Colonist Relationships and Colony Population Expansion

Started by Traveler, October 13, 2013, 01:25:19 AM

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starlight

Quote from: Traveler on October 13, 2013, 01:25:19 AM
Hi there,

I’m new to the forum and game, and get very enthusiastic about base building/micromanaging simulations. I’ve just only heard about this game from Quill18 on youtube. From the small gameplay footage I was able to get a hold of; I have to say I’m pretty impressed with what I’ve seen.

What I’m wondering about though is if colonists will be able to spawn more colonists if paired up. I’m not saying The Sims type of “get married, have kids, white picket fence etc”. I see that  Hypolite had already suggested something about relationships. I’d like to concentrate on after good relations between opposite sexes have been made.

What I’m thinking is that:

1.   If two colonists are of opposite sex and have compatible personality types, they will eventually pair up and create a new colonist. (nothing explicit obviously, just that they maybe go into the same living quarters or whatnot)

2.   Once successful ‘copulation’ has occurred the female will have a status on their profile saying she is impregnated.

3.   Over time the female will suffer penalties (akin to a debuff, since that’s kinda what pregnancy does lol). Penalties will become increasingly worse over time until ‘birth’ (again nothing explicit, just maybe the baby colonist will spawn in the same room as the female). Gestation* period could be realistic (months) so that overpopulation does not become a problem. The number of times females and males would copulate are based on personality types and if the pair are on good terms. The success of impregnation could be based on colonist traits?

4.   Child colonists would again have a realistic growth period. Maybe a three stage cycle of infant (needs to be taken care of by parent), child-teen(learns skills), and Adult (fully functioning colonist.

This could also bring about a teaching system, where colonists would gather to teach child-teen colonists. Or where child-teen colonists follow Adults around (in a kind of mentor system [assign child-teen to Adult; child-teen gains skills based on mentor]).

The teaching/mentoring idea could be a standalone mechanic too. That way you could train useless colonists that you capture or recruit some useful skills. But I just wanted to get my main suggestion about population expansion on the table.

Thank for reading and keep up the good work! Game looks great!

1. I think there are time-scale issues with this.
2. Apart from that, it will add "realism" to the game, but I am not sure will make it more enjoyable to play.


miah999

Tynan has said no children, due to the limited time scale of the game, so far the average game lasts only a fey months. My personally longest game was around 20.

But who knows he may change his mind some day.

Ford_Prefect

Hopefully the modding system will be robust enough someone can mod this in the game.
To do it properly, we would need to be able to mod entities and the ai for them.

Probably could still implement it ( in a less elegant way) if we could have a timed effects for a specific characters and change their image.  A women could have the pregnant effect applied to her and over time have negative buffs be applied to her (more sleep, food requirements) and have at the appropriate time have change her sprite.  Then when the child is born, just have the image of her carrying it.  Then when the child would be old enough to go around independently, create a separate person and remove all negative buffs from the female.  The new person would have debuffs that would slowly decrease as he/she aged allowing them to do more and more work depending on her/his stats.