Adjusted lifespans for the later stages to avoid orphans at adolescent & teen lifestage

[EllaEstella]

I just went through my first full family playthrough, meaning from creation of the founding Zoi until their death and playing on with the next generation. I have a couple of suggestions after I found it really strange ending up with an orphan teenager who is still 10 days from becoming a young adult even though she was born while her parents were still young adults themselves.

Where is the issue?

• The life stages from baby / toddler / child / adolescent / teenager sum up to a total of 38 days + 3 days of pregnancy = 41 days total cycle until the new Zoi is young adult.

• This means that the parent Zoi has to become pregnant latest at the 9th day of their young adult stage in order to be sure that their child will become young adult before they would evetually die of old age (accidents not counted).

  If they want 2 children to fully age up they would even need to get the first pregnancy going on day 5 or latest 6.

• This feels very rushed if you also want to explore the city a bit, go out with friends and find your love, marry etc. before getting into the family gameplay.

• The game also allows to get pregnant at adult life stage but considering the later life stage duration getting pregnant late in the adult life stage would mean you would eventually even die before your child becomes adolescent. 18 days for baby + toddler + child and only 10 days for the parent at middle-aged life stage. And I do not count senior in as at this life stage your Zoi could die every day.

• Considering the life expectation in our times I would rather expect that the Zois - at least if they had their children during the young adult phase - would be even able to see their grandchildren. But this is nearly impossible with the current life stage durations.

My suggestion:

• I think all the life stages are actually fine except the later ones.
• As mentioned before if you get your child at the end of adult life stage it should be at least possible to live until the child is a teenager at least.
• So I would suggest to change the middle-aged setting to 20 days instead of 10 –> 18 days for baby+toddler+child would bring the new generation at least to adolescent and able to live alone even if as an orphan.
• Second suggestion: please change the senior lifestage to at least give them 10 days in the lifestage before the random death is rolled every day at midnight.

[Samuriko]

Thankfully, control over the age groups length is supposed to be coming out in December.

The current age groups are :

• Newborn(0-3)
• Toddler(4-9)
• Child(10-19)
• Adolescent(20-24)
• Teenager(25-39)
• Young Adult(40-69)
• Adult(70-79)
• Middle-Aged(80-89)
• Senior (90+)

Now since 0.4.2, Senior have no chance to die from old age from 90-95, so they have 6 days “off the hook” which is much better than it was prior.

But the big issue stems from a generation being 42 days.
Even if a female zoi gets pregnant on her first day of Young adult (so at day 40 in her life) it still takes 3 days for the pregnancy (40-41-42).
Then another 42 days for that kid to be able to give birth/father a child itself… meaning 84 days before you have grandkids… if you don’t waste a single second !

We each have our own view on how the age groups should be distributed, hence devs giving us control in December.
However If you want to fix this, you either need to give adolescent and older the capability to have kids of their own, or make it so you reach young adult much sooner.

That would mean doing something like changing teens from 25-39 to 25-29 (Young Adult starts at 30).
Or alternatively increase the max age of zois which is hardcoded and set to 100 right now to something like 130 and re-equalize the later stage like you’re asking.

As long as we keep the 100 day age limit it really limits what we can do.
Ideally in such a system, young adult should start at 20, which it did before and still does in the “Realistic Aging” mod.

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Keeping the lengthy young adult period, I could see something like this :

• Newborn(until 2days), Toddler(3-4-5), Child(6-7-8-9-10-11-12), Adolescent(13-14-15-16), Teen(17-18-19-20)
  So young adult start at age 21 (like in the USA) could last until 50 (so still 30 days).

This gives you an extra 20 days to spend, which means you can have both adult and Middle-age increased by 5, and senior by 10… Giving you :

• Young Adult(21-50)
• Adult (51-65)
• Middle-Aged (66-80)
• Senior (81-100)

Right now senior are coded to live until 95 as aforementioned, tho this could be fixed to give a slight and progressive chance to die the older they get.
Let’s see if the December update lives off to the hype, if not I will gladly make a mod with these values for you !

[EllaEstella]

@Samuriko Like you say: either way if you just add to the later stages or reduce at the earlier ones to add to the later ones, the issue is that there about 20 days missing to achieve a normal lifespan feeling where the parents can see their children get married or even see their grandchildren grow up.

I might have missed that one but are we really getting full control over each life stage length in the December update?

[Samuriko]

As far as I know this is what was told.
As to say how much control, that remains to be seen.

Ideally it will be a slider like “The Sims” either a graphical one or just punching in the numbers somewhere in the menu without having to cook something up from the modkit. Crossing my fingers I won’t find it lacking. Bonus points if we can set chance of dying from old age ourselves on elders as well.

Here’s a low-res screenie from the Sims which explains what a graphical interface would look like :
( As you can see, both control of maximum age and each of the age groups ).
Also hopefully, our games will auto-adjust at prorata. Which means if you set length of young adult down from 30 to 12, and a Zoi is halfway thru young adult (15 days in), they will AUTO ADJUST to being 6 days into it after we change it.

[EllaEstella]

This is very familiar to me and I really hope that they will bring something similar so that every player can adapt it to their own needs and playstyle. As a longtime Sims 3 player I really liked how they managed this part and gave you the freedom to decide.

[Gadg8eer]

Given that I am hoping to roleplay a childhood I didn’t get to have with this game, I would hope the maximum length would be real values or longer.

Unfortunately I can’t work this out on my phone, let me get back to you all.

[HamzaTR]

Currently, Zois:

Die before seeing their children get married

Cannot meet or interact with their grandchildren

Pass away too early in general

Our suggestions:

Increase the duration of the Middle Age life stage

Allow Zois to:

Witness their children’s marriages

See the birth of their grandchildren

Spend time with them and watch them grow

These changes would strongly enhance the generation and legacy feeling of Inzoi.

[Seiden]

Hi @HamzaTR

Since your post covers the same suggestion about adjusted lifespans for later stages to avoid orphans at the adolescent and teen life stages, I’ve merged it into the existing thread so all related information stays together. Thank you!

[Gadg8eer]

Okay, forgot about this but I’ll post it now. I feel the game should give the current options of daylengths and instead gauge aging by number of in-game days. The following would be the default settings but should be freely customizable in length.

Infant - ~730 days (2 years, birth to 2nd birthday)

Toddler - ~1095 days (3 years, 2 to 5th birthday)

Child - ~1825 days (5 years, 5 to 10th birthday)

Tween - ~1095 days (3 years, 10 to 13th birthday)

Teenager - ~1825 days (5 years, 13 to 18th Birthday)

Young Adult - ~4380 days (12 years, 18 to 30th birthday)

Adult - ~7300 days (20 years, 30 to 50th birthday)

Senior - ~5475 days (15 years, 50 to 65th birthday)

Retiree - ~5475 days (15 years, 65 to 80th birthday)

Elder - ~7300 days (20 years, 80 to 100th birthday)

Centenarian - ~7300 days (20 years, 100 to 120th birthday)

Supercentenarian - Potentially infinite (120+)

- Infinite (If you achieve immortality and/or eternal youth without using cheats - so only through a meow store item earned legitimately - you get to make something up to replace “??? years old” like “10-ish” or “BEYOND MORTAL COMPREHENSION”.