Why the new job system -feels- wrong

[Badesumofu]

There is no need to wait for unemployment. I usually keep my planets 2 or 3 jobs ahead of the population. It's also worth noting that on specialised planets which are often the best option it's usually no issue to have a few more spare jobs open.

I find properly planning an empire and putting thought into when and where I build a building fun. This is a GSG after all, it's meant to take some thought and effort to play well.

 

[cscx]

It's relatively easy to shoot down the argument "but now you have to think more and that is good".

If thinking is the goal, then the game could always ask you to multiply two numbers in your head and give it the right answer before it allows you 'a click' . Or challenge you to a quick game of chess, and if you win - only then can you make changes to a planet .

The real questions is "Is the game making you think the thoughts that add to immersion and a good gaming experience". The answer is "no, because it keeps reminding me that it is just a game and not a real space civilization by making me do stuff (wait for spare pops before building) that doesn't happen in the real world - not even in the cliches of the Sci Fi 'real world' that we are familiar with ".

A possible counter-argument to the above is "but you do have to wait until you have spare money before you build anything, in both the real and the gaming world, right". To which the answer is - yes, and spare pops just doesn't work like spare money in the real world.
And non-spare pops also doesn't work like that in the real world - building factories in England when it got industrialized in the 19th century didn't decrease coal or food or iron ore production when everyone moved to the cities.

 

[The Boz]

building factories in England when it got industrialized in the 19th century didn't decrease coal or food or iron ore production when everyone moved to the cities.

This.
If anything, it *increased* it, to feed the needs of the new economy.
And farmers then didn't abandon farming, they did MORE of it to... you guessed it, feed the new economy.

 

[MeatyThud]

So. Despite having a more intrinsicate and interesting economy system, there is just a bad feeling in you when you upgrade an alloy factory and suddenly five pops move from resource generation to resource consumption: it feels like I am getting punished for developing my world. In a game, you want your players to feel rewarded when expanding, when advancing your empire, but you made a system that makes you feel like 'o shit my economy is crap becaue I tried expanding it', and it's poor psychological design. Compare to Europa Universalis or Crusader Kings: build a building, you now gain more ducats/gold each month.

Suggestion: Population should not be automatically promoted to higher strata. Available higher job strata should be filled when there are unemployed workers on your planet, or through an easy to access button that promotes a pop for you- Could even have two buttons, one for at each building interface to employ a lower strata pop into it, and one general button that is just 'fill all your higher strata jobs with workers' or something such - this could even be ticked to automatically fill jobs like the current system does.

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.

If you want the upgrade in advance of new pops Have you tried:

Deprioritise the job in question
Build the upgrade
Reprioritise the job as pops become available

But yeah maybe a “never autopromote” option on the planets population screen would solve it for those that prefer to build/upgrade in advance of pops arriving

 

[Badesumofu]

The real questions is "Is the game making you think the thoughts that add to immersion and a good gaming experience". The answer is "no, because it keeps reminding me that it is just a game and not a real space civilization by making me do stuff (wait for spare pops before building) that doesn't happen in the real world - not even in the cliches of the Sci Fi 'real world' that we are familiar with ".

You don't need to wait for spare pops, you just need to not make a bunch of specialist jobs available if it means all your farmers will leave their farms and cause your empire to starve. That's really a fairly basic level of planning. I have no idea what you're talking about with immersion and I suspect this is a case of 'immersion' meaning 'stuff I personally like'.

 

[PedroLuiz]

This.
If anything, it *increased* it, to feed the needs of the new economy.
And farmers then didn't abandon farming, they did MORE of it to... you guessed it, feed the new economy.

Of course, because the British population grew by a factor of 4 (if I'm not mistaken) in the period, they had hands to work both

 

[The Boz]

You don't need to wait for spare pops, you just need to not make a bunch of specialist jobs available if it means all your farmers will leave their farms and cause your empire to starve. That's really a fairly basic level of planning. I have no idea what you're talking about with immersion and I suspect this is a case of 'immersion' meaning 'stuff I personally like'.

Single-planet empire is running a +97 surplus of electricity, and +1 of food. Consumer goods factory gets opened. Have you planned on what type of worker will work there? No, and you can't, because it's random.
Unless you are seriously proposing the demented "set up construction for a year, and 11 months later remember to come to that planet to close the surplus jobs down so that the guys you want working in the new factory move there, and not the farmers that are barely feeding the populace"... in which case... I dunno, go away. You are clearly demented.

