Why the new job system -feels- wrong

[KingAlamar]

I feel less like the jobs system [in isolation] is broken and more like:

• The new system requires a LOT of mothering / lording-over.
• The system is actually pretty easy ... it just penalizes you [harshly??] if you don't fiddle with things on a fairly regular basis
• The other systems in the game don't feel as if they have been tweaked so they work organically with the new system
• There isn't much common sense automation that STILL requires you to make the same decisions but helps automate the actual timing & implementation

Note: Above comments are intended as a reflection of my SP experience.

IMHO there is an overload of simple decisions that need to be made on a fairly regular basis. It's not necessarily the decisions that are bad but the lack of game support in implementing the decisions through the process to actualize the decision. I.E. being a "manager" of the game / empire is fine and desirable. Having to also be the worker AND the project manager AND wearing other hats is the difference between the right level of decisions to be made vs. needless nuisance level micro.

TL/DR: We have the makings of a good skeleton in place. What we don't have is the rest of the body designed around taking advantage of said skeleton.

 

[Cat_Fuzz]

I came here for the thread about people not saving their baseline resources to buy into the upgraded specialist economy and instead found a thread on industrial era Britain, which by my reckoning has little to do with Population mechanics in a game set 300 years hence from that moment in human history...

 

[PedroLuiz]

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.

I'm talking about pre industrial post artisan manufactures, those that operates before industry took over

 

[PedroLuiz]

industrial era Britain, which by my reckoning has little to do with Population mechanics in a game set 300 years hence from that moment in human history...

It kind of does have something to do , and it's 500 years in my math

 

[KingAlamar]

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.

After reflection I do agree that the DECISIONS themselves [what to build & when & where] are "macro" and appropriate in isolation. The work needed to actualize the decision doesn't have enough automation / support so this IMHO becomes nuisance-level micro.

I do argue though that the jobs decisions themselves are still pretty simplistic. The only [slightly] complicating factor is you need to balance several needs at once but at the granularity that the decision occurs it's usually a pretty darned easy decision.

 

[cscx]

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'.

I mean that pops don't behave like this, because in the real world there are mechanisms that make them not behaving like this. There can not be a situation in the real world where everyone is making furniture and no-one's chopping trees, because IF there were constraints on labor capacity expansion, and IF you suddenly gain the ability to make furniture, THEN chopping trees would become lucrative enough to make/keep people do it.
This can still pull people off unrelated sectors and kill those sectors, I suppose. But agriculture isn't unrelated - food is actually a raw material input to furniture as well (you can't have cabinet makers who don't eat). And where will the extra money for food salaries come from - well - both furniture makers and tree choppers just got a raise - they can afford to pay more for food.

In a command economy - you'd have the ability to decide to pay everyone more (or force them to their job allocation ). In a free market economy - paying them more (a proportion of the newly created income from the newly started production of furniture), would happen on it's own.
The game is neither situation, as it is.

 

[KingAlamar]

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.

From what I see / experience I think one year for a specialist is somewhat realistic. I could see a ruler taking 2 years before they'd want to demote to "specialist". Maybe another year on top of that to demote again to worker?? Then techs, civics, "edicts", traditions, etc. could modify the above times in one way or another.

Note: I'm not necessarily saying "fun" ... but I've known folks with education / training / experience that simply don't want to work @ McDonalds. They are happy to wait until their 6 months [or longer] unemployment checks run out THEN wait for any savings they have to run out THEN they start looking for jobs "beneath them".

 

[AlphaAsh]

I think an obvious solution for upward mobility is to give some kind of control over education/training, and that promoting from worker to specialist would take time based on it. Living standards doesn't really work for somewhere to put it though. Possibly a policy or lengthy edict, with cost of rate of education being energy or even amenities.

(edit Apologies if I'm echoing an earlier post.)

 

[DrFranknfurter]

I just wanted to disagree with you again so I wrote a post:

• I don't know where this 5 pop growth / 20 month figure came from, even in 01.02.2200 I already have a 5.5 PG/19M (or even 7.5 with mechanist) and mid game i'm at 10-15PG/10-7months so I'd average it at 7.7PG/13M or else you're being dishonest

Perhaps I was wrong to try using maths when I should really have been talking about emotions, impressions, the flow of the game and the feel of it. But it's hard to explain or quantify those so instead I went with numbers.

I gave values for +2 to +10 growth per month so that's hardly giving "dishonest" figures. Either way it only makes the figures 0.5x or 2.5x times as big, like I said. The loss from using unemployed pops is still there for most empires. I started working with +5 because the save in question had a planet at +5 (the decision had run out and I hadn't noticed) and I was going to use nice round figures. In another save I have planets from +7.05 to +2.62 (Ecumenopolis to New colony). These are without emigration/migration treaties because that's just borrowing growth from other worlds. Also because after the agony of dealing with dozens of species I've been making sure not to allow migration treaties or for slaves to grow for that matter.

