Solution to HLW Problems? (Golden Rainbow)

Game News
February 24, 2009
1. High Level Workers [ top ]
High level workers remain a tough issue for many well developed countries and shortages persist.

To try and eliminate the problem, we have improved the automatic transfers into this group each game month to the maximum of 30.000. We have also increased the share of young High level Workers in the population in general so that the natural inflow of HLWs will increase. This of course will take some time to make a difference.

As a last measure, we have reduced somewhat the number of HLWs that are needed in upgrading some of the corporations. This slight change will result in more LLWs being hired in some types of corporations and will reduce the number of HLWs needed. The change will result in an increase in the number of available HLWs. Existing corporations will change their hiring immediately and some countries will see changes of several thousands.

Several more updates will follow that will not create major changes but will make more HLWs available.

could this be what we have been waiting for?

I've noticed a change already!.
First time in ages that I haven't had to convert workers!

The gaze of the Game Gods has rested on me for the shortest of moments and I am blessed.... I think.

Well what they need to do now is STOP making more changes, and see how this works.

So far, I think it is working really well.


W3C, please don't make more adjustments until we see if this fixes the problem. We don't need you to overcompensate.

As it is, one of my countries found itself short on LLW and MLW due to the change (and it had 600K LLW originally).


Also, please stop increasing workers in corporations. It is further eroding country income.

Q

Hasn't helped me much at all. Aegis FTZ is still short nearly 800k of HLW's...30000 a month, WOW, such a hugh improvement over the 24000 a month conversion rate. I would have been impressed if they'd put it at 50000 a month but 30000, sigh. Pointless.

Martock, the conversions have increased too. I've had no problems with HLW whatsoever since the latest change.

Try adding more HLW to your country and see if it helps. Also are you short in anything else? You might need to close a few corps to fix the problem. Do you have a large surplus of MLW and LLW?

Q

It does seem to have helped in nearly every one of my countries. The one that was the worst off is still having problems, but those problems included more than HLW.

It has changed virtually nothing for me in my main either, before the problem started i had NO shortages, now im short everything from mlm to HTS, 620K HLW shortage is pretty back breaking! With almost 2m unemplyed llw, so i cant buy pop!

Are there trades you can do throughout your empire to level things out? I had a few countries with shortages. It took some time, but I went through every country and looked at where I was short and where I had surpluses. I ended up being able to fill all but a couple of shortages with MLM. That's easily corrected through EP's.

For crying out loud...

The game doesn't have to nor should it adapt to your every need and whim. If anything, you should be the one adapting to the game.

If you want a perfect employment, do not have a population beyond 60mil. If you choose to have a population beyond that point, any worker and population problems that come from there is your own and exclusive fault.

I've had a few countries remaining at around 60mil of pop for a long time now, and I don't have any shortage of any worker and a employment index at around 92.

92 isn't exactly an ideal employment. That just means you have tons of unemployed in every area.

Unfortunately, some players (like Tendo) are trying for Level 7, which requires 94 employment. He's not going to get there with 92.


Why should we have to limit ourselves to 60 million population?


The change W3C made definitely helped the HLW problem, though it seems to have caused unintended problems elsewhere (at least for some others, I'm still doing fine with the change).

Tendo, I think what affected you was they boosted the worker usage in all corporations, this is causing shortages in countries which had a small unemployment.

Q

Here is a total number of all workers from my 17 Country empire, 3 months apart:
(Sorry formatting will not stay)

Game Date 3/27/2613 12/24/2612
LL Worker 47,401,347 47,025,011
ML Worker 40,153,181 40,021,577
HL Worker 30,022,622 30,141,896
LL Manger 13,259,311 13,226,579
ML Manger 8,938,363 8,910,901
HL Manger 4,443,669 4,433,648
Exec 535,138 534,071
HT Eng 18,322,501 18,310,526
HT Senor 5,253,714 5,248,428
Total HT Exec 513,641 512,478
Teachers 8,215,779 8,200,721
University Teacher 1,799,746 1,798,500
Nurse 8,458,927 8,444,098
Doctor 2,737,930 2,736,717
Senor Doc 1,498,104 1,497,388
workers 191,553,973 191,042,539
% Employed 91.90% 91.77%
% Growth 0.27%

You will notice all workers show an increase except HL Workers, there was a drop of .4%, in a balanced growing population all numbers should be going up.

