Babies

[destroyalldreamers]

If I wanted to expand my colony's population through Martian births. Is is better to send a 1/1 ratio of male and female founders or a (lucky) 1/11 male to female ratio?

[NotThatHarkness]

1:1 ratio. From the paradoxwiki: "For Martianborn children to be born, there should be fertile male/female couples in the dome. Each fertile couple effectively has a ((comfort−30)/10)% chance per Sol to have a baby. More technically, all fertile couples contribute (comfort−30) points daily to the shared pool of birth progress points in the dome. When that number reaches 1000, a baby is born."

https://survivingmars.paradoxwikis.com/Colonists#Birth

1:11 male to female would mean 1 fertile couple at a time, instead of a potential 6 fertile couples with a 1:1 ratio. And if that individual male doesn't have a high enough comfort to be interested in having a child, you are SOL.

[Ericus1]

Lucky my ass. That's "death by Snu Snu" territory.

But yeah, as mentioned the game requires couples. Figure it's important to mention that the sexy trait is a huge boost to fertility - equivalent to about a 50 comfort boost - and you want to avoid sending seniors, who can't breed, middle aged, who can become seniors in as little as 1 Sol, and other gendered colonists, who don't count at all.

[destroyalldreamers]

Thanks for the quick replies. My next colony will be better thought out.

[SkiRich]

Under the hood you only get babies from proper young pairs of male and females.
So balance and age are key.

[simonhobnob]

I like the fact that there isn't really a charge for having people come to your colony (unless you choose the restriction for that) and it only needs fuel... which is not hard to get

[WinCom7]

Get the sexiest and most hard-working females you can. Then do the same for the males.
A sexy idiot is better than an asexual genius.

[dtt.scanner]

LoL. You should also think about setting up a separate children's dome for early childhood education. You will discover that your population will increase almost faster than you can handle it. If you set the Dome filters to kick all of the children into the children's dome, they will take up residence in the nursery. If you do it well, you will only need one or two population rockets from Earth. After that, it's Martianborn all the way. You can scumsave your children in the early game to get the best possible results. They graduate to Youth sometime during age 5 (assume all of their adult traits), so if you save at the start of the Sol at age 5, when they pop into youth you can go back and try for a better combo if you get something detrimental. You need Playgrounds and High School to train the good traits. Playgrounds are supposed to teach them good social skills and be less mentally problematic, but after a while they will start coming out with disabilities no matter how hard you try. You will likely want a Sanitarium in at least one of your domes. If you put your College in the children's dome (kicking everyone but Children and Youths) then you may be able to keep other non-specialized residents from quitting their jobs to go to college. That can be a problem until you replace non-specialized jobs with robots.

[chic.aeon]

A lot of choices are going to depend on the level of difficulty and the options you have. I mean folks need to eat and breath and such more than make babies at the beginning LOL. AND if you only pick young "sexy" folks that have no skills -- that won't work all that well. Each game sponsor changes things so WE have to change with those changes :D. The super easy first game is very different from a 400 level game with very little money and research points. So keep that in mind too.

Personally I think it is important to have an infirmary in the dome since logically a mother would LIKE THAT. Know nothing about under the hood, just seems like a good thing.

I had one case (maybe game 3 or so) that the baby was born on touchdown. Sooooo :D.