Can you tell whos adopted?
How did my blonde couple do that?
And those are the names they were given, by the way.
As if you could not tell.

That's how the game's 'genetics' work. As you can see in the image below, the parents are shown at the top and bottom marked by rectangles. Parents will typically produce kids that fall somewhere between them on the 'chart' (although exceptions do happen). Each of the kids (shown in an oval) are between the parents on the chart. Bot, the adopted child, is the only one who isn't a 'genetic mixture' of the parents.

Wow. pretty wide range there! thanks! I didn't know the game used actual genetics- i was under the impression the kids popped out at random!

learn somthing new every day!

wow! these are cool. do you have any more charts like that for other hair colours etc.

Caramel, the 'chart' that LadyCFII shows above is actually part of an image in the image files of the game. If you go find that file, it shows ALL of the hair colors in the game, and you can use it and how LadyCFII explains the way it works above to chart your own family.

They are all in the game's Images folder, and the easiest images to examine are the BigHeads* images, which show both male and female. You can see how to access them here. I snipped a section out, so that I could mark it up to show how it worked.

But why so many redheads? The LDW games have been overrun with redheads since VV1. One game I quit playing because I missed the diversity of hair color. If genetics worked that way in real life, we would see a lot more redheads. Red hair is beautiful and rare. Except here.

In VV1, genetics hadn't yet been implemented in the game.

You may find the following threads/discussions on how to alter your diversity quite interesting:
Genetics for VV2
Genetics for VV3
And of course, for VF.

Yes, Happy Player, I realize that genetics was not used in VV1. However, it's not being accurately used here in the games.

"Approximately 1% to 2% of the human population has red hair."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_hair

What is the percentage of redheads in these games? I would guess at over 50%.

That's not really a true figure as it's for the whole population of the planet. Because of limitations in matching up skin colours and so on, all the LDW peeps appear to be of European descent, which is a much smaller number relative to the whole population. I agree, though, that even among those of European descent, the incidence of red hair is quite small.

I'd definitely not agree that over 50% of those in the games are redheads: 20-30%, maybe, but no more.