The finer points of the game. Meh. Living forever only costs about 2000 ASP/day. An Elixir is 30K ASP and gives you 15 days for a chug-a-lug, so each person only needs to make about 2000 ASP a day. Married sims, with a talk/flirt/kiss/makeout/woohoo loop nets you in excess of 9K. Maxed knowledge sims are particularly good at this, since they tend to focus on each other, and with their skills maxed out, tend to have few power-wants that clog the dials, with exception of the occasional see ghost/be saved from death, but since you pretty much never feed these desires, they roll quickly as long as you keep at least one of the higher spousal wants locked. If they simultaneously live a fairly isolated lifestyle, you're less likely to have play/talk wants pertaining to other sims clogging the works, especially if you make sure to lock one pertaining to their spouse, which usually manages to kick out the others. It helps to prime the pump at times by doing fast kiss interactions as freebie, non-asp actions, which usually causes the next roll to fill with those that the Sim last interacted with. You'll also get a few children wants, like "kid gets A+, kid is overachiever", but those are similarly easy to satisfy. Knowledge sims may even be easier than Family sims, who often get clogged with wants that cannot be satisfied immediately, like "have 10 children", "have 20 grandchildren", "interact with children who aren't here anymore or have gone to bed", "have a baby", etc., and are less likely to roll into the talk/flirt/makeout/woohoo chain.
Gee..the game hasn't been out long. You have a grasp on fine points. Were you a beta tester or do you work for EA? LOL! I wouldn't mind a thread on aspiration choice. I find I pick the same two over and over because some are just too hard. The knowledge based one appeals to me more personally so I find I pick it 90 percent of the time.
I can't help it, I'm a knowledge sim at heart. It drives me to learn everything about everything. I'm already an Elder, so the more I hit platinum, the longer I hold out. Mini-me is now pushing 65 gamedays, elixir binges not included, and his age bar is only about half full, and a winecellar with rows and rows of elixirs and a mad science lab of unused energizers, since you max your point bank at 327670, prompting a cash-out spree to get more banking room. He's definitely gonna die an old, old man....and he doesn't have to, but I've decided it's time to let go. He will be succeeded by his son, a Jedi, like his father before him: A knowledge sim that maxed out while he was still a teen overachiever. He has now been an adult for all of 3 days and is 2 promotions out from becoming a mad scientist. And no, I don't work for EA. I'm not a beta tester, although I regularly have people tell me I *SHOULD* have been a beta tester for such-and-such a game I played and commented on. But I'm too cynical and anti-corporate for them to ever choose me. I kick over their trash cans too much. I am a grouchy sim. The knowledge aspiration is definitely among the better ones, though: They're preemptively career oriented: While they don't really care very much about their actual job, what they *DO* like is invariably highly effective at preparing them for their job: Skilling. Once they max out, they become devoted family people, easily able to maintain a monogamous relationship with or without children. Their only drawbacks are the occasionally unreasonable demands to see ghosts, be saved from death, or (haven't had this one come up on a CAS), see aliens. None of these can really be considered to be reasonable demands that you can meet, and effectively mean the loss of a want slot. Strategic locking of wants is a must when trying to succeed as a knowledge sim, since knowledge sims are often overfocussed and will obsess over their most recently increased skill, and likely lose their secondary interest to See Ghost/Saved from Death unless you lock the second skill they're pursuing. You definitely do not want a knowledge sim to lose interest in a skill he has a high level in, particularly not if he is at level 9. While gaining a level in the skill invariably reinstates his interest at the next reroll, he will lose out on the ASP for "maximize" if you maxed him out to gain that point. Fortunately, it is not usually necessary to lock a maximize unless you have multiple maximizes floating, because maximize is heavy-duty and will generally stick around for some time. But better safe than sorry. "Max all skills" rarely needs locking. It's too powerful, and once it's in range, it'll clog a want slot until it is satisfied. This want is one of the most powerful in the game: At +30K, a Knowledger can devote half his adult life to the singular pursuit of this goal, and still come out ahead, as this 30K buys him a full Elixir tank that he can immediately chug down in celebration. And this doesn't even include the ASP you earned for gain/maximize individual skills, at least some of which you spent on thinking caps. Warning: Once a knowledge sim maxes out his skills, he becomes aimless. His wants will become random and undirected, generally centering around interacting with random people that rarely "stick". A knowledge sim is likely to ultimately meet a sad, unfulfilled end unless you get him a mate, since his days will otherwise be filled by aspiring to win games against random people....something which would be much easier if he could play games on the Internet! I mean, hell, it works at keeping *ME* in platinum mood, yet sadly, this option is not available to our