Birth Control or Overpopulation

[Ancilliu]

Hey Folks,

I am currently trying to find a "smooth" way to play the "endgame" of Surviving Mars. I managed to swith everything to regenerative resources and have my space elevator as fallback.. Science and rare Metals pay the rent, so "What is a googol?".

The goal is, not to have direct birth controls (implicit when the dome is overpopulated).

So all that is left is to provide life support and food. Moisture Vaps take care of the water supply, dome farms do the food production. Everything could be fine, but since it is and comfort ist high for everyone my sims seem to enjoy "producing children" more than any other dome service.

So my domes get overpopulated. This would be fine if producing children would stop then... but it does not. And producing children goes down as soon as the dome is overpopulated, but not if there is no room for children anymore. That way Mega domes with 300 inhabitants get overpopulated by more than 50 homeless children. Multiplied by around 20 mega domes at the moment the max number goes up to 1000 homeless. I managed to get a raw mats production for 1.5 Megadomes a sol but logistics (all low) do not work fast enough to keep that up, so I need to parallelize dome constructions. That leads to massive burtst in food consumption. Farms need nearly 10 sols to get to 100% production power, since I grow Quinoa, Cover-Crops, Apples (now 100%), Quinoa, Corn, Apples, .... this leads to massive micromanagement in food supply strategies. Every dome has its own food depot, regulating the demand, but even low drone loads rely heavily on shuttle supprt, which is low too but, but not delivering in front for building projects, so i need to build more depots for building projects, that need a fitting ammount of desired resources. Managing the demand of the building projects and the food-chain.

Thus there is no other way than do get back to birth control, micromanaging a gloabal number of children and senoiors, influenced by cloning chances (the breakthrough phenix projoct), sexy traits and so on. This leads me to play a game of repeating looking at the same numbers and click-rows-of-doom every sol.

Which makes the endgame totally "not funny".

Am I doing it wrong or is it just not possible to manage a growing endgame colony?

 

[Zaskow]

Did you try to set 'Don't allow births' on some domes?

 

[Ancilliu]

Sorry to respond so late... as i wrote, yes I did.

Now with the new update I did another playthrough and in fact nothing changed, besides open farms solve the food production problems.
Overpop still is a problem... the only solution in my actual playthrough is to replace humanity with biorobots... which still is not satisfying...

Even though, workforce is no problem in my current playthrough, since seniors can work.

Is there still no solution? Maybe a mod, if the devs dont care about endgame?

 

[ChadPeterson]

Ancilliu, I have been using the mod from SkiRich called Incubator.

I found this allows me to very accurately control the number of children by managing the number of nurseries in incubator domes allowing a steady growth curve over 80 sols toward a colony sized about 120 population for every nursery I have. I think this has helped me immensely to ensure I have housing, services and jobs constructed as the population grows at a rate of my choosing.

 

[th3freakie]

I hope at some point we do get some more factors influencing demographics besides comfort and the duality of births yes/no.
I'm glad we don't get too much direct control over it, since population development is a survival element, but as things stand right now that element seems to manifest just in annoying micromanagement, not in interesting trade-offs you have to consider.

 

[Promethian]

As long as you maintain the exact same amount of domes with births allowed. By this I mean, do not allow births in new domes made. You will eventually plateau in population. Then you can make all the domes and establish the needed services for all your excess population you need. From there allow one new dome for births and start expanding again.

 

[Xeorm]

Can always just not fulfill comfort as much. Lower comfort means less births. And more productive population. It's a win/win situation.

 

[Ancilliu]

Again this results in try and error and massive micro managing. At the moment I got 30ish domes with 6k population. Around 100 homeless and unemployed. I am building more domes without pause and forbid birth in any new one and randomly adding older ones to the anti-child campaign. Still there is no way to really tell the game to not overpopulate anything.
Disallowing too many domes to give birth could quickly result in large senior forces destroying the balance of the economic system. (In this playthrough I got lucky and had seniors work with a breakthrough)
Also food management gets worse as predictions are unprecise. Lost 15k food over the last 20 sols. Open farms don't seem to work efficiently anymore (before 100% terraforming and soil quali). They quote to produce 1000-3000 per farm (identic parameters). Having 20ish of them should give 40k in a non determined time. Got 500-5000 a sol what could be explained by normal farms and ranches. But where is the open farm yield?
Also moisture vaps only produce 2.5 water. I am supporting 600 units of water. Space is getting rare.
Why is there no water project? I would love to see the pure rain getting used. The farms don't care and water on. My Sims build rockets and seed clouds , but are too idiotic too place a cup on the balcony to collect water.
Conclusion, endgame still sucks. At least with vanilla.

 

[Xeorm]

It's also way beyond endgame. They've got simpler parameters where the goal is to do some achievement in 100 sols. Going way beyond that is...unknown territory. It's not really built for that many people I think.

 

[Ancilliu]

Well I think besides the open farm problem (which is maybe due to my misunderstanding how they work) I will give some mods a chance. for example there is one, that only allows children to be born, as long as there are free nusery slots available... maybe I can accomplish something like the ruleset above to limit birth as soon as domes get overcrowded. Or better even before.. Everything else should be moddable.