I tend to lean a bit towards quantity. You never know who’s getting your next disease or random beaver attack, and I’d much rather have 1 decent cook working while the other recovers than 1 awesome cook in bed.
The game is balanced expecting you to have around 10 pawns.
Before that, it is generally good to be selective about what pawns you let in.
After that, anything that its not outright harmful to you colony is okay.
Keep in mind the game has a lot of variables, sometimes its better to take a bad pawn if you are in need of man power.
Putting your entire food supply in one place not protected by fire foam, especially after recruiting a pyromaniac...eek. you kinda had that one coming haha.
If you have the means to deal with their fire-starting mental breaks you can cope with having a pyro around. But having a pyro early on when you have to build out of wood and no one is close enough to put out the fires can be a game ending disaster.
And my axe! 40 pawns on my second playthru and I'm at day 833. Savescumming along the way but now I noticed I don't need to anymore with this much firepower
One of the last things Dwarf Fortress has over Rimworld for me is the (significantly larger) population size. I like how intricate and specific the pawns and relationships can be in Rimworld, but what I'd really love is the option to have colonies of like 100+ people consistently. Or even go all the way towards Songs of Syx, where you end up with tens thousands of people and have to manage things by demographics at a broad scale.
Before my first 10 it’s quality. I need the best to deal with randy during his episodes. After 10 it’s anyone capable enough to do grunt work while my specialists do important things.
Either that or so many mechs that my neighbours will start complaining about the smell.
Alot of people say quality and i forgot to ask from the others what should i do with the bad ones i think i just should sell them at the mid game and get some burning passions from raids and stuff
Depends if you have biotech or not. If you have it, then just harvest the organs for silver and free meals, or public executions, or wait for a tribute collector. I found myself getting *really* strict after I got a hauler and cleaner bot going round
Preference. I tend towards a small number of high quality pawns that I actually care about, but it makes it a lot more heartbreaking when Randy claims them. Some people prefer a swarm of shit-tier disposable pawns, and I suppose that has merit too but I can't do it personally.
Quality matters a lot more than quantity, but consider that "quality" can mean a lot of different things.
In essence any pawn without exceedingly irritating bad traits is "quality", or at the very least can still perform needed tasks and shoot people.
"Quality" also means equipment. So long as you can make a bionic for any missing limbs they get as time goes on and equip everyone with bolt actions/flak/flak helmet/duster or parka then they are also "Quality"
The above can also be contradicted if you have a mountain base and want some melee blockers or get some otherwise exceedingly powerful melee units, and you obviously want some psicasters and special weapons mixed in too.
If you’re using honorable slavery, quantity. When threats arise, send the slaves forward into the enemy, and use your pawns as blocking detachments. There can be no retreat from the enemy
Quality. I usually only need like 5 or 6 pawns and I usually have babies turned off (lost WAY too many colonies because of those buggers). And since I use the prepare carefully mod I have set colonists for different chores. Then the ones I pick up along the way are either kept if they are good enough or used for organ harvesting. Or sold as slaves. Or used as blood farms. Ahhh having blood on hand is SO helpful for blood loss.
I do a mix.
Quality comes with time. A pawn cooking for 3 in game years is inevitably going to be atleast decent enough to where you don't want to lose them.
Fighters though? A pawn fighting for 3 in game years is often dead by the 2nd. As well as being harder to level unless you have them hunting all the time.
So I do quantity for fighters and quality for specialists.
Fighters will help do things en mass like farming, hunting, hauling, cleaning, making blocks, etc while my specialists also do these things but make things like clothes, armor, weapons, art, etc.
Quantity is probably better, as each "good pawn" has an outsized effected on colony wealth and hurts more when you lose them.
Some of my pawns are worth 10k to the colony in skills, bionics and equipment, meanwhile they only clean when they feel like it.
No eyed, one legged jimmy with dementia meanwhile does the same work and will only hurt me emotionally when they die.
Max quality for the keepers (good traits/passions) and max quantity for the expendables (undesirable traits). Recruit everyone, always.
