Pregnancy as another way to boost numbers

[TheLastOneOnly]

It seems odd to me that the only way currently to increase your colonist population is to capture raiders and or buy from a slaver. Its natural that colonists would have an inclination to full fill certain "needs" and hence would produce children am I right? Opportunities for "relations" could be made available in double beds and success would be determined by how well the two colonists like each other (I know this isn't implemented but hear me out). Female colonists would be incapacitated for a certain amount of time (reductions in movement speed, need to rest more, etc) that would increase as the pregnancy went on. Damage or Injury to the female colonist can cause her to lose the baby. Eventually the female colonist would need to be placed in a medical bed and would need to be treated the same as if she was sick or recovering from injury. A warning would pop up when its time to pop and depending on doctor skill of assigned colonist to help deliver the baby, the pregnancy could be a success or failure, with a chance of neither, both, or just one surviving (this introduces risk).  Baby would age to a child after a certain number of days, and child to teenager, in which case they would be able to do regular colonist activities. Might be difficult to implement with the current aging system but I would really like to see something like this! Right now my colony feels less like a colony and more like a hodgepodge of brainwashed raiders. Thoughts?

[BetaSpectre]

Commonly suggested. But here's the issue.

How long do you normally play?
A year? Two years?
Imagine needing 18 years?

IMO births would be near impossible to sustain. Though It is something worth considering IMO the only replication will be clones. Due to the time factor mostly.

[Kegereneku]

Basically what was said by BetaSpectre,
Even considering break from reality trying to force in the whole concept would complicate everything for something many consider 'optional' and it would look absurd on RW scale/time. This was the subject of much debate a while ago, I can link you to it if you want to learn about other aspect of the problem.

[Monkfish]

Basically what was said by BetaSpectre

Nope.

Beta makes the mistake of considering a proposal implemented 1:1 with how things are IRL. Whilst some things can be replicated somewhat faithfully in a game (such as bullet ballistics), other things need mild to heavy concessions in order to maintain gameplay whilst retaining plausibility and bonus/malus for whatever that thing is. I touched on this briefly here and I'm sure I've made another post specific to this suggestion elsewhere, though I can't find it. Anyway, my point is that expecting someone to wait 18 (in-game) years for an in-game infant meatbag to not be an infant meatbag is wholly unreasonable and it's a bit asinine to use that as an argument against an idea in principle. Any idea suggested on these forums could be utter dogshit or utterly fantastic, and most of that is dependant on how it's implemented rather than the idea itself.

Now I'm done rambling, I'd suggest a somewhat compressed timescale for children in game...

Yr 0-1 - Sex happens and a sex trophy is created. The screaming meatbag sleeps most of the time and screams for food the rest. Confined to a cot/bed, it often wakes its parents up.
Yr 1-2 - Meatbag now a toddler. Occasionally dribbles. Confined to parent's room. (I'd suggest minimum furniture requirements for baby making. A cot and a changing station or something. Maybe somewhere for FUN to happen.
Yr 2-3 - Meatbag is now approaching their teens. They run around the base making use of FUN things and getting under the feet of people. They can be drafted but cannot participate in combat (think "go to your room, the adults are doing dangerous things"). Multiple children in one colony would play with each other (hide and seek could probably be coded in fairly easily)
Yr 4+ - Fully grown adult. Now a full colonist that appears on overview 'n' ting.

What the above would produce (timescales open to fine tuning) is a somewhat representative growth period for a child (as opposed to a full-grown adult insta-generating out of its mother, or the polar extreme of forcing the player to wait 18 game years for it to become usefull) that could include a variety of perks and pitfalls (as parenting so often does). This obviously creates a bit of when looked at in the context of regular colonists ageing, bit this is, after all, a story teller first and a thoroughbred simulation never, and I'd much rather children implemented as above than not at all.

Childhood. Done.

[ReapDa]

Another explanation or solution could be the use of "glitterworld" technology and researching growth hormones to speed up the aging process. Maybe there could be a device that has almost the opposite effects of cryptosleep. Either way, I think adding children is going to add a lot of sensitivity to the game. Some people don't care for morbidity, but some people might find the idea of raiders slaughtering their colonist's children brash. It probably wouldn't be a good experience, even if you enjoy losing.

[Johnny Masters]

I'm leaning more towards Monkfish's position in that it's only a matter of thinking on how something could work instead of the many ways it couldn't. As long as it brings fun or challenge (which equals fun) I don't see why not children, if it brings too much trouble then yeah, no children.

I wasn't thinking much on regular children as a sustainable colony population renovation system (not against nor pro it), but more like an event of sorts, kinda like the blonde chick in Lost or rather the many women in lost who got pregnant. I guess the players could have the courtesy of being prompted by a decision tho'.

Regarding odds, Tynan has not stand against such thing (or for), nor is the whole PR thing what he is concerned. Like other suggestions here, its just that is far below in his priority list and instantly below a somewhat confirmed relationship update.

