Why the new job system -feels- wrong

[AlanC9]

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

I was not talking about internships. The entire career track is relatively low-wage. You're better off doing something useful, like bartending.

Reducing everything to salary is convenient for Econ 101, but it has little to do with RW decision making.

(This is not meant to defend the current Stellaris system as being realistic in any way, however.)

 

[The Boz]

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.

Because THE ONLY FEEDBACK the system gives me is a *red* unemployment symbol and an orange empty slot symbol. Do... do you see how stupid that is?

 

[cscx]

I was not talking about internships. The entire career track is relatively low-wage. You're better off doing something useful, like bartending.

Reducing everything to salary is convenient for Econ 101, but it has little to do with RW decision making.

(This is not meant to defend the current Stellaris system as being realistic in any way, however.)

Ah, ok. I guess this is better summarize-able as "some positions give you power/influence/importance/impact".

 

[Delthor]

There is a very wide, thick, heavy, and quite spacious medium between "your empire's economy crashed because you built a consumer goods factory" and "do whatever the hell you want, we don't care, here, have some free resources.

We are currently in that medium. In order to crash so hard you can't recover, you have to fail to plan on multiple fronts and continue doing things that are obviously mistakes after you make them once. There is a ton of space for people to actually learn the new systems, but people are coming to the forums and whining instead. Just like they did with the FTL changes, just like they did with the combat changes, just like they did with marauders, and so on. I just hope the devs continue to hold their ground during these growing pains like they have in the past. I'd be really sad to see all this work wasted by making it meaningless.

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 ".

I think the answer to your first question is a resounding yes. The pops on your world now feel alive. You have to think about how to provide for them and properly guide them. I've already said multiple times this thread why you don't have to wait for unemployment. That's silly and wasteful and there are plenty of better solutions if you put half as much thought into it that people are putting into arguing against the new system.

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.

Trying to get specialized pops on each right tile and making sure the sector AI didn't move them if they were still growing was a nightmare. It was horrible, meaningless micro that I do not want back because there was no meaningful decision there; just rote clicking. Now you have a system where that kind of micro is somewhere between heavily discouraged and impossible. It means you can choose specialized traits and only see benefits from a portion of your pops working matching jobs, choose general traits that benefit everyone, or create specialized worlds so you can have a large majority of your pops benefit from specific production traits. This is a much deeper system than the "drag every pop to the right tile" that's little more than glorified Candy Crush.

The work needed to actualize the decision doesn't have enough automation / support so this IMHO becomes nuisance-level micro.

Then the complaints should be with the sector AI, not with the core economy and pop system. Yet people are largely complaining about having to micro their way out of poor decision making, or more often, complaining that they aren't able to pop micro their way out of their poor decision. I still want to know why people think having actual meaningful play in the economy is "micro" when fleet deployment and design isn't.

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.

Coincidentally, you've ignored the multiple times I've explained ways to play the macro game better to avoid needing pop micro.

Because THE ONLY FEEDBACK the system gives me is a *red* unemployment symbol and an orange empty slot symbol. Do... do you see how stupid that is?

Just consider the larger context of that information instead of treating the game like glorified whack-a-mole, and you shouldn't have any issue. If the economy was as simple as "see symbol; do action immediately" then why bother displaying the symbol in the first place? It could just be automated because there isn't any meaningful choice. Maybe the UI could communicate things better, but using that as an excuse not to learn to play on your own is silly.

 

[AlanC9]

Trying to get specialized pops on each right tile and making sure the sector AI didn't move them if they were still growing was a nightmare. It was horrible, meaningless micro that I do not want back because there was no meaningful decision there; just rote clicking. Now you have a system where that kind of micro is somewhere between heavily discouraged and impossible. It means you can choose specialized traits and only see benefits from a portion of your pops working matching jobs, choose general traits that benefit everyone, or create specialized worlds so you can have a large majority of your pops benefit from specific production traits. This is a much deeper system than the "drag every pop to the right tile" that's little more than glorified Candy Crush.

Nevertheless, I think it would be better if jobs did go to pops who were better suited for the job. OTOH, the game's slow enough as it is.

 

[Delthor]

Nevertheless, I think it would be better if jobs did go to pops who were better suited for the job. OTOH, the game's slow enough as it is.

It does. I usually play an intelligent organic race, and never had issues with balancing worker jobs, since the ratio of employment to free jobs was usually kept proportionate across the different worker jobs. However, I just started a machine empire game where I have a bonus to minerals, and I've had to disable mining jobs to get my machines to not move from technician jobs to miners (I would have built less mining districts to start with, but I've had a wealth of space minerals and very little space energy).

