Opinions on Gestation and Growth

[Mattatatta]

This is a long read, I'm warning you of this now to be as a consideration of your time as a rando on the internet. I also bolded Tl;drs that sum up the paragraph(s) before it.

First mod I'll personally be looking for when I purchase the DLC is a longer gestation tweak. Taking "a baseline, largely unmodified human" and their up-til-now 45day/3quadrum/9-IRLmonth gestation period, and arbitrarily dropping it down to just 18days/1.2quadrums/3.6-IRLmonths doesn't gel with me. Especially when the high-tech, nutrition and power-intensive option ends up being only a 50% reduction to that as a result. Maybe it makes more sense in practice, but investing a lot of research time, resources, and then power and nutritional upkeep for a 50% shorter wait time until just a new baby colonist is created doesn't sound like a particularly enticing deal. Maybe the mood swings are that bad but in that case I'd take a mood swing severity nerf/mod over a long-term research goal.

Tl;dr: "Baseline, genetically unmodified" humans should still have the equivalent of a 9 month term, not 3.6 months across the board. Shortening it also reduces the "cool factor" of the growth vat tech

I am more than likely a minority of this opinion, especially since I have the same opinions about the changes to animal gestation periods being heavily lowered. This isn't to say I don't see the reasoning in these low-gestation stats. When it came to farming, it makes sense on the excel spreadsheet level for meat and leather production, and so makes farming efficient and viable, especially for colonies that despise eating plants. This time around I can see the logic to allow people to get to the new content that they've paid to experience, but I still can't help but disagree with the decision. I simply think that this isn't the best way to go about such a long-awaited feature in a simulation game.

Tl;dr: It only made sense to reduce gestation for farming livestock to make meat and leather production efficient. Cutting it down for humans simply to "skip" to the core content of the DLC is a lazy reason..

One issue I had after the animal changes was that I was not expecting the population bomb that came with it. Before, I could manage the population completely manually and seldom needed to, afterwards I had to start reminding myself to set up the auto-slaughterer to avoid drastically overpopulating my pens. Since auto-slaughtering humans isn't going to be a common thing outside of some specific ideoligion playthroughs, I can see "population bombs" or baby booms becoming an issue unless there is a mechanic in place that governs how easily colonists become pregnant, or provides the player a level of control over it, of which the preview describing the new features didn't make any mention of.

And to add to the potential population hell, because your colonists will only spend a little over a quadrum carrying a baby to term, a given colonist could be popping out kids 3 times a year, almost 4. If the colonist can also have twins or triplets, well...

Tl;dr: Get ready for baby booms, and a lack of tools to prevent it, if the omission of any such mechanics is an indication. Your love-blinded colonists are gonna go like rabbits, whether they have the food production to support it or not.

On the other end of the system you have the actual growth of the baby into a child, and then adult. I actually like what I've read about how its structured and paced for the most part, but just as I am a minority on the short gestation periods, I'm probably in the minority who like the sound of a semi-realistic long-term investment in raising a new generation of colonists.

That all being said, I imagine most people will figure out how to rush the childhood stage without ending up with a completely trash colonist, because going the natural path will take far too long for most playthroughs. Min-maxing child rearing not to make super soldiers or geniuses, but just ordinary adults before the player hits year 10 and decides to start a new save entirely.

It's the exact opposite problem, and what makes me laugh a bit is that the short gestation time has been implemented to mitigate the short runtime of a playthrough, even though - whether it is 18 days or 45 days - the gestation period is the shortest part of this entire cycle. You have three in-game years of the infant colonist being worse than your 92 year-old dementia sufferer who occasionally wanders off, with the added "bonus" of their poor mood harming the vibe of everyone in earshot. Then you have about 11 or 12 in-game years until they hit the roundabout age that current-version pawns are shown being capable of any kind of work.

The features surrounding the childhood of a colonist sounds good, and the rewards of getting to choose traits is immensely powerful. It might be enough to discourage using growth vats to skip those long years ahead. In the meantime though, you're gonna be developing the colony how you usually do, with more babies potentially being born each year and inflating your population count while contributing absolutely nothing to it. Assuming you survive the raids you get from having a high-population/low-fighter colony, you're gonna be wrapping up your playthrough's primary objective long before the first child born in the colony hits 14 years of age.

Tl;dr: Totally natural growth will far exceed the average lifespan of a playthrough, even with 18 day gestation or 9 day gestation, because you've still got at least ten years, maybe even 14 years, until the child becomes a fully-capable colonist. The new mechanics may not be enough to keep it entertaining the entire time, assuming the steady rate of births doesn't spell doom for the colony via famine or powerful raids.

