Nova Roma Most Important Feature
Browsing through Nova Roma’s subreddit leads us to a lot of people sharing their fantastic cities, interesting seeds, but also a few players asking for help. And most of them boil down to the same answer.
“My Pottery Workshop has resources but doesn’t produce enough to keep my residents happy”. “Why am I not farming enough Marble even though I have three quarries?”. Because you aren’t paying attention to Nova Roma’s most important feature: the jobs tab.
Nova Roma’s Jobs Tab, Explained
While your commerce starts off slow in your rebuild of the Roman empire, it quickly scales to a proportion that becomes hard to keep track of. That’s why Nova Roma automatically distributes your residents through jobs.
The priority with which it does this makes sense (it usually goes builders> food> commerce> etc), but if you want to keep a big city functioning well, you need to take over the automatic system eventually.
The only two jobs over which you have no control are: Firefighters and Heads of Household. The first don’t matter as long as you have Professional Firefighters (which you will as soon as you build a Fire Vigile), and the second ones are the people that bring food to your houses, so you wouldn’t want to mess with that.
Besides these two, you have complete control over job priority. But what does that mean? Nova Roma tells you the following:
“If there are no idle workers, workers will quit low-priority jobs to fill higher-priority openings.”
Firstly, you can check your Idle workers by taking a look at these three icons on the top right of your UI. From left to right, these are: total residents, available beds, idle workers.
Idle workers will take any job that becomes available. It is actually ideal to a small percentage of your population in this state, around 10% max, because they can fill in as Clear Land Workers or Builders when you need them. If you don’t have Idle Workers, you’ll always be dragging residents away from other jobs when you build anything.
If you don’t have Idle Workers, which will be the norm for the majority of your early game, your workers will prioritize the jobs in the order you choose.
When you click the “Jobs” button to the right of the Idle Workers icon, the Job Priority List shows up, as shown in the image above. The higher a job is in your list, the higher its priority. As you can see, we have 36 Quarry Workers and 45 Bakers. If we only had 60 Residents, they wouldn’t be spread in an even split between the two. We’d still have 36 Quarry Workers, but only 24 Bakers.
But the magic of the Jobs tab is that you can actually create even splits and control the minutiae of everything that goes on in your Nova Roma city. We have 36 out of 36 Quarry Workers, but we can cap that number at 30, which would move the excess 6 to the next job on the Priority List, giving us the aforementioned even split with the Bakers.
Understanding this system will make your early games much smoother, which is why we consider this Nova Roma’s most important feature.
Nova Roma: I found the best seed for my game
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