Stellaris Dev Diary #311 - Chiseling Away

[Starfury]

just to clarify, current base clerk outputs are 4 and 5 with the tradition and are being changed to 3 and 4 with the tradition, correct?

further when doing any sort of comparison math you can leave thrifty out of the calculations for simplicity since it's just the same % multiplier on each side of the equation

the math I was doing showed that using the all jobs from commercial zones you would need 7 commercial zones fully employed before the new system surpasses the old system in terms of TV output

The break-even point depends entirely on the trade modifier (and to a small degree on trade from living standards):

Depending on your trade modifier you need between 8 and 10 commercial zones to until you're no longer losing out to 3.8 clerks. If you factor in stability from excess amenities, you might have an argument for moving the break-even point down by 1 commercial zone.

And that's just the effect of the clerk change. Here's what you get from 14 pops in 3.8 compared to 3.9 with a modest 60% trade modifier

20% less trade with 900 more minerals invested and 3 additional energy upkeep.

 

[Echo Candor One]

The all-or-nothing design of clerks, where you either disable all of them or go maximum trade build, has always felt bad, and this new 1% bonus only reinforces it.

Why can't clerks just be something you need some of on most planets to make things go around, like the real life service industry? Make amenities more scarce so that on a populous planet you NEED clerks to provide them. Limiting Holo-Theaters to 1 per planet would help. It's not very realistic that you can just fix any shortage of basic amenities by sending your citizens to the movies, after all.

I think you're hitting on something good here. Limit theaters, make clerks necessary the way maintenance drones are.

 

[George Fernell]

You guys REALLY want us to use clerks huh?

On a more serious note, are the any plans for "Corporate Hedonism" Civic?
With how you are pushing Clerk jobs to be used, Entertainers will fall out of favour even more for Megacorps.
Can you at least give the civic a special bonus for overkill of amenities, as a band-aid?

 

[Thiend]

I think the clerk change is a step in the right direction, but I can't help feeling that their role is being pulled in two directions simultaneously - both of which just aren't quite working out.

The 1% trade value bonus is potent if exploited, but to get real value you have to go all-in on it. No real problem there. Except simultaneously they have more amenities and less base trade value. That seems intended to destroy the 0 habitability all clerks builds, and honestly I'm fine with that being gone, but more amenities is a "use fewer clerks" change and +1% trade for each clerk is a "use more clerks" change. I would suggest tying these to some kind of secondary trade policy not locked behind a tradition, such that you only get one of these but it is if necessary even stronger. For example, a policy for clerks to reduce amenities used by a small percentage and the competing policy is a 1-2% TV bonus. Then you can either use the TV bonus to focus trade, or the amenities used reduction to use them as a support role for large planets such as ringworlds. This also seems to me like it would make the jobs from city districts make sense, and valuable, rather than their current "disable on sight" status outside of dedicated clerk builds.

Separately, for Habitats. I've said this a couple times, but I think their per-pop efficiency is just too low for the current design. I would summarize the problems:
1. No orbital rings, but Habitats are no longer spammed so this loss is just painful.
2. It is no longer feasible to focus a single Habitat on a single job category because most systems will not have enough of any one job to fill the Habitat. This means either building numerous buildings such as the Energy Grid, taking all of the building slots and far more rare resource upkeep, or just writing that off as a loss too.
3. Habitat specializations, per 2, are basically useless. At the very most, I've had about 50% of the jobs on a Habitat focused within one specialization because of the need to build resource-specific districts on every Habitat. This compares very unfavorably with planet-bound designations and is a further efficiency loss.

I'm generally happy with the solutions the dev team find to problems so I won't be too exhaustive with my suggestions. Briefly, I would suggest a stronger generally applicable designation, slightly worse than any specific colony designation but not by too much. For buildings, perhaps Habitats could have special buildings replacing them, one for worker strata and one for specialist strata covering all of the relevant jobs in two buildings instead of... way more than two. For orbital rings, considering Habitats are already in orbit, this could be treated as a minor expansion of the Habitat rather than an additional structure - either with more buildings or without, I think the baseline number is probably fine to cover any two job categories even if that will be worse than planets on which those will likely be the only two job categories on a planet.

