The new pop system is horrible.

[Drachasor]

personally, i think the current way is more interesting, not less, since it allows me to boost ALL output from that job, and then have trait points to spend elsewhere. the one example i hadn't thought of was biotrophies.

but like i said before, being able to boost EVERYTHING from a job that produces multiple things, makes all the civics/origins/planet modifiers that give me jobs that produce multiple things MORE interesting

Not just bio-trophies really. Machine Intelligences in general have almost no civics or origins that benefit from this. So it's very unexciting for players of them.

 

[Critical Ethics]

I think that the current problem of race traits that affect one job and one job only would be solved if, instead of affecting a job or series of jobs, they would affect a job category or "job label" instead, where each job has at least one label. Civic-specific or special jobs could have more than one, thus benefiting from many traits at once. Say, priest output getting boosted both by the "traditional" and "charismatic" traits.

Something along these lines:

Spoiler: Trait revision idea

JOB LABELS

Agrarian (farmer, angler, pearl diver, wrangler, zookeper, hunter, warden)
Extractive (miner, scrap miner, rare resource miner, angler)
Technical (technician, artisan, artificier, augmentor)
Physical (miner, farmer, technician, soldier, enforcer, duelist, knight, labourer, hunter, toiler)
Social (entertainer, priest, high priest, bio-trophy, storm dancer, spa attendant, prosperity preacher, duelist, educator, knight, squire, telepath, merchant)
Administrative (bureucrat, politician, knight, priest, high priest, acolyte, noble, skywatcher, memorialist, science director, telepath, Executive)
Knowledge (physicist, engineer, biologist, science director, medical worker, archeo-engineer, educator, knight, astral researcher, skywatcher, memorialist, telepath)
Commercial (trader, merchant, prosperity preacher, Executive, pearl diver, artificier, cybernetic merchant)
Engineering (engineer, roboticist, cybernetic merchant, archeo-engineer, artificier)
Sociology (biologist, medical worker, spa attendant, wrangler, zookeeper, warden, educator)
Physicist (physicist, astral researcher, storm dancer, telepath, astrometeorologist, astral researcher)
Fabrile (metallurgist, artisan, rare resource syntetizer, catalyzer, artificier, roboticist)

LABEL-BOOSTING TRAITS

Ingenious (1): +10% job efficiency to technical jobs
Industrious (1): +10% job efficiency to extractive jobs
Agrarian (1): +10% job efficiency to agrarian jobs
Strong (1): +5% job efficiency to physical jobs, +20% army damage
Very strong (3): +10% job efficiency to physical jobs, +5% slave strata job efficiency, +50% army damage, +15% XP gain to commanders
Traditional (2): +10% job efficiency in administrative jobs, +15% XP gain to officials
Charismatic (2): +10% job efficiency to social jobs, +30 opinion from regular empires if present on the empire ruler
Thrifty (2): +10% job efficiency to commercial jobs, -15% leader maintenance costs
Long-lived (1): +5% job efficiency in administrative jobs, +10 years lifespan in leaders
Venerable (3): +5% job efficiency in administrative jobs, +5% elite strata job efficiency, +50 years lifespan in leaders
Intelligent (3): +10% job efficiency to knowledge jobs, +15% XP gain to scientists
Quick-learner (1): -50% pop demotion time, +15% XP gain in all leader types
Talented (1): +10% civilian job efficiency, -1 max negative trait in leaders
Resilient (1): +5% worker strata job efficiency, +50% army HP, leaders have a 10% chance to lose negative traits each passing year, as well as a 50% chance of surviving deathly events
Communal (1): -10% housing usage, -30% housing usage in colonies with 1000 pops or more
Nomadic (1): -25% resettlement costs, +15% growth from immigration, +15% habitability in colonies with less than 1000 pops on them
Conformist (1): +50% governing ethics attraction, -50% unhappiness from living standards
Docile (1): -10% size from pops, -20% size from pops if enslaved
Natural sociologists (1): +10% job efficiency in Sociologists jobs, +1 social research alternative if present on empire ruler
Natural engineers (1): +10% job efficiency in physicist jobs, +1 engineering research alternative if present on empire ruler
Natural physicist (1): +10% job efficiency in physicist jobs, +1 physics research alternative if present on empire ruler
Conservationist (1): −10% pop consumer goods & food upkeep, -5% per natural blocker, -5% in gaias (those might stack up)

It would solve most of my problems with the current system.

I also don't hate this idea I just like mine better in either case I think the job trait situation is firmly in "good enough given what else there is to be done" territory right now, assuming the outlier jobs get some kind of "Here's a temp fix" or "That's on purpose" dev note. Long term I'd very much like the whole job trait system to get further glowed up but there's a lot of other work to do right now.

