Apologies if this is already on the wishlist - but story progression. If my zoi has multiple children and I pick one to continue my gameplay, I’d like for the others to be able to progress as well. I hate seeing their profile continue say unemployed/no relationship etc. I love that they’re naturally building friendships and romantic feelings during their teen years. It be nice to say, continue that relationship for that zoi without my interference once they age-up and move out.
As long as it’s optional, or players could select certain households to not have story progression, then I’m all for it.
It has to be optional though because there are people who like to play multiple households. I don’t play that way, so I wouldn’t mind story progression at all, but people who enjoy that play style don’t want any changes made to their households when they’re playing a different one (at least nothing major like employment or relationship changes.)
In my current family gameplay save, I plan to have a multigenerational family. I hope I’ll be able to marry off the siblings who won’t inherit the family home before they move out. Their spouse would need to move in briefly though. I’m not sure, but if the zois who will move out of the family home can apply for a job before you move them out of the household, they will progress in their careers. I don’t know if they keep their job when you move them out of the household.
I think they will have children if you move them into a house on the map. The NPCs seem to have a lot of new babies all the time, so I’m guessing if the character is married before they move out, they would build a family with their new spouse.
This isn’t what you’re asking for, but it might help in the meantime.
Ideally, each family could choose whether to enable progression or not.
The same goes for aging. Now there’s an option to enable or disable it, but it applies to all families (whether they’re playing or not).
I have some families that I play and don’t want to age. But I’ve also created a “College” of potential partners for my teenagers :), who I’d rather age than play. Now I have to play them to make them the same age as the others.
There are 2 ageing options in-game, one to disable/enable ageing on your zoi, and one to disable/enable on other zois.
Given I typically play single zoi households, I am not sure whether “my zoi” affects the whole household or literally just the active zoi, so I don’t know if enabling “other zoi” ageing would help for you. It isn’t very clear from the wording, and I agree that what we really need is “disable/enable ageing on active household” or “inactive households”.
I use the trick stopaging true/false depending on what I’m interested in for each zoi (whether it’s a family I’m playing with or any other), so I stop or activate their growth. This way I control the evolution of the zoids that interest me and let the others follow their course.
Although aging settings is a separate topic from story progression, there are some odd things about aging.
In the last save I played where I had a child become adolescent, all their school friends became teenagers. I think it could be because we can’t create adolescent zois in CAZ, so maybe NPCs have to skip that life stage… maybe? In my Cahaya game, it doesn’t matter because my zois aren’t socializing with other students after class.
If NPC zoi children still skip the adolescent life stage, we definitely need a way to control aging for specific zois. Some might not even live in a house in the city, but it should be possible. At least, it sure would be nice if we could control aging individually.
Sort of like customizing zois using their ID number. We could have a cheat for aging on or off of the zoi by their ID.
But, back to the topic at hand, I hope we’ll have some type of options for story progression in the future. Maybe it could be set by zoi ID too. That would be cool!
I’d love it if I could select a zoi to have story progression so they’ll get their own job or way to support themselves, find relationships of their own, and hopefully find a partner to raise a family with. It would add a lot to the multi-generational games!
I’ll try to answer your question, but I noticed the translator isn’t always very clear ![]()
There are two options to enable/disable aging.
One for active families and one for inactive families.
The game considers the family you’re currently playing to be “active,” and the others to be “inactive,” even if you created them.
So, if I rotate two families and choose “enable aging for active families,” one will age at a time.
Within the same family, the option applies to all, unless you block one with Stop Aging.
I do it too, to “rebalance” the ages within a family. Otherwise, while the children become teenagers or young adults, the parents age too much. ![]()
I thought that was how it worked, but could not be sure having never tried it.
I also agree that options are needed to control not only ageing (life stage length being one such customisation currently required) but also story progression in non-active households. I do not play multiple households in one save, but I know many do and having your zois marry someone random, quit their job or have children while you are playing another household breaks storytelling.
I play with multiple families and multi gen. I stop start the ageing for families that I play and those that are inactive, to get the Zois I want at the appropriate age. For NPCs, I have stopped ageing. As the story progresses, if needed I use the age changing gimmick (see my post in Tips) to match the ages.
I think giving age control per zoi will be too complex for the game to handle (will create multiple simultaneous threads, increasing computations). So the currently available options for ageing (or not) - families and NPCs are good enough, or there should be 4 options - active zoi, active family, inactive (but playable) families, and NPCs.
Nice, it turns out to be the same kind of segmentation of “Followed Zois” in the general context we proposed a couple of weeks ago, based on several earlier posts:
tracking only for followed Zois, reflecting how players typically manage households or control broader city behavior (Disabled → Only My Zoi → Only Active Family → Followed Resident Familes (for Family Rotation) → Followed Zois
Enhanced Macro Simulation based on Karma System, City Stability, Shared Groups and Events (Cities Skylines inspired and optimized) . Only we also proposed tracking individual NPCs – if they’re friends, classmates, or simply characters we find interesting.