I used technicians as an example because of how bad they are, to show that even with poor output you'd lose a great deal by keeping a large pool of unemployed workers. It was also meant to be a useful comparison just keeping energy and minerals in mind (not apples and oranges comparisons). I could have used food converted to energy via the market but then it would have opened the argument up to being derailed by discussions of the exchange rate on the market, price per unit and lots of other confusing variables. (The post already felt far too big without those additions)
e.g. 1000 food would be worth 1205 energy in that save, 900 energy credits in another. All you're arguing here is that I was *understating* the loss by having technicians auto-promoted rather than using farmers instead.
I also didn't include the loss of output moving from utopian abundance unemployed to specialists... but you could add in another couple of rows for lost science and unity that isn't shown to the player as well if you want.

I may be an idiot, a retard or whatever other insult you wish to throw at me. But whatever I am, I did mess up (kinda) my first few games despite 1000+ hours in Stellaris. I've had a few games where it wasn't building said specialist buildings but instead capturing them that tanked my economy into a position where it just wasn't fun trying to figure out how I should go about fixing it (made more confusing by pops not working jobs that match their traits and a dozen other minor distractions)... The funny thing is, loading up those saves I was more than twice the economy score of any rival empire yet in no game since 2.2 have I felt good about my economy. I was in a great position in every save, the problems were fixable with a bit of playing with automatic market purchases, selling stuff or simply banking a larger emergency fund... but I felt like I was being attacked constantly. It just feels super stressful when for 1000 hours, since hour number 1 it's felt nice and relaxing. The same amount of play-time for each game in 2.1 vs 2.2 also has a completely different number of in-game years passing. In 2.1 with the same races, same time spent playing I was about 20-60 years further in the game (my Butterfree Barbaric Despoiler (butterflies) and Hawklon Star Technocracy respectively). That's also me abandoning the games 20-60 years sooner as I didn't want to go back to those frustrating economic simulations.

I understand you have a very different view. We all have different reasons for being excited (I love the possibilities in the new system and the room for improvement) as well as different reasons for feeling... *off* about the new systems. I was trying to work out what feels off for me. To be honest it's hard to pin it down. It's not that if I play a certain way I'm 1000 minerals down and that bothers me (it doesn't)... it's more that I can play in a way that puts me in the lead within the first decade and for the next century I feel like I'm working as a part-time accountant roleplaying as Ebenezer Scrooge. But even when everything is going smoothly I have to be hyper-vigilant not to make a tiny mistake with massive consequences (and I always play as a tired human being in the evenings rather than bright and shiny in the mornings). I feel like I'm walking on a tightrope when before it was a bridge with a lovely view. The AI in the game isn't any harder... so actually I'm doing even better than 2.1 relatively speaking even in first games where I was sure I'd messed up. It's just that the skill ceiling has gone up and I feel a little sad about that even when I'm happy about it.

Put it another way. I play Dominions 5 when I'm feeling alert and smart (very rarely), I play Conquest of Elysium 4 when I'm tired (almost always sadly). Both by the same developers, one just has a deeper economic, battle and logistical system. I love the simple system because it fits me better when I'm not mentally up to the deeper system. It's great the deeper system exists. But I'm just overjoyed that there's something easier that I can play on bad days, or to play with kids. I feel like Stellaris went from CoE4 to Dom5 overnight... it's great, deeper and more interesting. But I also feel like I lost my beloved simple game. I'll still play it, but for less time, only on good days otherwise it'll just give me a headache. It's also raised the recommended age up a good few years, cutting out a younger audience just as it's being ported to the switch and that new audience. I'd have made Megacorp and Stellaris two seperate games, one simpler and one more complex. (But both with ongoing development, bugfixes and new features). Having one turn into the other feels bad for me... even though I'm still playing (just playing less, slower and having less fun).

 

[AlanC9]

I mean that pops don't behave like this, because in the real world there are mechanisms that make them not behaving like this. There can not be a situation in the real world where everyone is making furniture and no-one's chopping trees, because IF there were constraints on labor capacity expansion, and IF you suddenly gain the ability to make furniture, THEN chopping trees would become lucrative enough to make/keep people do it.
This can still pull people off unrelated sectors and kill those sectors, I suppose. But agriculture isn't unrelated - food is actually a raw material input to furniture as well (you can't have cabinet makers who don't eat). And where will the extra money for food salaries come from - well - both furniture makers and tree choppers just got a raise - they can afford to pay more for food.

In a command economy - you'd have the ability to decide to pay everyone more (or force them to their job allocation ). In a free market economy - paying them more (a proportion of the newly created income from the newly started production of furniture), would happen on it's own.
The game is neither situation, as it is.

OTOH, there are class and status effects which aren't strictly monetary. You'll make more in New York as a bartender or a waiter than as an editorial assistant, but all those college grads flocking to the city still prefer the latter. (That's how we're able to keep wages low.)

The weird part is that you can just bounce immediately into the higher status job with no credentials. It's like they've implemented half of the Imperialism pop system, without importing the education mechanic.