poor Sims. The man who knows everything comes to realize that he knows nothing. Fortune sims are demanding, and not preemptive. While they desire advancement, they lack the foresight to achieve: They'll only desire to increase their skills as far as necessary to achieve their next promotion, and cannot be bothered to see beyond that. They frivolously waste their money buying goodies for their temporary housing, which will simply depreciate and hurt their net worth before they can move into their permanent estate, and their aspirations invariably kick in too late to plat them before work: The "Go to work" aspiration only kicks in after they already have gone to work, which is too late for it to affect their job performance. Get a promotion kicks in only when they return at the end of the day, *IF* you managed to plat them, and will invariably wear off by the next morning. They like to purchase things that they already have, or things that don't fit in their house. They have no sense of aesthetics, demanding things solely based on pricetag, often when they already have one that is just as serviceable, but cheaper. All this increases their bills which actually drags on their ability to acquire a fortune. While viable as gen-0 sims, Fortune sims are far happier as next-gens when born into a wealthy family, which gives them plenty of time to hit max creativity as children, since you can park them on the piano when they come home from school, and later in life they aspire to be painters instead, for a +6000 ASP painting that can be finished at leisure, allowing them to much more easily plat before work. Fortune sims can easily become successful, but just as easily become miserable, even when you try to succeed. Popularity sims are also quite good, and easy to satisfy, but require large amounts of micromanagement, since Free-willed sims are socially inept creatures that tend to just irritate each other. Even when you make them nice, and especially when you make them outgoing, since outgoing sims like to harass other sims. They have basically no real interest in their jobs, rarely desiring to meet prerequisites, skill, or otherwise. They are often committed socialites, however, and often make a good companion to the knowledge sim when it comes to meeting family friends for job requirements. A fair complement of Popularity sims is healthy for a neighborhood, since they're the glue that holds the place together. More shy Popularity sims tend to gravitate towards being painters. Popularity Sims are happy as Athletes, which simultaneously makes them very good for when you want to piss off a particularly annoying townie Sim, or just some sim you created yourself, perhaps in the image of somebody you didn't like, since they will then aspire to beat the tar out of the offender, a task they're quite good at if they're athletes! Beating people up can make an outgoing popularity sim a happy camper. And it's funny to watch! Romance sims are, well, similar to popularity sims. But they get slapped a lot more, and have shorter attention spans. They're fairly easy to keep satisfied, even if you keep their behavior relatively restrained, or even monogamous. It's certainly no harder than knowledge sims, if you figure that their more extreme demands constitute a potentially lost slot, much like "See Ghost" and "Be Saved from Death" in a monogamous relationship. They do, however, make poor family men, due to their aversion towards having much to do with their children. They basically never care about their children. If you want to marry them off, it's best to do so with a Knowledge sim: Knowledge sims are generally too absorbed in their work to pay much attention to what their partner is doing, and will often study away oblivious to the fact that their spouse is cheating on them across the house. I've had one walk through the room en-route to the exercise machine to satisfy his work-out cravings, barrel straight through the room where their spouse is cheating on them with the maid, thinking "Oooh, boy. This is gonna get interesting.", but instead they just wave and plod through completely oblivious, or utterly uncaring. It's funny like that. Don't count on this ALWAYS happening....but it happens enough. Don't pair a Romance sim with a Popularity sim. They destroy your parties. Romance/Family makes for an interesting combination that can work....as long as your romance sim remains uncaught! If you want some fireworks, let him get caught. Romance/Fortune works not unlike Romance/Knowledge. Somebody reported that Mary-Sue Pleasant (Fortune), actually cheered when her husband woohooed the maid. They may actually care even less than knowledge sims. I have yet to try this much, since Fortune sims are often so insatiable that I rarely make them gen-0 sims, which form the bulk of my population due to the need for fresh blood. Family sims, well, they make good breeders, particularly if you're trying to introduce positive traits to the neighborhood genetic makeup, but if you don't get them married off, or at least engaged soon, they are miserable! Oftentimes they are uninterested in woohoo. They like to talk to, play with, and soforth with their family members, and flirt/kiss with their spouses, but they seem less likely to roll the complete kiss/makeout/woohoo chain. This makes them somewhat demanding in terms of other people's time, since they have fewer fast ASP power-scores with other sims. A pair of family sims is very easy to keep happy, with or without children, though, since all they want to do is talk to each other.
