This is something I’ve been thinking a bout for a long while. As of right now we cap out our town at 20 hearthlings (via daily updates) but we have a town full of men/women and something always strikes me as odd… how come there are no kids? How come there is never a romance in town? Friendship? Rivalries? Nothing?
So this is a 2 part suggestion.
Part 1) I’d love to see relationships in our towns. Two characters can become friends, lovers or rivals. Rivals will occasionally “argue” when standing near each other in town. Arguments will give both hearthlings a small stat reduction for a few hours. Something like "Had an argument - ". Putting their beds further apart would reduce the chance of this happening. Friends works the same but as an opposite. Hearthlings get a small stat boost for a few hours when talking with a friend. Something like “Talked with my friend! +”. Putting beds closer to each other will increase the chance of this happening more often. And lastly, Hearthlings should be able to fall in love. 2 hearthlings can randomly fall in love and receive a significant stat boost when seeing each other. Something like “Talked with my lover! + + +”. When 2 hearthlings are in love you can build a double wide bed that both can be assigned to (only hearthlings in love can be assigned to a double bed). This guarantees they wake up with the lover bonus.
Part 2) So this is the fun part. Although I don’t think it necessary to include sex in any way, It would be great to see (after the 20 citizen milestone is achieved). SOMETIMES couples who share a double bed to sometimes have a child. Like other games, children are immortal and would be ignored by enemies, although they will still run away scared from them. Over a fairly long period they transform into a new citizen your town. This would be the only way to grow your town over 20 citizens. But, while a child they eat a lot of food, run around doing essentially nothing but playing and would still require you to build a bed for them. If you skip building them a bed, the child takes the double bed and it’s parents sleep on the ground.
This is a fairly unintrusive way to slowly grow out your town over time and gives some more incentive to build a town a specific way to obtain optimal happiness/stat results. However, the stat boost or drain would be small so you could ignore all of this until end game. Sure your hearthling will be not as happy if they are always seeing their rival all the time, but like in real life it isn’t going to be a major game changer. hearthlings will still do their job to the best of their ability as always.
Anyhow… just something I had been thinking about for a while now. Not sure if anyone else would be into something like this but i thought I’d finally take a minute on my lunch break to share it with you all.