Mod Suggestion: Clone Army

[antibodee]

Clone Army Mod:

Tier One Research:

Any Animal of one gender brought to to a sample machine, unlocks the ability to clone that animal at any time.  Ie, Female Muffalo.
Animal clone vats can generate a full animal every day. 

Tier Two Research: 

Tree 1:  Clone army:  Human clone troopers can be created in vats.  They are humans with level 20 shooting and melee, but no other abilities permitted, including hauling/cleaning.  These troopers are created for the singular purpose of combat. Created with new resources:  Biomatter and Stem Cells.

Tree 2:  Replicants:  Biomechanical clones with superior manipulation, sight, movement speed, but can only do one task of creator's choice.

Tier 3:

Tree 1:  Pawn Cloner:  Clone one pawn as a complete adult with the same traits and passions, but not the same skill levels.  Clone starts off with much lower skill level.

Tree 2:  Mind cloner:  A machine that copies the skill levels and traits of one pawn into another pawn.  The pawn who is about to have his mind erased may resist and have to be subdued and anesthetized for the procedure, much like resisting arrest.

[Canute]

Android Race, you can print your own pawns and they explode on dead.
MAI, similar to Androids.

[Morrigi]

A biological option would be pretty cool. The bottleneck would be time instead of resources.

[BasileusMaximos]

I'd suggest making the clones more customizable based on what you want.

The basic human cloning technology should only be able to make 'blanks' with no skills or passions. Blanks are made in special baths (which are basically beds people don't sleep on) that have a bill system that allows a pawn with the medicine job to make a 'blank' that is either male or female and entirely hairless (what you would put into the bath to make a blank I don't know.) They are technically a 'pawn' but are unconscious until preforming an operation on them to make them so.

After researching how to make blanks you can also research 'stimulants' which can be administered like drugs to clones that haven't been 'activated' yet. More advanced research means more advanced stimulants which means more skilled clones.

The more stimulants you add, the more unstable the clone. A blank is basically emotionless and does not break. A clone which is skilled at everything is extremely neurotic. Research can mitigate these factors somewhat. It is very dangerous for regular pawns to take these stimulants. I think how it would work is the more the sum total of all your skills is, the more drastic an effect stimulants have on the psyche of pawns. So a blank with a sum total of 0 skills is almost unaffected by a stimulant that adds +2 to shooting whereas a colonist with a sum of 50 would start having breakdowns all over the place. 

I'm not sure how you'd handle traits. My guess is that blanks start with no traits but have an increasing chance to develop one as they receive more and more stimulants.

Late-game research should be, as you said, being able to clone existing pawns 1:1 with all their skills and passions.

Also consider adding the ability to grow limbs and organs as the precursor tech to cloning.

[Morrigi]

There could be another approach, where the stability and functionality of the clone is based on time and resources. The most rudimentary cloning setup could pump out quite a few relatively unskilled "flash clones" in a short period of time, with a high rate of deformities, emotional instability, and other mutations. Those would be useful for unskilled labor or as a last-ditch attempt to hold the line in the face of impending raids. Increasingly complex medication and longer cloning times would result in higher-tier clones, culminating in nanomachines and gene therapy to create superhumans for the end-game, but creating such a clone would involve a cocktail of high-tech drugs and nanobots, and the better part of an in-game year, while flash clones would only take a week or two.