I have a few suggestions for players:

When selecting professions for people, make sure you follow their personality and don't give them a job they won't like to do. I have a person who doesn't like swimming, he is not a good farmer because of the fishing. Fortunately he is an excellent researcher, good for me because he is really old.

Also when building skills for your people, try to balance the men and women equally among each profession. Then when you start building your population, you won't have a whole segment of the work force for one job out of work because they are with the babies.

When you are thinking about boosting your population, make sure you have a good food supply. All those nursing mothers out of the work force and all those extra mouths to feed after the children are on their own.

When you have a large project to accomplish (clearing the beach, moving the stones, building a hut, collecting food etc) you can reselect their interests and get a large group working at once on it. This keeps workers involved in the project until it is done.

Related, since there is a lot of walking involved in some of the projects, you can keep an eye on a large group and when they complete a task and are walking back, give them a lift back to the beginning of the task. Cuts their work time in half. I think that in addition to speeding things up, by placing them back at the task, they are advancing their skill more than when they do it themselves.

I think the only way to advance farming skill is to take them to the berry bush, but I am not sure. You may want to get all your available farmers up to master level before you lose the bush. And I have always saved some berries before depleting the whole supply, I wonder if I will ruin the bush by doing so.

Another tip, the women can bear children even when they are old. If they are starting to slow down, get them pregnant. Chances are they are old enough to be REALLY good at something and will pass some skill to their children.

Great suggestions! I'm pretty new to this, too, and agree with all you said. I used the help function to start my game and it encouraged me to chose a woman to breed. Turned out she was my only skilled builder and was out of commission for two years!

Another thing I learned is to make sure you have a male trained as a healer since if your female healer is nursing she cannot heal anyone. I try to train two healers, but even that is no match if the rats attack!

--C

It's lucky for me, but if you ever get a villager with the "running" skill, he/she will move twice as fast as the others, so use them to full advantage, and make them a builder, as build always needs lot of running with materials.

Other suggestion is: try to gather 6000 Tech point as soon as possible, and get farming tech lvl 2, it will help you much in the start. And do not get any more child beside the starting one(tutorial needs to get a baby), until you either have the youngest child older than 10, or got the lvl 2 farming, or you will die without food very soon. But that's might be my unlucky part

I, too, help my villagers to the berry bush to get my food supply up quickly. I usually only use 2-3 villagers, then I cut back. Once I have my crops, I rotate villagers so they can all have farming experience. My food always gets blown alway in a storm or goes moldy...this only happens though when I have a ton of villagers. At this point, I put all my villagers on swimming (most already know how albeit not happy campers about getting wet.) I help them back down to the water...saves time and gets food bin filled quickly.

I am also careful NOT to have so many villagers doing building. I don't want to spoil anything, but you will lose in the end this way. Nuf said.

In several games I had a man who wanted to go inside constantly with the whole village. Boy, do I ever have to be careful when my star builder is a woman AND wants him too!

After a while you get to sort of know the dud villagers practically from birth; I use them for research.

Did you also know that children can heal sick villagers? It's worked for me a couple of times!

COOL!!!

I have a hint when you have a heat wave the children will walk on the water