Power Corrupts: OK, so my village was successful and self-sustaining; and after a while I began to meddle in things with the Village Sim Editor. I reduced everybody's Breeding Skill to zero, and began to favor the villagers I liked by reducing their ages when they reached geezerhood, while letting the others die off. Eventually I had 38 villagers; 6 men and 32 women. What can I say? The women are cuter. I paused the game and saved a copy with Village Sim Toolkit.

The Evil Experiment: Using the Editor, I made each of my women master of one of the ordinary life skills; and made them all Master Parents too, checking the 'Breeding' preference while I was at it. I made all the males into 'Rookies," that is, no skills and no preferences at all. I then made all the villagers the same age. Returning to the game, (still paused) I dragged all the drones, er, males, to the lagoon for a swim (so I could keep track of them). Then I unpaused the game.

Observations: As the map came up, I heard slurping noises and noticed my population was up by 2. However, Tomo was the only male Going Indoors. It took him a LONG time to get there. Not counting the half-dozen or so women who accosted him and then ran away (playing hard to get, I suppose); Tomo was successfully waylaid 21 times and fathered a total of 13 children before he even saw the inside of the Honeymoon Hut. How much action did the other 5 guys get? None. Zero. Zip. Nada.

Confirming Experiments: I restored the game and repeated the experiment with the same initial conditions except I "retired" Tomo. The result was essentially the same, only now Pili was the apparent alpha stud muffin. Yet again, with both Tomo and Pili gone, it was Ghali.

Conclusions: While I did what I could to make all the males equal (in this case, equally useless), I could not change their positions in the game's villager database. In all three cases the women went for the male with the lowest number; that is, the male closest to the top of the list. All other things being equal, the *#&$% firstborn gets all the booty.

is that a program? "village sim editor"

The Village Sim Toolkit is something that a user of Village Sim wrote. It's a hack program that allows you to edit certain facets of the game - that's what was used in this case. It was not developed by LDW and is not an authorized editor - use it at your own risk.

That being said, a link to it can be found by searching the forums for Village Sim Toolkit.

Go to http://jhywu.tripod.com/

The Toolkit allows you to store (save) and reload 5 different villages. The Editor allows you to fiddle with various statistics and villager characteristics.

You will find that some of the tweaks have odd results, so be careful about editing a game you care about. Also, the editor respects registration; i.e. if you havn't paid for Village Sim, you can't do much with the editor.

Brett, I have to say that not only was your experiment interesting, but you presented it in a very entertaining fashion. People have reported many times that there appears to be a "village stud muffin" phenomenon in the game, and you set about to prove it. If you look at some of the discussions from last April, you'll see some pretty hilarious dialogue about the "dating" behavior of these villagers.

Very dangerous and beta version stage too.

Archmage, if you are referring to the latest version of Village Sim Editor, it's not dangerous. I have used it up until v1.1 is out.

I hardly use it except for conducting breeding experiments. I wanna see if a male and a female who were masters in say Farming and Breeding, will have offsprings that are at least Trainee Farmers as soon as they are born. But I was disappointed.

Now VSE and VST don't support v1.1, so no more experiment for me. Anyway, good job, Brett! You made my day!

I'm kindof embarassed to say on this forum... but I also was using the editor with v1. I had it so most of my villagers were about the same age. They would get old and die in big groups. I would let enough die so that there was less than 65. At this point they would breed like crazy. This would boost the population up. Then (muah ha ha) AFTER a bunch were born, but BEFORE they had a chance to bury their dead, I'd resurect them. At this point (as long as more were born than burried)I would have a population greater than 65. Each time I did this, the populaiton would increase buy howevermany more were born than burried... I had a population of 99 for quite a while. VS handled it pretty well. It never crashed

VS editor is on beta stages, don't forget this. And you have said that: it don't supports v1.1. Maybe on a future release. And 99...