About [[FreeCol:Model.option.ages.name/ru]]
"Founding father recruitment ages" What is the meaning of "recruitment ages"? I suppose it means that certain founding father is available for recruitment only during certain period of time. Is it correct?
After doing some digging in the code, I found out that the concept of ages primarily has to do with a method for FreeCol's AI to select which founding Fathers to displays as options for the player to pick.
The ages are roughly from game start (normally 1492) to the year 1599, a second from 1600-1699, and the final of the three starts at 1700.
The decision to call them ages probably, and I am speculating, just simply to denote these longer periods of times (at least a century) with one simple word.
You may also translate "ages" as "epochs", or "centuries"; these are not related to the age of possible recruitment of these fathers, as if these were individual conditions for each of them, as they could equally be (for their epochs) quite young (~14 years old) or already quite old (more than 40 y.o.): remember that the average life expectancy of humans was shorter (except for some favorized families among the nobilities and rulers), and many young people could be emancipated very soon (especially if they were poor and had no properties or titles to inherit, and frequently married and themselves had children before reaching their 20's. Armies and fleets were also recruiting very soon in the campaigns, and many abandonned children were living in the street of cities, without any parent to take care of them, if they were not forcibly enrolled in armies or the churches, or sold by their poor parents.