Why is there no more (apparent) unemployment messaging?

[The_Evil_Chicken]

I just started my first game with the new pop system and I'm immensely confused with Civilians.

As far as I understand, they are the new unemployed pops. Instead of doing nothing they produce a little bit of something, but nothing substantial. So it would be logical to me that I'd get messaged if there are maybe around 100 Civilians, so I can fill their demand for jobs and give them something to do. But in my playthrough I noticed that hundreds of Civilians can exist without any unemployment message, on one occasion (recently annexed pre-FTL planet) there were even more Civilians than employed.

Is there any good reason for that? Because at the moment it just seems like a pain to me. It forces me to check all my planets constantly to look for civilians. Or am I getting something wrong entirely?

 

[BookHermit]

Here is the Dev Diary about it:
Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

But basically the Civilians are the part of your population that isn't unemployed but also is passively working and providing (usually) Amenities for cheap pop upkeep. They promote up to fill jobs as jobs become available, migrate to new worlds without affecting jobs on existing worlds, and unemployed people demote into them.

Basically the teeming masses of your empire that just quietly exist in the background with little need for you to worry or waste resources on employing them.

Think of it as the excess of current needs population pool, or your potential workers pool. You don't need them on a world, and you don't need to get rid of them either, but they are the ones who most quickly migrate to new colonies and push their working (non-civilian) population up as you get jobs built on them, and will promote into working population if jobs are available instead existing workers swapping jobs (making planets and income a bit less volatile as they grow and workers pop between jobs like in 3.14, as instead civilians promote up into workers to fill jobs as they open up).

 

[The_Evil_Chicken]

Here is the Dev Diary about it:
Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

But basically the Civilians are the part of your population that isn't unemployed but also is passively working and providing (usually) Amenities for cheap pop upkeep. They promote up to fill jobs as jobs become available, migrate to new worlds without affecting jobs on existing worlds, and unemployed people demote into them.

Basically the teeming masses of your empire that just quietly exist in the background with little need for you to worry or waste resources on employing them.

Think of it as the excess of current needs population pool, or your potential workers pool. You don't need them on a world, and you don't need to get rid of them either, but they are the ones who most quickly migrate to new colonies and push their working (non-civilian) population up as you get jobs built on them, and will promote into working population if jobs are available instead existing workers swapping jobs (making planets and income a bit less volatile as they grow and workers pop between jobs like in 3.14, as instead civilians promote up into workers to fill jobs as they open up).

Most of that makes a lot of sense, the only part I don't get is how to best manage building now. Back then I just waited for an unemployment message to build a building to give them jobs, but what is the player supposed to do now? I don't really like the idea of checking my planets constantly.

 

[BookHermit]

Most of that makes a lot of sense, the only part I don't get is how to best manage building now. Back then I just waited for an unemployment message to build a building to give them jobs, but what is the player supposed to do now? I don't really like the idea of checking my planets constantly.

Yeah, it's definitely different now. Not going to claim I have it all figured out yet but a few thoughts really quick.

You don't want to use up all of your civilians. They replace the old Clerk job as you main amenities producer as they multiply and grow (though early game you might want to drop Luxury Housing on new colonies to get them enough amenities until the planet starts growing civilians).

You also don't want to use them up as pop growth on a new colony is awful until they get to around 1000 pops, and civilians on your other planets migrating to your new colony is the fastest way it'll get up to that point.

Since civilians promote up to fill jobs, usually I've been waiting until I see a planet has 0 jobs available (all jobs currently filled) which I really wish would have an Outliner icon for that, and then figuring out what to build next. Since migration is pretty high (at least unless you take the traits that reduce it) even when I have unemployed pops they are usually migrating to somewhere else pretty quickly to fill jobs elsewhere in my empire.

It does feel like more planet micro though I can't tell if that is because of civilians or just the change to the new district system having me not queue as much stuff up vs waiting and having to check more often before building. A (0 Jobs Available) icon for the Outliner would be a nice addition to 4.0 as it might have more utility now than the "Unemployed Pops" icon does with how quickly people seem to demote or migrate.

Makes me really wish Planet Automation was in a useful state right now for the times I've tried to go wide since 4.0 came out.

 

[The_Evil_Chicken]

Here is the Dev Diary about it:
Stellaris Dev Diary #370 - 4.0 Changes Part 4

But basically the Civilians are the part of your population that isn't unemployed but also is passively working and providing (usually) Amenities for cheap pop upkeep. They promote up to fill jobs as jobs become available, migrate to new worlds without affecting jobs on existing worlds, and unemployed people demote into them.