[Kegereneku]

We could just link to that topic where we discussed it in length.

That way Monkfish wouldn't make the mistake of leaving aside everything that discussion brought like how ridiculous it feel to have the child magically grow up in less than 5-8years and the complication of acquiring meaningful background, skills and trait.

Imagine a optional feature that force the entire game to be simplified to make it viable, that cannot evolve or interact with other features without hijacking the entire gameplay, that need a continuous playtime of 5to8 in-game year to get result, supposing your colonist 'get busy' in the first years and supposing the child isn't eaten by a squirrel or a turtle,
A feature that will YET feel utterly pointless because RW cannot possibly make a child/parents relationship worth the trouble of forcing them to date and wish to have child in such a small settlement.

All that is part why I'll safely bet that Tynan will never implement the concept.

You can replace the whole concept by more social interaction and new way to get actual colonist (from cloning to diplomacy)

Edit : On the matter, I forgot to discuss that we each have different expectation.
- Do we want to boost the number of colonist ?
- Do we want actual toddler/children in the game ?
- Do we want a multi-generation game ?
- other ?
There's way different solution for each of them.

[Monkfish]

Ahh, that's the topic I was looking for!

Anyway, I quite frankly couldn't give a shit if a child growing up in 4yrs or whatever feels ridiculous to some when we consider that colonists can land on a planet having survived a catastrophic deconstruction of their space ship and immediately be able to magic up complicated structures and machines out of some scraps of metal on the ground. If we're going a pull an "aah, but x" argument card for an idea, it's only fair and reasonable to apply that card to the game as a whole and see if the argument still stands on its own merits. Something being seemingly ridiculous on its own suddenly isn't so ridiculous when compared to the context of the entire game.

Anyway, it's not like 4yrs game time is a short period that would be missed if you blinked or scratched your arse. 4yrs game time at 1x speed is 64hrs (2.66 days) in real time. That's a lot of time when it comes to gameplay and I've sunk less time into £50 AAA title games that I've completed, so 4yrs gametime really is a fairly reasonable representation of new-born to adulthood without making the player wait 18yrs (that's 288hrs or 12 days realtime). Even running at triple speed, you're still looking at almost an entire day of gametime to bring a newborn to adulthood.

EDIT: As for skills and traits, the obvious solution is to have the child's skills be the aggregate of their parents' traits and skills, with some random variance thrown in for shiggles.

[antibodee]

The scale is very largely built around age.  I thought children would be a good idea at first,  but the more I learn the game the more I see how it couldn't work without serious thought and consideration.

[Argon]

Consider this:  Longplays start at about 5+ years, this means that someone who has been running longplays since alpha 4 would have logged 25 in game years at a bare minimum.  Now imagine that Tynan figures out a way to make saves compatible across future alpha, and beta versions.  Within those 25 years a colonist could go from being the first child of the colony to having children of their own. 
All of this would depend on compatible saves of course.

-Argon

[TheLastOneOnly]

I promise I made an effort to look through the pages and see if this topic was brought up before so I'm sorry about that.

I like Monkfish's idea and I don't think it would over complicate things too much so as to compromise current game play. I really hope Tynan adds something like this because right now it feels like these common human needs/interactions are missing to an otherwise great game.

[undeadholyman]

The actual age of "coming of age" has gone up over the centuries, a relation between this and development of society.
In game have people who are under the age of say two, act more like someone who is wounded, they don't do much and need to be taken care of.
Then at age four or five they can start doing things like cleaning and hauling and could possibly add a school mechanic for training, (this exists in mods)
And as the person gets older they get to where they can do more things.
Early on in a play through a child could be born and expected to become a working member of society at age four, while later in game when the population is larger they could be expected to go through a sort of schooling process involving the skill building workbenches, however they would not have to, but this would give them skills to start with that are not randomly generated.
The person's backstory could just read "colony kid" or something, and it would have very few bonus skills.
So you could potentially have generations of people living and dying.

[b0rsuk]

Anyway, I quite frankly couldn't give a shit if a child growing up in 4yrs or whatever feels ridiculous to some when we consider that colonists can land on a planet having survived a catastrophic deconstruction of their space ship and immediately be able to magic up complicated structures and machines out of some scraps of metal on the ground.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

If you let some stupid shit into your game, people will use it to justify more stupid shit.

[akiceabear]

Commonly suggested. But here's the issue.

How long do you normally play?
A year? Two years?
Imagine needing 18 years?

IMO births would be near impossible to sustain. Though It is something worth considering IMO the only replication will be clones. Due to the time factor mostly.

This. If the goal is to increase the availability/growth of colonies, a better solution is boosting slave sales, integrating mods like Hospitality or MAI, etc.

[Toggle]

Honestly, just no. No colonists giving birth. No.