That was fantastic! ManagerJosh should stick that in a FAQ for everyone! I'm printing it off for future use. I'm a "stand back and watch until I figure it out" and instruction reader type in real life. This saves me a ton of trial and error! lol I'm still ticked off that the Cosco and Sam's Clubs are selling the game WITH the book for less than I paid for the game alone. I'm going to have to break down and pay for it anyway. I just "feel" that I'm missing some obvious things on the game. I think it's why I hang out here so much.
Heh, that'd be funny if he actually put my mad ramblings in an FAQ. Keep in mind this is all empirical field experience, be taken for whatever it's worth. It's likely that the results I got may not be the results you may necessarily get, depending on your playing style. In your case, these results probably apply, since in another thread, you claimed to have a rather controlling, fascistic style like myself. If, however, you decide to simply let your sims cruise on their own, or are playing with a different goal, your results may differ. I personally drive my sims to excel in any endeavour they embark upon. Once a sim takes a job, it's a driven rat-race to the top. Some of these behaviors may also be greatly influenced by the personalities I give Sims: While the other attributes vary, I do tend to have a bias towards 6+ active, because it enables "Run"....something I feel is a necessity when it comes to both trying to interact with uncontrolled Sims, which often requires that you run them down, overtake, and flag them down, and when trying to travel about in general: Large houses can take up to an hour for a lazy, slacker sim to cross, whereas an active sim barrels through the house at a breakneck pace. Lazy sims should not live in mansions. Especially not ones designed for aesthetics rather than efficiency. The results above may be affected by my biases towards these particular attributes in Sims, although I do have a fair variety anyway. I suppose that brings us to "personality of sim" as an important factor also, so I'll just do my field experience on that: Sloppy vs. Neat: Excessively sloppy sims will make messes where none would normally occur, such as a slobby sim, I think at < 2 neatness, will drag water out of the shower and utterly desecrate the bathroom as a result. You can make him clean it up, but this is not timesaving. A sloppy sim takes longer in the bathroom in general, since he will often destroy the environment, then whine about the problem he caused for about 7 minutes. A slobby sim, below about 3-4 neatness, will also not replace books on the shelves. This is not actually a timesaving behavior, because oftentimes, the tables they insist on dropping the books on are further away than the shelf, which is often located right next to the chair! If you have a slobby sim, make sure that there are no tables or counters in rooms with bookshelves, unless the table is right in front of their chair, because otherwise they will hike across the room in the name of laziness just to make a mess. A sim below 6 neatness will also take plates and stack them on top of the countertop, often the same countertop with the dishwasher. Left to himself, at, say, neat-5, he will decide he doesn't like the mess, then take the plate and stick it in the dishwasher. Somewhat of a time-waster here. A neat-6 sim will place dishes in the washer, except if you make them eat a table, in which they will sometimes do this, sometimes not. Exceeding neat-6 tends to result in excessively anal behavior which can be counterproductive in a working sim. Even at neat-6, Sims will sometimes becomes obsessed with making the bed, a behavior I feel is rather useless since the Sim will likely sleep in it again shortly. This action refuses to cancel, unlike in TS1. My opinion is that a neatness rating between 4 and 6 makes for the most well-balanced Sim. Shy vs. Outgoing: This attribute is more or less double-edged. A shy sim interacts poorly with those who are not close friends. At the same time, their social needs decrease slower. This can be both good and bad: It is good, obviously, because