Here's some tactics that I use, but it takes some work on your part.

I never have a VV selected on "parenting", and when I'm trying to get them to mate, I always select the mother. I try to give the VV another primary skill like farming or research so parenting isn't the only one they have skills in. It won't 100% stop them breeding on their own, but it does drastically cut down. In my last game that went on for many generations I only had a parent breed with a child once without my prompting.

I enjoyed keeping an extensive family tree and wrote down who the parents were of each child, so I could remember when they grew up. Since I wrote down that information, I never bothered to give them surnames, so I'm not sure how that would work. Your Phillip Fry and Amy Wong would have a daughter named Lucy Fry-Wong? Then Lucy would mate with a VV whose name is John Green-Smith, so what surname would you pass on to THEIR child? Sara Fry-Wong-Green-Smith, sounds a bit cumbersome to me LOL, but maybe someone else who has used surnames can tell us how they did it.

Anyway, by the time the person has reached 18, hopefully they have been training in something (other than parenting) since they turned 13. I look over my family tree and try to pick out mates for the new 18-year-old who are, of course not their parents. Then I exclude full siblings, and half siblings. I will sometimes try and even exclude cousins, aunts/uncles, but usually it's impossible to be that picky early on in the game. When you start out with such a small number, you might have to do the occasional half sibling or even full sibling pairing.

When you begin the game, one thing that helps me the most is to mate each woman with each man at least once. This gives you the widest possible pool to pair up the next generation. So for example if you start out with 4 women and 3 men. Those four women will have at least three children each with a different father if possible. It can be real tough to pull that off in the beginning of the game, but if you manage it, that gives you 12 people for the second generation to try and match up.


Edited by Tralah (11/22/09 05:09 PM)