AwesomeStory not producing any babies?

[Chiba]

I've been using Indiestone as story driver since it came out and just recently switched to AwesomeStory, so I'm used to the way Indiestone worked.
There were always marriages and a constant supply of offsprings, but somehow this seems not to be the case with AS. I've been playing for several Sim weeks now and most of my Sims are aging without a partner and producing babies.
Is this the normal behavior or might it be related to a bug? I'm using the base game with the latest patch and the latest AM.

Also, is there a way to fine-tune the AS popup information? I'd like to be notified of marriages and babies, but I don't really care if someone goes to work.

[Sigmund]

In order for a couple to procreate, there needs to be at least one crib (not in use, obviously) inside the house. 

[snowbawl]

I am assuming you have Story Progression enabled in the game options, yes?  You say you are getting story action pop-ups.  So let us proceed from there.

Have you placed cribs in houses?  Sims, under AwesomeStory, will not breed if there are no cribs.  Also, make sure there are affordable houses available, with cribs, for couples to move into for breeding space.  Are you getting pop-ups saying that "x" does not have any romance victims?  If you see these a lot, there are not enough appropriately aged partners for coupling and breeding potential.

Did you start AwesomeStory in an already existing hood, or did you make a fresh hood?  This does make a difference.

Afterthoughts:

If you hand-select partners for playables, be careful.  Check to make sure the potential partner does not have any love interests, or you break AwesomeStory's love cycle, causing some sims to start it all over again and wasting valuable breeding time for non-playables.  When hand-selecting, I choose from a pool of teenagers and then age-up the one I want.

Also, if NPCs start picking up traits such as "loner", these sims won't join in the race to breed.  Sometimes a little tweaking is in order.  You want to populate your hood in a hurry, make everyone "family-oriented" and place two to three cribs and lots of beds into every house.

[Tever]

If your problem is just that you don't have cribs, you can use the search bar to find the Awesomized neighborhoods someone posted. Cribs in every house for Riverview and Sunset Valley, I think.

[Renvalka]

Wanted this myself, so here's a link to the thread with 'em in.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,16383.0.html

[J. M. Pescado]

If you hand-select partners for playables, be careful.  Check to make sure the potential partner does not have any love interests, or you break AwesomeStory's love cycle, causing some sims to start it all over again and wasting valuable breeding time for non-playables.

Sounds like real life to me.

[snowbawl]

If you hand-select partners for playables, be careful.  Check to make sure the potential partner does not have any love interests, or you break AwesomeStory's love cycle, causing some sims to start it all over again and wasting valuable breeding time for non-playables.

Sounds like real life to me.

I actually like this "feature" of AwesomeStory.  It spends all this time making the perfect matches, then you come in with your godhand and pluck one tiny sim out of "the big picture" love story and send the rest of the sims into a high-speed wobble.  You can almost hear their tiny voices saying, "Goddammit!".

[Chiba]

As I said, I've been using Indiestone and just recently switched to AM for Story Progression, so of course it was enabled all the time.
I've also tried NRaas Story Progression, but it's not what I wanted. It was on a different savegame though, so this one has just been influenced by Indiestone before.

I guess it's the fact that most houses have no cribs. I play the same neighborhood since I started playing months ago, there are a lot of custom houses placed already, which is why I'm not going to start over with a cribbed-out neighborhood.
Guess I have to place the cribs manually then, unless there's a way to get around the need for a crib in each house to make the Sims procreate.

I get the message that a Sim doesn't have a romance victim every now an then. But sometimes they also find a partner. It just happens a lot less than it was the case with Indiestone.
There are lots of Sims of both sexes without a partner. I don't care if an Elder marries a Young Adult, I just want them to breed.

[J. M. Pescado]

Frequently "Romance Victim Not Found" is a temporary state induced by someone being at work or otherwise unavailable, and will pass in time. Ordinarily you wouldn't even see these messages, but you had to be nosy. I will probably revisit the crib thing some more later.

[Chiba]

As I wrote in my first post, I'd like to be notified of who's getting married or getting a baby. That's the only reason why I activated the info popups.
It would be nice if in the near future the ability to choose which information to show in these popups was introduced.

