Friends What's a good way to keep your friends. When you get high up in the job levels you have to keep a certain amount of friends, and I can't seem to keep them all. Any tips
I often let my friendships slip. I downloaded Pescado's AutoYak hack from MATY (more awesome than you) and now I can just click on Call/Friends. I think it will help keep my friendships up. You can also pick "targets" that you'd like to have as friends and call them too. Otherwise, you just need to faithfully call at least three friends a day. When your sim has kids that's not so easy to do!
just keep using the phone! the best thing to do is to only make friends with people in your neighbourhood, not npc caracters, this way you can work on the relationship from both sides, just because your sim is up to 100 with someone, doesnt mean they feel the same about him, and the longer you keep the relationship going by just using one sim, the less the other sim is going to like him, if you get what i mean?? with most of my neighbours (and i did this with sims1 as well) i make a 'friendship' family. with the last name as friendship so they are easily recognisable. you basicly make 8 sims, a really simple house (or a nice house if you dont mind cheating) and give them a phone, also, dont make them work so they are available at any time of day. then every sim you have can have 8 friends with little trouble. and you just go into the house and work on the relationship from the other side maybe once a week or so, depending on how often you play. the phone is brill for maintaining friendships, if you have some time spare before you go to work or when waiting for the darn delivery guy cos the foods run out (happens a lot to me) just click the phone, sort by friendship and call the sim who is last on the list with a smilie face. if you manage to get all your friends up to 100, then start making a new one, you obviosly dont have enough! another method i find works is for women to only make friends with women and men to only be friends with men. this stops couples from being friends with the same people, which of course, doesnt count as 2 friends. and i find its easier to deal with starting a more intimate relationship if the woman hasnt got 10 male friends who really like her. good luck, keep working at it
Caduto, I was just lurking around here from work and read your post. Very impressive. A lot of good ideas. I've always been so happenstance with friendships in my game.
well, when you need 10 or more friends to get a good job, having 2 people in the house with 5 friends each is a lot easier to maintain than 1 person with 10 friends! also, if you notice in my posts i dont use the caps lock a lot (or even at all), when creating sims in the game i dont put a capital in front of their first or last names, this makes them easier to recognise against the npc's, which makes maintaining the relationship easier.. i just wish their was a filter on the phone to filter out npc's, or a way to just stop them entering my neighbourhood!
I have a family with an obscene amount of friends. I can't remember the exact number, it's just extremely high. I have four adults living together, plus their teenaged granddaughter/daughter. The grandparents were made by Maxis so they started with a few friends. But the parents are no slouches either. All four made a lot of friends in college as well. The grandparents are romance sims, so they can't invite a lot of their "ahem" friends over, but they keep in touch by phone. The parents and kid are popularity sims. So, that's one solution, if you have more than one gen that you've actually played (as opposed to just creating them as elders). Have your sims move back home after college and do the combined family thing. That's one thing "player" elders are really good for; since they've been around longer they generally have more friends.
I must admit that Pescado's phone hack and auto social hack are a godsend. I tend to pick the popularity aspiration a lot more often now than in the early days and actually expect to make the 30 best friends target. Just out of interest I have been experimenting with aspirations of late. For some bizarre reason I don't have any dice in the house, so I resort to coin tosses when I want a random outcome. For a teen's first aspiration I toss a coin, heads is for egocentric: pleasure, knowledge, wealth, tails is extroverted: popularity, romance, family. For a teen I judge that wealth and family are likely to low priorities sooo ... if it rolls up tails then 2 more tosses determine the aspiration. heads/tails=popularity; tails/heads=romance; heads/heads=popularity and tails/tails requires a 3rd toss where tails=wealth and heads=popularity. This gives me a simple means of having most teens coming up either goonishly sad populists or on the hedonism side: pleasure-seekers ... on each side there is a smaller clique of nerdy knowledge geeks and drippy romantics and an even rarer band of those who love their families ... or money. When they get the chance to choose a new aspiration between sophomore and junior year a whole new raft of silliness is invoked by your's truly where some are given Job-sized aspirational millstones and others are rewarded ... al depends how I'm feeling at the time ...
I go by the personality of the sim. I don't use hard and fast rules, but this is how I generally decide. I figure to be a knowledge sim you need high neatness and activity because I don't want to have to nag them to skill. Knowledge sims don't have to be outgoing, nice or playful, so if I have sim who's deficient in these areas, they're knowledge. Popularity means outgoing and playful. Nice is optional but helpful. Neatness not needed. Activity optional. Romance means outgoing and active (gotta keep that sexy figure) and can mean playful too. Nice not necessary, though I do have a couple of romance sims who are really nice too. Low neatness OK. Family I reserve for sims that are medium active, medium neat, and shy but fairly nice. Playful is helpful. I don't have a lot of family sims. I don't like Fortune or Pleasure. These are last resorts. I save those for sims I don't like very much, generally, though I do have one Pleasure sim I'm quite fond of. I don't like how hard it is to get her in the happy, though, and have considered switching her often, to popularity for instance. So, once I take a look at the stats for most of my sims I know what they're going to be. Some are harder than others. I'm glad we have the cement mixer because I've made a few mistakes, and it's fun to be able to change sims if you want to. I think people change as they get older, anyway.
Well, that's why Maxis provided the option to change aspirations in college, but I suppose your aspiration changes when you get towards midlife too.
In spite of what it seems from my earlier post, I also change my sims' aspirations as they age. I have been known to change them 3 or 4 times during uni and I always consider whether a change is apt when a lifetime want is fulfilled and when aging to elder. I like my own system for assigning asps to teens because I, personally, find it very difficult to assign an aspiration on the basis of a sim personality ... that and the fact there are no messy sims in my world (if you can't eat in a civilised manner then you tend to starve to death in my free will-less fief ) and those who won't run somewhere, even if the house is on fire ... well they get to do that little "oh no! my bum is alight" dance and a premature visit from grimmy.
I never make lazy sims. And to me the gorilla stance says, "don't marry this sim." Lazy sims are kind of a drag to play. (Mitch Indie may be cute but he's a gorilla boy, unfortunately.) But, I've got a couple of lazy sims who were born in game that I'm quite fond of (Selena, Waverly). I try to pair them with active sims so their kids have a fighting chance. Both of them have kids who are in the acceptable range. Weirdly, slobby pajama girl (0 neat, 0 active, Maxis made sim), married another Maxis-made sim with average stats (4 neat, 4 active) and their kid ended up with 5 neat, 10 active. So you just never know ... BTW, pajama girl cleans up quite nicely even if she is a slob. She's quite pretty with actual clothes and a different haircut (is it just me or does that pageboy flatter no one?) Of course, if you make her a player like I did (so she wouldn't be a vamp anymore, didn't know about the "influence to drink" option at the time) you get another pajama girl. Sigh. Just what the world needed.