It won't swap pops who are already employed or change the thing that's growing, but I don't think that's necessary. Assigning new pops to an appropriate open job and moving pops to a heavily favored open job is enough for me. I've just accepted that the days of placing a precisely built machine pop on every tile are over.

 

[SpectralShade]

I've just accepted that the days of placing a precisely built machine pop on every tile are over.

which seems odd, given that you are supposed to be a united intelligence...

 

[Evangeline]

One quick addition: conquering AI planets no longer tanks your economy in the beta patch. This was due to a bug that made AIs fail to build districts, so that if you conquered their planets you'd just get a bunch of buildings draining all your resources without any production.

 

[DrFranknfurter]

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.

Amusingly my first game learning the new system, with the terrible death spirals from conquest wasn't actually because I'd taken a world. It was because I'd abducted slaves.
Story time: I made a weak, decadent race (butterflies) who raided for slaves. I'd played this race in 2.1 (they were weak) and wanted to see if the pop system made them any better.

So I settled half a dozen worlds, I picked the ones that were habitable and decided they'd be my specialist worlds.
I also settled fairly uninhabitable (desert) worlds and planned to dump slaves of the appropriate type on them to mine/farm/etc.
I declared war on each nearby target in turn (starting with my desert friends, then arctic friends etc.), stealing pops and ending the war to go weaken the next guy.
I now had slaves... sounds good... wrong! I was strong enough to beat the AI without slaves with a weak race, I didn't actually need the slaves at all... and there would be consequences...
Now I noticed unemployed pops on my Tech world. So I figure, build more labs. Still more unemployed so I upgrade the labs. Economy doesn't seem to budge (clue number 1). Yet more unemployed... I've been re-settling the slaves that keep being dumped on this world by raiding and I have no clue why they wont automatically go to other worlds that have free mining jobs. I figured they were dumped on the first planet alphabetically or by distance or something...
Eventually I've been resettling so many slaves that get dumped on this world that I worry I'll accidentally close buildings so I start moving all the clerks/farmers/miners of my main race to the tech world from my lower habitability worlds (there aren't that many of my race - clue number 2) and when I've done that I notice my economy has tanked...
Turns out on all my worlds ONLY slaves were growing and had been for the past decade of wars (I had like 6+ slave species, raiding xenophiles) and the reason my tech world was attracting all the slaves from raiding was that it had lots of unfilled specialist jobs. It also had lots of unemployed slaves (and domestic servants working the few mines rather than entertaining). So in moving my few remaining own species across I took the hit for lots of new specialists. I also found out that I'd have to set my own species to force grow on every world at -20% speed if I wanted to man the capitals of any newly conquered worlds. My economy needed a lot of faffing about to get back into shape while all my nearby enemies were sitting on 4+ ruined buildings that they never rebuilt. Game became unfun - the only challenge left was the economy.
So:
I waited to build labs/alloy plants until I was rolling in minerals and had unemployed pops.
I then upgraded the specialist buildings noting I was still earning lots of minerals.
I resettled pops from unsuitable worlds to more suitable worlds.
I tanked my economy because I hadn't hovered over the pop jobs symbol or opened up the specialist tab, thinking that there'd be no possible interaction as only 1 species could do those jobs.
I discovered:
The pop growth system is stupid,
Raiding is OP,
AIs can't recover from raiding,
Micromanage pops or very bad things happen.

Amusingly the next game I tried robots and had entirely different problems... job priority stuff, robots taking jobs when they produced about half the output of my organic workers and vice versa. Gained Psi tech before droids and was frustrated I couldn't focus on engineering. Also had a criminal megacorp set-up and crime started doing strange things, lots of events firing at 0 crime. Felt really buggy so quit. Also felt sad that I couldn't encourage either of the two allied megacorps to set-up on any of my worlds even when I gifted them 10k+ minerals and energy each and they had no other trading partners (lots of purifiers/devouring swarms/megacorps but no normal races).

Then a game where I was buying slaves off the market... I had more of their pops than they did after just a couple of years... crippled them worse than raiding. Their capital was lower population than my colonies. I felt bad for the AI, scrapped that game. Odd note: the slave buying and settlement UI is actually really good, the list of planets, jobs and housing is AMAZING... but why isn't that information available anywhere else or from the start of the game? It'd make a better outliner than the existing outliner.

Then a criminal megacorp... this time I actually looked at what the AI had built on its planets and felt bad for them 4xEnforcer buildings, no upgraded buildings or exploited rare resources etc. Also felt bad about my limited options and the branch closure mechanic. I tried using the market and, curious about the prices generated infinite resources... quit due to exploit and decided to not use the market at all till it gets fixed so I don't accidentally cheat.

