Averting a worker shortage crisis

[Theodidactus (OP)]

Help!

About 15 years ago, the colony of Euphrates began to experience a worker shortage crisis. It's a critical colony that is responsible for guarding a critical space lane, and for producing almost all the sorium in my space empire.

Assuming that it was simply the case that there weren't enough people on Euphrates, I redirected a ton of infrastructure to the planet...however, as the colony grows, the crisis seems to get WORSE.

Euphrates is an unterraformed rock with 150 maintanence facilities, 150 construction factories, 180 mines, 4 labs, and 50 fuel refineries. It has a population of 624 million, living in underground cities: a full 27% of its population is tasked to agriculture, and another 72% to service industries. 0% of its population is performing manufacturing.

How can I fix this? It's clearly not by importing still more people. Do I simply have to relocate the industries? Should I terraform to the best of my ability? Can I threaten to nuke them from orbit if the sorium doesn't flow?

[Haji]

Terraforming is the only option. If the colony cost is too high you end up with all the people tied in agriculture and service industries.

To elaborate, the amount of people in agriculture (as a percentage) is constant and depends on colony cost. For Earth like planets it's five percent. For the cheap planets (col. cost 2.0) it's fifteen percent. The higher the colony cost the higher percentage of your population is tied in agriculture.

The amount of people tied in service industries depends purely on your population. For small planets, the percentage is very small, but it grows. After a certain point (don't remember where exactly it is) 75% of the population will be tied up in the services. That is the maximum.

As such, if you have a planet with such a high colony cost that over 25% of the population have to be tied up in agriculture, then if you add more people you'll end up in a situation where there will be no one left to work in manufacturing. The only way to solve this is to either remove some population (so that less than 75% people work in services) or lower the colony cost of the planet so that less people work in agriculture (which means either terraforming or lowering the colonization cost by the technology in the logistic tree).

[Theodidactus (OP)]

That is too bad.
I suppose I better scramble the terriformers then. Or mass deport people.

[Barkhorn]

researching the reduced colony cost tech in the logistics branch can help sometimes.  It is possible though that its so inhospitable that even that won't help.

If you have no available people, you either need some orbital habitats and ground-based terraformers, or some terraforming ships.  Just ground-based ones alone won't help if theres nobody around to work them.

[MarcAFK]

Your only option is to move half the population elsewhere, Dump the construction factories and refineries onto another nearby rock and mass driver the resources to it, also replace the mines with automines.

[DuraniumCowboy]

Get rid of the research labs first, as they have very high worker requirements.  They can work just as fine anywhere else, so a good practice is to only build RL's where you will have a lot of surplus population.

[Barkhorn]

I agree that you want to move the labs first, but only if there's no ruins on the planet in question.  Ruins can provide a huge boost to research, and you dont want to go through the headache of moving those labs more than you have to.  Moving labs creates tons of garbage "Idle Research Lab" events that clog your event list, and since labs are huge, it takes a long time for the problem to go away.

[Theodidactus (OP)]

terraforming and incentivizing colonists to move to more hospitable planets is slowly fixing this problem. The mining has resumed.