All of my other problems with the Habitat rework beta were eliminated in this update.

 

[GnoSIS]

Habitats are still nerfed for capacity. The idea was reduce the spam of the seperate colony habitats, not have a system where capacity and building slots go to hell.

In that respect I'd expect to be able to build 36-42 district habitats at the end game and have space for 20+ building slots.

The problem was the fact that you would walk into a system and see 4-6 habitats - it never was the building/district/resource capacity they offered.

 

[rylasasin]

I'm still hoping that at some point during the whole 'species pack' rework that they fix Xeno-Compatibility.
I'm sure it looked good on paper to someone somewhere, but let's face it, no one uses it now because of they hybrid spam lag.

Maybe even replace it with a xenophile ascension path that gives bonuses for the number of (base) species in your empire/planets? There really is no 'good' ascension options for xenophiles right now when it comes right down to it.

Genetic is more geared towards xenophobes or hives due to the micro involved (though maybe add a way to merge species together through that?)

Cybernetic is just 'genetic but with robot parts.'

Synthetic is just turning everyone into a robot. It's pretty much the 'best' one for xenophiles right now, but only in the most roundabout way. It doesn't fit thematically at all.

Psionic is mostly just for spiritualists unless you get ultra-lucky or do some sort of gimmick.

 

[Thiend]

Habitats are still nerfed for capacity. The idea was reduce the spam of the seperate colony habitats, not have a system where capacity and building slots go to hell.

In that respect I'd expect to be able to build 36-42 district habitats at the end game and have space for 20+ building slots.

The problem was the fact that you would walk into a system and see 4-6 habitats - it never was the building/district/resource capacity they offered.

Arguably, the solution for this problem is simply allowing Arcology Project to be used on Habitats. It makes sense anyway, it should be easier to make a Habitat entirely a city than a planet (plus on a planet you remove natural features, on a Habitat you just... don't add any, it flows better narratively).

 

[Rafss]

Wait, so we have all these clerk issues now because the devs did not like "low habitability" clerks being fine?
So they had to hammer clerks as a whole?
My god, this is unbelievable. I did not know that.

 

[Douglas2341]

Could a dev please respond to the automation moddability concerns I raised last week about removing sector automation? As things stand, planet automation is still missing critical features for modders, such that I cannot port my mod (with over 4k subscribers) to use it until those features are added.

I posted precise details of the missing features here, which I'll quote for convenience:

Hi, I'm the author of the Better Planet Automation mod, we've discussed some things in other threads before, and I really should have commented here before now.

Things that are necessary for me to be able to port my mod from sector automation to planet automation without losing functionality:

• Mod script feature to control districts in the same way as buildings.
• Mod script feature to bypass the free jobs check.
• Mod script feature to bypass any and all other hard coded conditions that might exist.
• Mod script feature to suppress any hard coded building behavior that might exist.
  • I haven't rechecked recently, but the last time I tested it, planet automation would build city districts on planets with no free building slots even if the mod scripts all universally said to build nothing, including the mod script for building slots management.
  • Alternatively, remove all such behavior from hard code entirely, leaving it exclusively in the moddable script files.
• In upgrade_trigger block, ability to distinguish between different levels of upgrades.
  • If a planet has both a basic Research Labs and an upgraded Research Complexes, the script should be able to control which of them to upgrade.
  • This might already be the case, I haven't tested it yet, but I also need for the upgrade_trigger block to be independent of the available block. I need to be able to upgrade existing Research Labs while at the same time forbidding building new ones.
• Check automation scripts and potentially queue new construction every day, not just on the turn of the month.
  • Alternatively, for better performance, let it be triggered by changes in the values it depends on. For my purposes it would suffice to add a run_planet_automation = yes script effect in planet scope.