Of course, that's why they have the growth vats. But this puts us into late-Industrial or Spacer tech levels, which locks out Tribal tech-only playthroughs, and this tech being essentially mandatory in order to get any use from a new generation of colonists before 5510 feels like being funneled into a specific way to play the content. Why no cross-DLC interaction to help expand player options? Why not have psycast abilities to accelerate child growth or insta-complete pregnancy if Royalty is installed? Or Ideology precepts and rituals to achieve the same result (or even affect fertility rates)? Or what about rare and expensive one-use serums available in the Biotech DLC itself, styled after skill or psytrainers? Giving the player the option to pursue different ways to raise a child colonist to adulthood would help lead the narrative of the colony's story in different directions, rather than all roads leading to sci-fi lab-grown colonists, and the natural growth purists being left in the ditches.

Tl;dr: There's currently only one way to expedite the growth of a child, which seems like a poor oversight as it shafts playthroughs that avoid or forbid the tech level needed to obtain it, and misses opportunities to expand on previous DLC content.

It seems they wanted to achieve two opposing things at once. They wanted to cut down on "waiting time" so players can experience the new content sooner, and have the choice to accelerate through certain lifestages with what seems to be a sensible tradeoff to the character's quality. But at the same time, they ideally want you to not skip out on waiting for the child colonist to fully grow the natural way with the reward being a brilliant colonist that cannot be "made" in a laboratory (xenogenes excluded).

I originally started with my disagreement to the change to gestation time, and here I am picking apart the whole third of this expansion. I've gone off the rails here. Sorry.

Let's go back to gestation and from there sum up my opinions and what I'd have preferred to see.

• Gestation stays as 45 days or 3 quadrums, as nature intended. This keeps in line with the semi-realistic slow growth of the baby colonist after they're born. It also avoids colonists reproducing like rabbits by being capable of completing nearly four pregnancies a year.
  
  
• Player has more direct, in-universe ways to conduct family planning: Contraception that can be produced and added to drug policies, the ""dreaded"" a-word or sterilization added to operations, not to mention previous DLC interactions. There's a number of ways to allow the player to decide when and how often colonists reproduce, so that the colony doesn't kill itself under the weight of too many babies.
  
  
• Like a later patch to Ideology, give the player the option to select whether they'll play with the new children mechanics or not when starting a new save, but with a degree of customization to boot. Maybe disable colonist pregnancies, but leave babies being adopted on the table through quests or events, or turn off everything except for orphaned children turning up, or turn it all off for a base-game style of play.
  
  
• Provide a storyteller setting to define a multiplier for how quickly a baby reaches age 14, (assuming 14 year old colonists continue to be fully capable of work like other adults in base game), after which the colonist ages normally. This shortened period can then be further shortened by in-game mechanics like the growth vat. Don't want to run a colony for 20 years to play your next generation of colonists? Speed up how fast they grow globally. 50% faster (10.5 chronological years to reach 14 biological years), or two times faster (7 chrono:14 bio), four times faster (3.5:14) eight (1.25:14), sixteen times faster (52 days!), and then allow in-game tech to stack with it. One player might want to try a normal game with just a quicker child-raising element to it, another might want to churn out cannon fodder at insane rates like its the clone wars.
  
  
• Alternate ways to accelerate or skip years of a child's growth with and without the same tradeoffs as using the growth vat tech. Low-tech tribes and colonies can seek one-use items that speed up aging temporarily or outright increment a colonist's age by a set number of years, with especially rare versions having no drawbacks to quality of childhood, so that colonies with growth vats also have an alternate option that will interest them.
  
  
• Integration into Royalty DLC. Add psycasts that can accelerate growth, gestation, or nudge a colonist's quality of childhood in a positive way to offset the drawback of accelerated growth. Heck, you could make a Level 6 psycast where the psycaster trades years with another colonist: give a child X years of growth and the psycaster regresses in age by that number (and KOs from psychic shock). They're already adding eternal youth via xenogenes, why not make a similar psycast version?
  
  
• Integration into Ideology DLC. Precepts that affect reproductive rates, maybe it's sacred to have lots of children (or maybe it's not). Rituals that further alter chances of colonists reproducing, like worshiping (in)fertility idols, or celebrating a newborn's arrival so hard that a few colonists get baby fever (or quite the opposite). Or rituals that can speed up gestation, or negating the loss of childhood to age acceleration methods so a child can still grow up to be a brilliant colonist even if they skipped a few chronological years to reach adulthood.

The DLC integrations obviously start to become pretty major features that can't just be whipped up in five minutes. If the omission of any such interaction means there's no such interaction whatsoever planned for the Biotech DLC, then obviously it's not going to come out in a patch once the devs actually have the idea come to them. To be quite fair, there are other ideas I've floated that wouldn't be straightforward to make

And of course, my ideas might stink.

