Too many people?.....

[Hummer]

I'm over 1000 people, this is my first game. I feel like I can barely keep up with building mega domes and I still have homeless problems. I'm constantly concerned about food shortages. I'm barely keeping up with my water demands. I can't keep up with polymers.

Is there any way to get rid of people?
Or is this okay and my trajectory will end up fine?

 

[Ksyr]

There is a button in each dome that tells them to stop making children. I usually use this for some, but not all of my domes.

 

[YertyL]

The average number of births depends on the comfort of each dome:
https://survivingmars.paradoxwikis.com/Colonists#Birth
Ideally you could balance high and low comfort domes to regulate birth rates -- although I have a hard time doing this in practice too.

 

[Promethian]

There is a maximum rate of birth a dome can maintain. So if you disable births in all but a few domes eventually your population will even out and maintain at that level. Set up child and senior domes to absorb the non-productive (and non-reproducing) people from the productive domes to ensure you maintain a steady rate.

 

[Hummer]

Thanks all

 

[Foskito]

I'm over 1000 people, this is my first game. I feel like I can barely keep up with building mega domes and I still have homeless problems. I'm constantly concerned about food shortages. I'm barely keeping up with my water demands. I can't keep up with polymers.

Is there any way to get rid of people?
Or is this okay and my trajectory will end up fine?View attachment 561879

You must control the population manually. It is really important to keep population under 100 until you build the Mohole mine. Otherwise, you will get a chain reaction in every inputs & outputs with catastrophic consequences in +-50 sols.
Allow colonists to have children only when you are sure you can keep the total population between 90 and 100.
Why 100? Well, unless you know which mystery you are gonna face, it can be very hard to deal with something like Wildfire or Metatron without enough stability...

Once the mystery has been solved, everything has been researched, and all your inputs/outputs are balanced, then you can get as many colonists as you want. Not before.

 

[DansonDelta40]

You must control the population manually. It is really important to keep population under 100 until you build the Mohole mine. Otherwise, you will get a chain reaction in every inputs & outputs with catastrophic consequences in +-50 sols.
Allow colonists to have children only when you are sure you can keep the total population between 90 and 100.

I would very much like to be able to do that.
How do I do that, though?

I have played it several times, and always one of two things happens further into my playthrough: Either my population explodes, and I drown in homeless and unemployed people.

OR my vacant work slots skyrocket until most of my services and then my vital work places are no longer staffed appropriately, which sends my colony down a path to destruction.

I have tried separating my seniors from my workforce, but I never seem to be able to figure out how many senior residences I need for my current population. Also I don't know what to put into a senior dome so that they don't lose sanity so much they become earthsick. I want my seniors to live out their lives in peace, not suffocate in a death camp dome nor be forced back to Earth.

Will a Dome with parks, open-air gym and comfortable residences be sufficient, if the colonists have access to a stockpile of food?

I have tried several mods to mitigate the problems I've run into.

"Smarter Migration AI" and "Smarter Worker AI" as well as "Better AI" are Steam Workshop mods that help colonists find residences and workplaces even if they are further away from their current location.

"True Dome Network" is a Paradox Mod Manager Mod that allows me to set dome passages to be used by colonists to migrate to any dome in my colony, as long as it is connected to the network of interconnected domes via a passage.

I've even tried using "Incubator" to control birthrate in my domes... the mod limits the number of children born to the number of nurseries in my colony. However, I do not know how many nurseries I should build to keep my population stable, but also prevent overpopulation.

And I also don't know how many senior residences I need to keep my colony from running into the "too many vacant workslots" problem.

Does anybody know how I can keep this under control?

There is another mod called "Auto birth control policy", which sounds good on paper, but I have no experience using it. Has anybody used it and can tell me whether it works?

To be honest, I don't think this should be a problem at all in the game. The colony is founded by scientists and reasonable people, professionals.... they should know the threat of overpopulation as well as the threat of overaging population in a hermetically sealed colony on a hostile planet and autonomously control their birth rate according to the amount of residence space and work places available.

But it seems we are stuck trying to struggle through this balancing problem on our own...

So I repeat my questions:

How many children must be born per 100 people to keep a population stable?

How many senior residences per 100 people do I need? And what amenities can I give them in their senior dome that don't require workforce? Will they be sufficiently comfortable?

Can anybody please help me? I have looked up the issue but only found more questions and insufficient answers.

