Clones?

[Rubidium]

People seem to be conflating a couple different issues: clones as clones, and sci-fi clones as being grown faster than people.

These are different; if I have a way of growing people from embryo to adulthood in a short period of time, there's no reason I couldn't do the exact same thing with non-clones (either in vitro fertilization, or embryos created the old-fashioned way and then surgically removed, to say nothing of alien species like starfish that might have other methods of reproduction). Currently, a clone takes the exact same time to develop and mature as a normally conceived organism of the same species; the only difference is that the clone is a time-delayed identical twin of an already existing organism.

So, with clones as clones, what gameplay difference would it make? Remember that clones aren't identical any more than identical twins are, so they could and would have different ethoses and the like. Clone soldiers make some sense (presumably you are cloning your physically best specimens, as a poor man's version of gene warriors), but a broader society of clones doesn't do much different from any other society (other than let you grow replacement organs and the like, but that doesn't require you to clone the whole person, just grow some liver cells or what not).

Growing people faster in tanks is a separate issue, but that's just a tech that increases population growth rates.

 

[Elimdur]

Cloning coupled with the ability to transfer the consciousnes of a person from one body to another to have another way of acchieving quasi immortality. Similar to what the Asgard did. (just skipping the part with degrading genetic material and slowly going extinct)

 

[General Retreat]

Growing people faster in tanks is a separate issue, but that's just a tech that increases population growth rates.

Stellaris accelerated growth tech seems to be imperfect though. According to the clone army descriptions, they're about as resourceful as droids so far as personal initiative goes and live for around a decade.

Even commandos who are given additional development end up with weird mental quirks compared to normally born individuals. Between those two, I wouldn't have thought accelerated growth cloning would be appropriate for batch creating pops. The side effects could be... unsettling.

For standard embryonic cloning no actual mechanics are required. Pops would grow at the regular rate, so it's just a matter of your personal RP spin.

 

[Digrus]

Cloning someone would not really make him immortal, you would just get a new guy with the same portrait and species traits. And I am dubious to the idea that clones would naturally end up considering themselves superior, at least the majority of th

Well , I said "Immortal" because nothing stop you from repeat the same process every time he dies. We are cloning him for the skills he showed during his life, so I suppose we have the technology to transfer the knoledge from the old body to the new clone. The definition of immortality is "unending existence" so he is potentially "immortal".
You clone someone who's (at least) better than the average, you don't spend resource to clone a "normal" person.
Let's take the IQ, the best you can get is 160. If I clone only people with an IQ of 130 (or even better), I'll get a clone population far superior in that field (compared to the average popolation). If my cloning pool was formed by few hundreds of people with exceptional characteristic (high IQ, healthy, athletic) do you really believe the clone population I'd get out of it would not have any kind of superiority complex?
They were cloned 'cause their DNA was exceptional, how long will they accept to be ruled by someone who's not as exceptional as them?

I didn't specified before, but I don't think we need separate "clone" pops. The new clones would get divided between the normal pops, giving them small bonus thanks to the clone effinciency. They will breed with normal pops, it's not like they are a different species, and by breeding the new generation will not be composed by clones. It's the cloning facility that gives the bonus by continuously generating new clones. (i.e. if I close a medical clone facility I will immediately lose the happiness and the habitability bonus, It's not like the the normal pops will go around eviscerating clones to get their replacement organs )

 

[I am Sovereign]

Well , I said "Immortal" because nothing stop you from repeat the same process every time he dies. We are cloning him for the skills he showed during his life, so I suppose we have the technology to transfer the knoledge from the old body to the new clone. The definition of immortality is "unending existence" so he is potentially "immortal".
You clone someone who's (at least) better than the average, you don't spend resource to clone a "normal" person.
Let's take the IQ, the best you can get is 160. If I clone only people with an IQ of 130 (or even better), I'll get a clone population far superior in that field (compared to the average popolation). If my cloning pool was formed by few hundreds of people with exceptional characteristic (high IQ, healthy, athletic) do you really believe the clone population I'd get out of it would not have any kind of superiority complex?
They were cloned 'cause their DNA was exceptional, how long will they accept to be ruled by someone who's not as exceptional as them?

