Worker Shortage

[Zed 6 (OP)]

I currently have a -45 mil Worker Shortage on Earth. I am going to change one of my colony worlds to colonist source and Earth to Destination to take advantage of it's higher Annual Growth Rate. I was wondering what negative effects having a worker shortages cause to production and anything else? Second gen colonists don't want to be moisture farmers.

[Ziusudra]

It directly affects the Manufacturing Efficiency Modifier which affects all the Manufacturing Sectors. Each sector will run at that percentage.

The modifier is displayed on the summary tab for the colony, fourth from the bottom on the right hand column.

[Brian Neumann]

Another thing you can do is to shut down a part of your industry.  If you go to the civilian tab there is a section on the right hand side for various parts of your industry.  If you deactivate that part then they will no longer use any of your workers.  Be warned however that reactivating from this takes 6 months where the workers are needed, but produce nothing.  (demothballing)  Depending on how things are going you may have a lot of mines on earth but very little resources left for them to mine.  In this case shutting down the mines while your freighters move them elsewhere will free up some workers. 

As for the faster growth on the colony, it may be a higher percentage, but check the absolute growth rate.  (Growth rate x population)  While earth may be far lower percentage it will generate far more people if the comparative populations are at 10-1 or greater in all likelyhood.

Brian

[Zed 6 (OP)]

It directly affects the Manufacturing Efficiency Modifier which affects all the Manufacturing Sectors. Each sector will run at that percentage.

The modifier is displayed on the summary tab for the colony, fourth from the bottom on the right hand column.

Thanks, found it. Earth was at 85%. But I had let Mars drop to 46% without realizing it. Less total pop and high need for workers mean a much lower percentage. It will take a while to recover. I have stopped the drop on Mars and it is starting to recover now, slowly. Earth's decline is slowing and will reverse direction after the Emperor stepped in to stem the rampant runaway industrial expansion. Hi mineral surplus, lots of credits and few workers.

Another thing you can do is to shut down a part of your industry.  If you go to the civilian tab there is a section on the right hand side for various parts of your industry.  If you deactivate that part then they will no longer use any of your workers.  Be warned however that reactivating from this takes 6 months where the workers are needed, but produce nothing.  (demothballing)  Depending on how things are going you may have a lot of mines on earth but very little resources left for them to mine.  In this case shutting down the mines while your freighters move them elsewhere will free up some workers. 

As for the faster growth on the colony, it may be a higher percentage, but check the absolute growth rate.  (Growth rate x population)  While earth may be far lower percentage it will generate far more people if the comparative populations are at 10-1 or greater in all likelyhood.

Brian

That's good to know about shutting down parts of Industry. At this point I don't think I will do that just yet. And I see what you mean about Absolute pop growth. Earth, with its much greater pop will produce much more pop.


What happens if you set all colonies to Source of colonists, Do the civies stop transporting colonists? Or if set to destination for all colonies? Crash the game?

[jseah]

That's good to know about shutting down parts of Industry. At this point I don't think I will do that just yet. And I see what you mean about Absolute pop growth. Earth, with its much greater pop will produce much more pop.

What happens if you set all colonies to Source of colonists, Do the civies stop transporting colonists? Or if set to destination for all colonies? Crash the game?

If you set all to source, no colonists get transported by civilians.  Well, not quite.  Luxury Liners still move people. 

And while Earth will produce much more absolute population, the maximum total absolute population growth you can have is by having all colonies at the same population level. 

Needless to say, that will usually result in your industry splitting into many tiny bits, which can't be a good thing. 

[sloanjh]

What happens if you set all colonies to Source of colonists, Do the civies stop transporting colonists? Or if set to destination for all colonies? Crash the game?

Something to be aware of: you can't set all colonies to "source" (unless you only have populations greater than 25 million) in the current version.  The only flag in the DB is "destination", which is used to override the default "source" state of colonies >25m.

I assume that if everything is set to "destination" that you'll simply end up with a lot of empty colony ships.

John

[Thiosk]

Im about to obsolete my colony ships.  Theres about 15 million+ terrans in transit at any particular moment and its driving me crazy-- draining the earth of citizens.  Sure its great for the outer colonies, but I havn't been able to upgrade my shipyards in two decades because of the drain on the citizenry.  I'm sitting at 1.5 billions on earth and the number of colony ships has just steadily increased over the years.  The horde is more or less synchronized-- the population will recover, and then the fleet will return and round up about 15-30 million people and move them out.

[jseah]

I would think that 1 billion is enough for many things.  After that, the penalty on population growth is enough that I doubt it's worth putting more people on the planet. 

[Thiosk]

It is, but higher pops give you MUCH more growth per year than small pops, despite the lower "rate."  The growth rate is highly misleading.  Heres some data:

Code: [Select]

init    years
pop  %   1 2 3 4 5 additional pop 5 years:
130.00 4.75 136.18 142.64 149.42 156.52 163.95 34 million
475.00 3.54 491.82 509.23 527.25 545.92 565.24 90.24

1500.00 2.44 1536.60 1574.09 1612.50 1651.85 1692.15 192.15


These results show that at a modest 2.44 % growth rate,  after 5 years the population with 1.5 billion will produce an additional 192.15 million babies, whereas the smaller populations will produce fewer babes.  (less than 1/2 the number for 1/3 the population)  So what you really want is the biggest populations possible, because those provide more little worker bees for your factories.  Each individual is producing fewer babies, but theres so many more individuals that you get a lot of freakin peeps.

These back of the envelope calculations of course assume a static growth rate, which of course decreases slightly as population increases.

[jseah]

But for the same population, you could separate your populations more or less equally between a number of colonies. 
So instead of 1.5 billion capital + 5 other 25 million colonies, you have 2x 700 million pop planets, 4x 25 million colonies, and that'll grow population faster than the single big planet version. 
And the fastest population growth is when you divide all 1.5 billion into 6 equal portions.  But concentration of production power must take precedence so that's pretty infeasible. 

For example, in my game, I shifted all my research facilities onto another planet that had no resources.  Terraformed it and moved colonists over to it. 
In a period of 2 years, my capital planet population dropped by 40%, all of which went to manning the labs on the other planet. 

Starting from a 1 billion pop start, I now have 1.7 billion population in 12 years.  Not sure how much that is but linearly, that's a 5.8% growth rate.  Of course, actual growth rate is probably closer to 4% or so but that's loads better than if I had kept everything on one planet. 

My aim is to grow them both to 1 billion pop, then set both to source and move colonists + automines to another system in order to have two major industrial centers.  At this time, my "empire" is mostly a 1 system nation with a bunch of external holdings.  Can't wait to graduate to a "true" interstellar empire.