For the transition, it would also greatly help to have a script effect to set planet automation to enabled. I would much prefer to have the mod update pop up a notification simply informing people about the change, and that adjusting their settings for it has already been handled, rather than pop up a notice telling people that they have to manually adjust settings now because only the UI can do it.

Things that are necessary for me to properly make good use of the new job_changes block:

• num_forbidden_jobs script trigger in planet scope, supporting both specific jobs and "any".
  • num_available_jobs would also be useful, but I have a workaround for that one by calculating it from job_<job>_add modifier and num_assigned_jobs trigger, and I could just update the calculation to subtract num_forbidden_jobs.
  • This information is needed for certain calculations my mod does.

Side note, I strongly suspect that a major cause of issues with amenities handling, in both automation and the AI, is the define value AI_UPPER_AMENITIES_LIMIT = 5 in common/defines/00_defines.txt. I consider that value ludicrously low, in light of the magnitude of how much amenities a single entertainer provides. The difference between the lower and upper AI limits for amenities should be large enough that no job can ever skip past the entire interval between them by employing or firing a single pop.

Things that are necessary for my mod to properly integrate with the planet automation's UI and configuration settings:

• Trigger condition has_automation_enabled = yes/no for planet scope.
  • The corresponding effect set_automation_enabled = yes/no would be nice to have too.
• Trigger condition has_automation_setting_enabled = <key> for planet scope. This trigger should accept each of the values defined in common/colony_automation_categories, including any from mod files.
  • The corresponding effects enable_automation_setting and disable_automation_setting would be nice to have.
  • If you really want to be thorough, you could add on_actions hooks for when those settings are changed, plus a trigger last_automation_setting_changed = <key>

Triggers that would give highly useful information that automation really should account for but currently cannot access:

• Value trigger num_districts_blocked = { type = <key/any> value = <variable> } for planet and deposit scopes.
  • Note that type = any should return the blocker's effect on the planet's overall max districts, not the total of each individual type of district the blocker is blocking. A Dense Jungle blocker that's blocking a Lush Jungle should evaluate as blocking 1 type = any district and 2 type = district_farming districts.

Important things I would like to see added to automation scripts:

• Mod script feature for queueing a blocker to clear.
• Mod script feature for queueing a planet decision that has an enactment_time.

If you want to review the other things I suggested before, that conversation is here. If you think it might be helpful, I could also do a call on discord to discuss things sometime.

P.S. If you could get Montu's attention and suggest reviewing my mod like he reviewed vanilla planet automation, that would be nice.

 

[Thiend]

Wait, so we have all these clerk issues now because the devs did not like "low habitability" clerks being fine?
So they had to hammer clerks as a whole?
My god, this is unbelievable. I did not know that.

Based on that 1% bonus, they're clearly not hammering clerks as a whole. They seem to be looking for something that makes them better or the same while eliminating "colonize everything and if habitability is awful jam it full of clerks" as a build, although I obviously can't confirm that. I see that as a bonus, and I REALLY see this new clerk design as a bonus... I foresee ecumenepolii and ringworlds full-o-trade in my future.

 

[Troyen]

Fixed "In Breach Of The Galactic Law" not working properly

It's been a long journey to get that one fixed! I think it has been bugged for the entirety of 3.X (and looking back through reports, even 2.8).

 

[Isharon]

Still cant build gaia seeder on gaia world? Dont see anything about it in patchnotes

 

[Mech_infect]

Do you have any plans to implement organic ships, starbases and megastructures?

This is cool on the points:
- implementation of this saifi | space opera type
- interesting development of agrarian + geno empires
- boredom with excessive accumulation of food in some parties has a chance to turn into an interesting development
- an interesting link with the Civic Catalytic treatment


+

The Civic system is outdated. Only 2 and then sometime a third, when there are so many of them? due to the fact that civics and their characteristics of civics - to some extent, all countries are the same. For a more unique gaming experience and interesting roleplaying, make a system like with genes.