Social is a demanding bar to fill, as it requires at least one other Sim, who you may or may not have to interrupt. On the other hand, the slow decay rate, for a Shy sim with many friends to keep up, means that he will not sustain phone conversations well. Sims tend to hang up quickly if their Social meter is full. A fast decay rate will allow a sim to talk longer and build more points: Phone chat is probably the most effective relationship builder, since Sims do not tire of this quickly, and a positive phone interaction is worth 3-5 points, whereas a poor one only penalizes relationship by 1 point. Highly outgoing sims will harass and annoy other Sims. All in all, I feel that this attribute is more or less balanced, except at extreme outgoing: These sims annoy other sims and are disruptive. < 8 is recommended, but all other values are safe. Lazy vs. Active: This is, in my view, totally skewed towards active. There are really very few benefits to a lazy sim. It is either untrue that Lazy sims require less sleep, or that my tendency to drive them rather than let them lounge around depletes a lazy sim's energy quickly. In all cases, Active sims have, from what I can tell, far greater endurance in all things. A max-active Sim can nearly entirely ignore the "Comfort" motive, as he will rarely require it, and the times he spends reading books for skill on a decent chair, or sleeping on a good bed, will more or less fill it for the entire day. Lazy sims, on the other hand, cannot remain standing for very long. Active is the way to go, and the more, the better. Serious vs. Playful: The fun motive decreases more slowly for Serious sims. It also recharges more slowly, since Serious sims do not derive as much Fun from the high-fun objects, and while they seem to benefit more from the serious activities like chess, and book-reading, the low base value of these activities still does not allow them to refill quickly. This attribute is more or less balanced at all ranges, including extremes. Seriousness, however, costs no CAS points, but playfulness should not necessarily be discouraged in bred Sims. Excessive playfulness, in conjunction with high outgoingness, will antagonize other Sims. Grouchy vs. Nice: Grouchy sims, obviously, are cheaper to make in CAS. The benefits of extreme grouchiness are somewhat minimal, though. They are difficult to both make friends with, and as. Sims should probably not be encouraged to be grouchy, but excessively nice sims are, and this cannot be really be put in a nice way, pussies. They cry whenever a social interaction goes badly. This will happen often, particularly if they have a trait imbalance elsewhere, such as excessive Outgoing and Playfulness. All in all, a sim with maxed out personality attributes in all categories is NOT the best Sim. Although many TS1 people think so, this is untrue! A sim with maxed out neatness, outgoingness, activity, playfulness, and niceness is easily interacted with, but will almost certainly antagonize any normal sim of less than rosy disposition that it initiates interaction with....which will happen often! This sim will also be extremely anal-retentive and whiny, spending excessive amounts of time cleaning up things which the maid would have dealt with anyway, or things which will shortly be used again, and whine constantly about various needs falling....which will happen often, since the Sim will have high decay rates of both Fun and Social. All in all, I do not feel that trying to encourage sims to max out all of their personality traits is good. Many traits are aggravating when taken to excess.
I wondered why some of my sims cried at the drop of a hat! lol Others "worry" excessively. I've had to wrestle with some of mine to keep them from taking their one dish to the dishwasher when I prefer the last one at the table to clean it all up. The trait options when creating a sim upset me this time. I wanted to create a really serious, lazy, grouchy slob of a sim but you HAVE to use all the points now. You can't make a sim with all low range traits. I don't think I ever understood the lazy/active sim. Again..very informative! lol Thanks!
