It almost feels like you’re hinting at Mesolithic or even Paleolithic. I can tell you one thing, I would adore the Mesolithic =)
Sorry, later periods was what I intended to write, I just fixed it.
There will be earlier though: Ice Age expansion.
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No worries. That would be the upper Paleolithic, so before Mesolithic. It’s still a really interesting time, and definitely different sorts of animals. I think they still had giant cave sloth at that time LOL and they’re certainly won’t be a linen clothing debate LOL
The point I was trying to make is that the gauge has an anachronistic, modern timekeeping feel, while a rotating animated pictographic would have an intuitive, more immersive feel. I think this would still be effective at showing the progression through day/night and seasons.
It also seems superfluous to show your position in relation to the start of every other season. Seasons aren’t confined to precise quadrants either, especially if you add gameplay mechanics like an early spring/late frost or early frost/early winter.
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We have switched to a 15 days per game day, so each game season is now 6 game days instead of 3. A game year has now 24 game days, so years now feel less generic and seasons more significant.
Keep in mind that this scale may still change in the future.
Also, if we found a solution we like to decouple game balancing from time scaling we may offer configuration parameters for this. But at this point this is still unclear.
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So, given that adulthood would likely be 14-16 years of age, a child born to a sim would take to 336-384 days to become and adult?
Deaths from raids, accidents, illness will be very costly, for sure.
Would it be programmatically difficult to increase or decrease the speed time passes at the players option? something simple like a public int _TIME_MULTIPLIER = 24, And the player updates this via the settings configuration for the game, or is it programmatically difficult to change?
I would think some people would like to increase this so that they could raid and do sorts of activities more frequently, while some people would want to decrease it, perhaps even approaching a one-to-one ratio. I think the ability to change that speed would be really amazing, depending on how easy it is.
When I play seven games, I like to play match maker and hook up my characters and let them make little babies, who then grow up. It’s fun to watch them generation after generation.
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hence stonehenge and the like
From the experience of building-playing out, I would guess that a leisurely beginning will certainly be exciting. The real question about the length of a year arises later in the game: What happens after the founding of our one village? How long (playful) does the multiplication last? Ultimately, it’s about shelter and food, does not act as a Tamagochi too long a period?
If we compare it with AoE1, the competition determines the suspense there. This is known from the beginning and defines a game goal: victory over XYZ, this is necessary A, B, C.
One could have to accomplish tasks: “reach a population of 2000 tribal members …” o.k. How long would that take - and - why? Suppose that lasts for 400 years, what happened in 400 years in the Neolithic? Do you need the Neolithic at all? Or would a nomadic tribe no longer offer tension there?
The density of events in relation to the time course is very low before the Bronze Age. And after 50 hours of playing the first clay pot to burn … mmh …
You know what I want to get out of?
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spot on with this scale imho
To be honest, I really don’t think there’s any reason to worry about a boring game. You’ll need to survive in the first step, facing the wilderness. There will be plagues, etc. In later stages, there will be enemy raids to face off, maybe diplomacy and politics issues to look at, etc.
And if this ending event around the Indo-Europeans coming to crush (or reinforce?) your settlement is implemented, we’ll have a grand finale that will be a total surprise for the noobs, but also a real accomplishment to face when being an experienced player, orienting a part of their replay games, etc.
Really, I see lot of potential in A.C. that make me believe we won’t have time to bother, just lacking time to play and test every possible strategy 
EDIT : I said exactly the opposite of what I intended in my first sentence 
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When we get to those later stages, I should have some pretty effective information to post. I’ve been collecting important scientific works discussing burials and grave goods found at bronze and Iron Age sites. Some of these books can be quite difficult to obtain lol
This book can sometimes be found cheap used, but it’s often $2000 or more to buy. By the way, I think that’s a travesty that any science book should be so expensive. It is extremely useful when learning about certain Iron Age cultures, and provide a lot of information about later ones. Obviously this is an much use for the Neolithic stage, but it will quickly become useful. ( I got my copy on the cheap LOL)
Iron Age Archaeology and Trauma from Aymyrlyg, South Siberia by Eileen M. Murphy Iron Age Archaeology and Trauma from Aymyrlyg South Siberia by Eileen M. Murphy | Goodreads
Sorry for commenting so many weeks later, but I truly agree with the thought of a “rotating animated pictographic”, or similar. Immersiveness is so important to a game, and even a bad game can become good with such a quality. Having a lot of wooden or stone panels and buttons to work with, with decorations in other materials, would really improve things.