Basically the teeming masses of your empire that just quietly exist in the background with little need for you to worry or waste resources on employing them.

Think of it as the excess of current needs population pool, or your potential workers pool. You don't need them on a world, and you don't need to get rid of them either, but they are the ones who most quickly migrate to new colonies and push their working (non-civilian) population up as you get jobs built on them, and will promote into working population if jobs are available instead existing workers swapping jobs (making planets and income a bit less volatile as they grow and workers pop between jobs like in 3.14, as instead civilians promote up into workers to fill jobs as they open up).

Oof, that sounds awful compared to the old system. Well, thank you anyway!

 

[Red Death]

All there is right now is the yellow suitcase icon on the outliner that shows up on planets where you have Civilians that are also migrating to other planets. So that does show you where you have civilians (and thus no free jobs), but it unfortunately only works if you do have free jobs somewhere.

So since Civilians auto-migrate to where there are jobs, this is my method for now:

If the suitcases disappear, that means I probably don't have free jobs anymore. So I go to the planet where I want to build something, confirm there are indeed no free jobs, and then build what I want to build. I might do this on multiple planets at once in a larger empire. Once things are finished building, the suitcases reappear, and I wait for them to disappear again.

 

[aadf97799c]

civilian and maintenance drone should shown as unemploy pop

 

[Ingri]

civilian and maintenance drone should shown as unemploy pop

NO because you NEED them -> especially on planets with a lot of pops! because amenities from buildings and districts are very limited and wasting building/district slots for amenities is also fail, because they are limited as well and they are the reason why you even colonize planets. At last in the mid-game on older planets without civilians you would have negative amenities resulting in massive impacts on stability and economics
If they are marked as unemployed and you get rid of them because they are unemployed you are killing your economics - they are very cheep to supply and deliver a lot of amenities

 

[GloatingSwine]

Unemployment is basically dead. Only pops that are demoting are now actually unemployed (and that doesn't take very long).

Civilians aren't the new unemployed, they're the new clerks except there's an infinite job capacity for them and you can make them actually quite productive with the autochthon monument. (This is poorly communicated, it doesn't just add production to unity jobs, it adds productions to all of your civilians based on your ethics).

I don't think it's optimal, but I reckon it's possible to go into an all-civilians build because the educator civic gives you a building that makes them produce science and so does the monument with materialist ethics, and there's ways to juice up their trade output as well.

 

[exi123]

We just need some kind of indicator when planets have civilians in the outliner. With that information, you can go in and construct new buildings as long as civilians are ready to migrate to new jobs.

When the outliner show this, it can tied to different values, it does not have to be a total number. It could also be like 10% of pops on a planet are civilians and the icon appears.

The current unemployed icon is totally useless.

 

[Losttruppen]

We just need some kind of indicator when planets have civilians in the outliner.

And on the Resettlement window Planet dropdown menu, so I know where I have some to move from; I used to use the Unemployed icon for this, but that is now pretty useless, so I am forced to cycle through each Planet looking.

 

[Sweeze]

Yeah, it's a pretty bad system. Civilians are bad (absent certain OP strats that just let them produce free resources out of thin air), and you want to minimize them as much as possible. I find the best way to do this is to hover over the available jobs number and it'll let you check how many civilian "jobs" are being filled, from there you can tab across planets and do something at any place with more than 500 civilians.

Suitcase should probably only appear if there are 500 civilians or more because its basically useless now as just 1 pop makes it show up which means its almost everywhere.

 

[aadf97799c]

NO because you NEED them -> especially on planets with a lot of pops! because amenities from buildings and districts are very limited and wasting building/district slots for amenities is also fail, because they are limited as well and they are the reason why you even colonize planets. At last in the mid-game on older planets without civilians you would have negative amenities resulting in massive impacts on stability and economics
If they are marked as unemployed and you get rid of them because they are unemployed you are killing your economics - they are very cheep to supply and deliver a lot of amenities

that is not true anymore after the amenity building update

even size 25 hive planet only need 20000 amenity

building can easily support that instead of wasting pop on amenity

 

[Seyfried]

I want to very much agree with replacing the unemployment icon with a no-free-jobs icon.
I can also confirm that you need civilians for amenities, since I built up my first colony too fast, all the civilians migrated away from my homeworld and the amenities went very negative.