Still, I'm not terribly enthused by this aspect of the expansion. The rest of it sounds great, so I'm still in the market for the DLC when it comes out, I just feel a bit let down because this was the feature that interested me the most initially. And maybe that's my problem: having expectations.

I felt like banging out this huge essay just so there's a record down somewhere that at least one consumer is a bit underwhelmed, and to also find out if I'm right in thinking that I am in the minority here. Who knows, it might turn out that a lot of people share similar views but didn't know how to put it into words, in which case this might be a good thread for gathering all those thoughts.

I am aware of the mod that shall not be named here, and putting aside its most controversial parts, it does have a fairly well developed system for family planning and child growth. Not perfect by any means, but it offers some configuration options that deal solely with the things I've actually talked about above.

[Garatgh Deloi]

Or you could just adjust the speed in the storyteller settings and let the rest of us play the way they play tested it as the most fun.

Those that prefer a more “natural” progression can adjust the speed in the storyteller settings.

[Wantoomany]

That is a whole lot of words based on a whole lot of assumptions.

[Astasia]

Current human gestation time is 30 days, not 45.
Birth control is mentioned in basically the first sentence on the store page for the DLC.
Human growth is naturally accelerated so that children become functional members of the colony much faster than normal, with a slider to adjust this acceleration.

[rvg]

Baby booms should be manageable. Just as with Warg population it boils down to controlling the number of females in the colony. Keep the number of women low, and the population should be easy to control. Of course, it will mean occasionally passing up on a good colonist, but hey, adapt or die, right?

[Paroe]

Originally posted by rvg:

Baby booms should be manageable. Just as with Warg population it boils down to controlling the number of females in the colony. Keep the number of women low, and the population should be easy to control. Of course, it will mean occasionally passing up on a good colonist, but hey, adapt or die, right?

Personally, id hope something like vanilla outposts expanded is included so you have a way to "dump" these extra colonists and "spread your influence".
Another fun thing would be to go the empire route and send settler groups to found colonies under your faction, who then send you a yearly biff of silver and depending on your ideology potentially other goods!

[Caz]

Originally posted by Mattatatta:

Tl;dr: "Baseline, genetically unmodified" humans should still have the equivalent of a 9 month term, not 3.6 months across the board. Shortening it also reduces the "cool factor" of the growth vat tech

It states in the blog that this can be changed in the Storyteller settings.

Originally posted by Mattatatta:

Tl;dr: It only made sense to reduce gestation for farming livestock to make meat and leather production efficient. Cutting it down for humans simply to "skip" to the core content of the DLC is a lazy reason..

This is illogical when put next to your reasoning for human-kind gestation.

Originally posted by Mattatatta:

Tl;dr: Get ready for baby booms, and a lack of tools to prevent it, if the omission of any such mechanics is an indication. Your love-blinded colonists are gonna go like rabbits, whether they have the food production to support it or not.

There will obviously be options to mitigate this.

After these first three, I couldn't see a reason to read the rest.

[Shas'O O'Kais]

You can already adjust how long they grow up in story teller options.
Everything else you rambled about are just assumptions.

Also my mind is completely blown that you are upset that Tribals are going to have a hard time accessing cloning and accelerated growth technology? Yeesh. You're simultaneously saying it's dumb that they shortened growth rates of humans while at the same time complaining that they won't have a chance to grow up naturally in the span of a normal playthrough. Pick a lane my guy, yeesh. At this point you're complaining about literally everything, from both ends.

[AugustTheTitan]

Tynan mentioned pregnancy terms being configurable in game settings, didn't he?

[Astasia]

Originally posted by AugustTheTitan:

Tynan mentioned pregnancy terms being configurable in game settings, didn't he?

Not that I'm aware of. A slider for growth acceleration was mentioned, it didn't sound like this was related to gestation period. They stated a specific duration for gestation but haven't given numbers for child growth likely because it's variable and don't want to make people concerned by any default value. Human gestation period is a trivially easy stat to adjust in the game files though.

[Zalzany]

Whole ton of words for "I got an unpopular opinion should be a mode playstyle in mind." I mean so many damn assumptions and what the hell is point of a growth vat if not to speed it up, and there is huge cons if you use the vat you get a body adult faster, but lose all the cool perks to choose from at each age cycle and you can take it out at any time. This is not a damn mod its official and this dev always makes a large pro and con list half time stuff has more cons then anything else when people think its OP. Or you bust your ass with quests in vanilla to earn the really good stuff.

Then people show up with the easy mode mods going "I think it will be too easy." Yeah you gonna put 20 mods in that have no drawbacks, including ones that remove how hard vanilla is so of course you will say this, take out the easy mode mods "then its too hard." Well those are your options...