Let us also not for a minute forget that the humans of the neolithicum lived their entire lives as close to nature as possible. They knew, felt, experienced and foresaw the passage of time entirely different from most modern humans. They may not have had certain words or abstract phenomena as we have, but they knew the difference in a thousand ways between the hours of the day, or the passage of the months or seasons. Even today, outdoorsmen grow accustomed to determining the hour just by looking out the window, at the shadows and at the position of the sun. They may not tell you it’s 10.23, but they will be able to tell you it’s around two hours till midday. A primitive-looking “clock” showing the passage of time, without numbers, and with the top of the clock being the 12.00, and the bottom 00.00, and with sides denoting sunrise or sunset, would work fine.
The Romans famously divided day into twelve hours, and night into twelve hours, with the sixth hour (sexta, siesta), being midday and midnight, and the rest varying in length. Something like that?
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Or years fly fast or one year is not one year.
For game-play reasons we feel that the adventure is the year, so we need “longer” years, this makes the one year is one year not very good idea unless you want to be stuck in the game for real time weeks or fly through stone age, bronze age and iron age within the same human generation.
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Would be very disadvantageous for a family tree …
Would then rather seedlings
For the other extreme, you needed a 2nd screen to see the sequoia 
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I’d still love to have a modifiable timescale. Sometimes, it’s nice to slow down or speed up.
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Yep, understood. To be honest, I don’t mind to spend real time weeks playing a game 
so may the aging rate could be customizable, in order allow the player to select how mane years citizens get old per each year (I am not sure but I think somebody propossed something similar). There could be options in the game configuration like:
- 1 year is 1 year
- 1 year are 2 year
- 1 year are 5 years
- 1 yar are 10 years
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It would be great if the game also allowed playing in near real-time and thus staying on the same tech level practically forever.
One of the problems I have with some RTS games is that you race through the ages trying to out-tech your enemies. I hope this game does not allow this and that knowledge comes with time as opposed to with resource amount. I find it unrealistic to discover something by clicking on the “research this tech” button for 50 stone/wood/gold. I suggest that once tech is randomly discovered through time, you spend resources only to implement it.
In Neolithic it would take generations for new tech to be discovered. I therefore find it interesting to have the ability to play the game in three different time modes:
- Slow mode: You play practically forever on the same tech level and pay no attention to future discoveries when forming strategies since citizens should not be aware that they will even take place.
- Balanced mode: Let’s use our tech to do whatever we can as next discovery will be in 500 years (many hours of real time).
- Quick mode: Let’s wait until discovery of “something” before doing “that” as it will be easier.
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Based on what the developers have mentioned so far about tech progress, I think you will be very happy with the system 
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They said that thecnology only cames to you interacting with other villages, and it isn’t instantaneous, I though.
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I won’t quote everyone above this post, but the last ones are interesting questions.
On my end, I’m wondering if having the possibility to define the speed with real hours would not be a nice idea, notably when DLCs for other periods will start piling up.
For instance, when launching the game, you could ask to have Ice Age and Neolithic eras last 10 hours in real life, then Bronze Age 15 (because you love the period), then Iron Age 10. Each period could be defined with 3 or 4 phases.
Regarding coding and gameplay, this could be a good thing as the designers could define such or such tech or international event (like Greek colonization, or the Roman expansion) appear in phase 1, 2 or 3. The years would be counted from that, so that you may have for instance X human generations for each phase, and each year in-game passing according to the player wishes (instead of e.g. the Civilization series, which go always more slowly).
(But I’m obviously writing without having any knowledge on the engine and game programming, so this may be a very bad idea depending on the devs’ vision and current work.)