I didn't specified before, but I don't think we need separate "clone" pops. The new clones would get divided between the normal pops, giving them small bonus thanks to the clone effinciency. They will breed with normal pops, it's not like they are a different species, and by breeding the new generation will not be composed by clones. It's the cloning facility that gives the bonus by continuously generating new clones. (i.e. if I close a medical clone facility I will immediately lose the happiness and the habitability bonus, It's not like the the normal pops will go around eviscerating clones to get their replacement organs )

At some point this repetitive cloning will bring them some problems ( even if the follow up generations of "Dolly the Sheep" doing quite well right now)

 

[Digrus]

At some point this repetive cloning will bring them some problems ( even if the follow up generations of "Dolly the Sheep" doing quite well right now)

That's the good part. You seriously believed an "immortal" leader was for free? Do you think the 4th clone of your physic researcher will never try to open a gate and try to evoke a leviathan in your systems? That your admiral won't try to engage a dragon with his 12k fleet, unleashing fire and blood on your empire? That your scientist will not gift a rare technology to an enemy empire?

 

[General Retreat]

Cloning an intelligent person wouldn't necessarily give you smart clones. Genetics is a component, but intelligence is also a product of environment and education. It's also fair to assume that there isn't initially the tech to transfer consciousness seeing as it takes a second tier ascension perk to figure it out for robotics.

In all honesty, if leaders were going to use clones to improve their health, it'd more likely be by growing their own personalised organ banks. But that's a pretty convoluted and wasteful way to do things when the required replacement organs could probably be grown directly without needing a person to be attached.

If you really want to go down that route for your personal RP, it can more or less already be represented by the selected lineages leadership policy. Cloning, eugenics and genetic elitism - why not?

 

[Caspoi]

My issue is more whether it would be OP or not in the game, not for the mechanics to be the same as Robots, although my post was very poorly worded in that regard, what I'm saying is, cloning can't be a faster and more effective way of reproducing pops or else it would basically make it essential to gameplay.

It might be if you want to develop in that area (although an extreme focus would probably require the biological ascencion). Clones, especially ones that come from imperfect tecthnology could still have defects though, like clone pops having a modifier that lowers their fertility and just like robots pops they would cost energy to produce. Other drawbacks could be lowered mineral production and army damage due to their bodies suffering from greater physical exhaustion.

Well , I said "Immortal" because nothing stop you from repeat the same process every time he dies. We are cloning him for the skills he showed during his life, so I suppose we have the technology to transfer the knoledge from the old body to the new clone. The definition of immortality is "unending existence" so he is potentially "immortal".
You clone someone who's (at least) better than the average, you don't spend resource to clone a "normal" person.
Let's take the IQ, the best you can get is 160. If I clone only people with an IQ of 130 (or even better), I'll get a clone population far superior in that field (compared to the average popolation). If my cloning pool was formed by few hundreds of people with exceptional characteristic (high IQ, healthy, athletic) do you really believe the clone population I'd get out of it would not have any kind of superiority complex?
They were cloned 'cause their DNA was exceptional, how long will they accept to be ruled by someone who's not as exceptional as them?

I didn't specified before, but I don't think we need separate "clone" pops. The new clones would get divided between the normal pops, giving them small bonus thanks to the clone effinciency. They will breed with normal pops, it's not like they are a different species, and by breeding the new generation will not be composed by clones. It's the cloning facility that gives the bonus by continuously generating new clones. (i.e. if I close a medical clone facility I will immediately lose the happiness and the habitability bonus, It's not like the the normal pops will go around eviscerating clones to get their replacement organs )

It would still be more a case of copies of the original rather than him being immortal, and you assume a bit much in regards to the "memory copying". In most cases you would just be able to create people with higher likelyhood of gaining the same traits (some traits, such as AI assistant of course being an exception) as the old one as well as the possibility that the clone had gotten some flaws along the process (such as a shorter lifespan). Only with the most advanced of cloning technology (the kind that would require an ascencion perk to even be able to get) would you be able to actually copy his memories as well, which would make the clone very likely to have the same traits and levels as their predecessor but even then the clones would be copies of the original rather than him being immortal, for one you might make multiple of them, possibly even while the orginal still exists. Imagine having a really excellent governor and then deciding that he should govern every single planet and secotr in the empire, that could certainly prove... interesting.

 

[The Founder]

These are different; if I have a way of growing people from embryo to adulthood in a short period of time, there's no reason I couldn't do the exact same thing with non-clones (either in vitro fertilization, or embryos created the old-fashioned way and then surgically removed, to say nothing of alien species like starfish that might have other methods of reproduction).