Well, here's the gene cost system: Ordinary Civics cost one point. Powerful Civics are expensive in terms of points. There are also negative civics.
I don't want to sound pushy, rude, or narcissistic, but I think this is a GREAT idea that properly uses all those Civics that you came up with. And the system that is now does not allow all the Civics you invented to fully open up.

In the ideas from the community someday I will write this idea in more detail.

+

on the topic of a more unique gaming experience and interesting roleplaying:

Give the option to choose 2 origins. Limit some illogical combinations, and for obviously interesting combinations, give a unique bonus for choosing 2 origins at the same time. (special civic, special building on starting planet, special gene, etc.)


If you think it's a good idea, then just like me, please remind the developers about it (politely). I think the Civic system needs to be changed.

please give your own ideas in the form of civics and origins a chance to shine in the game. So far, all the variety is suffering because of a window of 2-3 Civic

 

[GnoSIS]

Arguably, the solution for this problem is simply allowing Arcology Project to be used on Habitats. It makes sense anyway, it should be easier to make a Habitat entirely a city than a planet (plus on a planet you remove natural features, on a Habitat you just... don't add any, it flows better narratively).

Well something like that, or allow 2 central complexes and have the bonuses from the upgrades count for both.

The problem with spam was the nightmare UI excercise to conquer them all. But right now? I'd even accept just limiting the old habitat design to just 2 per system - You get far more for far less.

 

[ZomgK3tchup]

Before Starfield released in 30 minutes and I disappear into the ether, I wanted to write about where the AI builds habitats.

At present, there are three considerations the AI takes when choosing which systems to build habitats:

- Increased weight for the core sector.
- Increased weight for Void Dweller guaranteed systems.
- Increased weight based on number of possible orbital sites.

This is good, but it could be better.

Specifically, I'd like to suggest additional weights for where the AI builds habitats:

- Is the empire's capital system.
- Has a starbase.
- Contains an existing colony.
- Contains a colonized special world (ecus, gaias, etc.)
- Contains a non-ringworld megastructure.
- Is a chokepoint AND has a pulsar or neutron star.
- Is Terminal Egress or Viridescent Lightbringer.

With these weights, the AI would choose systems to build habitats in a way that is both immersive, strategic, and avoids the dreaded habitat spam of yesteryear where you have to constantly invade systems because each has a single colony. It would primarily build up systems that already have something in them while also taking into consideration militarily strategic systems, such as chokepoints and systems meant to stall enemy fleet advancement. Nothing would make me happier than to see the enemy build a fortress system in a pulsar chokepoint or to see the AI try to fortify Terminal Egress.

The AI should still, of course, be weighted to favor systems it can build a lot of orbitals, but it should ideally favor systems with a lot of orbitals and are strategically valuable.

 

[klingonadmiral]

Void dwellers have a path to settling planets and have always had one. It's the same path every empire has to settling planets that its starting pops aren't suited to.

I question the wisdow of forcing every single empire into a "rush down your closest neighbour" playstyle.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

Based on that 1% bonus, they're clearly not hammering clerks as a whole. They seem to be looking for something that makes them better or the same while eliminating "colonize everything and if habitability is awful jam it full of clerks" as a build, although I obviously can't confirm that. I see that as a bonus, and I REALLY see this new clerk design as a bonus... I foresee ecumenepolii and ringworlds full-o-trade in my future.

But... this doesn't address that. It's completely orthogonal.

The problem: Clerks on low habitability worlds (while strictly worse than clerks on high habitability worlds) are still too good because it lets you grow your empire more effectively to put valuable jobs on the precious high habitability space but still employ all your pops (albeit in low value clerk jobs) on low habitability worlds.

A "solution" with lots of side effects: nerf clerks. If they're still marginally better than just cramming in more pops on high habitability worlds (spending more minerals to do so), then making them slightly weaker will remove that margin. This nerfs trade builds in general (massively, in the case of the current setup), but it does "solve" the problem.