 

[WhapXI]

So everyone here that's playing the game "as intended" are wasting thousands of minerals/energy/food.

This comment was wild. I did my best to follow what you're talking about, and I would say the most glaring omission is that you aren't factoring in the economic value of having more artisans, or the economic+military value of having more metallurgists. Merely the "loss" of having district jobs unfilled.

Also your big scary 6k figures of loss are pulled from the ridiculous premise of building a pair of level three factories, and then closing them down to get the mineral upkeep back. A far more robust solution would be to sell the 16 specialists' output on the market and then simply buy 96 minerals per month. You'll make a profit. Like, forever. Or you could just downgrade the buildings to put fewer people out of work at a time. Or you could build up your economy sensibly, focussing on filling planets with districts and having distinct urban industrial planets so that your key rural workers aren't being pulled away willy nilly.

My build-up/development strategy for a planet is as follows.

1. Colonise. Obvious.
2. Wait for pops to grow. Once there is an unemployed pop, build a resource district. The unemployed pop will take the job, and the next pop to grow will be immediately employed. One pop is unemployed for ~180 days. Not 120 months.
3. Keep building districts to match pop numbers until no more can be built (either all possible resource districts built or planet size district cap is reached). This way there are no unemployed pops and no unfilled jobs.
4. Once all resource districts have been built, there are generally 20+ pops on the planet and therefore a few unoccupied building slots.
5. At this point the next unemployed pop gets an alloy foundry, civilian industry, or research lab built for them. It will fill immediately, but only leave one worker job unfilled. The next pop to grow will fill this.
6. The next unemployed pop will get another tier 1 specialist building.
7. A city district will need to be built at some point. If there is no planet size left, then a generator district will be replaced. Or if the rural districts are too useful, then the planet will be allowed to stagnate.
8. If desired, the planet will be gradually developed away from rural districts and into city districts. Factories should only be upgraded to level 3 when there are no building slots for more level 1s.

So yeah. Your proposed economic (mis)management that results in thousands of resources being lost due to there being dozens of unemployed pops at a time is absolutely a result of players playing badly. I don't really know why playing the game extremely poorly being not what the game intends or rewards is eye-roll-worthy or somehow offensive.

Literally stop building factories if you don't have the raw resources to supply them and pops to work them.

 

[cscx]

Of course, because the British population grew by a factor of 4 (if I'm not mistaken) in the period, they had hands to work both

The actual effect of a factory is that it creates (more) demand for it's raw materials inputs, which automatically puts more/enough people onto making the raw materials. And growth in malthusian; more food from better farming (with machines) equals more pops.

 

[The Boz]

Of course, because the British population grew by a factor of 4 (if I'm not mistaken) in the period, they had hands to work both

Naturally, and the industry was created as a response to this population boom. Right?

 

[WhapXI]

This.
If anything, it *increased* it, to feed the needs of the new economy.
And farmers then didn't abandon farming, they did MORE of it to... you guessed it, feed the new economy.

The population absolutely boomed in this time. Increases in efficiency of tools and machinery meant mines and farms could be developed to access previously inaccessible resources. This compares to building more districts. Increases in farming/mining efficiency meant that fewer people could output more resources, and with the increasing birth rate from slightly better healthcare and nutrition it all lead to rural unemployment, or at least better prospects for employment in urban centres.

So yeah, the industrial revolution came about because raw resource output was increased dramatically. Not in spite of it. Every sector of the economy grew. Manufacturing didn't just leech off of the rest.

 

[WhapXI]

Naturally, and the industry was created as a response to this population boom. Right?

Industry was created as a result of better technology and the growth of stable international trade.

The population booming drove up demands for finished goods and drove down the price of labour, simply making it more profitable. Nobody saw lots of people and thought "hmm, maybe I could invent a steam-powered loom".

 

[The Boz]

Thank you.

 

[PedroLuiz]

Naturally, and the industry was created as a response to this population boom. Right?

Depends on which historian you ask, I remember reading about one that defended that part of the population boom came from buying more on the food trade using the exporting money and better wages, another one I read in July defended that the industrial revolution was heavily influenced by the high wages England had at the time, and the boom happened between 1750 and 1850 so unlikely that the industries came first.