Actually there is, right in the fluff text of Clone Armies and Clone Commandos:
"Vat-grown clones that reach adulthood in a matter of months. With a natural lifespan of less than a decade, their lack of personal initiative is deemed an acceptable trade-off for their total obedience to officers."
"These vat-grown killers are expensive to produce, but the extreme conditioning and training they are subjected to turn them into very capable soldiers. They are more independent-minded than normal clones, and some models have been known to develop eccentric quirks."
So the faster maturation comes at the tradeoff of shorter lifespan and reduced initative or prohibitive to realy mass produce cost.
Okay if what you need is an army. Not okay if what you want is a Civilisation or even a worker Population of 1 billion human equivalent.

So presumably a Civilisation Building Cloning process would not be relevantly faster then natural growth. It can be a bit more effective.
And I think that effectiveness could be easily modelled by "ordering" pops and growing them* like you do with T1, T2 and T3 Robots. A bit more effective later on, because the growth cost and growth rate is fixed. A bit less effective early on, as the fixed growth rate/time would be slower then a well run normal Colony.


*Robots have a fixed growth cost of 30 and a fixed growth of 1/month. So it takes 30 months for one pop, regardless of planet or already existing pops.
Organics start with 25 base cost and can have higher addition/month. But number of existing pops and habitality affects thier growth cost, making them quickly take longer then 30 months to grow a pop.

Even commandos who are given additional development end up with weird mental quirks compared to normally born individuals. Between those two, I wouldn't have thought accelerated growth cloning would be appropriate for batch creating pops. The side effects could be... unsettling.

Actually as I see it, it is a sign of them being "less clony" as a result of the more expensive process. Not-clones develop quirks all the time. And these clones can do that too.

In the end this is heavily modelled after the Clone Army from Star Wars, I think.

 

[Sinister2202]

Are you saying that clones should have no ethics divergence?

They should. Sorry, that was kind of misleading.

 

[Caspoi]

They should. Sorry, that was kind of misleading.

Wouldn't that be rather OP? I mean, right now there are only a few ways ro make your pops fully obedient and most of them are quite specialized and come with distinct disadvantages of their own to compensate for the lack of agency. At any rate it is not as if clones would be immune to changes of personality more than anyone else.

EDIT:, Sorry, I see what you mean now.

 

[BarskiPatzow]

I want cloning system like in eve online, with mind transfer. Maybe make it a 2 way choice, hivemind or that

 

[The Founder]

Wouldn't that be rather OP? I mean, right now there are only a few ways ro make your pops fully obedient and most of them are quite specialized and come with distinct disadvantages of their own to compensate for the lack of agency. At any rate it is not as if clones would be immune to changes of personality more than anyone else.

"Cloens should have normal Ethics divergence, like normally grown pops" is what I think he wanted to say. And you keep misinterpreting.

 

[Caspoi]

"Cloens should have normal Ethics divergence, like normally grown pops" is what I think he wanted to say. And you keep misinterpreting.

Oh, thanks.

 

[Gaen]

Hopefuly next DLC will address it.

Is there anything the the next dlc hopefully doesn't address? Some people on this forum are going to be very disappointed when the next dlc doesn't address everything = P

 

[Elimdur]

Is there anything the the next dlc hopefully doesn't address? Some people on this forum are going to be very disappointed when the next dlc doesn't address everything = P

Like the next update would fix the precursor quests, since release

But still, yes the cloning mechanic definitely has potential to be so much more.

 

[samson301]

What about leader cloning? We should be able to clone leaders.

Leader cloning costs more influence, and cloned leaders start at level 1

 

[Elimdur]

What about leader cloning? We should be able to clone leaders.

Leader cloning costs more influence, and cloned leaders start at level 1

But what would you gain from this? If they start at level one you have nothing. Or would your suggestion mean, they would keep their traits?

 

[The Founder]

What about leader cloning? We should be able to clone leaders.

Leader cloning costs more influence, and cloned leaders start at level 1

But what would you gain from this? If they start at level one you have nothing. Or would your suggestion mean, they would keep their traits?

Personally I would prefer just generally having the ability to pick a leaders trait. Maybe let it cost 2-3 times the normal Influence, but give me a leader with the trait I want and optimal starting age.
Would not totally invalidate the Leader Pool (as you might get a bargain there), while still allowing us to have the proper traits that are important (like New Worlds for Colletivsit/Individualist).

 

[StJimmyRocks92]

I'd say cloning should be the biological ascension's method of immortality. You could choose to either replace a leader with a new one or a clone of them with the same traits and a youngish age. Also I'd say it should come with a chance for genetic degradation that increases the more you clone someone (and maybe throw in a repeatable tech that reduces the chances?).