A slightly better (but partial) solution: reduce free clerks from cities, as they did. If the advantage of clerks was that it cost too many minerals to get non-clerk jobs on high habitability planets, then make clerks less mineral efficient.

A non-solution: make clerks roughly the same power, but only after you stack 60 of them (though if you throw in the old Merchant Guilds council position which is way stronger than the new one, it's actually more like 300-400 clerks before break even). This is just nerfing them in the early game, and letting them partially catch up in the late game. There's no interaction with the habitability mechanic, except to the extent that habitability is an early game problem.

There are ways to solve the problem (with existing scripting but with jank or with new scripting cleanly). You can give clerks some kind of base pop upkeep increase, so that habitability effectively directly nerfs their net output to a larger extent. Just making them specialists, actually, would do this, though it might not be high enough magnitude. You can ditch their amenity production so that they don't sustain themselves on low habitability worlds (aka, do the exact opposite of what this patch did). Or you could just add new scripting to make trade impact habitability after all (though IIRC they tried that a few patches back and it was janky).

Ex. A trader variant, designed to be slightly less abundant, with 1 per city and 2 per commercial hub (along with one merchant, after the relevant tradition), which gives 6 TV and no amenities. Slightly unusual (it's a weird specialist technician), but the result is that it produces technician output on a high habitability planet, but if it were on e.g. a tomb world, it would cost 4 energy equivalent and 2 amenities in upkeep (1 food + .5 CG, doubled) as opposed to the 3 that clerks currently burn on a tomb world (while they provide their own amenities).

• five 3.8 clerks and a merchant on a 20% habitability world
  • 37 TV and 13 amenities from 6 pops
  • 10.8 food/6.05 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 4 energy from district/building upkeep)
• 4 new-traders, 1 merchant, and 1 entertainer on the same 20% habitability world
  • 36 TV (and .6 unity) from 6 pops
  • 10.8 food/9.3 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 8 energy from district/building upkeep)
  • you had to build a full extra city and holo-theater to get there (an extra 900 minerals)

The new-traders would burn 3.25 extra CG and 4 extra energy (-11.5 energy equivalent) for 1 fewer TV on low habitability worlds. But on high habitability worlds, the merchants would mostly cover the traders, the extra CG upkeep from being a specialist wouldn't bite as much, and the slightly higher output (5 TV from clerk with Trickle Up Economics vs. 6 TV from a Trader) would make it more pop efficient overall.

Also note that this makes merchants and traders a much more normal specialist/ruler pairing (though the ratios would be off, maybe give traders -1 CG and 8 like the current traders, but again no amenities), instead of the weird worker/ruler pairing they had before.

And you can fiddle with the numbers: make it 5 TV, but 6 with Trickle up. Give the trader pop an extra 2 energy or 1 CG in upkeep (snorting lots of space-cocaine like an 80s trader or running some serious hardware to do their job), and suddenly they're double bitten by habitability. Give them extra amenity upkeep to achieve the same effect, but in a way that's nicely solved by other TV jobs (on high habitability worlds) instead. Mix and match to give one old-clerk, and two new-traders on hubs (no merchants), so they are very profitable on high habitability planets but you have to close one (or both) of the trader jobs on low habitability ones, making them inefficient.

To use a hopefully appropriate analogy:
Habitability hurts both top line and operating expenses (for most jobs), but trade is uniquely positioned to leverage low habitability environments, as its top line is not sensitive to habitability limitations. If you want to erode that leverage and wreck that bottom line on low habitability worlds, you could either cut their revenue in all situations (which will shrink their margins on low habitability worlds, but also hurt the margins on high habitability), or you can raise the operating expenses, which are sensitive to habitability, which will hurt the bottom line mainly in the targeted areas, but still leave plenty of room for growth in more favorable markets.

 

[Thiend]

But... this doesn't address that. It's completely orthogonal.

