Population Control

[Shadeseraph]

So. I finally gathered the patience to actually reach late game - mohole, specialized domes, scrubbers everywhere, reliable power sources and even space elevator for outsourcing. So I'm finally facing the dreaded "population creep" where the martians with any kind of commodities over the bare minimum seem to like to breed like bunnies (no, seriously, I went from 280 pops to circa 490 in about 4 suns).

So, while there is always the obvious option of just not caring about homeless and jobless people, I'm trying to come with solutions for this. Given that there is no "population controls" option, I've been thinking about how to do this.

Some rough ideas I've had in mind are:
-Split population by gender in all the domes (so - male only domes and female only domes) except the one that is dedicated for "breeding".
-Make their life just barely bearable to avoid them wanting children (so, no techs/upgrades that improve QoL, and only grocer, diner and infirmary) in all the domes except the one designed for breeding.

They still make me feel like an evil dictator in a distopia, but hey, if you cannot promote birth control... you've got to go there.
Any other ways to control population growth without bloodshed? Other tactic was to make any excess of people go into a dome designed to make them earthsick, but that doesn't work with martianborns and may even be detrimental if they start to go ballistic...

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

Yeah, I tried the gender-split domes once. Failed because it 1) it now costs 2x to build each type of dome, 2) early on it's difficult to get the specialists you need in the gender you need, 3) seems unpractical in reality.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

same it just, its not just that managing the rising tide of mankind is itself a sorce of logistical issues. Its that with the baseline birthrate so high, so many techs/breakthroughs become pointless. No workers in servace building? Why bother when unempoymentquickly dominates. Less workers? Longer lived workers? same issues.

 

[Shadeseraph]

same it just, its not just that managing the rising tide of mankind is itself a sorce of logistical issues. Its that with the baseline birthrate so high, so many techs/breakthroughs become pointless. No workers in servace building? Why bother when unempoymentquickly dominates. Less workers? Longer lived workers? same issues.

Well, not quite. It still means you can cram more stuff in less space. Factory Automation for example means that in a factory-heavy medium dome you can probably replace one apartment building for one factory and still have all of them running at full efficiency, which in turn reduces maintenance costs (you need less apartment buildings as well as less domes) - note that people do stop breeding at around 20% homelessness over the dome's cap, so you cannot just cram one dome full of rugged martianborns without any actual living space - you still need a certain ratio of living space to productive buildings. No workers in service buildings, for example, means that you don't need to provide living space to staff those and can dedicate it to more productive buildings (admittedly service buildings generally take few people, about 10-12 per dome, but still - that's one polymer factory more).

 

[MacroNova]

I think currently the best way to deal with this is to not care so much about your homeless population. It's lame, but there it is. Homeless people pretty significantly suppress the desire of your colonists to have kids. If you're like most people around here, you'll kick seniors out of their homes and make sure the productive members of your society have a roof over their heads.

 

[Xeorm]

I wouldn't worry about the homeless problem. If you have homeless, it'll drastically decrease the number of people that are born. If you can keep up with the homeless by building more domes and such, then they'll be happy. I don't think the game was really designed to be played long term with a single playthrough.

 

[spannbeton]

Guys, just use mods. There is at least 5 Mods I know of that implement some forms of birth control

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Guys, just use mods. There is at least 5 Mods I know of that implement some forms of birth control

Yeah in pen and paper gaming we call this the rule 0 fallacy, that because a game gives us the tools to fix a flaw that means the flaw dosen't count.

It may be easy to mod a fix, but there should be no need to do so, and doing so may interact with other things in ways that are hard to anticipate so it really needs an official solution that fits into the metagame better. For example, the Church of the New Arc has a goal of 100 martian born by sol 100, if there is an offical solution to the birthrate issues they will probibly alter that, none of the mods will have which can create a trap of sorts.

 

[Shadeseraph]

In any case, I don't really see it as an "undesired" feature. It is one challenge more than you have to handle, and I don't think it is really warranted to use mods to "fix" it as I don't consider it needs "fixing" - I just want to see which strategies people use to contain population growth, because I think it's an interesting topic.

 

[Holce]

I wouldn't worry about the homeless problem.

