a red flag for unemployment; unemployment isn't a crisis, but it's a little important. Building upgrades are yellow, so not flagged as crises.

 

[Delthor]

It's *bad design*.

It really isn't. People just expect it to be trivially easy like it was before. So they make poor decisions about how to build their planets and then expect to make up for it with pop micro like they used to. But the system doesn't give you that option, which adds real weight to the economic play that wouldn't happen otherwise. You're expected to make good decisions, but that seems to be too much for some people when it's economic decisions. People don't whine about their fleets being MIA after losing a battle or getting destroyed because they didn't consider their opponents' loadout. But they do whine about being punished for not being disciplined with their building.

Sure, they could work on some of the UI to guide people who freak out over yellow text without thinking about it. But the systems are sound.

Oh, and let us drag and drop pops between tiles again so we don't need to sit and do a million clicks on plus/minus buttons to achieve the same effect.

While you CAN work with things currently there's a whole lot of micro involved with these pieces that would be better utilized elsewhere.

If you feel the need to micro pops after year 2220, you're probably doing something wrong with your macro game. After the first game I played, the only micro I deal with anymore is resettlement, since emigration push pretty much never is enough to cause pop decline to keep a pop level steady without giving up a whole planet's worth of growth. With everything else, proper handling of your building eliminates the need to micro pops, and you only need it early because one pop moving can be 50% of your net income. I don't even wait for unemployment; I just plan my economy so that losing 2-3 workers won't cripple my whole economy, either through having enough workers to start with, having a stockpile while new workers grow, or using the market. Or all three, usually.

 

[KingAlamar]

If you feel the need to micro pops after year 2220, you're probably doing something wrong with your macro game. After the first game I played, the only micro I deal with anymore is resettlement, since emigration push pretty much never is enough to cause pop decline to keep a pop level steady without giving up a whole planet's worth of growth. With everything else, proper handling of your building eliminates the need to micro pops, and you only need it early because one pop moving can be 50% of your net income. I don't even wait for unemployment; I just plan my economy so that losing 2-3 workers won't cripple my whole economy, either through having enough workers to start with, having a stockpile while new workers grow, or using the market. Or all three, usually.

I'm still playing my first game under 2.2 as an FYI.

As far as micro goes I do feel the need to micro the planets themselves fairly frequently:

• Do I have the right mix of jobs? [I.E. enough miners vs. farmers vs. clerks vs various specialists, etc.]
• What job(s) should be next? [Expansion / new buildings]
• What about my amenities? Housing? Current population vs. open jobs?
• Have my planet-side decisions timed out [I don't get notifications of this]?
• How are my empire-wide stats [minerals, food, energy, alloys, consumer goods, motes/gasses/crystals]?
• How will this planet help further my overall goals while keeping planetary concerns balanced?
• What species are where so I can assimilate them in an orderly fashion? How will this impact specialists and other jobs?

Note: I'm playing Xenofile / Egal so I'm not doing a lot of pop-micro [move you here, move that there, etc.] Doing higher level decisions BUT given what seems like a lack of systems to help automate those decisions "constant vigilance" [I.E. tons of micro] seems appropriate. Also note I've never crashed my economy once, could, if I chose to, squash the rest of the galaxy like a grape [but I'm RPing so I'm not], running away from all other empires across the board [military,tech,economy].

 

[Delthor]

As far as micro goes I do feel the need to micro the planets themselves fairly frequently:

Many of the things you list are things I'd put under "macro" as the big decisions you make about running your economy, and almost all of the rest fall under this weird "meaningful micro" that is just part of the core play in the game now. The goal was never to reduce the number of decisions you made or reduce the number of clicks. The goal was to make it so that meaningless micro that had no real decision making involved was reduced or eliminated. That was definitely a success, as the number of clicks involving planet management went from about 20% meaningful (past the first 40-50 years) to 80% meaningful.

I was saying that trying to micro which pop works which job is something that shouldn't be needed if you naturally guide this by making good decisions about when/where/which buildings and districts to build. There are a ton of ways to fight the system in Le Guin. But if you stop trying to fight it and learn how to make it work for you, it's incredibly engaging. I'm fine with people asking to improve the sector AI so that it's more useable and does better, or really any automation to reduce the need for detailed planet management for those who don't like it.

But I very seriously object to people wanting to dumb the economy back down so that you can do whatever you want with no consequences.

 

[Tim_Ward]

When I upgrade my labs from 5 to 10 jobs, I want my unemployed guy and the following four newborns to take the jobs. Not my unemployed guy and four technicians. I want full control over who does what and when, as I had before 2.2.

In my opinion pop management wasn't bad before 2.2. The building and upgrade system was. I'd prefer to freely move pops inside their and into higher strata.

I don't think you're supposed to have that sort of control, your pops are supposed to represent blocks of autonomous people, you can't necessarily order them where to work.

I would support adding this level of control to hive minds, though.

 

[Brian Bóroimhe]

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.

I think exactly this is what is missing right now. The current "priority" buttons simply close jobs, but if you could also move jobs up and down the list and have the jobs filled from the top it would give you the ability to choose which jobs on a planet are its "overflow" jobs (by just dragging them to the bottom) which get filled by growing pops so you don't have unemployment, but are the first promoted to specialists when those jobs become available.

