Social engineering How much social engineering does everyone engage in? Persoanlly, I am obsessive about keeping the family trees and gene pools of my neighbourhood in an iron grip, and it is taking me a while to get over the fact that I can't control the genders of my babies. This problem has caused me to engage in ridiculous amounts of social engineering, for example creating, romancing and then moving in sims for the sole purpose of moving out again with unwanted children (like the boy twin I deleted and then realised that that DOESN'T make them go away, who I then couldn't interact with and made me feel very guilty and awful by crying and crapping himself). And making a family with four girls, two with a Popularity-mum (Chosledei) and two with a Family-dad (Rjonak), the latter pair with grandparents (for better family trees) and then moving in Chosledei with various couples I decided would be cute with a girl-child (many of these were same-sex so would have only adopted some random child from the phone). I did this by making her fall in love with Rjonak (so he wanted her to have his babies (Family sims are so scary, wanting hordes of offsping and grandchildren so they become immortal or whatever (though the Fortune sims are the worst - buying endless and identical crap actually gives them a full and happy life - what are Maxis trying to say?))), then moving her back and forth between her original house and the houses of others, and stealing Rjonak's children in the process. This made him have a mental breakdown once or twice, so I've compensated him for his pain by marrying him and Chosledei and vowing to bless him with many many children. Anyway, do you allow sims to follow their own paths, for example, do you have strictly predetermined marriages (e.g., this sim's child will marry that sim's grandchild and then have three children and marry them off to the grandchildren of this family, drawing up complicated projected family trees during loading times etc), or do you marry on the basis of autonomous flirtiness, and have babies when it appears as a Want or whatever? Please tell me your stories. By the way, what do you think of Maxis' TS2 emphasis on stories? I really like it, but I can see how it can come across as sugary and the stories as monotonous or contrived.
Er ... well, I do sort of plan marriages. But I don't micromanage thisngs too heavily. For example one of my families began with a single mother who had a teen and a toddler plus her parents living in. Both GP's were family oriented and it soon became apparent that they could not all live together for long. All the GP's wanted was more grandkids! So I moved the mother and kids out to see if they could make their way on only 20 thou. Unfortunately mom soon became pregnant by Burt Mashuno (the local lothario). Well I couldn't be having Burt's rep ruined by taking on 2 kids as well as his own, so I turned to the Collins household (4 males, 4 females all unrelated) to see if Fujiko could find a mate (and a pop for Mariko and Mikka and the one in the oven). Dennis fell for her hook line and sinker .... But boy did I ever feel sorry for him when she moved in and dropped twins. Eeek! I almost reloaded without saving; but I'd never had twins before so decided to see if I could cope ... I'm still on it. It is exhausting.
I make plans, but I change them a lot. Children that I have no use for are kept in families that I don't play very much. Andromeda is still a child, while her younger brother Albert have five children of which one have reached teenhood and will soon be able to produce offspring of her own.
You can: The baby's gender is determined shortly before it pops, so if you save and reload shortly before the birth, you'll get another random gender. I generally just leave well enough alone, though, unless I'm running into a shortage. Family Sims are scary, particularly if their children are family sims as well. I mean, imagine: A family sim has 10 spawn. Each of their children has 10 spawn. So you're going to have *100* grandchildren. If those put out 10 more each, you're going to have a THOUSAND. Are you aware of how unbelievably scary this is? Mine seem to eventually get tired of buying crap if their creativity skill maxes out, and start wanting to paint and write. I don't predetermine marriages from before birth, but once a Sim is old enough for it, I do start shopping around for one. As far as I can tell, Sims don't actually have an autonomous flirtiness factor, as it's said that Sims don't start romantic relationships without you prodding them. They also have no ability to break off a relationship: Once you get them to "in love", it basically never wears off on its own, and the game will oddly, still consider it to be cheating on a nonexistent marriage if you get "caught", perhaps because you ultimately end up marrying someone else. Last I heard, in the real world, this was a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Needless to say, the fact that all romantic relationships are severed on the teen to adult thing is actually a blessing if you want to let your Sim play the field for a bit before finding a bride. Unfortunately, the teen years are so busy that your Sims rarely have time, and my non-romance teens all seem to be workaholic, to boot. Mine, for instance, practically never roll their "First Kiss" want. It didn't even APPEAR. For my Knowledge sims, they were entirely trumped by "gain skill point", the Fortune sims wanted "buy crap" and finally "Sell Painting". The Romance and Family sims definitely get it, since these wants are part of their core desires, though. I tend to be very leery of their occasional random "Flirt with" wants, because this invariably will set up any non-Romance sim for long-term misery as it derails their want chains. Hell, even with Romance sims, this is a mess once you develop too many actual loves: They do better using the special tub for quick loveless woohoo flings. It avoids the unnecessary messes, since then nobody whines about "cheating" despite the fact that nobody's married. I mean, you'd think you'd actually have to be in an actual formal relationship to be able to cheat on it. Well, yeah, if you, like I, tend to manage Sims with an iron fist, you're not gonna get much in the way of a story you didn't contrive. Some people obviously like it, but I guess for us, it just seems too contrived and saccharine. I don't generally use the storytelling options much, except to occasionally take pictures of particularly amusing occurrences, like when a Sim manages to set himself on fire without my trying to do so.
