Crossposting from Reddit since I wrote a lot there:

Only so many characters to put into the top post, but I'm super proud of this thing and can't help but write a little bit more about it: this colony has been cooking since January, played here and there, and built into what I'm sure is the largest colony I've ever made in RW. This thing is even bigger than the other one I made, and that was, then, the biggest I'd made. There's a trend here towards dummy huge.

For the most part, it has held about 150~ colonists almost continuously, but a lot of these were being sent out to the map since I'd conquered the entire planet courtesy of World Domination, and a lot of those troops ended up coming home. Yes, I've literally conquered the planet - there's no other factions left to send raids. I've got screenshots, and some 300+ outposts populated either by the pawns that WD generates or slaves.

For the general plan of this run, this was meant to be my first real game touching the gene system from Biotech. I'd never actually played with it before (1.6 has been my first time back to RW since Royalty or so?), and figured, hey, let's make a colony where we use that. I'd already made a sort of tech-cathedral last time, so a gene-focused run was the next thing.

But that gave me an idea. See, I'm a BattleTech boy, and when I started spitballing ideas together, I realized that you could make custom xenotypes at game start that had heritable germline traits...and that made me go, "hey, I can make the Clans in this thing!", and the idea that would become the Verdant Citadel was born. For all its cosy vibes and beauty, the place is shockingly dystopian beneath the surface: it has a five part caste system, and all pawns are the result of careful use of the growth vats to expand and enforce that system. We've got a Warrior Caste, a Scientist Caste, a Technician Caste, a Laborer Caste, and even a Merchant Caste; each of these are born with genes that give them massive bonuses to the skills of their given role (and trash skills everywhere else to avoid runaway metabolic costs), leading to a super-specialization of workers.

Indeed, the entire city is actually divided into roughly eight pieces: each caste has one major district, and then there's three extra - a sort of "neutral" city center for everyone, and then the capital hall on the northside and the gargantuan genetic center on the central island.

I legit thought this run would be much harder than it was: most of my colonies in the past have been more generalized in workers, but this one was ultra-specialized since no one can work outside their caste, and to make things even more fun, I generally decided to forego the use of bionics and psychic powers. I expected to get ganked; someone in the system would die and a caste would be unable to keep expanding and that'd lead to a failstate.

Surprise, surprise, the caste system worked frighteningly well: as soon as the growth vats came online, the colony just completely escaped the power curve of the game as I know it. Pawns with virtually flawless stats could be produced at scale: a Warrior-Caste pawn that popped out the vat at age 13 or so would have 15-16~ in shooting and melee, and the other castes were equally specialized. Because of that, there was never a case of having to work around bad pawns or not having someone who could do a job, and since everyone was so specialized, they only ever worked on what they were good at: the Laborer Caste did all the cooking and farming, for example, and never, ever had to stop from doing those jobs so I had a virtually infinite supply of food even as the colony's population exploded. Adding Vanilla Skills Expanded to this mix only made it even stronger, because the pawns could get an expertise skill the moment they came out the vat and basically be the perfect worker, or you could stuff them back in the vat till 16 or so, which'd let you get them out when they're able to be used for ovum harvesting and thus make more embryos faster.

The result is the colony just went through the roof, much, much faster than I ever expected. Like, yikes. Lorewise in BT, the caste system can have serious jank to say the least (massive simplification) but it works REALLY well in this game, and got even better when it came to building this city...because since the city was divided into sections, no one ever had to walk across the entire map to work or rest or eat: everything they needed was always close by, making it more like five bases on the same map rather than one large one. That made building this gargantuan thing possible, and what was originally meant to be an experimental game, then a play of pretend at BattleTech's vatgrown weirdos, ended up taking on a life of its own and building a city so nice to live in that it probably upgraded the planet from Rimworld to Midworld or something.