Pregnancy as another way to boost numbers

[buttflexspireling]

  You make some good points. I also like to see what I assume to be isotopic dating of colonists next to their non-isotopic age. However,
I'm not sure how you would approach such with children. Should we
have them drop in drop pods from fertility clinics in space? Would colonists think they're aliens and shoot them to bits before they would land?

[ChannelJohn]

I KNOW there have been a million discussions about this feature for a while, but I wanted to add my 2 cents:

As both a dev and a lifelong gamer, I don't see any problem with artificially accelerating a child's growth in this game. This sort of abstraction in games is no more "ridiculous" than the trope of applying bandages or a medkit to, say, devastating rocket launcher wounds that very nearly kill a character and having that character be instantly healed (as in most games) or healed completely over the course of a couple of days (as in RimWorld). Plenty of things in RimWorld are accelerated/abstracted from their RL counterparts and nobody notices or cares because that's how games work. You accept the reality of the game.

I get that the rate of a child's aging would not match the rate of adults aging in RimWorld, but I sincerely don't think anyone would notice or care, especially when weighed against the immersion and ownership that comes from allowing a colony to grow and develop in this more family-centric way. I mean, how much more ownership of -- and connection to -- your colony would you feel if your newest colonists were the children of your early colonists? IMO, the psychological reward outweighs the stretching of the game's internal logic/timetable.

The Sims is a great example of this. A infant in that game is an infant for a couple of days. A child is a child for about a week. You could argue that the rate of a child's aging in the Sims is internally consistent with the world rules they've established -- adults are adults for about a month or so before they become elderly -- and therefore the example doesn't 100% apply, but I'd argue that the Sims has a similar discrepancy to the one the naysayers here are worried about: The Sims marks time by days and weeks. You play Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. That feels like real time (in an abstracted game way), yet your characters die after only an in-game month or two of life. This doesn't make RL sense. The short lifespan is not consistent with having a day-by-day way of marking time. And yet nobody notices or cares. It's part of the game rules and everyone just accepts it immediately as such.

Similarly, if RimWorld colonists -- who age a year for each in-game year -- have a child and that child grows to maturity/workability/productivity over the course of, say, a year, players would just accept that as the way the game works. NOBODY (except maybe the ones arguing against it here, and ONLY because they've already been arguing against it) would think it was weird. Games allow for this sort of abstraction/logic-stretching. That's part of the beauty of games.

Personally, I was quite disappointed when I googled and discovered that my newly married RimWorld colonists would never have children. It flattened the experience a little and definitely dampened my investment in their relationship. Other than a couple of temporary buffs and the possibility of heartache down the road, it made love relationships in the game seem a little pointless, tbh. Or, at least, pretty shallow.

Also, think of the stuff that having children in the game adds, either organically or relatively cheaply:

• The need to protect the children during a raid. Do you build your nursery as the innermost of your innermost sanctums with extra defenses? Or do you not and just hope for the best?
• Very strong -- possibly crippling -- debuffs for losing a child. I could imagine the mother would be particularly stricken.
• The psychological ownership and immersion of growing your colony from your beloved characters instead of only filling it out with randos.
• The buffs/debuffs that come with being pregnant/having a child/bringing a child into such a harsh world.
• The managment complication of having a colonist (or colonists) out of commission for at least some part of the pregnancy (treating it as you currently treat diseases).
• Debuffs for colonists who physically can't have children.
• Debuffs for colonists who REALLY want children (trait?) but don't have/can't find a partner. This would add poignancy to a colonist who hits on other colonists but is always getting rejected instead of just making them always seem like just a lecherous annoyance.
• Buffs/debuffs for the parents based on the traits that a child develops as they grow. E.g., maybe a child is born with a combo of traits from the parents, but also receives a random trait that may be good or bad. Or maybe, slightly less cheaply, they develop the trait based on experience(s) during childhood.
• Childhood diseases! Disabilities! The possibility of a child not surviving a disease! My god, the possible drama!
• Also less cheaply -- and definitely not necessary, but cool -- would be the ability for kids to learn/develop skills rather than start with them, either through experience or adult colonists performing a "teaching" task.