The actual effect of a factory is that it creates (more) demand for it's raw materials inputs, which automatically puts more/enough people onto making the raw materials. And growth in malthusian; more food from better farming (with machines) equals more pops.

Well, it does but it doesn't mean that the country of origin is the one that will provide those raw materials, more food from other countries could even lead to more unemployment to local producers

 

[Tech Noir Synth]

I disagree with some of your thoughts around not promoting pops instantly. The new system is a nice way to have more meaningful management of your economy, which in my opinion is a good thing.

However, we went from a mindless "clicking upgrade" to an extreme amount of micromanagement for pops just so they work according to their traits which was not there before. In total the amount of tedious micromanagement has increased if you want to min/max as much as before. And you should - after all Paradox has left all ressource boosting traits in the game, so I seriously doubt their intention was to shut down any amount of min/maxing.

I have created a thread which sadly got little attention where I presented simple yet effective options to improve on the current system and make it surpass the old system. You can read it here:

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...op-system-to-surpass-the-tile-system.1139859/

I will now copy/paste some of the content from my thread so that we can discuss here, as this one seems to get more attention:

" I want to use 4 different types of Robots for energy, minerals, science and unity. I can no longer queue up building these different pop types. Instead I have to check how many jobs need to be filled and I have to switch around which pops are being assembled manually. However each time I lose 50% on current assembly progress on the next pop, so I have to switch right after a new pop is added to not waste precious time.

Give us the option to queue up different Robot pops to assemble, so that we no longer have to check every planet, habitat etc in intervals. Make the AI smarter when it comes to assigning pops to jobs OR allow us to assign them manually (atleast for Robots). By doing this, you effectively remove the tedious upgrading of buildings and the insane micromanagement we are forced to do currently and you end up with a superiour, more immersive and beautiful management screen.

Each of the three ascension perks offers bonuses for ressource production, so having an easier time to allocate pops correctly would help out all players. "

 

[The Boz]

The population started booming after 1805, a few years after the looms were clearly shown as "these things are really nice!". Population boom followed industrial boom.

 

[PedroLuiz]

The population booming drove up demands for finished goods and drove down the price of labour, simply making it more profitable. Nobody saw lots of people and thought "hmm, maybe I could invent a steam-powered loom".

I tried stopping my derailing of the thread but:

• The growth of population doesn't increase the demand for finished goods, in some cases it could even diminish it, it was the better wages that did
• Low labor prices don't make industries more profitable, the opposite in fact, high wages makes low labour intensive machines better

 

[WhapXI]

Population boom followed industrial boom.

Power looms make people want to bone down? Better fertilisers and farming techniques from the early 18thC onwards caused the population boom.

• The growth of population doesn't increase the demand for finished goods, in some cases it could even diminish it, it was the better wages that did
• Low labor prices don't make industries more profitable, the opposite in fact, high wages makes low labour intensive machines better

I'll give you the first one but I don't think the second applies. I'm talking about like early 19thC machinery. The kind you'd have to stand in front of and manually operate for 14 hours and hope not to lose a finger at any point. The kind of industry where you need a large mass of unskilled bodies, essentially pressing a button all day every day. Being able to pay these people as little as possible due to the sheer abundance of unskilled labour is absolutely a boost to profits.

 

[PedroLuiz]

I'll give you the first one but I don't think the second applies. I'm talking about like early 19thC machinery. The kind you'd have to stand in front of and manually operate for 14 hours and hope not to lose a finger at any point. The kind of industry where you need a large mass of unskilled bodies, essentially pressing a button all day every day. Being able to pay these people as little as possible due to the sheer abundance of unskilled labour is absolutely a boost to profits.

And you're comparing it to manufacturing, a very efficient technique labour wise /sarcasm. They still save a lot of cheap labor

 

[WhapXI]

And you're comparing it to manufacturing, a very efficient technique labour wise /sarcasm. They still save a lot of cheap labor

I'm not really clear on what you're talking about or what your point is.

Early factories needed hundreds of people to operate efficiently to output the most cloth or whatever they could. Paying all of the unskilled workers a pound a day rather than a shilling would not have made the venture more profitable. Are you talking about more modern and advanced machines that are less labour intensive but require more skill to operate/maintain/not immediately break? Because I ain't.