Thanks muchly for the gender tip J.M. Pescado - it will save me lots of hassle and strife. During the time of the stories told I was running into a shortage, but also the genders that popped up were inconsistent with my vision of that particular family - both nuclear and extended. I think it was more the latter though, as I was (foolishly) relying rather on a handful of families to renew the blood of my neighbourhood, which is newish and didn't have very many children in it. Both terrifying and ridiculous. I don't think any sim deserves to be immortalised in a thousand children. Also if a sim neighbourhood held that many (I can't be bothered to do the maths) (allowing for the original weirdo(es) to die off reasonably quickly I suppose - grow them up in red maybe, or just kill them off depending on how natural you want things to feel) it'd be pretty b loody bland and homogenous anyway. Mine too, and same goes for one of my Popularity sims. This is supposed to be one of their big Wants I think. I'm pretty (but not completely) sure mine do - it's not as bad as in TS1 when you couldn't really avoid falling in love with someone if you wanted to be very good friends with them, but once my sims get really chummy they occasionally do minor flirts like Charm, plus constantly do the little swoon/growl attraction thing, though this might be because the person they're swooning over is a Romance sim or horoscopically compatable or something. Oh this is absolutely awful. I have numerous Knowledge sims who become obsessed with their flings and their Wants bars become subject to an endless barrage of horribly low-scoring interaction-Wants. It almost destroyed the Growing-Up of one of my favourite sims, Cetherine, who had a wonderful life with her Family girlfriend Sethera and their CAS adopted daughter Helly. She was a Knowledge sim who dressed in black, and as well as being a professional painted and a logician, she had many passionate affairs (she showed up on all my single sims' lots). This never caused any problems until the last few days of adulthood when she because obsessed with two people she'd known and loved almost since I moved her in as a fresh CAS. Of course, this created problems because poor Sethera, who was oblivious to Cetherine's infidelity, would be destroyed by the knowledge that her life's love had a collection of longstanding and committed lovers. Strangest is when people you're having affairs get shirty with you for 'cheating' with your actual spouse, even when they are aware you are married (they watched it happen, for example) - I suppose it would make sense if they objected to being cheated with (as opposed to on). Sims seem to be very sexually unliberated, despite all being bi. I meant it in the sense of overly artificial and unnatural-sounding, rather than created by the user. But, as I say, despite their being inherantly contrived, I still like sims stories. Me neither really - I prefer retelling them verbally to other people rather than narrating them pictorially for myself. I feel it gets in the way a bit. Words are so often too clumsy and cumbersome to accurately encapsulate things anyway, and I can't really be bothered to describe sims events in a poetic way in order to refer to them faithfully.
The attraction thing isn't actually an interaction, though, it's just an emote that occurs in the presence of a Romance sim of appropriate gender, and a few unconfirmed reported other cases. It doesn't actually affect relationships in any way, and isn't really an interaction, though. I've never seen a Sim actually attempt an autonomously chosen flirt out of the blue, however. In fact, all official information states that they won't, until you initiate a romantic relationship, after which the AI will pursue it on his own. That's ultimately the end product of any Knowledge sim: Knowledge Sims, unlike other Sims, have finite and very achieveable power wants: Maximize all skills, reach top of the science career. Once they've achieved all of the ones they can possibly achieve, they'll be derailed by a collection of either unfeasible wants (see ghost/be saved from death), but as these can only hog two slots, they'll also develop a fixation on either becoming gym rats (swim/work out), or latch onto one or more other Sims: At this point, you are well-advised to marry off the aforementioned Knowledge sim, or he'll start demanding things which simply aren't feasible, like interactions with people who aren't present, or "Win Game", which is simply not arrangeable. At least until they can play "Battleship: Nuclear War Edition", anyway, which is at least over quickly. Did you max out all of your actively pursued skills at this point? A knowledge sim will tend to fixate on the improvement of their last upgraded skill. Using locking, this means you can keep them focussed on two skills without trouble, by locking the one they didn't improve, and figuring the one they ARE currently improving will stay rolled because it's most recent. Once they max their focus skills, however, you'll have to autonomously "seed" a new skill much of the time by gaining a skillpoint in it, then waiting for wants to reroll. Eventually, you'll be down to like one or two skills remaining, and "maximize all" should lock itself in and refuse to go away until satisfied. Once you've maximized all, though....you're done. Want a simple 30K Asp again? Lose a skillpoint. The knowledge sim in question will then immediately return with "repair lost skill", and, of course "maximize all", so you can do it again, and again, if you really want. This form of derailment is somewhat annoying, because the point-values of Flirt/Kiss/Woohoo wants are often strong enough to derail some of the weaker wants of a Knowledge sim: See above for how to get around this. Yeah, no doubt because the behavior for it all was sort of tacked on as an afterthought. As long as they're written by other people, yes. Reading your own seems a little masturbatory. I don't really take story-style photos at all. I tend to instead take pictures of things that really make me laugh, then caption them with amusing headlines like "He's on fire! Look at 'im burn!"
I've been lucky to get some really good stories without really having to contrive anything. I just watch what my sims do and snap pics. Every so often, I'll look at the pics and put them in a sequence that makes sense to me and makes a story. For example, in my hood, I have the saga of Shoko, Gustave, and Vincent. Shoko and Gustave are married with two children, but she is a romance sim. Vincent is the next door neighbor who is also a romance sim. He's my neighborhood's answer to Wilt Chamberlain. Shoko and Gustave are having a fairly happy marriage at the same time as she and Vincent are having a fairly happy affair. But then, something happened, and she got preggers, but no one knew who the father was. Then the child was born and was the darkest skin tone just like her father, Vincent, and not like her "father," Gustave who is pale like the moon. The sight of her new bundle of joy sent Shoko into a combination of post-partem depression and guilt-induced nerves requiring the psychologist. This whole story required only 7 pics of fairly common and normal activities that I took. I probably ditched about three times that many after choosing the ones I was going to use.
I know. No, she just lost interest in everything other than two people who she became obsessed with in her last few days of adulthood. Wow. I think at this point I'd probably just resign myself to unfocusedness ... this is an example of what I'd feel to be artificial.