 

[WhapXI]

I'm talking about pre industrial post artisan manufactures, those that operates before industry took over

...Why? I was pretty clear on what I was actually talking about. Of course something totally different is going to be totally different. Again, I really don't understand what your point is.

 

[AlanC9]

I've had a few games where it wasn't building said specialist buildings but instead capturing them that tanked my economy into a position where it just wasn't fun trying to figure out how I should go about fixing it (made more confusing by pops not working jobs that match their traits and a dozen other minor distractions)...

Can't you deactivate specialist buildings at will? You'd get a little unemployment, but on a newly-conquered planet that's not going to matter because Stability's in the crapper anyway.

 

[wundergoat]

I can't read your mind. I also did it on purpose.

Also, duh? My point still stands, regardless. You're supposed to use pause in order to handle things when it gets busy. You can't in multiplayer, so don't play multiplayer.

Or change the entire game so it's less busy and you can watch a movie whilst playing on fastest.

Coincidentally, you focused on my comment’s intro (that pause is not viable in MP) and ignored my point, that the existence of a pause button is not an excuse for requiring a ton of time wasting micro to execute a simple development plan.

 

[AlphaAsh]

Coincidentally, you focused on my comment’s intro (that pause is not viable in MP) and ignored my point, that the existence of a pause button is not an excuse for requiring a ton of time wasting micro to execute a simple development plan.

I didn't ignore your point. I disagreed with your point. The existence of a pause button is to allow time to waste microing a simple development plan.

 

[cscx]

OTOH, there are class and status effects which aren't strictly monetary. You'll make more in New York as a bartender or a waiter than as an editorial assistant, but all those college grads flocking to the city still prefer the latter. (That's how we're able to keep wages low.)

It is still is a monetary incentive/effect, just delayed in time - in some future job that becomes possible because of the current lower payed job or location. All internships are like this.
Now if economies routinely crashed and burned and entered death spirals because pops took higher status jobs, would those jobs be "higher status"? Where's the story of the editorial assistant who says "L.A. turned into a wasteland and got conquered by the Japanese because there was no-one left to mine iron, but hey, YOLO, I can live the good life for 5 years as an editorial assistant in N.Y. before that too goes to hell and I become a lowly slave to the conquerors, like it always does when people move to the city from the mines as soon as they can do it".
It's not going to be known as a good higher status job, as in, leading to good long term prospects

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

It is still is a monetary incentive/effect, just delayed in time - in some future job that becomes possible because of the current lower payed job or location. All internships are like this.
Now if economies routinely crashed and burned and entered death spirals because pops took higher status jobs, would those jobs be "higher status"? Where's the story of the editorial assistant who says "L.A. turned into a wasteland and got conquered by the Japanese because there was no-one left to mine iron, but hey, YOLO, I can live the good life for 5 years as an editorial assistant in N.Y. before that too goes to hell and I become a lowly slave to the conquerors, like it always does when people move to the city from the mines as soon as they can do it".
It's not going to be known as a good higher status job, as in, leading to good long term prospects

If one pop moving results in total colapse of your econ, you may have bigger problems than the movment of the one pop. Likewise, if you know its going to happen, and you still do the thing that causes problems, theissue may not be with the game.

 

[Rhel]

Number of clicks has increased, though. Number of buildings and upgrades is ~the same, but you now often click to *check* the system, and decide not to do anything.
Overall, a slowdown for no gain.

Why would you need to check it? Unless you've got an overpopulation or unemployment message 90% of the time there's no reason to want to do anything. The economy practically runs itself now.

 

[cscx]

If one pop moving results in total colapse of your econ, you may have bigger problems than the movment of the one pop. Likewise, if you know its going to happen, and you still do the thing that causes problems, theissue may not be with the game.

Well, the actual issue is that either the pop has agency and control and knows what's best, or it doesn't and you have all the agency and control and can exercise it. Even if you ignore the bigger purely technical issue that new industries cannot possibly be able to kill their own resource input sub-industries.

There is always "the tragedy of commons", but it is never associated with the desire for upward mobility, at least in humans and human societies. As in "desire for upward mobility leading to not actually producing enough something". And why would alien species have a desire for upward mobility? Totally a missed opportunity there .

 

[SpectralShade]

It kind of does have something to do , and it's 500 years in my math

Since the new system have been dubbed by some that it turned stellaris into victoria 2 a-like, I guess you could say the timeframe is fitting in that regard

 

[Jorgen_CAB]

Stellaris economy is more interesting to work with now since it entail more important decisions.

It is not the amount of work you need to do but that the thing you do have effect on your progression and that they matter.

Some people complain that they need to do stuff, I wonder what it is they actually want to do then. Not everyone want to spend all their time playing conducting war so having an engaging and important economy system is a plus.

That being said the system is still very abstract and not very realistic, the whole system is kind of backward to how a real economy system actually work not to mention population growth and the use of population as labor and consumers. But all in all the new system clearly is way superior to the old system in all regards despite the many flaws.