Skewed Neighborhood Demographics

[rufio]

From various posts on this forum, I've determined that AL provides a steady trickle of new townies into the game.  This doesn't particularly bother me, as long as it doesn't cause BFBVFS, which I gather it doesn't.  However:

I have ACR and use it to randomly roll every single townie's gender preference, so that playing romance sims is actually slightly challenging.  After I installed AL, I noticed the usual initial influx of townies, and rolled their preferences.  Later on I noticed that more townies would accumulate, but the only thing that bothered me about this was that every single one of the subsequent townies seems to female.  My neighborhood currently has about 250 male townies and about 350 female townies, and there was no real difference between the number of male and female townies until I installed AL.  Is this some kind of random number generating bug, or is it by design?  From looking through the phonebook of a sim with the Head for Numbers perk, I note that the new townies do not all seem to have the same name, the same hairstyle, or the same hair color, which I would have expected to happen if it had been a random number bug.  Is there anything I can do to change it so that generates some male townies, too?

[purplebunny]

I think you've just been bit by sado-randomness.

Each time a townie generates, there's a 50% chance it'll be male, 50% it'll be female.

You could always generate your own townies using the NPC/Townie maker and only accept the male ones...

[Gwill]

I'm so glad to hear someone else say this.
The fact that all 4 births I've had since installing AL I'll gladly atribute to randomness, but every single new townie/social group sim the game has generated since then has also been female.  Whenever I look for roommates I get a list of all females, regardless of what family and who's searching.
My butler is male, and I have encountered a warlock, but all other new characters since I installed AL are female.  I have 50 female social group sims, that is notning like random!

[seelindarun]

How weird.  Can you check the date stamps on those character files to see if they were all generated within the same play session?  I habitually see the first-born effect when the game has to pull an NPC out of its ass, so I always re-randomise at the start of every play session.  I've never seen that bug skew gender in a pre-AL game, though.

[rufio]

I'm so glad to hear someone else say this.
The fact that all 4 births I've had since installing AL I'll gladly atribute to randomness, but every single new townie/social group sim the game has generated since then has also been female.  Whenever I look for roommates I get a list of all females, regardless of what family and who's searching.
My butler is male, and I have encountered a warlock, but all other new characters since I installed AL are female.  I have 50 female social group sims, that is notning like random!

Good to know I'm not the only one who noticed it.  It also happens with born-in-game sims too?  Darn.  I haven't had any since AL.

[Gwill]

How weird.  Can you check the date stamps on those character files to see if they were all generated within the same play session?

They're created unevenly over many days.
I installed my pre-AL neighbourhood on the 21st, 3 characters were spawned on the 22nd, 24 characters on the 23rd, 5 on the 24th and 25th, 12 on the 26th, 3 on the 27th, 6 on the 28th, 4 on the 29th and 3 on the 30th.
66 new characters (if I counted correctly), out of these, two auto spawned character are male (the Warlock and the Butler), and one male was spawned using the townie gun set specifically to male.

Good to know I'm not the only one who noticed it.  It also happens with born-in-game sims too?  Darn.  I haven't had any since AL.

I wouldn't draw any conclusions based on just 4 births.

I checked the gender balance of my hood with the census tool, and it appears that my hood has a pretty good gender balance even after those 50 women decided to invade.  It could simply be that my hood has been overly male dominated (without me noticing) and EAxis has suddenly implemented the gender balancing tool it's been rumoured the game possesses.
Even if that's so, this is a terribly bad way of bringing balance.  I for one would like to see some bohemian males too.

[Gastfyr]

Can Butlers even be female?  I thought they had to be male much like nannies have to be female.

[Gwill]

Can Butlers even be female?  I thought they had to be male much like nannies have to be female.

I'm guessing they're all male.  That's why I mentioned him as a special case.

[J. M. Pescado]

You could always generate your own townies using the NPC/Townie maker and only accept the male ones...

BAAAD! A generated sim doesn't just "disappear", so what HAPPENS is that every time you reject a sim, it just gets killed and becomes a dead file in your neighborhood. Don't do this! If you want to "reject", quit without saving.

[Gwill]

You could always generate your own townies using the NPC/Townie maker and only accept the male ones...

BAAAD! A generated sim doesn't just "disappear", so what HAPPENS is that every time you reject a sim, it just gets killed and becomes a dead file in your neighborhood. Don't do this! If you want to "reject", quit without saving.

It's also an idiotic idea simply because the townie generator allows you to select the gender of the characters you want generated.

[kutto]

I moved someone into Brookhaven Manor, an apartment someone here linked to with a restaurant on the ground floor, and everyone who lived there was female. All the waiting staff was female, the chef was female, the tenants were female, even the landlord was female. I agree; something is off here.

[jsalemi]

I had that happen in the Desiderata hood, too.  I plopped down an apartment house and moved in the romance female that was living with her sister and brother-in-law, hoping to give her a wider pool of potential conquests.  Every tenant and the landlord are female -- not a male in site.  Something is wacky, because pure sadorandomness shouldn't have caused that.

[Gwill]

How are the overall demographics for the rest of you?

As you can see, mine appear to be pretty balanced on the whole:


However, as you can see, all my social group sims are female.



(More... leads to two more females)

(Zachary was manually created with the townie gun set to male only)

Is the game just trying to balance old "mistakes"?

I find it very frustrating that my female romance sims can't find a male roomie piece of ass.  And the complete lack of male jocks, techies and gearheads completely unrealistic.

Edit:  And here are some shots from my test hood, which has a male craze goring.
Here's how it was from before I started testing (test hood created pre-AL).


Here I used the "create all townies" option on the townie tree, with gender set to random.


Here's the demographics after I sent a sim to search for room mate.

[LauraW]

I have the same problem. All my social townies are females. I have created three apartment complexes..one with 4 apartments, one with 5 apartments and one with 10.  Every single social townie is a female. I even left one apartment without saving so they would regenerate, and again, all females. This wouldn't be so bad but this is a medieval neighborhood and I would like some males in the apartments.

I have created these apartments over several days, quitting the game and saving in between.

[Gwill]

Pescado fixed it.
I believe it's part of alfixes.package

[LauraW]

Thank you. I took that out due to a conflict but guess I need it again. I appreciate the response.

[jsalemi]

Thank you. I took that out due to a conflict but guess I need it again.

How to make life simple, and your game as bulletproof as possible:

If Pescado has a mod with the word 'fix' in it, and/or it's designated as critical, you need that mod.  If something else conflicts with it, get rid of the something else.

[Insanity Prelude]

This "steady trickle of new townies" seems awfully unnecessary. Don't forget notownieregen.package when you grab alfixes.

Notownieregen does work on this, right? Because I wonder how I ended up with more character files than I started with a for a couple sessions, without creating new Sims of my own.

[seelindarun]

notownieregen doesn't prevent the spawning of social group townies if you play apartment lots.  I haven't played enough with an empty 'hood to tell you how many you have to have, but it probably depends on the number of vacant apartment units in your 'hood.  Either notownieregen, or maybe alfixes, should help to recycle the social townies if you already have enough to go around.

If you don't have any apartment lots in the 'hood, notownieregen works as it always has.