How to breed specialist pops instead of worker pops and how to manage overpopulation on my capital?

Question

I got Stellaris when the Federations DLC came out. I had a couple of hundred hours on the console version, so I thought it would be fine, but I am encountering an issue pretty frequently:

I have a bunch of open Specialist jobs but have unemployed workers, so I was wondering how I could make sure my specialist jobs were done.

Another issue was that in my capital after maybe 35 pops or so I would get unemployed pops and I wouldn't have any more districts, so I would have to wait for 5 more unemployed pops and then make them jobs. When I was waiting for more pops, the crime rate started to increase. I built some enforcers to keep them in check, but the Enforcer jobs don't give work to many pops.

How can I make specialist pops instead of worker pops and how do I give everyone jobs and manage my crime rate in Stellaris?

Answer 1

It would be helpful if you post a couple of screenshots of the planer with issues. It depends on pop type and their citizen rights. Examples why you don't have specialists:

• Simple robots can't be specialists
• Droids can't be researchers and rulers
• Most slaves can't be specialists (you need Indentured servants slavery type to counter that)
• Some traits like Proles prevents stupid species from complex jobs
• Are you sure you have enabled those work places and reset priorities?

Most pops can perform any type of job, there is not special specialist pops type. Make sure you actually have specialist work slots first, after that any regular worker with soon promote to specialist

Regarding waiting for next building slot, that sounds strange. Even the tiniest planets can support 50-60 pops. Are you sure you've cleared tile blockers and built enough generator/mineral/agriculture districts? Try replacing building with low worker count (refineries, monuments, clinics) with buildings with high worker count - commercial hubs, high-tier factories, labs and forges.

Answer 2

I don't believe there is a way to make pops that are of a specific worker type (at least not without mods), otherwise planet management would be far too unbalanced for the current design of the game. If such micromanagement were possible, one could just assign specific species to specific job roles (e.g. a species with a farming boost could be assigned to be farmers only), or turn off population growth for a specific species because you don't have any jobs available of the type they fit.

Planet populations and their growth handled by the game system in a somewhat randomized manner (and is actually one of the main reasons for slow play before lots of optimizations were made in the 2.6 Federations update).

There are some things you can do to manage unemployment and populations, though, depending on your civic choices:

• turn off population growth entirely on a planet
• migrate pops off-world to a planet that needs pops of that worker type
• cleanse certain populations that are not useful
• encourage growth or set food consumption policies to manage how quickly your entire empire's population will reproduce.