9.4.2 HR not working properly, ignores "force role"

[Phei]

I apologize if this has been brought up...

My setup is 3 teams of each for time slots 0 to 8, 8 to 16, 16 to 24. so I have Des, Des 2 and Des 3 for my first design team. DesX, DesX 2 and DesX 3 for my second design team and so on. I usually get to 5+ development teams, huge support team and marketing... It can get rather hectic with 30+ teams.

For a long time now I only hire leaders, train them and set HR for them to autofill teams. It has worked great until I picked up 9.4.2, my first alpha 9. So, I enable HR on a team, set budget to 500,000, check force role and type in number(s) for how many progs or deses etc I want.. I set preffered age to 20, max Education bar and set Education cooldown to -1 (this last one sends more people to education simultaneously.)

In my current game I am on easy in 2008 with billions to spare and its time to move on to medium difficulty. However HR is messing up. My teams are not keeping to "force role check". For example my DesX team is set to have 8 designers, but instead it currently has 4 designers and 4 programmers. Screenshot here

https://ibb.co/izUAGF

It seems like HR is training designers to be programmers. Actually, it seems like HR is training everyone in every team regardless of them being forced role and changes their role erratically. Endlessly training and changing roles ignoring HR setting. After a while my whole design team does not have a single designer, or a programming team no longer has a single programmer...

I hope I explained the problem... Anyone seen anything similar?

[cfranks007]

I don't use HR :).

I suppose some day i should just to see how bad it is and if there is a work around.

[Phei]

Long ago I played without HR and it was a nightmare to keep multiple teams in check... I would certainly never attempt 500+ employees without HR.

[ECInnos]

i held off from reporting this myself in 9.3.2, but i have the same issue. maybe someone can shed some light but for fun i cheated to make everyone 100% skilled, then noticed that even with rave reviews for programming, my art was mediocre. noticed that the art teams i setup were force role-ing to programmer, so i'd change role back to artist, and it would change back to programmer before my eyes. now i used this cheat later on in game, and im thinking i had this issue from the begining, as even with artists only knowing 100% skills in art but nothing in dev or programming, and i was getting releases that were only good at best, and i wouldve expected atleast great quality.

i also was using project management so i dont know if that did it, but im with the OP, im sure theres a role bug going on. i havent played the newest update thanks to Conan Exiles haha, but i really like this game, and that bug disenheartened me, cuz my big company felt like a giant failure =\

[Phei]

At first I thought maybe an error happened when promoting from design phase to alpha without immediately switching from design to programming team. That could maybe explain why designers turned to programmers as they wrote some lines of code... But then I started seeing marketeers from my marketing team becoming programmers or designers and I absolutely dont ever use them for anything other than marketing...

Anyway, I share your disheartening feeling after looking into my teams and constantly having to do the only thing that sort of fixes things for a time - firing unwanted people. HR then quickly autofills, works fine for a while until the cycle restarts...

[Coredumping]

Role assignment is based on skill, so maybe the HR manager ended up hiring someone who was inadvertently better in another skill. This could happen if they are very low skilled to begin with. I haven't messed with how HR works since alpha 8.

[Phei]

It doesnt happen with new employees. HR does fine when it starts hiring. It starts messing this up after 10+ years...

Here is a screenshot of my Design team "Des"

https://ibb.co/b4zGqa

So this guy Mauricio Walsh is 54, he has been with company 21 years, he was a designer for a long time and then somehow his role changed to programmer and he will remain a programmer no matter what I do. You have HR settings for "Des" team also. You can also notice that all other designers in "Des" have been with company for a year cause I fired all who became programmers a year ago. This guy Mauricio Walsh turned programmer less than a year ago, after 20 years with the company.

[Coredumping]

Originally posted by Phei:

It doesnt happen with new employees. HR does fine when it starts hiring. It starts messing this up after 10+ years...

Here is a screenshot of my Design team "Des"

https://ibb.co/b4zGqa

So this guy Mauricio Walsh is 54, he has been with company 21 years, he was a designer for a long time and then somehow his role changed to programmer and he will remain a programmer no matter what I do. You have HR settings for "Des" team also. You can also notice that all other designers in "Des" have been with company for a year cause I fired all who became programmers a year ago. This guy Mauricio Walsh turned programmer less than a year ago, after 20 years with the company.

He has the same base skill in programming, design and art, so the game just defaults to programming based on which order they are written in code. You could disable force role and set them all to designers instead.

[Phei]

Not forcing roles is a possible workaround but this is not how I remember HR working in alpha 8. With this workaround though new employees become "Any job" and this creates new problems for teams that have for example programmers and artists in them.

[ECInnos]

hhhmmm, yea im npt sure why i didnt think of just turning it off haha, but i was trying to keep force role on because a few of my teams had people near retirement, os i expected to have to replace people soon. im going to try turning off force role as i did suspect the equal base skills caused the role issues.

i know this isnt the suggestion thread, but maybe we can have a force role option for the actual role we want? aka force role is a drop down menu, i select artist as the force role, and it hires them, not just basing it off of the area you enter numbers for who to hire. i know i saw someone else ask for multiple role options too, as part of my idea behind the role cheating was i was attempting to see how quickly a jack of all trades team could make X product, and at Y quality.