And on and on. The added gameplay and gameplay depth is much more important here than the possibility of a handful of weirdly pedantic players saying, "Hey... why do kids grow to adulthood in a year while adults grow on a slower timescale?" And, tbh, I don't believe anyone would think that/notice anyway because the long history of games has conditioned players to naturally accept those kinds of discrepancies and abstractions as just part of a game's rules.

At the end of the day, I desperately want my married colonists to have a child that is, to some extent, a combo of them and/or their traits. That would be amazing. And I'd love to have to protect that child for some nicely balanced amount of time, which might require some adult colonists to sacrifice productive time elsewhere that needs it (adding complication to your management of the colony). All in all, it adds a ton of interesting stuff relatively cheaply, and I don't believe the "but the time doesn't match exactly!" argument is compelling.

All that being said, I do agree that having the children growing over the course of 18 in-game years makes no sense. Individual games don't last that long and the time-to-payoff is WAY too long to be satisfying. But abstracting that time for children makes perfect sense and would work brilliantly. IMO.

[O Negative]

I definitely see human reproduction as a thing to come. It adds so much depth to the storytelling aspect of the game, and the numbers are already in the xml for lifestages and such. I feel like Banished did the reproduction thing fairly well, but it lacked the complexity of "skills" which RimWorld has. It also had accelerated years (think 3 days/season in RimWorld; early, mid, late)

If it were me doing the human reproduction system, these would be my design questions:

• Life stage textures: How is skin tone and head shape distinguished/decided when a baby is born?
• Backstory/Character development: Perhaps a childhood "colonist" trait would do, but how is the adulthood one determined?
• Skills & Passion: Skills could certainly start at 0 across the board, but how is passion determined?
• Traits: How are these determined over time? On birth? (oh, forget this baby... she's going to grow up to be a neurotic, psychically sensitive, pyromaniac...) Based on traits of parents? Based on traits of other colonists? Chance to be randomly generated from the whole pool of traits?
• _{Aging: Already discussed quite a bit. Personally, would opt for slow growth with 14 being the capable-of-all-work age, and 16-18 being the reproductively-capable age}
• _{Cost vs Benefit: This is a game about survival. Is the ability to reproduce meant to be a complication or quick profit? I think it's a complication, which is why I opt for slower aging/maturing people}

That's my throw at this conversation. Held back for a while, but I felt like I needed to add a couple of things to the conversation. Age isn't the only factor here, guys.

[Lightzy]

Please no.
I don't want to see babies be born in two weeks and mature in 2 weeks more. It's retarded.

I am fine with babies being born in 9 months and maturing in real-game-time and you have to take care of them or suffer huge morale penalties and if you remain there for like 13 years you get a useful (possibly very useful, because he's grown up doing all that survival work and practicing with guns etc) little asshole

[jmababa]

lightzy is right is should be same as pet babies born in the realistic manner and maturing in game time you take care of them or suffer moral penalties and even might be mental breakdown for parents replaces pets parents going manhunter.

[Draegon]

Cannibal colonies would get even more disturbing with human reproduction introduced. I still support the idea if colonists having kids though.

[Mr.Styoopid]

It seems quite strange how there is no reproduction in this game, considering the whole point of colonization is to spread forth the (race). People argue that the time scale in which the child will become of age is complicated or takes way too long. I think i'd prefer a compromise between practicality and realism (perhaps speed up the time scale in which children advances to adulthood). In addition, it doesnt seem sensible if the only way in which the colony can survive in the long run is to buy or capture slaves; if this were to be the core principle in which colonies advance in numbers, then eventually there will be extinction of the race.

[Dante King]

Please no.
I don't want to see babies be born in two weeks and mature in 2 weeks more. It's retarded.