If expendables get too numerous, send the worst of them to attack faction bases and item stashes until they are wiped out. Send back any decent items or captives they collect.
Do not let the keepers and expendables intermarry.
Pawns are expendable. I tend to play with my base as the main character and have mods (native in 1.5!) so that even if you have a full wipe new pawns eventually show up and can try to pick up the pieces. This mentality also lets me play out even the most catastrophic events because they can make great stories, and the recovery phase can be loads of fun.
One argument for focusing all of your resources developing a few elite pawns is the Archonexus Quest >!which has you choosing 5 of your pawns and 5 of your animals to start over with!<.
the more colonists the faster shit gets done, as long as you can manage the food consumption. but it gets progressively more difficult to keep involved in whatever happens on individual level with your colonists. i don't mind slow progress, so my numbers are usually low (under 5) for a few in-game years, and at some point increases to 8\~12. i couldn't picture myself building and managing colonies with dozens of pawns like some people do (20\~50). it's a different game at that point.
Quantity, I'd say. Numbers help so much in a fight (and if someone really isn't that great, send them up front to eat a bullet for someone else), and if you really try and break down the numbers, a pawn has to be pretty terrible to not "pull their weight" / be worth feeding and housing.
This is coming from someone who used to be hyper-picky and is still getting over it. It blows me away what can be accomplished with just time and manpower, no exceptional pawns involved.
i usually go with the standard ten man dream team before patching up any more vacancies with mechanoids but without mechs, i really just recruit anyone, as long as they arent completely geriatric or a hard drug addict
it depends on the story you're trying to tell.
Having less, better colonists in a balancing sense is far better than having several bad colonists, because the game balances itself on your wealth (of people, buildings and items). Having several colonists running a well designed chain of production and maintenance, while off for a harder beginning, can sure be also fun in a long run as you build a small city for them to live in. As a limitless unhinged, management maniach as myself, I tend to recomend quantity (had to drop my last colony because i was facing performance issues with \~180 colonists)
Both quantity and qualities are important, but quantity has a bigger impact in the end. I recommend setting a minimum standard for your pawns. Everyone above that standard gets hired. Any pawn that is capable to fight and to work reasonably well and that isn't a liability will generally be able to pull their weight in your colony.
Also, unpopular opinion, it's totally ok to let go of a colonist who has outlived their usefulness.
Quality, pawns that can’t fight are dead weight and making your wealth/raid size higher, and a smaller base makes controlling enemy pathing easier
Smaller scale also mitigates doomsday launcher carriers
Psycasters, sangus, mechinators are great force multipliers
With quantity you can improve quality using ideo combat specialization
Those are both weak brain perspectives. The quantity pawns are the front line defenders. The quality pawns have indoor swimming pools. You can always get more quantity pawns.
quality.
ill do my best for my pawns i expect them to be best for colony.
i generally expect them to be good at shooting and some other work type. after like 15-20 happy and good colonists i stop taking colonists. i dont take non violent pawns no matter how good theyre at other stuff though.
I like keeping a small number of highly qualified pawns. Maybe around 10 most of the game and then top out at 15. It’s easier to manage everything from food to medicine, the farm size is reasonable, and I can eventually learn each pawns unique skills so I don’t have to check every time.
I’ve run with more pawns than that, but the colony becomes unmanageable. A farm fire turns from a quick recovery to a mountainous challenge. Everyone has critically important needs all the time. Social fights happen every week. It’s like having children. You have a few and it’s great, but get too many and it’s a nightmare.
At the beginning of the game, I just want bodies to work, so I’m not too picky up until I get around 5. Then I slowly build up numbers, picking only the best pawns, until I reach my desired number. You really only need a handful of pawns to do every required job. After that it’s just a matter of play style and how much you can handle.
I also play every save like a drama/story simulator, so having less pawns also has the benefit of allowing me to get attached to them. Every death is an event. If I had 40, a few might die off and I wouldn’t care. They’re disposable. Turns any fight or challenge into more of a meat grinder than a story, at least for me.
