Explosive Population Growth

[th3freakie]

Hey everyone.

Been doing my first colony, greatly enjoying it. One thing I can't quite figure out, though. Babies.

After I reached the ~300 colonists mark, population growth just went completely off the scale. My dome/farm construction can barely keep up with the housing, jobs and food needs of all these enthusiastic nerdish workaholic martians. I figured there would be some point where comfort started having diminishing returns on babies, but it doesn't seem to happen. If you keep a happy population, they just crank those kids out like mad. I know you can turn of births in specific domes, but that just seems like a waste too.

So, how do you deal with it? Is there a point where the birth rate stabilizes?

 

[hazard151]

There's two important stats here to keep in mind: Minimum Comfort to have children, and actual Comfort. Total population of the dome is also important.

Once the minimum Comfort threshold is met the dome starts accumulating birth points, and the speed at which those points accumulate is dependent on the actual comfort level, as they accumulate the higher the average comfort level and the number of couples capable of having children. As long as average colony wide Comfort is high this exists as a positive feed back loop until the housing shortage grows so severe it starts to impact birth numbers. That will still leave you with more than 10% of your population effectively being in excess as you just can't build both a labour demand and a housing supply against that sort of runaway exponential growth.

Because of this, stable birth rates depend on keeping the population's Comfort level in a fairly specific range to prevent excessive growth, or careful management of which domes are allowed to procreate and which are not. Both risk population collapse.

 

[th3freakie]

But are stable birth rates something deemed desirable?

 

[ChoGGi_2]

Nah, I think most people just toggle disabled till they want more, if you're on pc/xbox you can give this a whirl:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1736467180

 

[Olterin]

Something I've been meaning to try: set up the first domes for maximum comfort and growth, once they reach self-sustainability, all further domes shall be set to birth controls. The non-controlled domes need to be set to kick out seniors. In theory, there should then exist a stable population level.

 

[Promethian]

If you keep expanding with more domes and allowing birth in those new domes then your growth rate will just keep increasing. If you set some specific domes to allow birth and block it in the rest you can keep expanding and you'll eventually hit a stable population. For me late game is essentially a cycle of allowing births in a new dome, then building and adjusting to the higher birth rate until I hit stability. Child and senior specialized domes are a big help for all of this.

 

[th3freakie]

If you keep expanding with more domes and allowing birth in those new domes then your growth rate will just keep increasing.

I don't think this is right. More domes and more people might increase births, but not necessarily birth rate (i.e. births per existing colonist). But I see people often use the birth ban to try and maintain a stable population. Feels a bit weird (wouldn't the colonists be annoyed at it?) but it makes sense in a resource managing way.

 

[Xeorm]

I don't think this is right. More domes and more people might increase births, but not necessarily birth rate (i.e. births per existing colonist). But I see people often use the birth ban to try and maintain a stable population. Feels a bit weird (wouldn't the colonists be annoyed at it?) but it makes sense in a resource managing way.

Birth rate can be kids/adult or kids/time. Add more domes to handle more people to handle the population growth and you'd continue to see the number of kids / sol increase. As long as death rate is below birth rate of course. Which it very likely would be, given how the human growth curve looks.

That colonists aren't annoyed I'd take as another special thing about Mars. Much easier to agree with rules like that when death awaits you just outside.