Players "playing badly" *rolls eyes* or rather, not as the game intends is perhaps the reason it *feels* so bad. But the reason people play like that is because it is more productive but also more risky - tighter margins, bigger swings in production, more to keep in your head... lots of mental maths to work out how your production will actually change when each building is constructed. It's also much, MUCH less fun.
If you wait for unemployment, say 20 months per pop growth to produce a building... or until you have 3 pops unemployed for a consumer goods upgrade for example you would lose out on 1x60 + 1x40 + 1x20 months of pop output, so at a growth rate of +5.00 a month to play like people here keep insisting people play you are worse off by:
120 months of upkeep = 120 food or 150 food (Nutritional Plentitude), 12 consumer goods (stratified) or 30 (decent) / 120 energy (robot)
Using a random save for actual values rather than using default (unrealistically low) tooltip values:
120 months of pop production = 10.7 food (1284), 8.3 minerals (996), 6.77 energy (812.4), 2.5 Trade Value (300)
If you only start the building upgrade at that point you can add in another 600 days or 20 months output lost (140 months wasted... but 10 years of wasted output alone seems fairly bad to me. Also if you have a growth rate of +10 or merely +2 you would modify these numbers to 60 months wasted (x0.5 the above values) or 300 wasted (x2.5 the above, say 3210 food lost)
If you only upgrade when you have 3 clerks instead of 3 unemployed you're producing 300 trade value in that time, say 150 energy and 75 consumer goods (sells for 138, buy for 169.5 in the save). Net output 319.5 energy credits maximum value... (minus the 12 or 30 consumer upkeep for workers... but I've been ignoring the upkeep that these pops would have from city district housing either way, as well as the tiny increase in crime from unemployed)
So if you wait for unemployed pops you lose at least 812.4 energy, if you have clerks instead of technicians you lose 492.9 energy. It's never smart or efficient to use clerks or unemployed pops when you can help it. People saying otherwise are simply incorrect, but they are playing a more fun version of the game in their ignorance. (also you can add in the upkeep of 2 generator districts for 60 months, 120 energy before reductions and it would only change it to 692.4 and 372.9, but clerks also require city districts or a commercial zone so it's a bit muddy trying to compare upkeep).
But, once you see that it makes sense to avoid using unemployed or clerks whenever possible you do then have a problem. Upgrading that consumer goods building then has the issue that the building cost would not be the stated:
30 minerals --> 48 minerals
4 energy --> 5 energy
1 crystal --> 2 crystal
but instead depending on which of the above jobs it displaces:
30 minerals --> 48 - 72.9 minerals (min - max, miners displaced)
4 energy --> 5 - 25.31 energy (min - max, technicians displaced)
0 food --> 0 - 32.1 food (min - max, farmers displaced)
1 crystal --> 2 crystal
Clerks are useful to reduce these swings as the change sits just in between at 12.5 energy lost per month rather than 25.31, much less painful... but that's forgetting that every clerk you have is netting you more than -3 potential energy per month anyway due to their terrible output, so if you're sitting on 10 clerks you're already at -30 energy.
So if you're sat at a comfortable +100 of each resource. You could wait a decade with unemployed pops and lose out on about 1000 food or 10 months profit or 1 decision per decade (10% output lost to playing as people here keep telling people to play) or you could have farmers/miners/techs instead of unemployed/clerks. But if you do then building a consumer goods upgrade would change your balance by significantly more than you expect or anticipate from the tooltips. That's all from building a SINGLE building on a SINGLE world... if you have say 10 worlds, maybe upgrade 4 at once then you could be shifting from +100 to -71.6 minerals (not +40 minerals like the tooltips indicate). That is indeed playing badly... but it comes from trying to maximize job output combined with a complete dearth of information on the consequences of your actions.
So, you made a mistake 2 years ago ordering those upgrades. Fine, ok. One mistake, shouldn't be too hard to fix. If you panic and try closing buildings... it gets into a frustrating death-spiral trap territory. e.g. in the above example the hypothetical player could try closing 2 upgraded buildings (out of the 4 built). This would reduce upkeep by 96 minerals, but now you have 16 unemployed for 1800 days or 60 months, a loss of output of 16x60x8.3 minerals = 6048 minerals that you may have expected to get if they had merely demoted back to miners. Worse if you consider the increased upkeep of specialists in terms of food and consumer goods as well as the fact that you've just turned off 96 consumer goods production... 2.25 energy to buy each of those 96 goods so you've gone from +100 minerals, +100 energy and say +0 consumer goods (the reason you wanted them in the first place) to having +24 minerals, -116 energy, +0 consumer goods for the next 60 months (so you need to find 6960 energy from somewhere...).
So the mistake of upgrading a building too quickly could cost you:
6048 minerals and 6960 energy if you misjudge the costs. And the game has made you feel like a complete idiot.
BUT you weren't "being an idiot". Waiting for 3 unemployed pops on those 4 worlds would have cost you:
5136 food, 3984 minerals or 3294 energy.
So everyone here that's playing the game "as intended" are wasting thousands of minerals/energy/food. The others are having less fun and when they make one slip they fall into a painful death-spiral that makes them feel stupid. All because of the stratum auto promotion and delayed demotion mechanic. I love the idea of it... if anything I think it's incomplete because it lacks education and other complications... but I really wish people could see that it isn't perfect and that it feels designed to bite first time players. A better system would provide more information in the tooltips (the actual change when a building is built) as well as giving more flexibility (e.g. having clerk-equivalent specialist jobs that can be turned on/off or removing the demotion time).