Then a normal (well pacifist spiritualist megachurch) megacorp... found out vassals/impose ideology were broken. Reloaded an earlier save and did things differently. Also found out that imposing ideology created a megacorp... for some reason I had hoped they'd pick a random authority and let me install branch offices because they like me for liberating them. Megacorps don't play well with other megacorps... I didn't want to make more of them. Just making subsidiaries worked better... but the AI still felt bad. Yet put up enough of a fight attacking me from 3 different directions (joint wars) with decent fleets despite their oddly poor economy that I felt uncomfortable with raising the difficulty too much more.

Anyway... so several games started but not finished. Also started up as a hive and stopped after 1 war as I'd instantly converted the nearby hive mind to my side and the rest of the game would have provided no challenge whatsoever.

So every game I've had issues with the Job system. Lots of different little issues and some huge glaring maddening issues that people seem to be willfully ignoring. The entire system feels rushed... but the changes in the newest update have helped a great deal and I look forward to more improvements. Like better tooltips, they're not useless now but still need work. I'm looking forward to playing the game when it all gets sorted but for now it kinda gives me a headache trying to work out if I've done something wrong, if it's a bug or a design flaw and how I'd go about fixing it either way. Perhaps I've been harsh but every game so far has been unbalanced with completely new bugs and issues. I'm hoping that one combination of ethics and civics will feel fun... but I haven't found the fun that I had before just yet. Instead I'm repeatedly saying to myself - "well that's obviously not working properly yet. That's an exploit. That's OP. Should that be happening? ...try something else" over and over again. Then coming on the forums to whine about it and vent my frustrations. (and being called a retard for my troubles... which isn't so fun either and could quite easily put a person in a foul mood).

 

[wundergoat]

Coincidentally, you've ignored the multiple times I've explained ways to play the macro game better to avoid needing pop micro.

I didn't, your strategy was brought up in my analysis and commented on this earlier in the thread.

And here is the excerpt of my post that addressed this:

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.

Here is your detailed post of your strategy, which actually quoted the above post:

Poor play is tossing down buildings without care or consideration for the consequences. Or failing to maintain proper stockpiles to handle situations that may arise like refugees (if you accept refugees). Or failing to maintain the pop/job/amenity/housing balance. Or setting your economy up so that losing 5-10 workers instantly crashes your economy.

Proper play can avoid pretty much all the pop job micro people complain about doing. None of the things I do to avoid or mitigate this issue require micro:
1. Build a larger foundation of workers up front so that you don't dip negative even when some promote.
2. Maintain a stockpile so you can handle a negative balance while you grow the new pops needed to work jobs.
3. Use the market as a last resort due to its relative inefficiency.

If these three things aren't enough to absorb the shift as you promote pops, you're doing it wrong, and need to slow down your specialist expansion so that your pop growth and worker base can keep up. Yes, this means developing your planets as they grow and not building tons of stuff in advance. I don't really see that as micro, though, or at the very least, it's meaningful micro. I feel like it's the same as complaining the AI didn't adjust to enemy movements after you queued up a bunch of orders for your fleets. Whining about needing to micro your fleets in order to succeed in war is absurd; why is needing to actually think about your economy and properly time things any different?

Short answer - I consider your method a valid and sound way to avoid crashing your economy, but I also consider it a workaround to a UI issue and not some deep strategy or some inherently superior "proper play".

Basically, your method for adding 5-10 specialist jobs is to wait until you have excess population and/or the stockpiled resources to just add them en mass without breaking your economy. That's essentially the second option I bring up.

I think I was clear that I'm not having trouble balancing my economy or am otherwise mismanaging it. I'm annoyed at how pops automatically promoting makes executing a sound economic plan more difficult and time consuming.


So, I'll give a rundown of my issues and my position, giving an actual example from a game I have running.

I have a 21 planet empire with 8 sectors. My two main worlds are pretty well developed and my initial resourcing colonies are finally filling up their worker jobs. I've got plenty of base resource production and new resourcing colonies are starting to be productive so I'm going to start floating excessive minerals (currently 10k stockpiled on +250/mo). Therefore, I want to add a bunch of foundries. In the interest of decentralizing my production and taking advantage of excess building slots, I'm going to build them on those maturing worlds. I can build 3 foundries on each of 4 worlds, which will consume an easily affordable 144 minerals/month. Putting the foundries on these worlds also means I can keep them at T1, meaning I get 6 jobs per planet without using rare resources. The buildings will cost 4-5k minerals which is easily affordable.

Plan has been decided on, time to execute. Now, how to do pull it off?

