I've been playing for 7 real-time hours so far, and there are a couple of things I'm wondering. 1. What is a good food supply so that I can put my people to work on other things? My Harvesting is level 2, everything else is level 1. I realize that researching is very important, so I have 2 people researching and the other 3 are farming, and no building or clearing is getting done. For some reason I can't get my food supply above 270-ish. 2. When is a good time to start having kids? 3. When you go back to the menu, is the game paused? And if your looking at the map and just turn your palm off, does the game still continue without you?

Thanks for any help!

1) It's generally a good idea to keep the food supply above 350, if possible, so that your villagers won't be worried about food.

2) Once your villagers have learned how to farm, you should be able to safely increase your population to around 10-15, depending upon your difficulty setting.

3) The game is never truly paused unless you set the speed to "paused" on the preferences menu. If you turn off your Palm when the game is running (unless it's paused), the game will appear to have been running the entire time it was off when you turn the Palm back on. The downside to doing that is that the game is saved only when you exit. If you regularly just turn your Palm off with the game running and something "bad" happens (like a soft reset or crash of some sort), you will lose the things that your villagers have achieved, since the game will revert to the last time it was saved. If you've never saved the game, you'll have to start a new one.

As with all computers and software, the safest thing is to save periodically - anytime you've accomplished things that you don't want to lose. I've never had a computer yet that didn't do bad things sometimes, and Palms are no exception!

I have about 8 kids all but one is female? any trick to getting more males??

Breed more! Seriously, just as in real life (I have only grandsons and no granddaughters), sometimes things get a little out of balance. It's most noticeable when you have very few villagers, and usually becomes more balanced as your population grows. Be glad you have mostly females. It's a lot harder to fix when you have only one female and all the rest are males! That's part of the complexity and challenge of the game.

Or real life, for that matter?

Who here wants to bring back the days where there is one 'master' breeder male in every village? His job is to make as many women pregnent as he can.

I wonder whether in the 1.1 patch they will put in the functionality of other jealous males. If one guy does too much breeding, the others throw him in the ocean (or from the temple roof).