 

[wundergoat]

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

Ignoring that pause isn't a viable options playing with other people, the existence of a pause function isn't an excuse for some actions taking inordinate amounts of actual player time. In my limited time to play, I don't want to spend too much time micromanaging pops. Right now this means accepting that I have to accept inefficiencies in order to avoid the UI issue.

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.

What constitutes poor play? I agree that adding and then staffing a ton of specialist jobs so your raw material production tanks is poor play, but making a system that requires a bunch of micro to accomplish "steadily add specialist jobs" isn't exactly leading to good play. A system that requires me to check back every few minutes to execute this seems like it should be in an RTS, where efficient player action is part of the skill. It doesn't belong in a GSG/4x.

Regarding large numbers of planets and supporting a big specialist shift, yes, you absolutely can absorb the impact of swapping workers to specialists if you are floating extra resources and production. If you aren't, or are adding quite a bit more specialists, you can still run into problems late game. And no, this isn't a planning problem because it CAN be mitigated with a boatload of clicking.

I don't think you're supposed to have that sort of control, your pops are supposed to represent blocks of autonomous people, you can't necessarily order them where to work.

I would support adding this level of control to hive minds, though.

You can achieve this level of control over pops within the existing UI, it is just very time and action intensive. The UI should be improved to make it easier.

Also, gestalts can already freely move between strata without any negatives. Thank god, since their baseline colony capital buildings have so many non-productive jobs.

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.

Short answer - I don't want to be spending a lot of time interacting with this planet after I've decided how I want it set up.

Long answer - If pops did not autopromote, as in only new pops would take higher strata jobs, I could queue up buildings instead of having to come back every 10 minutes or so. The checking up isn't so bad early game, but once you start owning significant parts of the galaxy it feels like a time suck. With current UI, your options at that point are to either suck it up and take the econ hit while your new pops fill out worker jobs or wait until you have excess population then add the jobs.

With an autopromote toggle, turning it off would mean I could queue up those specialist buildings and expect those new jobs to be filled every 20 months or so. With the addition of a better job priority system as well, I could implement my economic plans easily and with minimal player work, freeing up time for 'diplomacy' and other pursuits.


I think an example would be helpful. In one of my games I have a mining world that is almost filled up. I'll have lots of extra building slots left once the resource districts fill up. Adding T1 alloy foundries makes sense here - they're relatively low upkeep and I could use more alloys. I could reasonably build 3 to add 6 metallurgists. It is ~1100 minerals for the foundries, so being able to prepay is pretty trivial, as is the energy upkeep. Miners here are making 8.5 minerals each and metallurgists consume 6 minerals each. If I queue up the three foundries and swap 6 miners for metallurgists, that's a fairly rapid 87 mineral/month swing. I can absorb it as my current income is +250/month, but I have more than one world that I want to start adding finished goods production to, especially as additional resourcing colonies are developing. Autopromote off means that I have a steady ramp up of -36 minerals/month over the next 10 years instead, which means I can easily queue up specialists on most of my early resourcing colonies.

I could just micro it and build an alloy foundry every 3.5 years across 4-5 colonies, or make a clerk building as a worker holding pen and revisiting the colonies in 10 years to swap to alloys, or just give up on the whole endeavor and take actions to boost emigration to central production worlds. But why should I have to do that when a damn toggle saves all that work.

 

[Zenopath]

My two cents worth on this topic is that having unemployed specialists that are "too proud" to work in a worker job is ridiculous. In the OP´s example, he could normally fix the problem by downgrading the priority of his new alloy production plant, freeing up specialists to become workers. But because they don´t want to downgrade back down to a job they had last month, they instead choose to be unemployed and do nothing if you unassign them even if there is work waiting for them as workers.

Gameplay wise this is a pain in the ass, and seems to only really exist to provide benefits to egalitarians who give unemployed populations stuff to do or reward picking a tradition that reduces the time it takes unemployed specialists to get off their ass. In real life, people who get fired from a high paying job will probably spend some time looking for another high paying job before going to work at a lower paying job, but nothing like the 4 or so years that in game specialists do. I think that an unemployment time of 3 months would be enough to punish players, 120 days would be streching it, but 1500 days to be willing to take a lower paying job? Not fun or realistic.

 

[Evangeline]

Just a quick note for the people struggling with microing 50+ planets: you can automate your sectors and let your governors decide what to build when.

They don't seem to do a good job yet, though, but once this gets patched there will be less microing in large empires.

But I really dislike that my 50 planets need to scrolled through - we need little clickable messages at the top when a pop is about to be built who would become unemployed, and when all housing is used up on a planet. Instead, we still have the now completely useless "a planet has finished its building queue" - why are you telling me this? Why is this clickable? It means nothing to me, because I need to wait until the planet's population completely catches up with the new building, anyway. I want to be informed at the top about the things that ACTUALLY mean that I can and should proceed to do the next thing or fix a problem. So the message system really needs to be updated to 2.2 instead of being stuck in the past.