All the preferences for dome population and work specialization stop working when a dome becomes overpopulated. I have scientists working in a factory in a dome and engineers working in a reseach center in another dome. The problem is the scientists was formed in a third dome and couldn't reach the research domes because of overpopulation. When I added the domes with factory the scientist go to the new dome...

The fun part is that the system does not work well if you have too many room for people. Build to many houses with no jobs and the domes with fill in no time by people kitting their jobs for a domes without jobs...(The worst is that I had cut the power thinking the people would not move in) This issue may create cycle. Youth going from a dome with jobs and houses to a dome prefering youth but with only houses. But then, because they are no jobs, they return to the first dome. And they move again and again....

We realy need birth control and people not moving for domes with worst living condition.
domes and people should have a check value:
having a job=> +1;
having a house=> +2;
domes with free houses => +2;
domes with free jobs => +1;
People should only move for domes with better or equal value. They can move even when overpopulation. Scientist formed in a dome with no job and no house could move in a domes with no job and no house that prefer scientist. So when a scientist become to old to work, he could take his job instead of working in a factory.

After that we need an exchange system. In my situation, the engineers in the reserach center should have exchanged their home and work with the scientists in the factory.

 

[Wenla]

If you're like most people around here, you'll kick seniors out of their homes and make sure the productive members of your society have a roof over their heads.

And what you will do if you have studied "Forever Young"?

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

In one game, I was going along happily building and expanding along the map. I had built a basic "school" dome for kids and uneducated colonists to get educated and set the filters for all the other domes to reject children and anyone uneducated with the idea that those colonists would migrate to the "school" dome and become engineers, botanists, scientists, etc. Then one Sol I started getting the "starving colonists" warning even though I had well over 1000 units of food available. When I took a look at the dome that was "starving", I discovered over 300 colonists in that dome, nearly all homeless and jobless! In a panic, I quickly built TWO mega domes and outfitted them with nurseries, schools, universities, and apartments. After a few sols most of those homeless and uneducated migrated to the two mega domes, but that ended up just causing a population explosion. So yeah, I think we still need some better population controls in the game.

 

[spannbeton]

Yeah in pen and paper gaming we call this the rule 0 fallacy, that because a game gives us the tools to fix a flaw that means the flaw dosen't count.

It may be easy to mod a fix, but there should be no need to do so, and doing so may interact with other things in ways that are hard to anticipate so it really needs an official solution that fits into the metagame better. For example, the Church of the New Arc has a goal of 100 martian born by sol 100, if there is an offical solution to the birthrate issues they will probibly alter that, none of the mods will have which can create a trap of sorts.

Ehm, yeah. I generally dont buy games without mod support for exactly that reason.

 

[Marak55]

There are multiple issues with the AI for the domes; I will list a few here that are critical. As a result of these issues I never play a game anymore with human or clones, if I don’t get the Biorobots I start again, I just take the first 6 colonists (same sex so no children are born) and make the Biorobots and go from there. This is a shame as there would be such diversity available if it was tweaked correctly, I will explain. Their needs to be a population cap per dome, so only if there is room for more do they breed. I have had domes with 100’s of homeless and jobless colonists that just would not happen in reality and immediately spoils the game (time to switch off life support for a while). It could be added to the filters “dome cap” and you set the rules on it. Because as soon as you make it remotely comfortable they breed like rabbits in spring, to the point of ridiculousness. The same with the clones. Clones should not to be able to breed at all, that would help some, because as soon as you have made a few of them you now need to destroy the factory as it just keeps pumping them out and don’t die fast enough, again it needs some kind of filter to cap this and keep it in step with the domes ability to support both in jobs and housing space, other wise the clone factory is redundant as well. Also what I have found when playing only the Biorobots is that when you balance a dome to perfection and fill all the jobs and houses and move onto build a new dome the entire population of the perfect dome migrates over while your building they new dome leaving the old dome all messed up again! This is highly irritating and time wasting. I found a “kind of” fix for it last night after having this issue with 8 domes, if I set the quarantine on the dome that seems to stop this massive migration from happening, but we should not need to do this. As for the job allocation, well that is just not even close to right yet, I am sure your aware of this as I have seen many reports in the chat rooms. There is a “mod” out trying to deal with this, but I have not installed any mod’s on my game and will not do so for some time as it is so new and I do not trust the moder’s ability to get it right just yet, I want the vanilla version to be right first so I know which is causing the issues. So maybe in about 6 months time I may look to adding a mod? However, these AI issues should not be all that hard to fix now your aware of them.