The problem: Clerks on low habitability worlds are strictly worse than clerks on high habitability worlds, but they're still valuable because it lets you grow your empire more effectively to put valuable jobs on the precious high habitability space but still employ all your pops (albeit in low value jobs) on low habitability worlds.

A "solution" with lots of side effects: nerf clerk. If they're still marginally better than just cramming in more pops on high habitability worlds (spending more minerals to do so), then making them slightly weaker will remove that margin. This nerfs trade builds in general (massively, in the case of the current setup), but it does "solve" the problem.

A slightly better (but partial) solution: reduce free clerks from cities, as they did. The advantage was that if it cost tons of extra minerals to get more jobs on high habitability planets because you need to add more building slots to use more of the planet, then make clerks less mineral efficient.

A non-solution: make clerks roughly the same power, but only after you stack 60 of them (though if you throw in the old Merchant Guilds council position which is way stronger than the new one, it's actually more like 300-400 clerks before break even). This is just nerfing them in the early game, and letting them partially catch up in the late game. There's no interaction with the habitability mechanic, except to the extent that habitability is an early game problem.

There are ways to solve the problem (with existing scripting but with jank or with new scripting cleanly). You can give clerks some kind of base pop upkeep increase, so that habitability effectively directly nerfs their net output to a larger extent. Just making them specialists, actually, would do this, though it might not be high enough magnitude. You can ditch their amenity production so that they don't sustain themselves on low habitability worlds (aka, do the exact opposite of what this patch did). Or you could just add new scripting to make trade impact habitability after all (though IIRC they tried that a few patches back and it was janky).

Ex. A trader variant, designed to be slightly less abundant, with 1 per city and 2 per commercial hub (along with one merchant, after the relevant tradition), which gives 6 TV and no amenities. Slightly unusual (it's a weird specialist technician), but the result is that it produces technician output on a high habitability planet, but if it were on e.g. a tomb world, it would cost 4 energy equivalent and 2 amenities in upkeep (1 food + .5 CG, doubled) as opposed to the 3 that clerks currently burn on a tomb world (while they provide their own amenities).

• five 3.8 clerks and a merchant on a 20% habitability world
  • 37 TV and 13 amenities from 6 pops
  • 10.8 food/6.05 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 4 energy from district/building upkeep)
• 4 new-traders, 1 merchant, and 1 entertainer on the same 20% habitability world
  • 36 TV (and .6 unity) from 6 pops
  • 10.8 food/9.3 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 8 energy from district/building upkeep)
  • you had to build a full extra city and holo-theater to get there (an extra 1000 minerals)

The new-traders would burn 3.25 extra CG and 4 extra energy (-11.5 energy equivalent) for 1 fewer TV on low habitability worlds. But on high habitability world, the merchants would mostly cover the traders, the extra CG upkeep from being a specialist wouldn't bite as much, and the slightly higher output (5 TV from clerk with Trickle Up Economics vs. 6 TV from a Trader) would make it more pop efficient overall.

Also note that this makes merchants and traders a much more normal specialist/ruler pairing (though the ratios would be off, maybe give traders -1 CG and 8 like the current traders, but again no amenities), instead of the weird worker/ruler pairing they had before.

And you can fiddle with the numbers: make it 5 TV, but 6 with Trickle up. Give the trader pop an extra 2 energy or 1 CG in upkeep (snorting lots of space-cocaine like an 80s trader or running some serious hardware to do their job), and suddenly they're double bitten by habitability. Give them extra amenity upkeep to achieve the same effect, but get nicely solve by other trader jobs (on high habitability worlds) instead. Mix and match to give one old-clerk, and two new-traders on hubs (no merchants), so they are very profitable on high habitability planets but you have to close one (or both) of the trader jobs on low habitability ones, making them inefficient.

