Jobs system - what am I missing?

[AileTheAlien]

I recently picked up ONI after a prolonged absence, and the one thing that really confuses me, is the jobs system. It seems like it doesn't really fit with the rest of the game. Resource management (rocks, metal, food, oxygenn, etc), building placement, decor management - these are all systems which have fairly general rules, that interact to produce interesting results. (Choosing how to lay out buildings, how near or far to place storage, how to make and efficient plumbing system - all offer either a challenge, or expressive choice.) The priorities and skills seem to match this (to some extent, at least) - the player gets to choose what priorities dupes should have, to make some trade-offs. Do they make one dupe a jack-of-all trades, or focus on one skill alone? Do they let any dupe do the cooking, or only the chef with the highest skill? The player has choices to make, for efficiency, or for personal preference.

The jobs system however, seems like it doesn't fit with the other systems in the game. It limits player choice (dupes first are specialists, although micro-managing the system allows for generalists). It also seems to have some other problems, that make me wonder what the point of it is. For example, one of the posts I stumbled upon when I was coming back to the game, was in the Suggestions forum, complaining that the hats made all dupes look the same (it covers up their hair). It also seems like a roundabout way of arriving at the existing skills / priorities system. When assigned a job, the dupe gets some bonus to a skill, and when they master a skill-level, they get a bonus to that skill. There's also a check-box for auto-assigning priorities, for jobs. Additionally, if you have more jobs to fill than dupes, you need to micro-manage jobs-assignments, so that you can do certain tasks (for example, researching geysers, or digging harder minerals). That seems like it's just a more complex way for players to interact with the existing skills and priorities, that are already present in the game.

What am I missing here? This seems like a lot of effort, to limit player choice, cover up existing art (hair), make the skill / priorities system more complex, and introduce micro-management. It's not fun for me, but maybe I'm not the target audience? Is it meant for people who play with big enough colonies, that they can always have dedicated specialists dupes?

[wachunga]

You're not missing anything. Jobs are very half-assed. The game is in early access so it's to be expected to a certain degree. Right now jobs are a shiny plastic bauble. Looks good from a casual glance. Closer examination reveals little inherent worth. Maybe in 6 months it won't be so craptacular.

Don't feel like you have to jump on the jobs carousel if you find it tedious and annoying. There's only a few meaningful job skills, once they are mastered you can forget the jobs screen exists. Level 2 miner, level 2 courier, level 1 research, level 1 cook, level 1 art, mechatronics if you want conveyors. Ignore the rest.

[QuQuasar]

Jobs seem designed to force, or at least encourage, players to specialise. 
 
In theory at least this heads off a potential gameplay trap: new players who fail to specialise, reach the midgame, and start feeling like ONI is an extremely slow-paced and boring game because when they designate a job it takes cycles to get done. In reality it's because they're wasting huge amounts of time making their miners cook and their researchers farm.
 
In early iterations of the game, before priorities and jobs, every dupe quickly became a super-dupe, preventing that sort of mid-game fatigue. But it also meant specialisation wasn't necessary. By introducing jobs, Klei were able to (mostly) remove super-dupe skill-levelling and re-introduce specialisation into the game.
 
Jobs addresses all this by forcing new players to think of dupes as specialists and reminding them whenever they do the hat dance that a particular dupe has a particular set of skills. For an advanced player, Jobs don't really offer much. For a new player, they're far more accessible than priorities and good at gently nudging their thinking onto the right track to making an efficient base.
 
It's not a perfect system by any means, but I think they're an important part of the game design at this point. Certainly they're not going anywhere.
 
Hats hiding hair is silly, tho. Especially in portraits. #WeDemandHatlessPortraits

[The Plum Gate]

@AileTheAlien, try hitting the L button shortcut will bring up the "old" tasks priority. I find this more or less overrides their priorities. I had to look in the commands list for it.

I'm not liking that you need rocket scientists to actually be on the rocket - that's quite the job journey, per se.

[Sasza22]

The job system was designed to make it a more player controlled progress in how dupes get their expectations higher. If you can`t get their morale high they will no longer get their expectation high on their own. Instead their expectation is based on the highest job they mastered. This way you can take it slow and not train high tier jobs early or rush for them but get some morale boosts early.

The second part of the job system is the morale system along with the schedule system and food permissions. You can assign your dupes do different schedules so some have more downtime and get higher morale and others work longer but you keep them at low expectation not assigning higher tier jobs.

That said the job system is not finished yet. Most higher tier jobs don`t give anything meaningful other than stats and are just a waste to train early on. Hopefully this will be adressed in the upcomming patches.

[Mariilyn]

The hats can be a visual indicator to quickly see who does what. If I notice my cook in the space biome, I kinda know something is wrong with the priorities or door permissions. These could be taken off during downtime.