Resource issues when loading saves?

[Drehtür]

Usually I finish games in one run through, especially in multiplayer. Is there some I know that calculations are pushed to the end of the month, that's normal. Today though, I started a game and played as usual and after coming back from a break noticed something really wonky with resources. Basically everything is ♥♥♥♥ed, I mean literally every value that I was playing off of was completely wrong, before taking a break I was selling 40-50 food excess (playing as biological pops for fun but my empire is also huge, just over 700 sprawl). Now I'm negative about 350 food. I was selling well over 200 alloys. Now I'm barely earning 70. My strategy actual revolves around earning consumer goods through trade, so I never produce very much, this value wasn't that bad compared to the others though sitting at about 318 consumed and producing 100 or so, considering I was positive before this is still also messed up. My energy credits don't even seem to be positive anymore and, interestingly, my trades from before the load made this even worse. Minerals are by far the most affected stat, previously sitting at over 1k maybe even 2k but this number was huge and I'm working off of memory, it was literally a 30-40 minute break I remember it quote clearly. I'll obviously just delete the saves and start again but this is really, really, weird and I can see it ruining things like multiplayer. Does anyone know what this is caused by? Some sort of in-game desync. My computer is kinda beefy so I would be surprised if that were the issue--there could have been something affecting my computer though.

PS: Bit of a side note here, I have 800 pops, 8 sectors and this is a huge galaxy with over 30 AI with fallen and marauders and caravans and all the other fun stuff at normal values. Beefy computer or not, I know that half of the issue is simply how big this game is despite it only being 2318. I'm still curious though if this is common even in smaller games. The game actually hasn't slowed down that much, it's noticeably slower obviously, but not unplayable. On top of that, I swear it was moving much faster PRIOR to loading the save. Is it just still calculating things because it's been a while if it is, pretty sure that isn't the case. Maybe loading all of that at once caused issues too somehow. Realistically, I don't think anyone can give me answers so if you've experienced this at least let me know about that.

[Astasia]

Did you wait until the end of the month? You said you know that's when calculations happen, but you didn't mention if you actually waited.

Otherwise the only thing I can think of that could have happened was a bunch of pops had their jobs changed, reloading the game forces a recalc on job priorities. There's no other way for resources to change that dramatically, it's not like they appear out of nowhere, they come from districts/buildings and jobs, and there is no reported bug that exists that causes buildings or districts to just disappear on reload.

[Drehtür]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Did you wait until the end of the month? You said you know that's when calculations happen, but you didn't mention if you actually waited.

Yes, I was talking about how I had waited quite a long time but I should've clarified. I waited around 1-2 years (I kept playing the save basically, despite what happened) and nothing went back to its old values.

Originally posted by Astasia:

Otherwise the only thing I can think of that could have happened was a bunch of pops had their jobs changed, reloading the game forces a recalc on job priorities. There's no other way for resources to change that dramatically, it's not like they appear out of nowhere, they come from districts/buildings and jobs, and there is no reported bug that exists that causes buildings or districts to just disappear on reload.

The pop re-calculation sounds rather plausible. I'm using a ton of different pops because of how many empires there were in the game. That still confuses me though as if it reloads job priorities shouldn't it put pops on the jobs they're good at? If anything, shouldn't my resources have gone up? Still really strange but that could very well be what happened. Considering none of my population were slaves, I don't think it has anything to do with that but as another consideration, my empire did take slaves in the start of the game and it may be possible that when I gave them residence, it didn't update that residence for the species that were already slaves, so when I reloaded the save there may have been pops that swapped into no longer being slaves--this was something I was considering while playing since, although I never had many slaves myself before the swap, I had conquered primarily authoritarian nations who were definitely selling slaves on the market prior to me owning the planets. It may be possible that there were a lot of planets that had slave pops that were not updated with my empire's rights. Still, a bit of a stretch considering I have no screenshots or anything of what the salves were like prior. Also, my empire wasn't set up for slave production so it's not like a .1 bonus on even 100 pops was going to be a massive dent, again, if anything, I would have expected the new happiness levels to increase my resources.

Great suggestion though, hadn't thought about job priority. In fact, if I recall, slaves tend to be forced into certain jobs so it could be both.


PS: Disregard everything about slaves as, after playing around with it a bit, I don't think that's a thing. I swear it was, but I must've been mistaken as I can't seem to recreate it. I can only sort of recreate it but not in the way I was thinking so disregard that as all of my pops DEFINITELY updated to no longer be slaves. The resources weren't being affected by that, after playing with it slavery could technically solve some resource issues but considering there weren't issues to begin with, that can't be what caused it.

[Astasia]

Sometimes the job system also does stuff like take a specialist out of a job and put another pop in because they are better, but now you have an unemployed specialist waiting to demote.

[Drehtür]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Sometimes the job system also does stuff like take a specialist out of a job and put another pop in because they are better, but now you have an unemployed specialist waiting to demote.

This was actually an issue during the game as I took in more pops they kept yoinking jobs but it never caused massive resource shortages. On the new save it also wasn't an issue, especially considering if it was I resolved it in the two years I kept playing. This I knew contributed a little bit. I think I'm going to mark your first suggestion as the answer because I really can't see it being anything else, I've been messing with this save a lot and really can't see any other plausible cause. If it is a bug caused on loading I have no way of knowing, I'd rather say it was calculation because I can at least change my empire a bit and micromanage my pops in a way that avoids it in the future.