Ideal is what you make of it.

My ideal is not to lose my head over things I cannot change. 92% of employment, or more, or less, for two straight years without exchanging workers is something I welcome.

I could raise it far more, if I just were to build a few more corps and switch around some workers.

What you need to be aware is that if you buy population beyond 0 natural growth, it is only natural that a group of workers will be hit harder than others when the country begins it's slow correction.

As such, your decision will be between a stable workforce and a population at zero natural growth, or wonky workforce and a population beyond zero natural growth.

As it is your decision and no one else's, you alone are to feel the consequences.

And if you were to think beyond rigid terms, you could fix your problem employment by building corps with a low demand of HLWs.

In the end, this is a problem created by players with unwise decisions that can be solved by the players' with measures that aren't driven by obsessive perfection.

LG, I said that I'm doing fine with the change. There are others, who micromanage far less than I do, who still are hurting from the HLW problem.

Also, my countries that are less than 60 Million pop had problems with HLW until about Sunday, now they are fine too.


I'm not interested in helping just myself, I'm interested in helping other players as well. Even W3C finally swung around to realizing there was a problem, and they took action to fix it. I applaud them for that. Now if they could just fix some of the other major problems.

Q

The HLW issue in my empire isn't going to be fixed by limiting myself to 60m pop LG...and opening corps that have a low HLW demand would require me to toss CEO's out or request they do that...and that's not going to happen. I don't think I even have a country that has less than 60m in pop.

The problem I have with HLW's is that the small conversion rate of 24000, now 30000 does little to help the situation. 50000 would have been a better figure if only because I might be able to perceive the change. As it stands now, it's confusing to figure out if ANY of my efforts have been successful. It's even more confusing when you go about spending GC's to buy pop, see it materialize but not have a clue just how many of each you recieved. I bought 3m pop yesterday for Aegis, and my HLW's dropped from being short 750,000 to just over 550,000.

I'd prefer an easy solution of just letting me spend GC's to buy X amount of workers as I need. I mean we can already buy 1m in random #'s with 5GC, so why not let us buy X amount of workers that are needed. I'd prefer to leave it to workers only and not other professions but that's my choice. It would give me a much better feeling too if I got a 'receipt' stating just how many of each worker and professional class I received when I bought pop. I accept it is random but a statement to the affect would be helpful.

<!-Quote-!>Quote:

The HLW issue in my empire isn't going to be fixed by limiting myself to 60m pop LG<!-/Quote-!>

Yes, it will. That's how the game works.

That should be more like "yes, it would, if you were building your empire". It isn't impossible for you to rebuild your empire, but it is a slow process. The gains, however, are quite substantial and invaluable (peace of mind).

Not at this point...if I were to start over, sure, but I can't reverse the point that I'm at now. That would require me to force CEO's out and scale back everything across the board just to sell of pop. It would be easier for me (though not beneficial to my own CEO's or to those existing in my lands) to simply either sell the country or dereg it. Neither of which I am interested in doing.

@ Martock,

you can work out how many of each worker you will receive when you buy POP.

You get the same % per million that you already have in your Country. My % of HLW is around 7.5%.

If I wanted 750000 HLW then I would have to buy 10M POP

Its probably better to take C3s, close down all the schools/hospitals/corps, and do population transfers for HLW than to buy population with GC. That's what I've been doing. In my case the HLW shortages seem to be getting better.

you can't close down schools, hospitals unless you have overf 70% level of those. yes you can close corps though.

It might be better to take C3's but I'm just not into that anymore.

@ Coolwind - how do I figure out the % of HLW I have in my country? I don't recall seeing a chart or page for that.

@ Martock, you have to calculate that yourself but it's easy enough, just go to your pop/employment pages and work out the % that you have in your country:-

Click departments/labour/occupation and income stats then total profession HLW divided by total population.

I always have a wee spread sheet handy evrytime I buy POP just to check what I get

Ok...gave it a whirl and here's what I came out with:
Total HLW: 6529519
Total Population: 119173451

Now dividing 6529519 by 119173451 gives me an ugly number of 0.054790047155720949962252918227567 so it's looking like my % of HLW to population is 5%.

Mmmmmmmm quite low. Mine is 7.5% with a POP of 89.2M in my Main