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[DizzyCrash]

We need to create a mod to fix this crippling glitch in the game ware each civ has one skin and one hair tone, or a varied of one or the other, but its annoying cause everyone looks the same... also there hair is always "extremely long" We need more variation in our characters and such, I dont like playing with 40 civs, usually one of each race so I can document it more easily, and having that ONE race be a race of blonde haired brown skinned people with long amazonian hair and amethyst eyes is just really screwed up...

Once apon a time I created a cast for every hair and skin combo, it was long and very very very stressful and encountered a glitch ware the hair color was not listed, thus had to re-do it all over from the top with the hair and skin tone listed in the description of the cast... I gave up after that... Although i can post what I had already done.

But we seriously need to solve this issue.

[Rex Invictus]

?

Civs don't have one skin tone and hair colour, unless that's listed in their creature description.

[mcbucko]

What you're experiencing, with all members of a civ having the same hair and skin color, is the result of a genetic bottleneck in your species history. Yes, really.

Basically something happened in world gen that there was only a small number of the population that reproduced to make new members of the species, or else you got bad luck with your gene randomization and they all had same looking children as a result.

To prevent this from occurring, make your starting civilization population larger to try and promote variety.

I don't know what causes the lack of variety in hair length though.

[Deon]

The hair length should be defined as a cultural shape. Only dwarves have that setting in vanilla (where they trim and tie beards and hair), all other creatures like humans or elves need this to be manually added.

[Reelya]

Right now there's no gene crossover at all. Someone in another thread confirmed that traits are only inherited from the mother. Genetic variation seems to be crudely simulated by adding some randomness to numerical traits of the mother for her children. This of course wouldn't work for things like hair color, which aren't a numerical slider. The population model, single-chromosome mother-only genetics, and model of spread from one site to another all exacerbate the issue of genetic bottleneck.

I don't like the idea of spawning different castes for every combination of gender, hair and eye color. This could easily be done programmatically however, and not by hand. But there might be a better way, which involves far fewer castes, and is much less random, while still providing for diversity. You can take advantage of the fact that children will inherit the eye and hair color of their parents only if it's not over-ridden by the caste system. So a "normal" caste child should inherit a caste-specific coloration if their mother has it.

So, what could be done to inject just enough variation into the gene pool is to make extra female-only castes: one extra for each hair color, and one extra for each eye color. These children should inherit the other (hair or eye) color from their own mothers, and will pass on both hair and eye color onto their own children. So, if you have 20 eye colors and 20 hair colors, you can get away with creating 40 extra female castes rather than 2 (genders) * 20 * 20 = 800 new castes. I'd make the new castes have low pop ratios compared to the normal castes. e.g. if male pop_ratio = 100, then normal female pop_ratio would = 60, and each of the ~40 (assuming 20 of each eye and hair color) would have pop_ratio=1

these rarer castes would act to inject diversity into the ongoing gene pool, without having to totally randomize things at every generation, and without needing hundreds of extra castes: just one per hair color and one per eye color.

[DizzyCrash]

Right now there's no gene crossover at all. Someone in another thread confirmed that traits are only inherited from the mother. Genetic variation seems to be crudely simulated by adding some randomness to numerical traits of the mother for her children. This of course wouldn't work for things like hair color, which aren't a numerical slider. The population model, single-chromosome mother-only genetics, and model of spread from one site to another all exacerbate the issue of genetic bottleneck.

I don't like the idea of spawning different castes for every combination of gender, hair and eye color. This could easily be done programmatically however, and not by hand. But there might be a better way, which involves far fewer castes, and is much less random, while still providing for diversity. You can take advantage of the fact that children will inherit the eye and hair color of their parents only if it's not over-ridden by the caste system. So a "normal" caste child should inherit a caste-specific coloration if their mother has it.

So, what could be done to inject just enough variation into the gene pool is to make extra female-only castes: one extra for each hair color, and one extra for each eye color. These children should inherit the other (hair or eye) color from their own mothers, and will pass on both hair and eye color onto their own children. So, if you have 20 eye colors and 20 hair colors, you can get away with creating 40 extra female castes rather than 2 (genders) * 20 * 20 = 800 new castes. I'd make the new castes have low pop ratios compared to the normal castes. e.g. if male pop_ratio = 100, then normal female pop_ratio would = 60, and each of the ~40 (assuming 20 of each eye and hair color) would have pop_ratio=1

these rarer castes would act to inject diversity into the ongoing gene pool, without having to totally randomize things at every generation, and without needing hundreds of extra castes: just one per hair color and one per eye color.

I dunno... that just sounds like still hundreds of casts just minus the copy and paste male versions.

[Eldin00]

Well, this solution (if it works as intended) requires <number of hair colors>+<number of eye colors>+<number of skin colors> castes to keep all colors for all three things in the population, whereas the method described in the original post needed 2*<number of hair colors>*<number of eye colors>*<number of skin colors> castes, which is several orders of magnitude larger.

