Social Simulation Stuff: Raising Children

Princess Maker with less lace and lolis(0% lolis actually)

So I was suggested an amazing game for reference for the social sim stuff in Axioms, Kudos from Positech, not a game you expected from that dev, imo. That won’t help much for this post but once you scrape off the mobile/casual game feel it has some great examples of non-dating social stuff.

This will be a shorter design post because their isn’t a massive difference between children and adults. Mostly a restriction of options.

In any case today I’m going to talk about an obvious thing you need in a pre-modern fantasy world simulation. Childrearing. As I’ve noted before every turn is a “week” and currently weeks are roughly 10 days with 4 weeks a month with 10 months, so 400 days a year. I’ve been considering doing 8/50/400 or 5/80/400.

In any case a child from the turn it is born until it turns 16 has 640 turns. Children can’t take actions until they turn 8 and have their schedule decided by their guardian. After that they get to use half their Attention Points and their guardian gets to decide on the use of half.

The choices you make for children at all stages do influence their opinions of you and others, even though they’ll always do what you say. I thought about some effectiveness modifiers like if they really hate studying and you make them study but probably not till an expansion or the sequel. I cut a ton of features to save for the sequel because scope creep is my true enemy.

Actions

So kids get most of the same Actions as adults. They can do similar stuff, minus sex and drinking I guess. They sort of build up their Interests and Desires over time, adults are much more fixed in their Consciousness. Kids also sort of have special stuff because they can be assigned around. So you can send children to Magic or Military Academies, assign Tutors and Trainers, and such.

I should bring in some realism and say that a lot of this stuff, as far as institutions, has to be built up by the gameplay. This is why I don’t recommend players to do starts before 1000 simulated years. It might be great for minmaxing a super nation or maybe creating an ancient empire, but then you’d probably want to skip a thousand years or so.

Children have much more time to learn and develop because typically adults, especially merchants and aristocrats, have to engage in politics and trade and other stuff. Think of something like the theming of Academagia/LLTQ with mechanical aspects for kids similar to Kudos. There won’t be fancy dialogue or pretty art but the depth of the simulation will be much more.

Slice Of Life

I’ll use a noble as an example because they have more flexibility in military, magic, markets, and such than a child of merchants or mages or a martial marshal. For the first 4 or so years of life babies children can’t really do much. You’ll leave them with a maid or a nurse and maybe after a couple years a governess or something. You can do stuff to them but their actions will be mostly generic and they’ll have reduced Attention Points. Around 5-8 years they’ll get to 75% of attention points instead of 40% or w/e the numbers are. More actions will open to them.

Once children are 9 they’ll start to be more like a person and develop their personality and Interests and Desires. They’ll start to be able to initiate more themselves. You’ll have far more options for what to have them do. Starting around 14 they’ll become essentially full people but just restricted legally. They’ll be able to develop romantic feelings, peform most adult actions, although not as well, and possibly be useful instead of something to invest in. They’ll become full adults at 16 and be independent although as aristocrats their parents will have some legal and material power over them.

Academy

Not all types of characters and not even all characters of the same type will handle their 14+ kids the same. But generally you have 14-15-16 when they are still kids and perhaps 17, 18, 19, 20 as adults that are still dependent on wealthy parents to send kids off to train. Women might get the short end of the stick depending on the polity and be married starting at 18. In a properly organized polity noble children could be sent to various institutions for magic, religion, combat, management, and so forth.

At this stage, especially if you play as the child they’ll have an experience something like a fantasy/military school sim game with more depth and breadth but less “story/art”. Pending on the final base Attention Point allocation I make after play testing you’ll have something like 10-40 “actions” a turn on average with standard “actions”. So 1-4 a day more or less with the current turn time period.

I suppose you could fiddle the game settings to have a more detailed character life experience vs the strategy elements. Give more Attention Points, lower the cost of personal “actions/interactions”, abuse the Locations mechanic, or something.

So you could do stuff like hang out with other noble kids or “scholarship” students and go riding, help each other train magic or weapons, socialize, and so forth. Much more detail and flavor than Crusader Kings but less than Academagia depending on settings. To some degree this also applies to younger children home at their castle or estate or w/e but they have less options and Attention Points.