What's the incentive to getting more duplicants?

[364266_1452783569]

This game seems to be about strategy and trying to come up with the most optimal ways to survive.  
Wouldn't the most optimal way to survive be to not hire anything beyond 5 duplicants?  
Going from 3 duplicants to 6 duplicants doubles the amount of resources and care you need to survive.  
Also negative traits will tend to stack to being unmanageable, such as 10 mouth breathers or something and you're done for.  
Is there a legit reason to get more duplicants besides purposely making the game more difficult? (Which is contradictory to the whole trying to survive, by doing things that decrease your survival chances.)
 

[blash365]

Some people like to have more sentient beings around.

Some strategists value the extra pair of hands.

Some planners want to fill every role with a dupe.

 

There are good reasons to have more dupes. But it is certainly getting harder to accommodate all of them.

[ButterStuffed]

Getting things done quickly is why I get more dupes.

[Carnis]

I play with accept all for challenge. I dont accept loud sleepers or flatulent though. It gives toi a nice clock when oxygen is always scarce.

 

There is no Obvious incentive beyond getting things done and The fact that you can upkeep quite a few with good Steam geysers

[Soulwind]

I love loud sleepers.  That's an easy one to mitigate.  I won't take flatuant or biohazard.  I like to keep my living area free of bad gasses and playing on miserable,  I can handle zero immunities but can't really keep up with negative immunities. 

[Snotface]

When you want more of a challenge.

Maintaining a 20 dupe base feels like more of an achievement than a 5 dupe base.

Edit: for some reason i didn't read your last paragraph

[Miravlix]

The game contain a time system, a dupe take a certain amount of time to do a job. I'm completely confused how you would run any of my bases with just five dupes and what is this mythical less work 5 dupes require compared to 32?

 

You need a very small farm room and a single chef to supply food and then you are creating millions of surplus food even with 20 dupes. O2 is automated, so isn't work for dupes.

 

[0xFADE]

You get more stuff done per cycle.  I don't expect you can do much ranching at all with only a few dupes.  There are quite a few things that require a dupes active time.  Lets say you only had 1 dupe and needed to depressurize an oil well or groom some stuff.  That is taking a big chunk of your total dupes time to do it.  Now if you had 40 dupes it would only be taking 1/40th of your dupes time.

 

[Lilalaunekuh]

I play with small duplicant numbers like 3-12 most of the time. But if your base gets bigger the traveling times go up on average, so duplicants that should do more than one job will travel a big chunk of their day.

=> This results in a noticeable slowdown of your gameplay (each dig/build task takes so long ...)

 

[KittenIsAGeek]

I ran a base off hydrogen power once.  Had to have 20 or so dupes to consume enough oxygen to be able to produce the hydrogen I needed to run everything.  Usually I top out around 12 dupes unless I have a good source for water.

[old_fantom]

30 minutes ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

I play with small duplicant numbers like 3-12 most of the time. But if your base gets bigger the traveling times go up on average, so duplicants that should do more than one job will travel a big chunk of their day.

=> This results in a noticeable slowdown of your gameplay (each dig/build task takes so long ...)

 

This.  I feel like you get to a point in the game where having to few dupes will cause your resource issues to be worse than if you take on more dupes.  For example, you have 10 dupes and so many far flung jobs for them with high travel, that your farms are neglected.  If you add supply dupes, your farms are better tended and you end up with more food than if you keep the 10 dupes.  

[beowulf2010]

4 minutes ago, old_fantom said:

This.  I feel like you get to a point in the game where having to few dupes will cause your resource issues to be worse than if you take on more dupes.  For example, you have 10 dupes and so many far flung jobs for them with high travel, that your farms are neglected.  If you add supply dupes, your farms are better tended and you end up with more food than if you keep the 10 dupes.  

Agreed. I tend to keep to the low end because I'm lazy about food production, but at some point, I need more dupes for no reason other than to breath the surplus oxygen. 

[clickrush]

When I started I often only built 6 dupe colonies. Over time I tried out higher numbers. I settled on 16 now for most of the time. The reason I don't go lower is that the game just progresses very slowly then. I don't go higher because I don't like building large living area bases. 16 dupes fit nicely into the starting biome with the layouts I'am using.

[avc15]

2 hours ago, KittenIsAGeek said:

I ran a base off hydrogen power once.  Had to have 20 or so dupes to consume enough oxygen to be able to produce the hydrogen I needed to run everything.  Usually I top out around 12 dupes unless I have a good source for water.

Now you can just pump all that useless o2 out into spaaaaaace

Speaking of which, i bet they will finally have to pick more sane numbers for the electrolyzer.

[Arash70]

Getting more done in less time.

[364266_1452783569]

11 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

I play with small duplicant numbers like 3-12 most of the time. But if your base gets bigger the traveling times go up on average, so duplicants that should do more than one job will travel a big chunk of their day.

=> This results in a noticeable slowdown of your gameplay (each dig/build task takes so long ...)

 

But now it's taking 40x the time to gather food and manage the oxygen of those 40 dupes.  You burn through the world resources 40x faster also.

[blash365]

Not true. Since your dupes will most likely use a shared infrastructure. Granted, some resources might scale with the number of dupes but others are fix investments independent of dupe number.

To me it is part of the game to go to the limits of dupes you can sustain.

One might even argue that there are close to unlimited resources in the game.

Water: toilets, geysers, NG/Oil refinement produce water

Power: Steam might be viable now, solar as well. Plus you can still cook oil to NG.