[Phei]

Neh.... Tried it for a few hours and it is a mess without "force role." It could be ok for a small company but with 500+ employees it becomes a micromanagement nightmare of sorting through employee list.

1. If you leave employees at "Any job" thats just what happens. For example my OS team is set to 16 programmers and 2 artists. With unforced roles team has 18 "any job" employees. After enough development time on the OS outsourced review shows 95%+ in programming but barely 60% in artistry. Not good.

2. Manually selecting roles makes development fine. However, it is a pain to manually select roles when you have 24+ teams and 500+ employees. For example, clicking just through 18 OS team employees to find out which 2 should be set to artists so rest can be set to programmers is a nightmare. Game becomes a slugfest chore of sorting through employee list... And you have to keep sorting and sorting as employees die, retire or quit...

3. Workaround for this workaround with unforced roles is to have clean teams with no overlapping of roles. Artists in their own team and programmers in their own team... However then the number of teams goes up and it becomes a pain at promoting a project from design to development to select proper prog and art teams. But at least this setup makes it easier to assign roles to employees.

Can we please just have it so that HR does not default to a role other than the one that is FORCED?

[ECInnos]

@Phei as you mentioned in #3, thats what i do. after reading thru this i started playing again, and it does the job. however, as i always noticed before, your going to have alot of people just sitting there doing nothing at times. i try and space devs out team by team, but it always amounts to design teams sitting dormant, and same with art teams at times, depending on the project. ( i will also mention i play with the MYMO mod ,starting in 1970 usually so i can try and become a true powerhouse of a company by the 90's haha)

i have a blueprint i made in game for a "department", which is a 37 computer setup, in 3 rooms with an extra head team lead room. i usually run 3 teams in a department, 1 design, art, and program. i have 3 software and 2 hardware (i also use the hardware mod), 2 marketting so far, and 3 support. with 2 8 man teams (core and a "sector head" team, both meant to be jack of trades for contracts and what not) thats 386 employees according to my last save.

it takes alot of time ot micro manage that, but its doable. however, if things worked as hoped im sure it would make this big team build go more smoothly. slightly off topic but one thing that kind of confuses me is the "development time" slide in project managment. im thinking it might be easier to once again use a drop down, saying "my projected goal with this project is to release X quality products". i'm sort of a perfectionist so i want to release outstanding products XP but im ok with great quality for instance. so if i could direct my teams to aim for what is thought to be a great quality product, i think its easier then saying "oh, develop for 150% time, or maybe 200% time? i dunno, lets flip a coin and go with it"

considering educating employees makes them better, that can hopefully stop over development? i will say though with my recent play with the new patch, i haven't over developed a thing, compared to before i felt like i had to sit here like a hawk, cuz the instant design hit outstanding, if i didnt promote, it started going back doing for quality. im liking everything so far otherwise in the new alpha 9 patch.

[Phei]

Overdevelopment for me has only been a problem in the design phase and only early in the game. Later when projects are bigger design takes more time so its easier to pause and promote at the right time.

I never figured out how project management worked in Alpha 8 and I didnt get around to it yet in 9. I have to check it out. However this micromanagement to workaround HR problems is just too disheartening...

Blueprints... Heh... I have a ton also. Basically every game I improve them or expand them. I use really large rooms to avoid noise problems. I have never built a single cubicle... Room for programmers has 25 desks, room for artists 15. Its funny when they are used by small teams like 5 programmers and 2 artists. So on every floor I will have two rooms for programmers, 2 for artists and 1 conference room. With alpha 9 I have now made a mega room, basically merged two 25 desk rooms. I use it for support teams... So on a support floor which is now top floor of my building(s) I have one 50 desk room for programmers, 15 desk room for artists (I dont even know if they are needed for support!?) and a conference room with 65 seats.

I abandoned keeping leaders in the room with the team they were leading a long time ago. It was just too much of a hassle to worry about assigning bonus desk items like phones, calculators, drawing pads etc... I tried making special small rooms for leaders but they being social made them suffer from isolation. So I just make one room for leaders on the ground floor with about 20 desks. If I have 30 teams that means 10 leaders are present at any one time and it works great...

Alpha 9 is a great step forward and I am sure CORE will eventually fix this current HR nightmare.

[Coredumping]

I could perhaps add a variable to employees, so they remember which role they were hired for. Currently the game does not know who was hired for what, HR just assumes they should be working with what they are most skilled at.

[Phei]

Its up to you how you are going to do it. You have created something marvelous so far!

[El Guapo]

I'm new to the game, so I might be doing it wrong. Anyways, this is what I do:
HR set on hiring people without forcing roles. I then proceed with checking each team member and manually assign a role in the employee details and uncheck the "any job" box.
People stay in their roles without any trouble.