This is a topic that has been discussed in this past but I never got around to doing anything about it. However, I am now motivated by having my population dying off extremely fast and therefore unable to man the remaining industry
For v3.2, using a tab on the Pop window, you can shut down different industrial sectors. When a sector is shut down, it requires no manpower and produces nothing. To reactivate an industrial sector requires six months (to retrain workers, etc). The sectors you can shut down are as follows: Research Facilities, Construction Factories, Manned Mines, Fighter Factories, Ordnance Factories, Fuel Refineries, Terraforming Installations, Financial Centres. You can't shut down (at least for this version) Shipyards, Maintenance Facilities and Commercial Freight Facilities.
When an area is shut down, it is stil displayed on the Pop window and you can still add things to queues (or remove them), mainly so you can still view the potential for that area and you don't have to start redoing the queues after reactivation. It is clearly labelled as Inactive though and no activity will take place for that area during the 5-day increment. No workers are assigned to any shut down areas and no workers are shown for those areas on the Pop Summary. Reactivation is as simple as pressing a button for that industrial sector. A countdown from 180 days is displayed and when it reaches zero, the sector is back in action.
Steve
