Thoughts on breeding (parenting):
- Parents (really mainly the moms) seem to take much, much longer than other skills to go from trainee through adept to master. In fact, I've never gotten a master parent, even when I've had a woman do nothing but breeding from 18 until she dies (whereas it's easy to grow a master researcher by the time they're in their 30s)!! As far as I can tell, she only gets credit for the "embracing", not for "caring for baby", which I think is a rather odd skew, as caring is much more difficult, time consuming and labor intensive than the act of procreating! I would fix this, first by renaming the skill to parenting, and then awarding skill points for caring for babies (with more points for twins and triplets).
- Just as anyone under 18 is too young for breeding, so should women eventually be too old for breeding. Somewhere around 45-50, I would think.
- Involve the men!!!! Maybe the game could randomly switch who cares for the baby between the mother and father, so you would never know who's available to work until you entered your game. Or maybe the guys would have to do "caring for toddler" when the kids are 2-4 years old, just to even things out. Or even just for one year (2-3).Anyone under 4 is a little young to be running around unsupervised anyway.