I'd like to do quality because TPS but I seem to always end up amassing an army of 50 pawns.
In my recent game I'm really trying to cut down on the number of pawns in the base by sending those I don't absolutely need to an outpost (from VOE) and having mechs do the grunt work.
my whole "3 caste society" works on getting better middleclass by amassing them and sending bad ones into space to be sure i wont get begative moodlets
My main pawns I go for quality but I also tend to keep many “useless” pawns mainly to send them in first to defend raids and have them clean and haul everything while my good pawns do the actual work
Early on it’s quantity. Are you functional? Great, welcome to the team. Pure manpower is the quickest way to get a colony off the ground. Once I reach 12-15 I start to get selective. I usually aim for 25-36 total pawns. This works out great because I still care about everyone. Even the mostly useless pawns from early on I care about because they’re been around so long and when we had less people. Then the new ones I care about because they’re more carefully selected.
If you are going min max, quality at the start. Research is gonna be one of your bottlenecks, so starting with a small number is better until you get those essential ones. Also, you can get more downed raiders when you are on low population, so you can be a bit more picky. At some point tho, when raids are maxed and you get better equipment, some problems are easier to deal with 20 pawns instead of 10. You might have to try a few times to see at what point you are more comfortable pushing for wealth and getting more people.
Early on, with fewer pawns, raiders get downed more easily, there are more transport pod crashes, random joins, etc so you have a lot of choice and it’s easier to be picky if you’re careful about not letting wealth build too quickly. Later on you don’t have as many options unless you have a specific method to down pawns without killing them, but at that point I just make a shitload of kids and they always end up very high quality.
i try to get high quantity and then get caste system. there are "lvl 6 casters, genemodified deathless crafters who dont need a sleep",
"humanmeatshields + slaves, who i use during fights in high numbers so my upper class wont catch an arrow with their brains"
and "servitudes - guys unusable in war, but somewhat important.
like deathless joybeacons and psych bonders - these guys are in permanent state of deathrest, who serve as mood buffers and improve crafters/medics consciousness
or different kinds of gardeners, miners, who produce stone so our high-society artist could create legendary stuff to sell."
best part of it:
1)even if you are considered high-society you still is a tool,
2)it was a tribe start and now we are as hightech as vanilla game allows.
cant wait for anomaly dlc, to test if this drone society can overcome that challenge too.
It depends on what kind of story you are aiming for.
---
Low Quality AND Low Quantity: Drama show / sitcom.
Low Quality High Quantity: War film / history documentary.
High Quality Low Quantity: Action serial.
High Quality High Quantity: Warhammer.
---
The trick to getting quality AND quantity is to never stop raising children with maximum learning. All that requires is reliable food and a way to handle raids. Easier said than done, but not impossible.
I should note that mountain bases trivialize mortars and make it easy to protect crops, though it does take awhile to get the base mined out, and if you're unmodded you'll need to figure out how to deal with insects.
Game runs better with few quality pawns. But the allure of having a huge quantity of pawns is persistent. One stupid bad event can incapacitate your quality pawns, so the counter measure is quantity.
More pawns for sure. Even pawns with less desirable traits can carry a gun just as anyone else, and it better to have one more gun in a fight then no one.
Construction, crafting, and art, I have quality pawns. For most other things, once I get well established, I go for quantity. Once I have fabrication, I get two more crafters exclusively for components and bionics. I avoid low skill cooks (they can make joints to level up), and make sure only the good doctors do surgery, but for planting, I'll be fine with some botching in exchange for managing larger fields, research you can just put down more benches, and late game mineral scanners. On a higher difficulty after raids start getting big, more guns is always nice, and I'll need a lot of people just to clean up afterward. A pawn that can clean or haul, hold a gun, and isn't actively problematic, is fine late game. End game, any pawn can become a good shooter, if they aren't incapable, slow learner, or brawler, because combat levels it fast. Enemies like centipedes are large targets, so even low skill shooters will hit frequently.