What would help the job and homeless allocation is if there was an option to select full automatic, as this is painful when you have large populations and also when you click on the colonists symbol it jumps you all over the map to their location and wastes so much time getting back again, you need to be in one place you don’t need to jump to every single colonist as your moving them, you need to remain at the location your at and not jumping all over map. So for small populations this is almost ok, but for large ones it is a nightmare and real game spoiler. If you wanted to keep it as an option, which would be great, you need a separate page to come up like when you select a research item. You could then work on ALL the jobless and homeless at one time. For example you could have a check box system assigning the domes and jobs for each colonist or a drag and drop system where you just drag them to the appropriate job in the appropriate dome. This would actually make it interesting and easy. But seriously the way it is now just does not work and spoils the game big time! Which is why I only play with Biorobots now. This unfortunately eliminated the need for schools, nurseries and playgrounds, which is a pity as it takes from the game somewhat, but presently it is unplayable any other way. The other downside of playing just Biorobots is you can wait several 100 days before it appears (if at all) and this just wastes time, plus this usually eliminates the need for any kind of science labs or research as most if not all the research is done by this time so why do you need it?

 

[MacroNova]

And what you will do if you have studied "Forever Young"?

Ummm....not kick them out? If you have Forever Young then Seniors are indistinguishable from other colonists for all intents and purposes, so there's no need to micromanage them.

 

[MacroNova]

In any case, I don't really see it as an "undesired" feature. It is one challenge more than you have to handle, and I don't think it is really warranted to use mods to "fix" it as I don't consider it needs "fixing" - I just want to see which strategies people use to contain population growth, because I think it's an interesting topic.

I definitely disagree with this. Either you accept that your colony will continue to grow in an unsustainable way, or you have to rely on less-than-desirable methods for controlling population. You can segregate men and women, you can just allow yourself to have a large homeless population, or you can make all of your domes uncomfortable. Those are terrible solutions for gamers who want to take care of their colonists' needs.

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

You can segregate men and women, you can just allow yourself to have a large homeless population, or you can make all of your domes uncomfortable. Those are terrible solutions for gamers who want to take care of their colonists' needs.

You can also quarantine a dome and cut all life support, but as you said, that's not a solution good moral commanders would choose.

I'd also like to point out that once you get 1000's of colonists, micro-managing them is utterly hopeless. Even with a better UI, I'm not about to click through 1000's of colonists just to reassign each of them to domes and jobs. Now, what I would like is a way to quickly mass-select a group (based on whatever filters, including homelessness and unemployment) and be able to move them all in one click to a new dome. I'm tired of constructing a new dome, setting up the filters, then waiting for the clueless colonists to slowly migrate over.

Oh, and one other idea: When I select the specialization on a university, I'd also like to designate a "graduation dome". That way I can educate, say, scientists and once they graduate they immediately move to the "science and research" dome(s) I've already built. THAT would be immensely helpful.

 

[spannbeton]

Oh, and one other idea: When I select the specialization on a university, I'd also like to designate a "graduation dome". That way I can educate, say, scientists and once they graduate they immediately move to the "science and research" dome(s) I've already built. THAT would be immensely helpful.

You can already fo that. Simply disallow specialists in your education dome and prefer young people.

 

[SoftwareSamurai]

You can already do that. Simply disallow specialists in your education dome and prefer young people.

I did! But it didn't seem to work. In fact that's why I was surprised to find some 300 colonists in my school dome, many of whom were specialists (jobless), while at the same time I had several domes under-populated for the specialists (botanists for the farm domes, engineers for the manufacturing/power domes, geologists for the metals dome, etc.)

 

[spannbeton]

Yes because you dont have enough housing. people need free living space to migrate.