After finding buying and becoming addicted this weekend I now have Virtual Villagers on my work puter, laptop and home computer... so 3 games running. And boy is each set of villagers different! My work batch has to be micro managed or they run all over instead of sticking to their tasks...the laptop has discovered how much fun laundry is (my village furthest along) while the home computer is struggling but hanging in there.

I have spent 3 days reading about 70 pages of forum posts and many of my initial questions were answered But I do have some more technical type I couldn't find.

1. Is it possible to have more than one game running on the same computer, BUT not at the same time? For example I still pause my games cause after the first night I came back and they were all dead, so now I don't leave them running unsupervised. I check in on them periodically to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to and check food supplies and such.
But the kids saw the game and now they each want to play. I saw that you can have up to 5 games going by using different usernames, but if I let them each make a game on the home computer can I pause mine so time is stopped and they don't die off by accident while the kids play their games?

2. I would (eventually) like to experiment with leaving the game running overnight, while at work etc, but don't want them all to die off again Is there a way to save the game so if I wake up and they are all dead I can restore back to where I was before I went to bed?

3. Has anyone found a good way to track your genitics? I've got a spreadsheet I'm keeping to try to keep from inbreeding but then accidently dropped one of my dads on his 18 yr daughter instead of the research table... and the dude got her prego BLAM first try...and neither had breeding checked or that high if skill in breeding...go figure! Still no twins though but I haven't put any tech points in fertility yet.

LOVE THE GAME!!!

yep, you can let your kids each have their own games and still pause yours so nothing changes within your game. you set the time speed on each game individually, so the speed of one won't affect the others.

I have my main game on half speed and nothing awful has happened overnight so far. The only bad thing is elderly villagers dying, and I knew they were going to go some time.

I tried to keep track of my genetics but eventually gave up lol. Especially hard when they get pregnant while you're away and you don't know who the father is.

No way to save the game, hopefully in the next instalment.

Lol, your work comp batch sounds like a normal work environment. Wish I was brave enough to play at work hehe.

The games are automatically saved every 10 minutes, as well as when you exit Virtual Villagers. While it's true that there is no in-game facility for backing up your game(s), there is a fairly simple way to do it manually:

Pause all of your games so that the games will suffer no ill effects from the passage of time. Using Windows Explorer, go to the directory where Virtual Villagers is installed and look for files named Isola**.ldw (where ** is a number). The single-digit numbers are your "primary" savegame files and are numbered 1-5 (corresponding to the player slots). The two-digit numbers are the "backup" savegame files, and are numbered 21-25. There is also a file Isola0.ldw which contains settings.

Copy those files to a safe location until they are needed.