Food: Either use more critters (e.g. fish) or use water for bristles

Heat: can be vacuumed into space now.

 

[Craftcoat]

10 hours ago, 364266_1452783569 said:

This game seems to be about strategy and trying to come up with the most optimal ways to survive.  
Wouldn't the most optimal way to survive be to not hire anything beyond 5 duplicants?  
Going from 3 duplicants to 6 duplicants doubles the amount of resources and care you need to survive.  
Also negative traits will tend to stack to being unmanageable, such as 10 mouth breathers or something and you're done for.  
Is there a legit reason to get more duplicants besides purposely making the game more difficult? (Which is contradictory to the whole trying to survive, by doing things that decrease your survival chances.)
 

With just 5 dupes you wont be able to access every job and its benefits in the game.

For example if you dont get a rancher you cant start to get the most of critters

[beowulf2010]

31 minutes ago, 364266_1452783569 said:

But now it's taking 40x the time to gather food and manage the oxygen of those 40 dupes.

Not necessarily. In smaller bases, you have more general purpose dupes jumping from job to job instead of having dedicated dupes for certain time consuming tasks. 2 dupes dedicated to farming and a 3rd cooking everything can feed a heck of a lot of other dupes. 

[WanderingKid]

I typically run with 15-20 dupes, depending on their spawn chioces, and I try to do it quickly.  Target is 15 by cycle 50, usually.  There are a lot of 'don't care' negative traits that with a large enough dupe population they clean up the problem.  So, 3 guys don't want to cook?  Okay, one of the other 12 can do it.  2 non-diggers?  Sweet!  Builders you are! … you get the idea.  A lot of the negative traits are easy to work around.  There's only a few I avoid on sight: Anemic (too damned slow), Mouth Breather and Bottomless Stomach for obvious reasons, Flatulent to avoid air problems, and Narcoleptic because that is horrifying annoying to me.

If you can go for specialties, you end up better off.  Two dedicated farmers will pretty much keep up with your food supplies (if you don't try to fertilize) for anywhere from 3 to 15 dupes... so why not make it 15.  A single dedicated cook can handle most of a colony alone, and reduces stress and other issues at the same time.  Two diggers go much faster if they never *stop* digging, same theory with 2/3 architects.  Each one of these dupes could switch back and forth, but each particular job goes faster if they're specialized. 

Also, the same amount of infrastructure can support few or many dupes at once.  I typically build my main electrolizer construct with 4 electrolizers and a heat sink. It can happily cool 5 or 20 dupes with enough atmo, so why not put more of them to work?  A lot of construction projects are like that.  The more dupes you have, the more you can get done per cycle, and if you build for the expectation, you can build once and then forget it for a while.  I find more dupes helps me change where the challenge positions are to good food and high décor instead of 'can I build it before we die of boredom'. 

[blash365]

1 hour ago, Craftcoat said:

With just 5 dupes you wont be able to access every job and its benefits in the game.

For example if you dont get a rancher you cant start to get the most of critters

That's not true. You can do all jobs with just 1 dupe. Once you learned a job, you unlock all its benefits.

[avc15]

generally pretty soon after expanding into having high numbers of duplicants you need a sustainable base, IE not just gathering resources from the map and consuming them. Otherwise you have to go farther awau and farther, pretty quickly you wash out the benefit of having your extra dupes.

So you have to tech up fast and be building towards something sustainable. Dupes just maintaining and building.

[Pyrrus]

My long standing goal in ONI has been to see how many duplicants I can support sustainably. As the numbers rise the problems become more involved and interesting. The theoretical maximum has continuously risen though rover the last few updates  - Pre- Volcanos it was about 70-80 using morbs and pufts with the limit being geyser water, after the ranching updates it was roughly 200-300 (in theory!) with the limits being ~100 per Major Volcano or equivalent and 120 per oil geyser, whichever ends up lower. Now with the cosmic upgrade there are no longer limits on the amount of high quality heat available thanks to the molten glass so the limit should only be the oil geysers... and the amount of raw ore on the map.... and the fact that the game does not like duplicates and critters in the quantities this requires....

I should note that I have never actually reached these theoretical maximums... though my current map has everything in place more or less... but now there are new toys to play with....

[Craftcoat]

On 2.6.2018 at 1:31 AM, blash365 said:

That's not true. You can do all jobs with just 1 dupe. Once you learned a job, you unlock all its benefits.

So a Dupe keeps for example the critter wrangling trait?

[Carnis]

On 2.6.2018 at 6:18 AM, Pyrrus said:

My long standing goal in ONI has been to see how many duplicants I can support sustainably. As the numbers rise the problems become more involved and interesting. The theoretical maximum has continuously risen though rover the last few updates  - Pre- Volcanos it was about 70-80 using morbs and pufts with the limit being geyser water, after the ranching updates it was roughly 200-300 (in theory!) with the limits being ~100 per Major Volcano or equivalent and 120 per oil geyser, whichever ends up lower. Now with the cosmic upgrade there are no longer limits on the amount of high quality heat available thanks to the molten glass so the limit should only be the oil geysers... and the amount of raw ore on the map.... and the fact that the game does not like duplicates and critters in the quantities this requires....

I should note that I have never actually reached these theoretical maximums... though my current map has everything in place more or less... but now there are new toys to play with....

Curious about your numbers. How does a major volcano feed 100 dupes?