A few tips learned from playing a lot hints and tips for Virtual Villagers 3: The Secret City

A few tips learned from playing a lot

There is a hint that says to make a chief real quick, the only problem with this is it takes away a valuable resource (working power). Yes the chief can make food (but only once every 24 real hours)and make the workers closer to him to work faster (but at first you don't have enough manpower to make that a large difference). My suggestion is you wait to have a chief and make a new baby:

Take a villager, have him start collecting the firewood next to the honey comb. Take another one and have them collect the dry grass on the NW corner of the map, left of the waterfall. As your doing that put a villager on a building. Once the grass and wood is on the firepit have a nearby villager attempt to start a fire, stay on him to make sure he is successful and keep at it until a fire starts up. Once you do that pick up the torch right under the honey comb and they will smoke the bees out. Then take the villagers to the comb and keep at it until they start harvesting the honey.

That will keep your village alive for a while and at this point if you can't keep playing make sure you pause the game in the options menu before you turn it off. It goes in real time like you were playing it the entire time and if you wait longer then 6-8 hours you will come back with a half dead island.

When you have some time to kill in the beginning waiting for your slow villagers to do what they are doing you can do this to speed up the harvest of the honey:

Well you know you can drag a player to the honey comb at will and they start harvesting honey? Well after that they walk to the storage bin, unload the honey then waste all your precious time getting back to the comb. I've found to kill a little time when my food is low to speed the process up a bit by dragging my farmer from the food bin to the comb (after they have unloaded the honey of course).

Even though the tutorial says to make a new baby real quick, I think you should hold off on doing that until you have food supplies set, plus you need "all hands on deck" to be able to work for the things you need while learning the game. Once you get settled down and are confident on letting the island go for a while then I would start looking for a chief. Ideally it is a female, so only put females up to where the robe is to have them try it on. Why? A very important thing here! A chief can have a baby and nurse it while being a chief! A normal newborn totting mother can't do anything but walk around and play with her baby, a chief carrying a newborn can still do all of her chiefly duties!

While on the subject of a baby (which me and my fiance are expecting in August 1st, 2008 and at this point of writing is only a month away). When you want the village to enjoy the birth of a new member, take the female chief and find a man. Remember the honey trick? Well same thing applys for makin' babies. Once the status bar at the bottom says they are going indoors just click on the female and move her slightly and instantly you will find out if they were successful in creating a new life or just successfull in wasting some time doing the horizontal monkey dance (not too much of a waste of time, depending on who you ask).

Those are just some tips I have learned through trial and error so you don't have to make the mistakes I made.

Hope it helps

-ImissATARI

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