Thoughts on Children and Population Growth

Good. I want to be concentrating on building and defending my town, and the hearthlings exist to run around and do my bidding while I twirl my moustash and giggle in a mencing way.They don’t have time to run around and look after babies. :slight_smile:

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i think the need then a new task familiytime or freetime :wink: so that they can make babys or handle the babys/teenagers ^^

our units will eventually do more “freetime” sorts of activities… very early on, the team talked about having units fly kites, toss a ball back and forth, go fishing, etc.

should be fun to see! :smile:

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lol jup that would be cool :smiley:

There is actually multiple solutions to this problem both in this thread and the “Dark subject” thread

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What problem? I never said there was a problem, I said I don’t want babies in the game. :slight_smile:

That problem.

Oh, OK, let me rephrase then. It’s not about the time, its about thew fact that I’m totally uninterested in having babies in my game. I’m totally cool with having a variety of “idle” animations and idle activities (the hip swaying one is getting a bit old, we need something else) but i’m utterly uninterested in my hearthlings doing other activities which prevent them from being available at the exact moment I want a building built or a mine dug out (or whatever). This includes (but is not limited to) looking after babies. For me, this is a game about building a cool town and defending it, and my hearthlings are agents. When I know I have 12 agents, I will take that into account when planning tasks I need performed, and it would piss me off if I actually only turn out to have 8 agents available to do the tasks because two of them have vanished into a house (that I mysteriously can’t see through the walls of right now) and two others are running around with babies.

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Well i guess you ran out of luck as loads of idle animations and activities will be added such as fishing babies could be a solution, playing cards, having a drink etc.)

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This is here where we actually had an idea where babies are mostly an accessory on the mother and where children actually help moving objects. Or another one where they start directly as children that will play more but not count directly as adults in the population scheme.
Or a third where children start as apprentices at the point they spawn and where there is only enough children to be able to take the place of their masters when they die.

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How did I run out of luck? Fishing, drinking, cards etc are all awesome idle animations. The keyword being “idle”. As soon as I give them a task, they’ll run away from their fishing etc and go and perform it (assuming it’s not an actual fisherman, which may well be an upcoming class, for all I know) because they’re not idle anymore.

Looking after babies isn’t an idle thing, it’s something they can’t just run away from which means they’re not available to me, There’s a difference.

If Radiant want to put toddlers stumbling around occasionally, and have an idle animation for workers to play with them, that’s fine, as long as when I give them a task, they go and do it and stop being idle.

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i can tell you there will be 100 percent an freetime task for the civz (first dispatcher already in the actionsfolder) ^^ and in there freetime they can do what they want … but dont ask me how much percent of there “normal” workrate this will use ^^

at the moment its only set the civz to light the fire and sit around it xD perhaps marschmallows hmmmmmmmmmmm xD

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First post for me :slight_smile:

I’m loving this game and really feeling the nostalgia in regards to games like the Settlers and also Cultures. This game is those games but just on steroids!

Are there plans/ideas for other ways to get people into your city? With the ability for players to create houses, place furniture, name our villagers ect that there could be more methods to gain more people in different ways. Can Hearthlings become couples/married and have a simple animation to have children that grow up and become part of your village/city.

In Cultures children born obviously couldn’t do anything until a certain age, but they would still have to eat ect. I would love to see this in as I think its pretty important if we’re able to conquer other villages later on in the game, then we need a lot more people. The process at the moment to gain more villages is not that great and I hope it changes, I just don’t like that approach personally, I would like for some random events to happen that allows me to make a choice, for example;

“5 Heathlings are looking for a home, would you accept them?” something simple like that.

I had another suggestion that involved giving villages ownership of houses, but another person in a thread has mentioned this. This would support the idea as “families” can live in a house hold.

There are many other ideas that I have but I would like to know the future plans for this, I would eventually down the track want to make a large town or several with decent size populations.

They already said this kinda thing wouldn’t happen… i believe they said it would be too complicated with their programs or something… stonehearth barely runs properly as it is…

no children anyways.

hey there @Farrugia88 welcome to the discourse :smile:

this idea has been suggested many times, though to my knowledge TR is trying to avoid having children in-game for… reasons…

so @SteveAdamo @Relyss should it be merged with this thread,


or is there a better one that i dont know about?

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welcome aboard! :smile:

agreed on the merge … :+1:

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Instead of adding new hearthlings through food, wealth etc… There should be a romance system that allows the females to fall in love with the male workers. Eventually having them get pregnant and birth offspring. The females would basically do nothing while they are pregnant. This would increase their hunger and needs. Having to create a home for her and man. They would also want cooked food and items like a comfy bed etc. I think this will add an awesome element to the game. Once they give birth the children are more susceptible to being killed by goblins etc until they mature after a few days. Sounds like a lot but i think it would be cool.

This was brought up in the last stream. @sdee said it would not be happening. Besides the difficulty of dealing with the whole process you mentioned, and the mechanics of stuff like goblins, it strongly affects game ratings (ESRB stuff).

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This has been discussed quite in depth in the following topics:
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/thoughts-on-children-and-population-growth/2957
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/dark-subject-what-happens-to-dead-people/592

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so then someday someone can make a mod when the engine is accessable :wink:

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