[vjmdhzgr]

Another benefit of that system would be making it more common for traits to actually be inherited genetically rather than completely random as they would if you made all castes have fixed hair and skin colors. Also It would be a good test for if all traits are actually inherited from the mother because I'm not sure I believe Toady made such a significant mistake in his genetics coding, but if he did then it should definitely be reported as a bug.

[Reelya]

Not a bug - just place holder code.

Someone verified it works like this for animals. Weak females give weak babies regardless of the father being weak or strong. Strong females have strong babies, also regardless of the father being weak or strong.

In other words, there's no bug, Toady just hasn't coded in crossover at all. This is probably because if you code in the most obvious quick and dirty solution to crossover - averaging the mother and father's stats, then that converges on the population average over time, and you lose all variation.

Also, creatures do not have pairs of genes. Without gene pairs it makes little sense to code crossover. The best that could be done in that situation is to flip a coin and you get dad's gene or mum's gene. Since that's not really optimal either, Toady is definitely coming back to redo genetics fully in the future. As everyone probably knows Toady doesn't like to waste time on piecemeal sub-optimal tweaks, he'd rather rethink a whole system at once, and when he does it for genetics we'll definitely get proper paired chromosomes with all the recessive genes and stuff that goes with it.

[Vattic]

Someone verified it works like this for animals. Weak females give weak babies regardless of the father being weak or strong. Strong females have strong babies, also regardless of the father being weak or strong.

I thought this too, but I'm having trouble finding the original posts.

[vjmdhzgr]

Someone verified it works like this for animals. Weak females give weak babies regardless of the father being weak or strong. Strong females have strong babies, also regardless of the father being weak or strong.

I've heard of this before, but that's only one aspect of genetic inheritance. While traits like hair color and skin color working the same would explain civilizations ending up with only one of each, I think it's likely that it was just intentional. I just generated a 5 year old world and checked a human mead hall and several houses and everybody except for one soldier who I suspect was a foreigner, had dark blue eyes, charcoal hair, and copper skin. It also makes sense, in real life most countries generally only have one native skin color, and one or two native eye and hair colors so it seems intentional to me. I am however still quite interested in the results of the idea being suggested so if it's not done by somebody else I'll probably do it.

[DizzyCrash]

To make my job easier I am making a list of more specific hair and skin tones so I dont need to include like 200 from the base game and I need a little help.

~~~~~~~~~~~
   BLOND
~~~~~~~~~~~

[COLOR:BLOND]
   [NAME:blond]
   [WORD:YELLOW]
   [RGB:255:255:0]

[COLOR:GOLDEN_BLOND]
   [NAME:golden blond]
   [WORD:GOLD]
   [RGB:212:175:55]

[COLOR:DIRTY_BLOND]
   [NAME:dirty blond]
   [WORD:BROWN]
   [RGB:152:118:84]

[COLOR:PLATINUM_BLOND]
   [NAME:platinum blond]
   [WORD:SILVER]
   [RGB:192:192:192]

[COLOR:SANDY_BLOND]
   [NAME:sandy blond]
   [WORD:TAN]
   [RGB:210:180:140]

~~~~~~~~~~~~
  BRUNETTE
~~~~~~~~~~~~

[COLOR:BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:brunette]
   [WORD:BROWN]
   [RGB:150:75:0]

[COLOR:LIGHT_BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:light brunette]
   [WORD:BROWN]
   [RGB:152:118:84]

[COLOR:DARK_BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:dark brunette]
   [WORD:BROWN]
   [RGB:101:67:33]

[COLOR:RICH_BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:rich brunette]
   [WORD:CHESTNUT]
   [RGB:221:173:175]

[COLOR:DEEPEST_BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:deepest brunette]
   [WORD:CHOCOLATE]
   [RGB:210:105:30]

~~~~~~~~~~~
  REDHEAD
~~~~~~~~~~~

[COLOR:GINGER_REDHEAD]
   [NAME:ginger]
   [WORD:PUMPKIN]
   [RGB:255:117:24]

[COLOR:FIERY_REDHEAD]
   [NAME:fiery red]
   [WORD:SCARLET]
   [RGB:255:36:0]

[COLOR:AUBURN_BRUNETTE]
   [NAME:auburn]
   [WORD:AUBURN]
   [RGB:111:53:26]

[COLOR:STRAWBERRY_BLOND]
   [NAME:strawberry blond]
   [WORD:ROSE]
   [RGB:244:194:194]

~~~~~~~~~~~
   RAVEN
~~~~~~~~~~~

[COLOR:RAVEN_BLACK]
   [NAME:raven]
   [WORD:BLACK]
   [RGB:0:0:0]

[COLOR:JET_BLACK]
   [NAME:jet black]
   [WORD:BLACK]
   [RGB:0:0:0]

[COLOR:BLUE_BLACK]
   [NAME:blue black]
   [WORD:BLACK]
   [RGB:0:0:0]

Can anyone think of more descriptions of shades of black hair? prefurably ones that sound like brunette and blond, ya know, really official.

[Vattic]

Could have straight up "black" hair if you fail to find any better.

[Urist Arrhenius]

Spawn with red hair.

[LuckyKobold]

Inquire about what exactly this is.