Yeah the AI on this game is starting to get on my nerves. It's pretty stupid. I was hoping for a game that I could leave like a virtual fishtank and walk away. But instead they've either made things intentionally difficult, which the solution is alot of micromanagement/busy work.

The doctors are pretty stupid. Without the hospital, Sick people get healed sometimes, and sometimes not. They never train themselves alright. The same thing goes with parenting. Even when your village is out of space for newborns, all the parents want to do is have sex in the funky shack. It's really lame, since mates tend to go for those who have alot of skill, which means that the non-parent mate gets distracted away from whatever job they were doing. Why can't those set as parents just teach the children?

I never played VV1 and hoped that VV2 could be as hands off as VV1, but the level of lame micromanagement is getting really annoying. It's kinda disappointing.

There are ways around those problems. If you don't want too many children, then try to make only the women parents, and make a parent male only if you're ready for a population boom. Then the parent women won't distract the men from their job for too long.

If you just want to make master parents, then do so while they're old enough not to have babies, and find them an older male to mate with. Keep them together, and they'll continue to mate together without distracting anybody else.

Though, I do wish that adept parents would be more apt to teaching lessons to the children after they've been shown to do that...

I've found if my food is on the low side, in the 100's my adept doctors will wander around and study plants on their own. Don't know why, but it's the only time they do it after reaching adept.

The micro-management in the game is actually somewhat of a "feature" if you look through all the posts of what everyone wanted in the new game, that's basically what they all ask for. Everyone wanted to be more "involved" in the game and they wanted more to do than "set it and forget it". IMHO, I think that LDW did a great job at developing the game so it could be played succesfully either way. You can go through the game with a fine tooth comb and get every collectable etc, or you can spend a little time each day playing it then leaving it for long periods of time. One thing that I think this game does is give you A LOT more game play for your buck.

Completely agree with you Batgrl2u, I was about to post separately to say how much more interesting this game is because once you get someone to Master in a skill, you can move them on and make them start to gain more skills in the hope of getting the '3' Masters. I'm forever checking on their skills and moving them on now, there again I have all the time in the world because I am off work sick!

What I have done with my kids is start them healing as soon as possible, then by the time they get to 'working age' they already have a fair bit of skill as a doctor to work with, I have several Master doctors now this way, I am however at Max population with all puzzles solved and only one collectible to find an elusive butterfly!

Have fun
NN

Say, could you explain that a little more?
I thought the kids wouldn't do anything but play and collect the collectables until they reached 14. Even setting their basic skill at healing doesn't seem to help.

Kids can heal sick people. So if you use a kid instead of an adult everytime someone is sick, the kid will gain healing.

No kidding? Well I'll be darned.
(seriously considering making an "icky" stew and dragging my kids around, seems kinda cruel though.)

Using the black plant by the pond for all three herbs makes and icky stew. I haven't tried that as a way to heal people deliberately though.

I can't either :(. I tried making ALL my kids healers so they could get a good start when they got old enough but all they did was wander around the village "Bored" and even when I grabbed them and made them into Trainee Doctors they just stayed at that level unless I kept dropping them onto the plants - which takes a LOT of time :(.