Although I must admit, I haven't been playing without a Story Progression Mod ever, so I have no idea if these messages came from Indiestone or from the base game, but they haven't appeared since I removed Indiestone.
Well, my copy of the WA expansion just arrived, going to install it now and see if my game actually works after that.

[Inge]

Noooo!  Please don't change how sims need a crib in order to breed.  I deliberately plan my crib distribution to make areas of the hood where there are large families, and other areas that are quieter and just have childless couples or a couple of kids.

[snowbawl]

Noooo!  Please don't change how sims need a crib in order to breed.  I deliberately plan my crib distribution to make areas of the hood where there are large families, and other areas that are quieter and just have childless couples or a couple of kids.

I second this.  Cribs are my means of control.  Unless Pescado can come up with something better, don't mess with mah crib system.

To get story notifications, you must set InformOnStoryAction (or whatever it is called) to "true" in the configuration.  You will be notified of everything except births (which I find aggravating).  Read the newspaper for birth announcements.  Or I hear that Buzzler's something-or-another (birth control mirror maybe?) provides birth announcements.  Not sure if it has been updated, but since I see Buzzler running around here occasionally, I'd be willing to bet it is either updated or will be soon.  Last I saw, it was available in the Pudding Factory.

Indiestone had a tendency to asplode hoods with random hook-ups and births.  AwesomeStory takes a more logical approach.  Marriages make sense, coupling ideal sims together.  The process takes time, as it should, NPCs going through all the levels of romance just as your playables would.  There is no wam-bam, instant 100+ sims hood.  Personally, I like it that way.

[Chiba]

Just so I get this right: Is one crib per house enough for a family in there to get several children, or do I need to place one crib for every possible child they should be allowed to get?
In other words, is a crib in a house just an indicator that they can start having babies, as many as they wish?

[J. M. Pescado]

A crib is a storage receptacle for one baby/toddler. One crib is sufficient to induce them to produce babies, but the simultaneous bandwidth is limited by the number of cribs. So if there is only one crib, then they will produce one baby, then either seek to upgrade their house or wait until it is 6 before they produce another one. However, ince a larva is 6, it will now require a bed instead of a crib: If the house lacks one, the fambly may move to a place that has enough beds for everyone, which may or may not have a crib. If that new house lacks a crib, they will then not produce more.

[kuronue]

Also note that not every house needs a crib - they'll move to one with a crib if they want to spawn.

[Buzzler]

As I wrote in my first post, I'd like to be notified of who's getting married or getting a baby. That's the only reason why I activated the info popups.
It would be nice if in the near future the ability to choose which information to show in these popups was introduced.

This stuff is perfectly accessible for scripting mods; there's really no need to pester Pescado with it. I just took the related code snippet from the BCM and made a stand-alone birth notifier. I'v made a marriage notifier as well, but it's difficult to test it, because marriages are difficult to initiate without involvement of the active sim. And to work with StoryProgression mods, it's necessary that said mods send the appropriate events so the notifiers have something to catch.

[Chiba]

As I wrote in my first post, I'd like to be notified of who's getting married or getting a baby. That's the only reason why I activated the info popups.
It would be nice if in the near future the ability to choose which information to show in these popups was introduced.

This stuff is perfectly accessible for scripting mods; there's really no need to pester Pescado with it. I just took the related code snippet from the BCM and made a stand-alone birth notifier. I'v made a marriage notifier as well, but it's difficult to test it, because marriages are difficult to initiate without involvement of the active sim. And to work with StoryProgression mods, it's necessary that said mods send the appropriate events so the notifiers have something to catch.

So what should I be looking for to achieve this? Apart from AM I'm not really experienced when it comes to Mods for Sims 3.

[chann]

As I wrote in my first post, I'd like to be notified of who's getting married or getting a baby. That's the only reason why I activated the info popups.
It would be nice if in the near future the ability to choose which information to show in these popups was introduced.

This stuff is perfectly accessible for scripting mods; there's really no need to pester Pescado with it. I just took the related code snippet from the BCM and made a stand-alone birth notifier. I'v made a marriage notifier as well, but it's difficult to test it, because marriages are difficult to initiate without involvement of the active sim. And to work with StoryProgression mods, it's necessary that said mods send the appropriate events so the notifiers have something to catch.