Option 1) Queue up all the buildings on all 4 planets. Pops will autopromote from basic production jobs, leading to drops in mineral production right when I add demand, previously calculated as ~87/mo swing per planet. That puts me at -100/month minerals. It will take ~11 years for planetary populations to grow back into the lost worker jobs. This is actually affordable since I'll steadily add worker jobs over those 11 years, but I'll need to pause any development for most of that time. This option doesn't work well since I don't want to pause construction on my ~10 young colonies.

Option 2) Put a foundry on each of the 4 worlds, come back and add another as more pops spawn, which works out to every 3.5 years. This is the best for my economy since it doesn't impact worker production and steadily adds mineral demand as I'm adding mineral supply from the new colonies. Downside is that it means I've got to periodically check back on the colonies. At the speed I'm playing and the time it takes to pick out the planets and build the foundries, it's 30-60 seconds every 10 minutes, working out to 5-10% of my playing time. It's annoying since I've got to remember to cycle back every 10 minutes to click a bunch, but very much doable.

Option 3) Wait for the requisite pops to grow, then add the foundries. This can be enhanced by adding a clerk building to avoid unemployment and mixed with option 2 to start alloy production now. This is the macro oriented build and is very easy and time efficient, but accepts that the economy will be less efficient and will add alloy production more slowly. Ultimately, I'm still queuing up the foundries, just a few years later.

Option 4) Screw it, abandon decentralized production. Use the various mechanics to encourage emigration to dedicated forge worlds. This is super easy but makes the overall economy vulnerable.

Or I click a box to disable autopromote, queue up the buildings now as in option 1 and have them fill out when new pops spawn as in option 2 with the time impact and ease of option 3.


I'm failing to see why this option would be controversial, since I can achieve the same results with a bunch of excess time and effort. Will someone please enlighten me?

 

[-Temple-]

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".

I agree with this, I also see the instant promotion towards a job not 'instant' in a RP/lore sense which is what this thread wants.

I see the time upgrading/building the actual building as training time, as they could read a fucking book or watch FutureTube videos on how to do something while is building, and as things become more modern/advanced the more simplified it becomes especially in manufacturing, I can say with confidence that making alloys/consumer goods is just tossing buckets of minerals in 1 end and pushing a button, if anything goes wrong you push a 'emergency stop' button, that is what most modern/advanced manufacturing is nowadays anyways lol, I also forgot to mention that some jobs in a factory might require you to pick 1 of the finished product up and put it in another machine for quality testing but who knows, in the future that shit is probably automated too.

 

[AlanC9]

Option 4) Screw it, abandon decentralized production. Use the various mechanics to encourage emigration to dedicated forge worlds. This is super easy but makes the overall economy vulnera
ble.

Vulnerable to what?

As for the rest, I don't see the downside of option 2. Unless there's a major war on, I might as well do something while waiting for stuff to happen. Besides, I'd still end up checking up on the worlds a lot even if I wasn't actually starting new buildings, just to see how far they are along their growth curves.

Then again, I wouldn't ever be in a position where a plan like yours would be worth making in the first place. I'd be constantly laying down forges as my pops and minerals could support them

 

[wundergoat]

Vulnerable to what?

As for the rest, I don't see the downside of option 2. Unless there's a major war on, I might as well do something while waiting for stuff to happen. Besides, I'd still end up checking up on the worlds a lot even if I wasn't actually starting new buildings, just to see how far they are along their growth curves.

Vulnerable to anything that can take a world out of play, bare minimum of an unlucky crisis spawn. There is also a vulnerability to other economy shocks, since a foundry world should be running t2 and t3 production buildings and those rare resources will be getting imported. Low tier production buildings on your resourcing worlds don't need rare resources and might not even need to have stuff imported from off world. It is also worth noting that this strategy isn't mutually exclusive with having a forge world.

Downside of option 2 is right there, 5-10% of my time spent on scrolling and clicking through the interface. Not thinking, not planning, not analyzing. Clicking. If you have nothing else to do, its not bad, but I rarely don't have other things to do at this stage. I'll have a few tech and tradition choices to make. I've got a dozen new colonies that require attention, but I've actually got to make decisions with those and might need some resettlement. I'll want to actually think about if I need another rare good refinery for the advanced buildings on the core worlds. Ship designs and fleet compositions probably will not need adjustment but if they do, it is time consuming. If I've got a war going, then that is taking a chunk of my attention. And if nothing else, just checking through and inspecting my worlds, which I am not actually doing during that 30-60 seconds of queuing up new foundries.

 

[Delthor]

Short answer - I consider your method a valid and sound way to avoid crashing your economy, but I also consider it a workaround to a UI issue and not some deep strategy or some inherently superior "proper play".

