You're exactly right! The game is much 'friendlier' with respect to food supply and research when the game is on (and slow speed is friendlier than medium or fast). The balance will be improved for the v1.1 update.

In that case, I'll have to work quickly because I actually kind of like the challenge. I love taking on tasks that others say are impossible-don't ask...don't know why.

Although, so far, I'm about 7 attempt in (making progress) and the only time that I was actually doing pretty well...my pda crashed when I tried to turn it on and I had to hard reset it, and of course I hadn't backed this particular game yet. Currently, four out of my five villagers have died and the only reason that the one survived was because I told him to do something that turned him into a healthy 10-year old. So now I have him storing up as much food as he can. Hopefully he can store up enough food for a barrel of babies to live off of until they grow up (so far, no barrel).

I think that I might end up starting #8 in the near future. Eh, oh well. It would be nice to see some healthy villagers again. lol
-spaceman

I'm a lot like that, too. I love challenges, and will keep at something long after others have gone off to do something else! Even after v1.1 is released you could always keep a copy of v1.0 around somewhere and install it when you want to take on another desperate situation!

That's how it is with the most difficult setting. When I was running all of the game balance tests, I can't tell you how many dead villagers I had! And, since I was doing tests, I couldn't even intervene to help them! It was so sad!

Ok. I succeeded. Here are my stats.

Realtime Hours Played: 222
Villagers Born: 98
Villagers Cured: 157
Villagers Buried: 28
Oldest Villager: 83
Max Village Population: 65
Food Harvested: 506758
Crabs Caught 3848
Total Tech Points Earned: 778715
Tech Levels Completed: 12
Island Events Encountered: 16
Puzzles Solved: 12 of 12

Puzzle 1: 52
Puzzle 2: 46
Puzzle 3: 78
Puzzle 4: 99
Puzzle 5: 102
Puzzle 6: 124
Puzzle 7: 75
Puzzle 8: 120
Puzzle 9: 139
Puzzle 10: 222
Puzzle 11: 222
Puzzle 12: 149

Played on Fast mode with game paused overnight.
The GC took FOREVER to show up, but then wasted no time taking care of Puzzle 11. I had no major catastrophes and only a couple of times when I had problems with food. Nobody ever died of starvation. At around hour 219, I had about 15 people die for no discernable reason, but I was happy for that to happen because I was still waiting for little GC and had maxed out my population.

Very nice! Few people have managed to pull off that particular feat! Congratulations!

Congratulations - if the GC had showed up a bit earlier, your time would have been better than mine! I got Puzzle 12 in 158.

This is really interesting! So you don't need the GC for puzzle 12? I guess I really don't know what it is then. Well, I think it must have something to do with the cactus because they keep looking at it but if I put someone there, they start to study medicine and I really don't need any more doctors right now.

I was planning to go on Hard Fast next time but maybe I'll do Hard Slow. I think I'll keep the population around 50 or so instead of getting up to 65 so there'll be room for the GC. I'm assuming you have to do puzzles 1 to 9 before the GC will arrive, right? Of course, it might be hard to keep the population at 50 because, once they get turned on, it's not that easy to turn them off and there are a lot of dirty old men going after the young girls!

Mine is boring right now because all the tech points have been earned and we've lots and lots of food and nobody has much to do except figure out puzzle 12.

Puzzle 12 is the killer - most people need help to find it - the villagers won't find it on their own. Take a look at the first (or maybe second) post in this forum as to how to get hints.

There's really not much point in trying to keep the population down - after all, the GC has to come from somewhere and no babies = no GC.

Good Luck with the Hard level - I've gone back to easy and I'm experimenting (unintentionally) with how many ways I can kill off an entire village in the shortest possible time!

I had a minor die-off in my game that essentailly took me from 25 pop back to 5. So I started the great breeding program. At one point I had 7 farmers, 14 women nursing and about 20 children running around. Its a surprise the garden didn't sprout on its own just from all the nature calls!