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I played a little with 2.5.0 and noted down several options to improve the program, from my hypocritical point of view, of course. Here I bring in only two options concerning organisation of specialists (citizens).

1. Recalculation of worker distribution, including specialist reduction where possible, does not occur sufficiently or intuitively; it fails e.g. after happiness modifying buildings are complete in production, a dancer is not given away for a worker. There may be also other occasions where this doesn't happen, but should (cannot detail for now). Failing to do so might prominently disturb the role of AI players, e.g., and force human players to permanently observe cities' happiness table.

2. If you activate a specialist of any brand, they are taken from the set of contended citizens. This is not good in my eyes; instead they should be subtracted from the set of uncontent citizens. Rationale: There are promises made in the game rules that contradict the current practice. a) it is said that a certain amount of workers are content for a given amount of cities of a nation. This should be reliable, but isn't. b) It is said that the world of specialists is separate from the world of workers; given that, any newly added specialist may not disturb the set of contended workers; instead the specialist should be added to the unmodified set/ratio of contended and uncontent workers. Example: if there are 3 contended and 4 uncontent citizens, an added specialist (for a new citizen) should not change this setting but be added on top of it. So it would render correctly: 3 contended, 4 uncontended and 1 specialist. If the specialis is given up for a worker, the setting should be 3-5. That's my best understanding of that rule.

Hello,

FreeWilly wrote:Recalculation of worker distribution, including specialist reduction where possible, does not occur sufficiently or intuitively (…)

That's what City Governors are for. Just select one, enable it, and your city is managed automatically. But beware, the "Prefer Food" manager will let your cities die if there are riots at size one.

Louis

I wonder what the calculated worker distribution does if you have switched off governors (which is the default case). Definitely there is something going on because worker distributions seems recalculated from time to time and the choices, though not perfect, appear to be quite meaningful. I have never played with gvn. because I never saw them making a difference. So I don't see yet where the practice of a governor begins and where the anonymous aid ends. But be this as it may, as long as anonymous aid exists, I still tend to suggest the above corrections to it.

Supplement to initial post:
Point 2) Investigation showed that the criticised behaviour only shows in cases where the set of the Happy (green colour) citizens changes (I subsume the happy under the contended). In cases where the green set does not change, the behaviour is as I recommended.