I'm failing to see why this option would be controversial, since I can achieve the same results with a bunch of excess time and effort. Will someone please enlighten me?

What you dismiss as a UI issue is a core mechanic in the game. Pop demotion is something affected by a tradition and a civic; this clearly isn't some UI issue. You just seem to dislike consequences for undisciplined building just because you don't like dealing with this part of the game. However, failing to plan and execute your building strategy in a way that your economy can handle should have consequences. Just like queueing up a bunch of fleet move orders so you can ignore it "to avoid micro," and later discovering that you queued a move into a starbase where a fleet you didn't expect was waiting and your fleet loses half its members and goes MIA for a year.

You dismiss it as meaningless clicks, but you yourself acknowledge that you have to think about and consider how and when they need to be made. In your post, you come up with four different approaches to solving this problem, each with trade offs, and you didn't even acknowledge the market as an option. How is this not depth? How is this not improving the game by providing challenges that the player has to overcome with good play? This is a case where giving the player more control actually reduces depth by giving you a checkbox to completely eliminate that challenge in the game. It's like asking for a special kind of evasive that is only evasive of larger fleets, and won't flee from smaller fleets, just so you don't have to "micro" your fleet as much.

Regardless, they've said they are planning to have a grace period where pops who just barely promoted won't need to wait to demote, so at least that's something for you. I feel like this just adds fiddly micro as a workaround to an interesting game mechanic, so I doubt I'll ever use the feature. It's just not needed once you learn how to properly plan and prepare for an expansion to your specialists.

Edit:

I'll have a few tech and tradition choices to make. I've got a dozen new colonies that require attention, but I've actually got to make decisions with those and might need some resettlement. I'll want to actually think about if I need another rare good refinery for the advanced buildings on the core worlds. Ship designs and fleet compositions probably will not need adjustment but if they do, it is time consuming. If I've got a war going, then that is taking a chunk of my attention. And if nothing else, just checking through and inspecting my worlds, which I am not actually doing during that 30-60 seconds of queuing up new foundries.

So you complain about planets needing attention in order to construct buildings at the appropriate moment, but you don't complain about all these other things that require your attention with varying levels of meaningful choice?

Well, 90% of the time, I know how I'm prioritizing tech, so I want to be able to give my scientists a general priority and have them choose their next tech choice so I don't have to! And I know I'm going to be using whatever rock/paper/scissors thing I need against the enemy I'm facing, so the auto-build should just do that for me! When I declare war, I pretty much know what the fronts are, so why can't I just assign my fleet to handle it all automatically and only bug me if something weird happens?

You can apply the logic of "I have a plan and want to automate the execution of that plan" to nearly anything in the game. However, executing said plans is a part of Stellaris. It's no shooter or other real time game where execution is often the biggest challenge, but if want a game that's all strategic planning and zero tactics or execution, you're playing the wrong game.​

 

[KingAlamar]

Then the complaints should be with the sector AI, not with the core economy and pop system. Yet people are largely complaining about having to micro their way out of poor decision making, or more often, complaining that they aren't able to pop micro their way out of their poor decision. I still want to know why people think having actual meaningful play in the economy is "micro" when fleet deployment and design isn't.

Actually the Sector AI has nothing to do with the lack of things like a job prioritization feature. Being able to define TRIGGERS for expansion, getting notifications when decisions have expired, Buy / Sell orders for the market, etc. have nothing to do with AI but have everything to do with keeping good decision making while appropriate UI changes to minimize "nuisance-level micro" [manual planet scanning loops].

About the Sector AI I'd love to see one that's competent or at least good enough to follow-up on directives you give it. That would mean that the rest of the AIs would be more competitive.

As for the economy I don't see anything hard at all about it -- at least to have passable play as a Megacorporation:

• For planets you colonize largely develop minerals first.
• Add food as-needed.
• Energy isn't needed at all for a Megacorporation so ignore this
• Add a holo-theater or similar for amenities as-desired
• Add Mineral [first], Farm [second] as you need jobs.
• If not getting enough housing sparingly add City Districts
• Once complete feel free to add specialists [Research, Unity, Consumer Goods, Foundaries, etc.] as needed

Balancing out [and redeveloping] the home planet is slightly trickier but it boils down to:

• Focus on minerals as you can and food & amenities as you must
• Build Research & Unity as soon as minerals allow
• Build SOME alloy plants [for Corvs / ships] but leave a stockpile for outposts, buildings on planets, etc.

Would you get crushed by a good human player? Probably. Would you crush the current AI while doing the above?? Absolutely yes.