The year your Life begins can change far more than the date on the screen. It can change how you find work, what your wages can afford, the home you move into, how you keep in touch and the opportunities available to the people around you.
Historical Lives brings that changing world into the Life you build.
You can now choose a starting year from 1950 through to 50 years beyond the current year.
Begin Adult Life in your chosen year, or choose Formative Years and grow up from that birth year. Start in the 1950s, spend your childhood in the 1980s, enter adulthood around the millennium or choose another year that means something to you.
Every available year is a starting point in its own right. Begin in 1970 and suitable earlier developments are already part of the world. There is no need to play through the previous decades to make them available.
What the world already has is different from what your character owns or has experienced. Your personal history still comes from the Life you actually live.
Homes, possessions, vehicles, transport, education, jobs, businesses and social activities reflect the period you are living through. A smartphone cannot solve a problem before that technology is available. A familiar skill or older possession can remain useful after something newer arrives.
World News follows the period too, with developments and reporting suited to what people could know at the time. As the years pass, changing services, local places and ways of communicating can open up new possibilities.
There is more to experience across neighbourhoods, community activities, family Life and both small gatherings and major social occasions. New authored situations and connected stories bring those changes into ordinary days, as well as the decisions you remember for years.
Prices and wages begin from period-appropriate foundations, but your Life is not locked to one fixed historical price list.
Economic conditions, government decisions, supply pressures, businesses and wider events can affect what happens next. The Labour Market connects those changes to work: the opportunities available, new pay offers, hiring conditions and the pressures facing employers.
That can reach your household in different ways. A change in living costs can make a move harder to afford. An employer's circumstances can affect your next opportunity. A policy can help one part of the economy while creating a difficult trade-off elsewhere.
In a Life that begins in an earlier year, pay is settled each year in line with earnings across the economy, which need not match prices. Rents are reviewed yearly, and fixed mortgage deals end on a variable rate. Your balance and outstanding loan principal do not simply rise with inflation.
The same starting year can lead to different Lives as your decisions and the world around you develop.
Political Life has more room for meaningful decisions, from constituency work and parliamentary responsibilities to cabinet leadership and government.
Election manifestos give commitments a place in the wider political story. Tax, spending and public-service decisions connect to the same economy, jobs and household pressures experienced elsewhere in LIVORA.
As the serving Prime Minister, you can examine your country's national finances, including GDP, inflation, public debt and the budget. The responsibilities belong to the office: government funds remain separate from your personal money, and a change of leadership does not wipe the country clean.
New pandemic and war systems bring longer, connected world events across all five of LIVORA's fictional countries.
Live through the pandemics of 1957, 1968, 2009 and 2020, and face new ones that grow from the world's conditions. Public-health capacity, available treatments, travel, work, public information and government responses can all matter.
Conflict involves relationships between countries, tensions, diplomacy, escalation and the possibility of prevention, peace and recovery. Its consequences can reach trade, supply, prices, employment, travel and everyday Life.
When another government is in charge, its response becomes part of the world you live in. When your character is Prime Minister, decisions about the country's response become part of your responsibilities. The choices available depend on the period, the evidence, your authority and the resources the country actually has.
Neither a peaceful Life nor a difficult one is decided simply by choosing a year.
Personal firsts, changing places, older possessions and experiences shared between generations give the passing decades a more personal meaning.
A place can change while keeping its history. A possession can become something a family remembers. A development that once felt new can become ordinary by the time the next generation grows up.
If an eligible adult child continues the family story, they inherit the world that has developed, alongside the appropriate family and estate circumstances. Their own Life and experiences remain theirs.
Starting in the current year keeps the familiar opening LIVORA experience. The new connected systems can then respond to the events and decisions of that Life, just as they can in a historical or future start. Existing Lives keep their progress and history.
Clearer visual overviews, useful detail when needed and continued work on responsiveness and local-first play support the larger world without turning it into a collection of separate systems.