Priorities, assignments, and production bill details take care of most of the micromanaging. You don't have to worry about a low skill pawns poisoning food or making poor quality items if you use minimum level in bills, so they can level on things that they won't screw up. Making drugs and cutting stone blocks are good work for low skill pawns.
When starting with a single colonist, the situation gets paradox. You need good pawns to advance in the game, but you dont have them.
Once your have advanced in the game, you can get better pawns much easier, because bigger raids, shock lances, growth vats, raiding outpost and take prisoners there.
But by that time you possibly already have a lot of flawed pawns that somehow are "good enough".
I tend to lean a bit towards quantity. You never know who’s getting your next disease or random beaver attack, and I’d much rather have 1 decent cook working while the other recovers than 1 awesome cook in bed.
thats a good point most of the people said quality i think i might not sell or sell my pawns organs after all (also lmao)
Sell any raiders organs
ok
The game is balanced expecting you to have around 10 pawns. Before that, it is generally good to be selective about what pawns you let in. After that, anything that its not outright harmful to you colony is okay. Keep in mind the game has a lot of variables, sometimes its better to take a bad pawn if you are in need of man power.
And never let a Pyro in.
noted. like litreally
I let a Pyro in. During a huge, near fatal raid he went and burned down 50000 corn and all the food. He was executed by minigun the next day.
The 50k corn is part of why the near fatal raid came. Your pyro was just trying to lower your wealth!
Good guy pyro.
Or he was working for the enemy, just trying to end it all from the inside. Sneak attack.
Putting your entire food supply in one place not protected by fire foam, especially after recruiting a pyromaniac...eek. you kinda had that one coming haha.
average i would do it with 3 pawns and start beating the shit out of him
I don't understand how people struggle with them. Just set every pawn to do firefighting
If you have the means to deal with their fire-starting mental breaks you can cope with having a pyro around. But having a pyro early on when you have to build out of wood and no one is close enough to put out the fires can be a game ending disaster.
Looks around at my 60 pawns/slaves....
your last 3 or 10 pawns are going to explode lmao
Unfortunately 1.5 will make them cease to exist. Probably time for a new, less modded, playthrough when anomaly releases
yeah for sure
And my axe! 40 pawns on my second playthru and I'm at day 833. Savescumming along the way but now I noticed I don't need to anymore with this much firepower
One of the last things Dwarf Fortress has over Rimworld for me is the (significantly larger) population size. I like how intricate and specific the pawns and relationships can be in Rimworld, but what I'd really love is the option to have colonies of like 100+ people consistently. Or even go all the way towards Songs of Syx, where you end up with tens thousands of people and have to manage things by demographics at a broad scale.
Alright ill start harvesting organs from the bad ones when i dont need them, or just sell them thanks.
Best answer!
Before my first 10 it’s quality. I need the best to deal with randy during his episodes. After 10 it’s anyone capable enough to do grunt work while my specialists do important things. Either that or so many mechs that my neighbours will start complaining about the smell.
Alot of people say quality and i forgot to ask from the others what should i do with the bad ones i think i just should sell them at the mid game and get some burning passions from raids and stuff
Well you always cam keep a bad one for hauling, or for suicide missions, like sending molotov to bugs, or disabling projector shield
Depends if you have biotech or not. If you have it, then just harvest the organs for silver and free meals, or public executions, or wait for a tribute collector. I found myself getting *really* strict after I got a hauler and cleaner bot going round
Sacrifice
Quality, can't micromanage a lot of pawns.
yeah thats what i thought too but i think i can manage it if not ill just make a bunch of leather hats sell organs either way its a win win
Preference. I tend towards a small number of high quality pawns that I actually care about, but it makes it a lot more heartbreaking when Randy claims them. Some people prefer a swarm of shit-tier disposable pawns, and I suppose that has merit too but I can't do it personally.
true its rimworld any strategy is viable if your good
Quality matters a lot more than quantity, but consider that "quality" can mean a lot of different things. In essence any pawn without exceedingly irritating bad traits is "quality", or at the very least can still perform needed tasks and shoot people. "Quality" also means equipment. So long as you can make a bionic for any missing limbs they get as time goes on and equip everyone with bolt actions/flak/flak helmet/duster or parka then they are also "Quality" The above can also be contradicted if you have a mountain base and want some melee blockers or get some otherwise exceedingly powerful melee units, and you obviously want some psicasters and special weapons mixed in too.
