The problem is not too much construction, it's too few people/too many jobs.

A lot of people are complaining about the massive population crisis they get lategame and the Qinmigration Meta, which are obviously ahistorical in the Old World.

Imo tho, making construction harder wouldn't solve that. I mostly know about Russian history - and also just finished a Russia run - so I'll refer to that, but the kind of orders-of-magnitude growth you get within decades is pretty accurate; Russia really did grow that much in a few decades in the late 1800s.

The main problem is, by the Russian Empire census (1897; yes they only had one census because censuses are scary things used for stuff like "elections" and "democracy"; the amount of information the player gets is unrealistic but it makes the game more fun imo) the overwhelming majority of the population was STILL technically-not-serf peasants.

Again, you had economic growth comparable to what a decent player can achieve (if anything the game undersells it; I feel like if I didn't pass massive reforms and stuck to playing "classic russia" I would be underperforming it by far) WITHOUT burning through hundreds of millions of workers.

Notably, natural population growth was around 1.5% - that's only slightly lower than what I have with max investment in public healthcare.

I feel like buffing natural pop growth and reducing the amount of people required to run non-subsistence buildings would be a more effective way of making unemployment - rather than overemployment - the bigger problem.