To use a hopefully appropriate analogy:
Habitability hurts both top line and operating expenses (for most jobs), but trade is uniquely positioned to leverage low habitability environments, as its top line is not sensitive to habitability limitations. If you want to erode that leverage and wreck that bottom line on low habitability worlds, you could either cut their revenue in all situations (which will shrink their margins on low habitability worlds, but also hurt the margins on high habitability), or you can raise the operating expenses, which are sensitive to habitability, which will hurt the bottom line mainly in the targeted areas, but still leave plenty of room for growth in more favorable markets.

It was my (perhaps incorrect) impression that clerks on a planet with bad habitability would now have an effectively higher cost to the player because with a low number of clerks their yield would do less to cover the operating cost of the aforementioned planet used to grow pops.

If that's not correct, another option (besides adjusting clerks per my first post in this thread) would just be making trade habitability-sensitive, or otherwise increasing the penalty to growth of low habitability. I was under the impression as a non-practitioner that this would kill no-habitability clerks, if not I support anything that will. It just helps trivialize habitability as a mechanic.

 

[SirBlackAxe]

Rather than Clerks giving +1% trade value, having them give a higher bonus specifically to trade value from living standards might be more interesting. That would encourage using them for amenities on all your high-population worlds, where they can take advantage of scaling with the number of pops, instead of just being a feedback loop where you want to put them only on dedicated trade worlds.

Similarly, perhaps the trade bonus granted by Thrifty could be lowered but also applied to trade from living standards instead of just trade from jobs, if that would impact TV job balance such that they can have their base trade increased back up to make them more useful for empires that aren't going all-in on trade strats.

---

With the +6 planet capacity from +2 max districts Void Dweller hives now start with an effective -(1-(3-0.28) / (3+1.5)) = -39.[5]% pop growth penalty, up from -72%. Better (1st pop is now grown over 3 years earlier than it was in the first beta), but still a bit painful.

I think Void Dwellers would love swapping the modifiers from the Superior Colonies agenda from Colony Development Speed (Habitats as a class already have +200%) for Habitat Build Speed, in order to help them get their initial colonies up and running around the same time planetary empires do.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

It was my (perhaps incorrect) impression that clerks on a planet with bad habitability would now have an effectively higher cost to the player because with a low number of clerks their yield would do less to cover the operating cost of the aforementioned planet used to grow pops.

If that's not correct, another option (besides adjusting clerks per my first post in this thread) would just be making trade habitability-sensitive, or otherwise increasing the penalty to growth of low habitability. I was under the impression as a non-practitioner that this would kill no-habitability clerks, if not I support anything that will. It just helps trivialize habitability as a mechanic.

That impression is correct: nerfing the output shrinks the margin on bad habitability worlds, but it comes with a nerf to good habitability as well.

Suppose you start with a very-bad habitability margin (after Thrifty) of 6.25 TV - 2 food - .5 CG = 3.25 energy and a high habitability margin of 6.25 TV - 1 food - .25 CG = 4.75 energy.

• Reducing the jobs to 4 TV (4*1.25=5) will shrink the margin to 5-2-.5*2=2 energy on the low habitability world (reduced by 1.25 energy equivalent), but it will also shrink it by the same 1.25 energy on high habitability worlds as well. The low habitability clerk will suck, but so will the high habitability one. Why take a 3.5 energy margin job, after investing a trait in Thrifty, when a technician on the same world will have the same base 3.5 margin, without any investment (and scales much better with tech)?
• If you instead give the pop another .25 CG upkeep by making it a specialist, it shrinks the bad habitability margin by 1 energy equivalent (as it's paying double pop upkeep), but it only shrinks the high habitability world by .5 energy: it hurts the target (low habitability) twice as much as the presumably-good use of clerks. So the high habitability clerk still gives you slightly better bang for your buck: 2 amenities and +.75 base energy over the technician (which is good, because you invested a 2 point trait in it, so you're giving up something like +10% growth). But the low habitability clerk sucks again: 2.25 energy margin isn't worth it.

Targeting upkeep will heavily nerf the low habitability use cases (and also slightly nerf the high habitability ones) instead of taking a nerf bat to all of them at once.

