Colonist Maximum?

[_SoMe]

I wonder how many colonists i can have with cassandra on vanilla

right now i am having 11 colonists and 3 prisoners which i am planning to recruit.

Lets say i am getting raided, no one dies and i am able to capture 1 or 2 pawns, repeating the process. How far can i go?

[Astasia]

There is no maximum, you can recruit as many as your PC and micromanagement tolerance can handle.

[_SoMe]

thanks, i wasnt sure, because i read some maximum number in older topics.

[Emelio Lizardo]

At a certain point the number of critters and items begins to slow your system. Your machine is the real limitation on what you can have.

Remember to select for colonists with good traits.

[_SoMe]

since my rig isn't high end i am not going to exhaust it.
Still gonna try to reach the maximum possible.

[pheanox]

There is a 'soft cap' for each story teller where they will stop sending you colonists and it will be harder to get new colonists, that's around 20 for Cassy and Phoebe, and around 40 for Randy. There is no limit though, I have gotten saves of people with 80+ colonists and I know I've heard people talking of having hundreds.

[ASMR gaming]

try the perry persistant storyteller it doupbles the soft cap of colonists.

[Gamefever]

Oh I was wondering about that today, got really overwhelmed having 26 colonists so I rolled a new game. Was not the issue of food, places to sleep, or keeping them in gear....Just not used to having so many of them....Was a struggle just to get and keep 8 to 10 alive for a long while.

[Astasia]

"Soft cap" is probably the wrong word to use here and I think causes some confusion. It's more like a minimum than a soft cap, the game intentionally tries to bring you up to a certain minimum population with freebies just to keep you at a "colony" level, beyond that recruitment works in a normal fashion with no increased difficulty. It's really the invert of a cap, with extra bonuses to population gain early on that eventually slows down to a normal amount which carries on to infinity.

As for Randy he uses the same population intent scaling as Casandra and Phoebe, except now he has an extra modifier called minIncChancePopulationIntentFactor which probably means he's always able to send you free colonist events at a low rate regardless of your population.

IE by the time you get to about 20 population with Casandra and Phoebe you will stop seeing slaves being sold, escaped refugees events, wanderers, or escape pod crashes on your map. Anything where you could get a colonist to join without requiring the normal recruitment methods. With Randy those things will always be able to happen, forever, just at a fairly uncommon rate. For all of them you can continue to down raiders and recruit them at a similar rate from start to finish.

[Gamefever]

Haha, well sure I did not see any easy to recruit pawns after about 10.

This game though I had about 9 jail cells and two full time doctors and two full time crafters....Was giving every single raider that survived a complete body overhaul with joywires and all sorts of crazy gear and sometimes drugs.
If one raider happened to have traits I liked well snatched them up out of the prison pool.
Recruited 3 Sanguines and 2 also had transhumanist.
So that got kind of crazy with hamonizer implants, everybody at camp was A-O-K.

I figured their consciousness would be severely impaired making jailbreaks a breeze to handle since that tax collector for the empire only comes once a year and pawn quality does not matter.

[Acuru]

Playing with smaller map, helps if your machine is not powerfull.

[_SoMe]

Originally posted by Acuru:

Playing with smaller map, helps if your machine is not powerfull.

for this first playthrough i selected mapsize 100%. i really dislike the "pangaea" look :D also i wanted to give it a try to see how far i can get without having lags.

weakest part of my rig is my gpu -> Radeon HD 5770 sapphire 1 GB back from 2009 -.-
i am still way over the recommended specs. according to "game-dabate" calculation which drops me a number of 300% perfomance on my gpu and 491% for my cpu. i am running with 16GB RAM

right now i am having 13 colonists 1 prisoner and something about 60+ tamed animals

everything is running completly smooth so far

only thing i realised is that wildlife density is becoming quite low.
haven't seen more than about 20 wild animals wandering the colony map for a while.
in the beginning i tried to tame as many as possible making part of my base look like an arche noah, until i realised how much time taming and training takes my pawns, even with 4 pawns having a + 10 skill on handle

so now i am trying to minimize my lifestock a bit and being more selective on the animals i want to have around. the last 3 traders visiting me usually didn't have more than about 5 animals for sale. still my tamed ones are pretty busy dropping babies over and over

also wondering whats the max number on tamed animals before the game starts to make it harder in some way. FE my last two labrador puppies had some health issues short upon birth -> cirrhosis

to cut a long story short -> i am going as far as things start to get laggy, sharing my experience :)