Though hey maybe my or your suggestion is only an afternoon's work and someone's frantically pointing at the screen making excited noises as we speak!

 

[Ikael]

I don't like "half assed" because I feel it implies lazyiness or a lack of caring. I think the devs very very much care about delivering a quality game and are putting a great deal of effort into doing so. I don't agree with all the decisions they've made or where they've chosen to focus their limited time but even there it's very easy to make those kinds of judgements from the outside. There's dozens of things in the game I'd consider at best quarter implemented but I would never say they haven't been putting their full backs into it, ass and all.

Sorry, English is not my mother tongue, so I did not knew that "half assed" had that much of a demeaning connotation. I consider that the recent Phoenix changes have lots of potential precisely because the underlying game design mechanics are quite solid, despite their current implementation. I also never quite liked the whole "change for the sake of change accusation, either.

But it is pretty obvious that those changes are on a very, very unfinished stage, and that's to put it mildly. It is not a lack of effort nor intelligence from the developer's side, but rather development time (or to be more precise, an acute case of scope creep). And it is a pity, because when I see people demanding a full reversal of those changes, I see a good idea getting possibly compromised or discarded due to a terrible first impression that could have been avoided with a bit more time on its refinement.

 

[FleetingRain]

So if I understand it correctly, the reason for the change to unreadable mess was because someone on the dev team has OCD or something and doesn't like fractions.

I'd guess fractions are more annoying to deal with because of floating points. But I'm not a game dev.

 

[jedavis]

If a Trait boosted Unity, then it boosted Unity regardless of what the Job that produced Unity actually was. Which made it generally applicable.
Whereas a Trait that boosts Entertainers specifically is much less interesting, because, well, one may not use any Entertainers. Repeat for any Trait that boosts specific Jobs: if one does not use that specific Job, then it is worthless. And thus these traits are much less interesting.

Absolutely. Before, it didn't matter if you got your unity or your minerals or whatever from some weird job swap. You take the +10% unity trait and you get +10% unity from jobs, just like anybody else, and you pay the same 1 trait point for it as anybody else. Now, if you get some resource from a weird source that doesn't fit into the narrow, preconceived job category, you may not have the option to boost it with species traits to the same extent as the standard paths do.

 

[Abdulijubjub]

I'd guess fractions are more annoying to deal with because of floating points. But I'm not a game dev.

Floating point causes desync errors. Everything is actually an integer under the hood.

But there's no reason you can't have e.g. 0.01 pops as the smallest unit. It would be exactly the same as the current system, but with the decimal shifted 2 points to the left before it's rendered.

I think the real reason they went with this specific scale is that the original growth required was 100, and it made for a nice "1 growth = 1 pop per month" baseline.

 

[Critical Ethics]

Sorry, English is not my mother tongue, so I did not knew that "half assed" had that much of a demeaning connotation.

Don't worry about it. And yeah, Internet communication encourages hyperbole and performative (or heartfelt) overreaction (cough cough myself included). It never occurred to me before that trying to learn slang entirely from online usage probably results in a lot of ESL posters thinking stuff like "get ****** you ***** *********** ******" means "I believe you have made a slight but understandable error in your reasoning and thank you once again for agreeing to be best man at the wedding."

Heck, even within English there's a few words that are things you'd call a friend in one country and things you wouldn't call your worst enemy in another. I'm uh... not going to give examples here for obvious reasons.

I consider that the recent Phoenix changes have lots of potential precisely because the underlying game design mechanics are quite solid, despite their current implementation. I also never quite liked the whole "change for the sake of change accusation, either.

But it is pretty obvious that those changes are on a very, very unfinished stage, and that's to put it mildly. It is not a lack of effort nor intelligence from the developer's side, but rather development time (or to be more precise, an acute case of scope creep). And it is a pity, because when I see people demanding a full reversal of those changes, I see a good idea getting possibly compromised or discarded due to a terrible first impression that could have been avoided with a bit more time on its refinement.

I don't know how much of it was scope creep so much as just being more work than expected while being locked into a deadline by the season pass, but yeah this really is what's killing me. All the cool stuff is hard to see when there's so much jank getting in the way, and there's enough jank that jank minor jank feeds into other jank like a jank katamari. And with every change there's going to be at least some people who want it deleted and reverted out of genuine preference or just reactionary brigading, and a bad release just gives the latter ammunition. It was very obvious post-beta who was saying "Delay this, there's too much work to do" vs "Delay this until you come to your senses and delete it". Doing the latter to drown out, and in two cases I know of drive off, anyone trying to have a productive discussion is a self fulfilling prophecy. There was absolutely not enough time to get changes this big to the level of jank needed for a quality release and delaying wasn't an option so it was always going to be janky, but even slightly less jank might have reduced the jank feedback loops to "Good enough, considering."

e: jank