If you double down on targeting low habitability by taking away most of the amenities:

• The high habitability world can get away with e.g. 12 pops needing 12 amenities with 9 amenities provided (from the three merchants among the now-amenity-free traders). They can either tank the happiness hit from slightly lower amenities or provide them from elsewhere (ex. it's not much different from employing another 11 artisans/miners/technicians and one entertainer). The happiness hit might even be canceled out by the pops getting promoted to specialist (from the upkeep-via-strata solution).
• But the low habitability world (which will likely have nothing but these TV jobs on it) will have 12 pops needing 24 amenities (in the extreme case) with still only 9 amenities produced. Missing 25% amenities is unfortunate, but tolerable. Missing 62.5% amenities is a disaster: that's almost -42% happiness. So to put them on a low habitability world you have to build a whole extra city district/holotheater and hire an entertainer, which hits their pop efficiency and mineral efficiency at the same time.

If the problem is habitability, target the things which are hurt by habitability: pop upkeep, and amenities. Giving more amenities, reducing the overall trade, and moving the big job from Ruler to Specialist, is doing the exact opposite of targeting low habitability. It's nerfing the job overall and seemingly going out of its way to cushion the blow for low habitability worlds, by making sure they have high happiness/stability despite their increased amenity needs and by making it so they aren't e.g. burning an extra 1 CG per low-habitability merchant by reducing upkeep from 2*1CG to 2*.5CG.

The current change seems designed to hit TV jobs on high habitability world as much as possible while achieving the same damage to the supposedly targeted low habitability ones.

Edit, to re-iterate the concrete example:

five 3.8 clerks and a merchant on a 20% habitability world

• 37 TV and 13 amenities from 6 pops
• 10.8 food/6.05 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 4 energy from district/building upkeep)

4 new-traders, 1 merchant, and 1 entertainer on the same 20% habitability world

• 36 TV (and .6 unity) from 6 pops
• 10.8 food/9.3 CG/10.8 of 13 amenities in upkeep (plus 8 energy from district/building upkeep)
• you had to build a full extra city and holo-theater to get there (an extra 900 minerals)

The alternate-rework version ends up burning .54 CG and .66 energy extra per pop, plus makes .16 fewer TV per pop on a 20% habitability world than the previous setup. And you had to spend 90% more minerals to get the same 6 jobs.

But on a high habitability world:

ten 3.8 clerks and two merchants on an 80% habitability world

• 74 TV and 26 amenities from 12 pops
• 14.4 food/9.4 CG/14.4 of 26 amenities in upkeep (plus 8 energy from district/building upkeep)

8 new-traders, 3 merchants, and 1 entertainer on the same 80% habitability world

• 84 TV (and .9 unity) from 12 pops
• 14.4 food/15 CG/14.4 of 19 amenities in upkeep (plus 16 energy from district/building upkeep)
• you had to build two extra cities, a holo-theater, and a commercial zone to get there (an extra 1800 minerals), but you now have 2 open trader jobs if you want to expand with more pops (along with the unused entertainer)

The alternate rework is burning .46 extra CG and .66 extra energy per pop, makes .833 more raw TV per pop (though it has lower amenities, giving it a ~3% TV penalty, canceling out about 1/3 of that). Though you're still spending more minerals (which was one of the things that was intentionally nerfed), you've got more available jobs on the high habitability world at the end, unlike the low habitability world.

So the reworked version still burns more CG on high habitability worlds (higher proportion of merchants), but it has higher total output in return. And it gets extra useful jobs for those minerals that low habitability is forced to keep spending on holotheaters. Meanwhile the low habitability world is paying twice as many minerals and making less profit than before from the same pops (losing almost 2 energy per pop compared to 3.8).

Hitting amenities and pop upkeep hits low habitability harder. If that's what they want to do, they should nerf that, instead of doing the inverse (adding amenities) and nerfing overall output.