I am fine with babies being born in 9 months and maturing in real-game-time and you have to take care of them or suffer huge morale penalties and if you remain there for like 13 years you get a useful (possibly very useful, because he's grown up doing all that survival work and practicing with guns etc) little asshole

Tell me, would you ACTUALLY wait 3 seasons, and then wait MORE THAN TEN YEARS, for one colonist? I know I sure as hell wouldn't.

[Mr.Styoopid]

Please no.
I don't want to see babies be born in two weeks and mature in 2 weeks more. It's retarded.

I am fine with babies being born in 9 months and maturing in real-game-time and you have to take care of them or suffer huge morale penalties and if you remain there for like 13 years you get a useful (possibly very useful, because he's grown up doing all that survival work and practicing with guns etc) little asshole

Tell me, would you ACTUALLY wait 3 seasons, and then wait MORE THAN TEN YEARS, for one colonist? I know I sure as hell wouldn't.

The developer would have to come up with a compromise ofcourse. No, i would not wait that long for a mature colonist (that is exactly why i suggest speeding up, within the balance of realism and practicality ofcourse). But tell me, how is maturing in 4 weeks (like you said) anymore retarded than building a giant turbine in a matter of minutes? (an hour and abit ingame)

[O Negative]

Here's a compromise:

Faster aging of all individuals.

Banished did this fairly well, even if it could've been done better. Years passed rather quickly, and you ended up with some old people pretty fast, but you also had a whole new generation of young folks ready to replace them when they died. All this would require is shorter "years" or a new aging algorithm for all people (ie. people age 3 years/year).

Having youth age at a different rate than adults is a stupid idea which needs to be dropped. Comparing biological aging to the construction time of buildings (which can be lowered artificially by advanced tools and material manipulation techniques) is silly, in my opinion.

[PieTau]

I just want to see wen the baby is in the womb  "amputate part baby"  and when it is named "amputate part Mickey"

[JesterHell]

If children are added I don't want faster aging for them, I'm one of the few people whom wants to be able to play DF fortress mode at adventure mode timescale so short cuts like this don't appeal to me.

[Lightzy]

Please no.
I don't want to see babies be born in two weeks and mature in 2 weeks more. It's retarded.

I am fine with babies being born in 9 months and maturing in real-game-time and you have to take care of them or suffer huge morale penalties and if you remain there for like 13 years you get a useful (possibly very useful, because he's grown up doing all that survival work and practicing with guns etc) little asshole

Also in the first 2 years everyone in the colony get a morale penalty because they have a constantly crying self-centered (though it's not his fault) little asshole that wakes them up at nights, wets the bed and craps his pants and pees in their face when they try to change him 3-6 damn times a day, if they even have diapers, which they now have to spend their time crafting.

Also everyone gets a further morale penalty because the mom breastfeeds in public and some find it gross and some are mad at those who find it gross and all everyone is just fucking upset now over fucking nothing.

In the next couple of years everyone gets a morale penalty because there's a little asshole that keeps almost killing himself out of childish stupidity, always seeming to prefer to play around exposed power lines, stone cutting machinery and boiling water.

And the dad gets a permanent morale penalty because his son is stupider than him and that's like a father's worst nightmare

And then the mom gets a permanent morale penalty because she thinks the father is being dismissive of her and her genes, blaming her for the stupidity of their son, until finally they end up divorcing and now everyone has to deal with it, causing the whole colony more morale penalties

[Tammabanana]

Children are chaos and drama incarnate, and thus inevitable in Rimworld. But speeding up their growth for the sake of a population boost would be counterproductive to the storytelling goals.

DRAMA.

[demeggy]

The one constant this always boils down to (stating the obvious here) is *drumroll*... gameplay. More or less everyone accepts that it would be a complete pain in the butt to have to wait 15 ingame years for your children to mature, and there are a lot of pros and cons, and varying ways of it being brought in... with that in mind, people shouldn't get so worked up about accelerated growth. Whether it's a narrative driven mechanism (some sort of progenation/rapid aging machine), or just a simple fact of the gameplay, the only way children will ever materialise ingame, is when the player doesn't have to sacrifice insanely long playthroughs just to see Junior grow on.