Are the worrying sims suffering from red aspiration? Are they likely your insatiably prodigal Fortune sims, who you are probably not buying enough junk for to keep them happy? Did the aforementioned Sim recently suffer a work-related incident, such as being fired or demoted? These things upset Fortune Sims a great deal. Like I said, excessive neatness results in extremely anal-retentive behavior. The personality of a sim greatly affects the optimal design of a house: You have to cater to certain behavioral traits in attempt to minimize the amount of time wasted by them. For instance, if you do not give your Sims a table to eat at, they will individually carry the dishes to either dump them on the table, or a dishwasher. A pair of cheap dishwashers can also greatly improve plate disposal bandwidth. Dishwashers are best located underneath the food processor or Microwave, NOT beneath the empty countertop upon which food is often prepared or served, because this counter is often blocked by Sims preparing, or getting, food. Also, making your kitchen devoid of a table with chairs around it greatly improves food flow in some families: If the kitchen has no table, or no chairs at the table, a Sim serving food will deposit the food upon an unoccupied counter in the room, and it will be self-serve. Otherwise, the sim will serve food to the table without regard to how many Sims will actually be dining, preferentially favoring the unoccupied places first. This means that if Sims are seated at the table, awaiting the food, the server will dispense food to the chairs not occupied, then take his plate and run off across the house because all of the places are now occupied by a Sim, or already have a plate served in front of them, leaving him no place to sit. On the other hand, my approach I find works well is to have a table in the room, but to not place any chairs at it: Instead, the family eats self-serve at a bench in the kitchen. With no table. They then either deposit the plates upon the table, reducing "counter clog", and the neater members deposit their plates directly into the dual dishwasher docking stations. It also shortens the turnaround time of a meal by a good 5-10 Simminutes, since they will not engage in the "pull chair, sit, eat, get up, push in chair" animations, which are slow and time-consuming. Instead, they just park their butts on the bench and eat with any squeezing or inching. Slobbier sims then deposit their used plates on the nearest surface, generally the chairless table. To optimize your layouts, try to observe the behavior of your individual sims: Identify their behavioral quirks, then redesign the layout to suit them.
I cannot believe the stuff you've noticed! lol You must score really high on spacial relations and patterns on testing. Are you pulling this out of your head or do you keep notes? You'd make a fantastic efficiency consultant. I've moved bookcases or chairs to prevent sims from sitting on a chair with low comfort when there was a perfectly wonderful high comfort chair just as close. I've redesigned bathrooms next to kitchens when they chose to take plates in there to wash rather than the kitchen sink. You've taken this to another level though! lol I think, asthetically speaking, the lack of chairs might bother me but I seldom get everyone to the table to eat at the same time anyway! lol It would never have occured to me to even try "no chair" dining! lol With the kitchen islands available in this game you might not even need a table to accomplish this. I'll play with being more efficient. It's another mini-goal to keep the game interesting.
I do pretty well there, yeah. I always thought everyone did, though. It seems fairly easy. Are you pulling this out of your head or do you keep notes? You'd make a fantastic efficiency consultant.[/QUOTE]I'm pulling this from memory. My memory isn't what it used to be. If I had been actually keeping notes, I'd be able to quote you the exact cutoffs for exactly when certain neatness behaviors manifest, for instance. Maybe I should do that. There are many reasons to place bathrooms near kitchens, among which includes the fact that hunger->bladder->hygiene is a cycle: Eating generally depresses the bladder meter, prompting a trip to the toilet, which in turn depresses the hygiene meter. Thus, I have Sims often run this cycle, so it's helpful to have bathrooms near kitchens. Taking plates to wash at bathroom sinks rather than kitchen sinks is usually a behavior prompted by lack of dishwasher: If all available dishwashers are blocked at that particular moment, a Sim desiring to have a plate washed will navigate to the nearest sink instead. Note that the choice of nearest sink, as with many other nearest-object choices, will occur without regard to the presence of walls, so a Sim will hike around the house to reach a sink located on the opposite side of a wall, when a much "closer" sink actually exists on their side of the wall, but at greater linear distance. My sense of aesthetics tends to lean towards the spartan and functional. Maxis-built homes, for instance, look distinctly housey, but I'd never be able to conceive of such a design on my own: My own designs invariably vary towards right-angle construction and rectangular rooms. Left entirely to my own devices, I'd create a neighborhood that looks like a military base. Only external inspiration manages to prevent this, and my construction still strongly leans towards the blocky. It should also be noted that, unlike TS1, it is unlikely that a large, busy family will have everyone become hungry around the same time: Since people now bum free food at work, oftentimes half the family