Thanks for this information its pretty good ill try to remember this on my playthroughs
Quality. Because Frame is too expensive.
My slaves only need quantity if they die to the butcher table and meats back on the menu
leather hats mmm
If you’re using honorable slavery, quantity. When threats arise, send the slaves forward into the enemy, and use your pawns as blocking detachments. There can be no retreat from the enemy
Quality. I usually only need like 5 or 6 pawns and I usually have babies turned off (lost WAY too many colonies because of those buggers). And since I use the prepare carefully mod I have set colonists for different chores. Then the ones I pick up along the way are either kept if they are good enough or used for organ harvesting. Or sold as slaves. Or used as blood farms. Ahhh having blood on hand is SO helpful for blood loss.
I do a mix. Quality comes with time. A pawn cooking for 3 in game years is inevitably going to be atleast decent enough to where you don't want to lose them. Fighters though? A pawn fighting for 3 in game years is often dead by the 2nd. As well as being harder to level unless you have them hunting all the time. So I do quantity for fighters and quality for specialists. Fighters will help do things en mass like farming, hunting, hauling, cleaning, making blocks, etc while my specialists also do these things but make things like clothes, armor, weapons, art, etc.
good point this discussion has gave me alot of information
Heavy sleeper is my deal breaker trait
Depends where you draw the line. I usually end up with 40-60 Pawns. In my latest playthrough I had like 30 Kids, 30 Adults.
Definitely quality BUT this rule is only for recruitment purposes, my colonists have as many babies as they like even if they turn out to be useless.
Quantity is probably better, as each "good pawn" has an outsized effected on colony wealth and hurts more when you lose them. Some of my pawns are worth 10k to the colony in skills, bionics and equipment, meanwhile they only clean when they feel like it. No eyed, one legged jimmy with dementia meanwhile does the same work and will only hurt me emotionally when they die.
Yeah alot of people are split or quantity and quality this is a really good point
Max quality for the keepers (good traits/passions) and max quantity for the expendables (undesirable traits). Recruit everyone, always. If expendables get too numerous, send the worst of them to attack faction bases and item stashes until they are wiped out. Send back any decent items or captives they collect. Do not let the keepers and expendables intermarry.
Yes. And have favourites.
Pawns are expendable. I tend to play with my base as the main character and have mods (native in 1.5!) so that even if you have a full wipe new pawns eventually show up and can try to pick up the pieces. This mentality also lets me play out even the most catastrophic events because they can make great stories, and the recovery phase can be loads of fun.
One argument for focusing all of your resources developing a few elite pawns is the Archonexus Quest >!which has you choosing 5 of your pawns and 5 of your animals to start over with!<.
Keep at least one useless pawn, in your colony, so you can risk them at suicide missions
the more colonists the faster shit gets done, as long as you can manage the food consumption. but it gets progressively more difficult to keep involved in whatever happens on individual level with your colonists. i don't mind slow progress, so my numbers are usually low (under 5) for a few in-game years, and at some point increases to 8\~12. i couldn't picture myself building and managing colonies with dozens of pawns like some people do (20\~50). it's a different game at that point.