I've found that using the age transition events don't work well either if you're trying to create a birthday notifier. A lot of the events only get sent if they happen in the active household.

[J. M. Pescado]

And to work with StoryProgression mods, it's necessary that said mods send the appropriate events so the notifiers have something to catch.

AwesomeStory should be firing the appropriate events, so that the information will appear in your newspaper if you elect to play normally without the Voice of God.

[Simulate]

Noooo!  Please don't change how sims need a crib in order to breed.  I deliberately plan my crib distribution to make areas of the hood where there are large families, and other areas that are quieter and just have childless couples or a couple of kids.

Rather than completely change the way births are controled, Pescado could put an option in the configuration file.

Cribs required? enabled/disabled.

This would allow the game to have the current method available and a version that did not need cribs. Both parties to the discussion on cribs (for or against), should then be happy.

This would however require more coding on Pescado's part, as he would need to put checks in the game to decide which block of code to process and add any additional code.

He may not want to do this. Although, as I support the "No cribs lobby" I hope he does.

[J. M. Pescado]

I have contemplated this, as it seems sim-babies actually survive surprisingly well under neglected conditions, and am currently working out the necessary conditions to prevent the game from exploding due to population overload if there are no constraints on mass-spawnage, as many PROBLEMS can result under conditions of uncontrolled spawning. Given that a population explosion doesn't get properly "felt" until it is over and the system is out of control already, there needs to be mechanisms in place to keep the computer from going down in flames as a result.

[Simulate]

Based on your last post.    RE: cribs.

In the UK, many years ago (15+) there was a commedy called "2.5 children", based on the average increase in population: Plus half a chiild per couple.

Would it be possible to build such a check into the game.

So that: pregnancies, babies and  young children, could be checked against the number of elders. With a plus 0.5 weighting for more pregnacies.

Also a check would need to be kept on the number of teens, YA and adults. Incase of premature deaths etc.

Obviously, the extra CPU processing needed would have to be considered, for those with less powerfull PC.s.

Just a thought.

[Zazazu]

it seems sim-babies actually survive surprisingly well under neglected conditions

My custom 'hood, Dragon Cay, features lots that lie as close to each other as possible with homes that usually take up the majority of their lots. As a side effect, I can hear things going on in neighboring yards (chitchat) and the few things that actually occur in homes. For the past four days, I've been hearing baby babble from a sprog created by Awesomemod. Little Jennifer Power's mom & dad are gone almost all day at work and around town (Reid Powers being the neighborhood manwhore and Mom spending her evenings playing chess with the neighbor boy at the library). She hasn't died yet.

There is a cheat, "exterminate x" with Awesomemod that will automatically cull whatever number you specify of sims from the unchosen. I've used it in the past to shake things up.

[J. M. Pescado]

Pretty sure that's an EAxis cheat and not AwesomeMod specific. Therefore, depending on how it picks sims, it may not actually be avoiding Chosens unless it is picking using the Story mode picker. Also, it is very unlikely that it cleans up after itself, so your neighborhood will be left full of detritus, especially if the picking is relatively indiscriminate.

[highstresslevel]

I'm having this problem as well.  No matter how I arrange my 'hood, most of my sims grow old and die without producing offspring.

I start a new game.  I place 24 couples, in identical houses.  The houses have a crib, and two empty single beds.  The couples have at least two matching traits, no Dislikes Children, Loner, or Commitment Issues.  Relationship scores maxed to 100.  Affordable family housing is available when the third child becomes a 6.  Everyone has a job.  Only three of the couples actually produce offspring.  The rest just grow old and die.

Same setup, ten couples.  Two produce offspring.  The rest: old, die, ect.

Four couples, only one reproduces.

I have one couple, both are Family Oriented, both have the Surrounded by Family LTW, and they will sit there for six sim weeks with an empty crib if I put them in the 'hood with 24 couples.  Stick 'em in the 'hood with ten couples and they make like rabbits.

Am I doing something wrong?  Would I be better off creating singles and letting story mode match them up?  Or is it just a feature that only 20% of sims get to reproduce?