will return quite satisfied, and have no need of food: Using a dining table causes the food-dispenser to serve food to these empty places at the table. This impedes your cleanup effort afterwards, since these plates must be individually gathered and washed: Since they are not empty, they will not be "stacked" by a cleanup crew, and must be individually washed one at a time. Very time-consuming. Well, it started fairly early: In the beginning, on a budget of 20K, you really have to cut back on the nonessentials. So when I built my starting temporary housing shack, it was fairly spartan: Fridge, pair of counters, stove, couch, bookshelf, bed, bathroom, misc. skilling objects. Tables were a luxury I couldn't afford. So, my Sim, when eating, would engage in the following behavior: First, he would grab a plate. Then, he would plop his *** down in the nearest chair to eat. "Nearest" appeared to be room specific: As my house was basically two rooms, "the room", and "the bathroom", he'd hike across the room to seek the couch, or the computer chair. I notice that when the Sim chose to eat at the computer, he engaged in a much more time-consuming behavior of pulling the chair out, squeezing his way in, and only then eating. Naturally, in an effort to improve efficiency, I attempted to reduce the hiking by moving the couch, and the bookshelf as well, closer to the cooking area. This also had the desired effect of reducing his desire to sit down in the computer chair instead. I noticed that plunking down on the couch to eat was much faster than any alternative method of eating. A study of the way the various standard Maxis homes worked revealed that table+chair seeking priority of a Sim looking for a dining spot was rather high: At first I thought maybe it was room-bounded, with stairs not breaking the definition of a room, as Darren Dreamer persisted in hauling his food all the way upstairs to his table in his drawing room if the kitchen table was full. I tested by walling off the kitchen in an attempt to convince him to stay there. It didn't work. It appears that, instead, the desire to seek a conventional table + chair setting overrides any other concerns. In order to get a Sim to dine efficiently, no free table+chair must be available in the entire house. Anyway, overall, I find that as a general rule, the more "conventional" a Sim's behavior, that is, the more it seems to conform to the way normal people behave, the less efficient it is: The more you try to equip a Sim's home so that he behaves like "normal" people, the less efficient he becomes, as in the dining behavior: Improvised behaviors are far more efficient, due to the Sim's poor ability to multitask. I mean, sure, people actually sit down at dining tables to eat....but it's not like *I* ever do this. It's inefficient! Instead, I haul my food back to my desk, and eat it there. Unlike a Sim, however, I do not simply eat. I eat while using my computer! That's efficient! And Sims can't do that.
Orion..I want to apologize for highjacking your thread. If ManagerJosh can move J.M.Pescado and my off-topic posts to another place it would streamline your discussion.
Heh, well, now we've lost the natural segue which began with Orion's discussion about living forever and having unlimited children, to which I had pointed out that immortality is 2000 ASP/day, and rather trivial to achieve.
It does so happen that I happen to have a large forehead dome. It's made somewhat more prominent by my baldness, and the waxy finish it has. I'm not sure this is why they annoy me so, though. I think they're just after my money. Naturally, they fail to meet my standards, and I am thus uninterested in them.
I was only kidding, just meant your clever, It's a line from ghost buste's it goes: Venkman Egon I bet the chicks really dig that large cranium of yours Egon Actually I think there more interested in my Epidermis LOL I love Egon, Mr.T
Let me catch up here ... have we esyablished that it is possible for a sim to live forever without turning off aging?
Yes, a Sim can easily live forever using only in-game, non-cheatcode methods. If Maxis ever fixes the apparently memory-related jump-out bug, this will even become safe. Consider: The Elixir of Life aspiration reward costs ~30K ASP. It contains 5 doses, which, when administered properly, subtracts 3 days. This means that a full tank is worth 15 days. So, if your Sim receives one of these every 15 days, he lives forever. 30K ASP, spaced out over 15 days, is 2K ASP/day. Therefore, on a day in which a Sim earns > 2K ASP in profit, that he does not need to spend on thinking caps or other goodies, he can save them instead for an Elixir. He will thus live forever as long as he makes 2K ASP/day. Now, this is not a hard task: Generally, any married Sim can be manipulated into developing, often rather powerful, interact-with-spouse wants. A common one would be the typical Flirt/Kiss/Makeout/Woohoo chain, worth about 9K ASP right there. That'll last him for about 4 days even if he accomplishes nothing else, and tends not to consume very much of either Sim's time, since you can manage this cycle right before both Sims go to sleep.
How to make a teen an overachiever? Both my parents want their kid to become an overachiever, but I don't know how to do it. Please help!
LOL At JMP. But, you know what, somehow back in time when this was a live thread, I missed it. I don't know how or whY, but I did. And I missed reading all the wonderful tidbits you included about sims aspirations and relationships. Since furthering Sims Relationships is my main area of gameplay focus, I found it all EXTREMELY educational. And I even gave you an approval.