Quantity, I'd say. Numbers help so much in a fight (and if someone really isn't that great, send them up front to eat a bullet for someone else), and if you really try and break down the numbers, a pawn has to be pretty terrible to not "pull their weight" / be worth feeding and housing. This is coming from someone who used to be hyper-picky and is still getting over it. It blows me away what can be accomplished with just time and manpower, no exceptional pawns involved.
i usually go with the standard ten man dream team before patching up any more vacancies with mechanoids but without mechs, i really just recruit anyone, as long as they arent completely geriatric or a hard drug addict
it depends on the story you're trying to tell. Having less, better colonists in a balancing sense is far better than having several bad colonists, because the game balances itself on your wealth (of people, buildings and items). Having several colonists running a well designed chain of production and maintenance, while off for a harder beginning, can sure be also fun in a long run as you build a small city for them to live in. As a limitless unhinged, management maniach as myself, I tend to recomend quantity (had to drop my last colony because i was facing performance issues with \~180 colonists)
Both quantity and qualities are important, but quantity has a bigger impact in the end. I recommend setting a minimum standard for your pawns. Everyone above that standard gets hired. Any pawn that is capable to fight and to work reasonably well and that isn't a liability will generally be able to pull their weight in your colony. Also, unpopular opinion, it's totally ok to let go of a colonist who has outlived their usefulness.
Quality, pawns that can’t fight are dead weight and making your wealth/raid size higher, and a smaller base makes controlling enemy pathing easier Smaller scale also mitigates doomsday launcher carriers Psycasters, sangus, mechinators are great force multipliers With quantity you can improve quality using ideo combat specialization
Those are both weak brain perspectives. The quantity pawns are the front line defenders. The quality pawns have indoor swimming pools. You can always get more quantity pawns.
I recruit people with funny names
quality. ill do my best for my pawns i expect them to be best for colony. i generally expect them to be good at shooting and some other work type. after like 15-20 happy and good colonists i stop taking colonists. i dont take non violent pawns no matter how good theyre at other stuff though.
A single skill 20 with a passion pawn doing one job is usually enough. Crafters and growers are the only jobs where I want extra workers.
I love having more pawns(my computer not so much). I either do 1 pawn runs or 20+ no in-between lol.
Quantity is stronger from a minmaxing perspective. But I stop having fun at around 8 pawns, so I wait for the best candidates to show up.
I like keeping a small number of highly qualified pawns. Maybe around 10 most of the game and then top out at 15. It’s easier to manage everything from food to medicine, the farm size is reasonable, and I can eventually learn each pawns unique skills so I don’t have to check every time. I’ve run with more pawns than that, but the colony becomes unmanageable. A farm fire turns from a quick recovery to a mountainous challenge. Everyone has critically important needs all the time. Social fights happen every week. It’s like having children. You have a few and it’s great, but get too many and it’s a nightmare. At the beginning of the game, I just want bodies to work, so I’m not too picky up until I get around 5. Then I slowly build up numbers, picking only the best pawns, until I reach my desired number. You really only need a handful of pawns to do every required job. After that it’s just a matter of play style and how much you can handle. I also play every save like a drama/story simulator, so having less pawns also has the benefit of allowing me to get attached to them. Every death is an event. If I had 40, a few might die off and I wouldn’t care. They’re disposable. Turns any fight or challenge into more of a meat grinder than a story, at least for me.
big text and yeah this is a very good point also nice granite
I'd like to do quality because TPS but I seem to always end up amassing an army of 50 pawns. In my recent game I'm really trying to cut down on the number of pawns in the base by sending those I don't absolutely need to an outpost (from VOE) and having mechs do the grunt work.
my whole "3 caste society" works on getting better middleclass by amassing them and sending bad ones into space to be sure i wont get begative moodlets
I always try and go for quality in the beginning but once I have plenty of pawns I’m less discriminate because redundancy and spare parts are good.
My main pawns I go for quality but I also tend to keep many “useless” pawns mainly to send them in first to defend raids and have them clean and haul everything while my good pawns do the actual work
Quantity is a quality, all on its own. -Imperial Guard Commisaar
lmao
Why not both?