 

[Foskito]

You don't need mods to control the population growth. There is a button in every dome to forbid new births. Once you press it, no more children will appear until you deactivate it.
So, when you see your population is getting closer to the 100 number be sure to press it before, in every dome. If after 10-15 sols your population is shrinking (because the oldest colonist are dying and no children are born), just activate it again and let it grow to the same number from before.

Be sure to not have unemployment neither vacancy jobs. You can reduce the employees that are needed in any building in any shift, and you don't need 3 doctors in 3 different shifts, for example. Anyway, 95-98 colonists can do everything that you need until you get the mohole mine.

 

[DansonDelta40]

You don't need mods to control the population growth. There is a button in every dome to forbid new births. Once you press it, no more children will appear until you deactivate it.
So, when you see your population is getting closer to the 100 number be sure to press it before, in every dome. If after 10-15 sols your population is shrinking (because the oldest colonist are dying and no children are born), just activate it again and let it grow to the same number from before.

First of all, thanks for replying!

Your solution sounds doable, but is not really the kind of thing I am looking for, since my request is rather for a way to build my colony so that I DO NOT HAVE TO micromanage population.

I had to play offline today, so my colony of interconnected domes suffered from not having access to the "Smarter Migration AI" and "Smarter Worker AI" mods, since they are Steam Workshop mods, and offline mode disables them.

So now I have over 200 homeless people while my colony has around 250 vacant residences... and around 50 unemployed people while having over 100 vacant work places. Its layout is not designed around the way vanilla AI works.

Had to build another incubation dome and start calling in more earthborn colonists to cover workshifts. But without the smarter AI mods my colonists will just stay homeless and unemployed in their home domes, since their neighboring domes are full already - not noticing that there are brandnew domes on the other side of the colony that they could migrate to. Have to figure out whether playing with the better ai mods activated will help that situation.

Now I am slowly gaining new martianborn colonists, at least.

I also found out that domes for children or domes for seniors, as well as domes for tourist (I use tourism to supplement my money making strategy via the "automated tourism" mod) do only need comfortable residences, oxygen, water, a stockpile of food outside the gates and some comfort-raising unstaffed buildings such as decorations, hanging gardens or similar.

Which has helped me redirect workforce away from those domes and back into the economically important parts of my colony.

Be sure to not have unemployment neither vacancy jobs. You can reduce the employees that are needed in any building in any shift, and you don't need 3 doctors in 3 different shifts, for example. Anyway, 95-98 colonists can do everything that you need until you get the mohole mine.

I am trying and failing miserably to do exactly that. I have both massive numbers of homeless people now - while having way more vacant residencies than I have homeless people - and a large number of unemployed people - while having lots more vacant jobs that they could occupy. If they just started moving. Which they don't without the Smarter AI mods.

I'll have to see whether my colony starts working better again when I regain the ability to play online, with all my mods active.

 

[Ksyr]

I usually ignore the max 100 population artificial limit that some people use and I have never had a problem with it. It's just unnecessary micromanagement for very little gain. And a boring game. I survived every crisis without even knowing about the 100 pop limit.

When I have multiple domes I set some of them to not have births and others to have them and then leave them like that for most of the game. Full growth is usually way too much. Exactly how fast your colony should grow is a matter of experience, but I assure you, it can be done with very little micromanagement. Set the birth policy when you create a new dome and keep it for most of the game.

 

[DansonDelta40]

I was able to play with my „Smarter AI“ mods on yesterday, and set one medium dome as a children‘s dome full of schools, nurseries and playgrounds, with hanging gardens for comfort and just a stockpile of food outside the airlock.

Managed to get a very small growth curve, and thanks to the smarter AI mods my colonists migrated to where the jobs and vacant homes were, so now I have a small one digit number of homeless/unemployed which just means people have grown up and are looking for employment.

My three barrel domes for seniors with basic residences, parks and a gym are doing fine, as well... not full yet despite a population of 1.5k colonists. So I‘m thinking that, as long as I play online on steam and can thus have the benefit of smarter AI, I‘ll be able to build colonies the way I like.

For anybody who comes here looking for answers to the same problems:

If your intention is to build a network of interconnected domes making liberal use of passages, you‘ll probably want to try the following number of mods:

Steam Workshop Mods:
-Smarter Worker AI (Helps colonists find jobs even if they are more than one passage/dome away)
-Smarter Migration AI (Helps colonists find residences even if they are more than one passage/dome away)

Paradox Mods:
-True Dome Network (Let’s you click on passages and set the range of passages that colonists use for migration or seeking employment - 1,2,3 or infinite. I always set it on infinite.)

If you want to limit your number of children to your number of nursery residence spaces, I recommend the Paradox Mod „Incubator“.