Having done lots of games at the low and medium difficulty level, I thought I had pretty much got the strategy for this game sorted. So this last couple of weeks I have been trying it at hard level.

I am convinced it is impossible.

I have tried about 10 games, and have never managed to get further than level two farming, with no other tech levels - whatever I try, I can't get enough food to keep them going (even with the basic 5 villagers all set on food) before they weaken and die. I initially thought - Ok, slowly get the village population up by keeping one breeding while the others farm, but then I realised that without sufficient tech back up you can't breed them successfully as it has 2 effects - taking a woman off farming, so the others get less food and get weakened, and also then you have kids running round eating food but not being productive. Also, you can't research enough to get to higher tech levels, because then they all die because you haven't got enough tasked to harvesting. Its a catch 22 and you can't get any further.

My most recent game has been the best - I had got to a point where I had 9 villagers - 5 adults (2 women and 3 men), and 4 kids - (3 boys and a girl). Food 150, tech 11000, level 2 farming, level one the rest. Hut built, beach cleared. all were on farming. one of them was on red bar for health (but seemed to be increasing as the food went up) but the rest were all green and healthy - I left it for an hour to find that a monkey had visited my research table and given me 2000 plus tech points - taking me to 13000 - but 4 of my adults have died, 1 is on the tiniest sliver of red, all the kids show weakened, and they are all still under 10 (including two aged 2 and 4) . The food store is still 100 plus, and the farm is still there. but I only have one adult who is practically on the point of death. All the kids are boys too, so even if by some miracle they do survive I'm still going nowhere fast.

I really don't know how I can ever get past this point!

I really think it is impossible. Unless anyone can help?

Maybe it really is too hard. Anyone having success on hard difficulty?

Ah... I guess its not just me then!

I can share a few pointers with you that will help you with playing on hard in the 1.0 release of Village Sim. The game balance will be tweaked for the 1.1 update to Village Sim, so these hints shouldn't be necessary for it. I won't divulge the inner workings of the game, but the following changes to your approach should help tremendously in this version of Village Sim:

• Run the game only at slow speed.
• Keep the game on as much as possible, rather than off (or running another application)

These two things will help tremendously by maximizing your villagers' productivity and minimizing food consumption. I'd really like to hear how your game goes if you try it this way!

Arthur, the hard setting is likely impossible unless you play the game the way I outlined. Doing it that way, I've played pretty far into the game before I moved on to testing other things.

slow speed takes forever though... not sure I can stand it! I can't leave it on all day, got to work, so will have to pause until I can give it my attention and then it will take years to do! and how do i keep the game on? do you mean i have to leave in in the cradle all the time to stop it switching off?

incidentally I tried adjusting the clock on the palm in a few games to see if i could speed up my playing of the game - I had done this before in the lower difficulties, and it made it less frustrating waiting (I don't have much time during the day to look aty it, even in the evenings). I only moved it 10 or 20 mins at a time max, but it didn't seem to work. the effects were variable - sometimes they seemed to be productive, other times the food stayed persitently on 0 despite me setting them all to work. generally they appeared not to be productive during that time, so the health levels went down much quicker. hopeless!

That's the problem right now, but it's the only way I know of to succeed on the most difficult setting. It may not be worth the effort to attempt it in this release. My Palm devices are only used for testing, so I can afford the luxury of running the game that way!

The only way to keep the Palm from turning itself off is to play the game constantly or keep it in the cradle. When you use the clock forwarding technique, the game is going to behave exactly as it does when it's off - not a good way to maximize your villagers' performance.

I am doing hard level right now. Granted, I got a whale early on and that helped a great deal in the beginning foodwise, and I was able to put all 5 villagers on research for a year or so.

My biggest problem with hard level is that my farmers will stop fishing to push the boulder when food is really low. I keep having to dump them into the ocean.

I have found that I can go from having over 3000 food to only around 400 very quickly. It seems to take forever for anyone to become a master anything. But then again, this IS supposed to be hard.

My suggestion for hard level is to not breed at all until you have harvesting level 3 and the beach cleared. (I almost killed my little villagers by having 3 women with babies and suddenly realizing that I couldn't fish because of all the debris)

I'm sure I can remember seeing that another user finished playing the hard level, and in a very good time. She may have more tips for success, but, I was upto 200+ hrs and still struggling

Treefern, I think that was me you're talking about - I've been offline for a couple of days so have just seen this thread.

I finished a Hard game in 174 hours. I ran it on fast while I was watching it - I was sitting with it in the cradle beside me all day, so I could jump in any time they got short of food or had any other problems.

After about attempt #5, I also ran it on Slow overnight - in the cradle switched on. I found that if you leave it sitting on the map, you don't get events and you don't seem to get the freeze or reset issues either - so I could leave it all night with the villagers either researching or farming.

As StacyDlacy says, it's easy to drop major amounts of food if you're not paying attention. This happened to me mostly when I exited the game - even going back in a few seconds later decimated the food count.

Leaving the game running seems to make the food figure go up faster (and drop slower) than if the Palm is switched off or the game is exited - although this could just have been a false impression so I won't be upset if Arthur contradicts me here.

I'd suggest Pausing the game if you can't stay with it.