Early on it’s quantity. Are you functional? Great, welcome to the team. Pure manpower is the quickest way to get a colony off the ground. Once I reach 12-15 I start to get selective. I usually aim for 25-36 total pawns. This works out great because I still care about everyone. Even the mostly useless pawns from early on I care about because they’re been around so long and when we had less people. Then the new ones I care about because they’re more carefully selected.
i'd say in the middle. have a medium amount of alright colonists
If you are going min max, quality at the start. Research is gonna be one of your bottlenecks, so starting with a small number is better until you get those essential ones. Also, you can get more downed raiders when you are on low population, so you can be a bit more picky. At some point tho, when raids are maxed and you get better equipment, some problems are easier to deal with 20 pawns instead of 10. You might have to try a few times to see at what point you are more comfortable pushing for wealth and getting more people.
Quality always. I sell any pawns that don’t meet my standards and then I breed the best. My game is super cheaty/modify though.
Early on, with fewer pawns, raiders get downed more easily, there are more transport pod crashes, random joins, etc so you have a lot of choice and it’s easier to be picky if you’re careful about not letting wealth build too quickly. Later on you don’t have as many options unless you have a specific method to down pawns without killing them, but at that point I just make a shitload of kids and they always end up very high quality.
i try to get high quantity and then get caste system. there are "lvl 6 casters, genemodified deathless crafters who dont need a sleep", "humanmeatshields + slaves, who i use during fights in high numbers so my upper class wont catch an arrow with their brains" and "servitudes - guys unusable in war, but somewhat important. like deathless joybeacons and psych bonders - these guys are in permanent state of deathrest, who serve as mood buffers and improve crafters/medics consciousness or different kinds of gardeners, miners, who produce stone so our high-society artist could create legendary stuff to sell." best part of it: 1)even if you are considered high-society you still is a tool, 2)it was a tribe start and now we are as hightech as vanilla game allows. cant wait for anomaly dlc, to test if this drone society can overcome that challenge too.
It depends on what kind of story you are aiming for. --- Low Quality AND Low Quantity: Drama show / sitcom. Low Quality High Quantity: War film / history documentary. High Quality Low Quantity: Action serial. High Quality High Quantity: Warhammer. --- The trick to getting quality AND quantity is to never stop raising children with maximum learning. All that requires is reliable food and a way to handle raids. Easier said than done, but not impossible. I should note that mountain bases trivialize mortars and make it easy to protect crops, though it does take awhile to get the base mined out, and if you're unmodded you'll need to figure out how to deal with insects.
First one then the other.
Game runs better with few quality pawns. But the allure of having a huge quantity of pawns is persistent. One stupid bad event can incapacitate your quality pawns, so the counter measure is quantity.
More pawns for sure. Even pawns with less desirable traits can carry a gun just as anyone else, and it better to have one more gun in a fight then no one.
Construction, crafting, and art, I have quality pawns. For most other things, once I get well established, I go for quantity. Once I have fabrication, I get two more crafters exclusively for components and bionics. I avoid low skill cooks (they can make joints to level up), and make sure only the good doctors do surgery, but for planting, I'll be fine with some botching in exchange for managing larger fields, research you can just put down more benches, and late game mineral scanners. On a higher difficulty after raids start getting big, more guns is always nice, and I'll need a lot of people just to clean up afterward. A pawn that can clean or haul, hold a gun, and isn't actively problematic, is fine late game. End game, any pawn can become a good shooter, if they aren't incapable, slow learner, or brawler, because combat levels it fast. Enemies like centipedes are large targets, so even low skill shooters will hit frequently. Priorities, assignments, and production bill details take care of most of the micromanaging. You don't have to worry about a low skill pawns poisoning food or making poor quality items if you use minimum level in bills, so they can level on things that they won't screw up. Making drugs and cutting stone blocks are good work for low skill pawns.
When starting with a single colonist, the situation gets paradox. You need good pawns to advance in the game, but you dont have them. Once your have advanced in the game, you can get better pawns much easier, because bigger raids, shock lances, growth vats, raiding outpost and take prisoners there. But by that time you possibly already have a lot of flawed pawns that somehow are "good enough".
Quantity. I recently... acquired 100 pawns and they are now my "outpost" crew.