that's a very sad story but I can top that. I decided to invoke a "selective breeding" program in a new game a la Star Trek TNG - the Benleuti & the clones. (each woman was to have 3 babies by 3 different men to broaden the gene pool). at first it was easy to keep track - the "settlers" were Dick & Jane, Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice - the kid I named Nora after my maident great-aunt and I was going to keep her child free to see if she would live longer.

it was easy to track the parents of the 1st generation born on the island - Dick & Jane's daughter Emma was renamed DJ Emma and so on. once TC Kara, BJ Anoki, DA Alawa, TJ Moki, BC Kiri,TA Manu, DJ Emma, DJ Kato & BA Aziza got old enough to have kids of their own it got a little more complicated. I actually downloaded the free trial version of Legacy, a family tree program, to track the "marriages" (i.e. embraces in VV speak) and their kids.

unfortunately Emma could only have kids with Manu, cause all the other men were her half-brothers. I carefully chose who could "embrace" and recorded the names of their children. now when I wasn't looking Nora wound up nursing (in her 40's - I'm telling you perimenopause SUCKS) but I had read in this forum that the oldest man will make the most babies so I gave my oldest villager credit for that one, knowing that none of the men were related to her anyway. I let her have a 2nd one with a different father since my whole experiment to see if childless women live longer was ruined. (yes there is a point to this story and I'm getting there).

So, it turns out that with the trial version of Legacy you can only have 30 names in one file, so I exported the younger ones into a new file and kept track until that file hit 30, then I had to copy all the names into an Excel file to track the 3rd generation being born on the island cuz I was getting tired of hitting a limitation.

Now I learned this past year in a course I took that in the dawn of civilization the first taboo was that women didn't "embrace" men of their father's generation, so I was careful about that - which was challenging when most of the suitable "men" were still too young for the task.

I tracked 30 births of 2nd generation islanders, had 4 births of 3rd generation islanders, and had carefully arranged 10 nursing mothers. when I wasn't looking, Iruwa got knocked up and I couldn't even GUESS who the father was.

of course they're all much older now - and we've buried BC Kiri & DJ Kato's firstborn daughter Kae, who died a master farmer at 72.

after 195 real hours, we've had 101 babies and buried 18 people (the oldest was 84)and while I was typing this the 16th puzzle finally got solved.

my point is - this game is ridiculously addictive, you can't predict anything except that everything is unpredictable, and I LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT!

enjoy.
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"I have not failed, I have simply found 10,000 ways that won't work." Thomas A. Edison