Play Style / Rules, by request: Tuesday Island + Baskerville

[LFox]

Personally i'm not going to play government jobs such as school teacher, police officer, fireman ect.

But if you want to do it i suggest grabbing a teleporter from inge zipping the kids in then sending em off at the proper times.  I actually have a hack that allows you to call all sims without the business perk if you want it.  VERY VERY handy for meeting people.  You'll probably want to setup desks for each kid setup a bookshelf at the front and have the teacher sit at her desk or something while the kids read skill books.  Then at say lunch time you drop out food let them eat play and so forth then round em up and push em back into classes.  IF and that's assuming it's done and you can find a buyable homework of some sort you can dump it on each kids desk and have them do that for a duration in class (can they do homework at desks?  I honestly haven't ever tried).

To add to schoolish stuff as you said you can have reading to the younger ones.  Older ones can do athletics, obstical course, yoga ect maybe even practice giving speeches in a school hall or something.

[Zazazu]

Hm. Can unrelated kids be added to a set casual group? Then I could just invite the casual group. That's what I wasn't liking about my idea, the need to individually invite over everyone every day. Unfortunately, I have no kids in the 'hood at the moment. One baby, one fetus.

I don't know that I'll do police and firemen either. I don't want to have municipal jobs that are paid from one person, at least not at this point. I don't want anyone burning to death, either.

[pbox]

For the school stuff, check out the School page at simlogical: http://www.simlogical.com/sl/Sims2Pages/Sims2_School.htm -- Inge has made a vast set of hacks/objects specifically for that purpose.

[Zazazu]

Absolutely perfect, thank you!

[Yimmit]

I wondered when I saw pbox if you were plasticbox from MTS2. Clayton J. Burnley has one of his most rapidly successful businesses ever in your Backdoor Lane 08 property. Only two days open while daughter Carolyn is at school (close when the schoolbus drops her off) and he's already at level four. I have a whole sector of my hood set up with your backdoor series (mostly for decor right now since I only have a few families and with no20k handouts most of them can't even afford your starter lots).

So am I to understand that these Ingelogical hacks allow for a fully functional school that allows skilling, etc, while at a residential lot? Would I have to teleport the kids in? Ever since my unhacked base game stopped sending the schoolbus and kids started getting taken by the social worker and asypr insisted the problem was my computer and not my game, I have been very nervous about messing with school. I suppose I had envisioned the school as a business lot that was never visited (someone upthread mentioned this, but a quick scan does not reveal who...). Do you teleport the kids in for school every day? I guess I'm thinking about your mountain area and how you keep the kids from going to school, but as you said, this is my 'hood, I make the rules.

The more the I ruminate on this, the more I want to try it. But it seems like it will necessitate many hacks that I don't want in my normal hood and I need to get my discs together and start something on a separate user account on my computer. But then that seems like a lot of work. I've just recently installed OFB and finally have things starting to gel and take off in my regular hood. I want my employees to be able to quit in my normal hood, but if I do a T-island-type set-up, it sounds like employeesneverquit will be necessary for slave wages and all.

I have the known OFB-mac bug that does not allow me to name neighborhoods. I have the base game loaded on my parents' computer. If I create a neighborhood there, can I just dump the n006 folder in my Base-Uni-NL-OBF machine and be good to go with name included? If I change N001 there to N001-bak and create the new hood, will I be townie-free? (I have all the empty templates in my home game). No, I'll answer my own question. Of course, I will be townie free if I do that. I'll see if the transfer takes.

And one other job, if you have Monique's computer, would be to run a newspaper, with your employees writing articles. I'm still looking for the buyable newpapers, but you could charge a subscription fee to receive the paper and use the visitor controller to ban paper delivery on lots that don't subscribe. Of course, that could be a business the mayor runs and makes the townfolk subscribe.

Ooh, I need to go vacuum and dust for Mom tomorrow anyway. I'll give it a go...

[pbox]

So am I to understand that these Ingelogical hacks (etc)

I believe there's detailed instructions at simlogical. Look there.

it seems like it will necessitate many hacks that I don't want in my normal hood

You can install the BaseGameStarter (Numenor @ mts2) to get around that. Took me about 10 minutes all in all -- now I have a regular FullGame with all the hacks and stuff, and an "Up to Seasons" game that also has all EPs but lives in a separate folder and uses a different set of d/ls. 

Theoretically you could also swap d/l folders depending on what hood you want to play, but this will not work with Monique's AutoPayments (and possibly other hacks of hers) .. running the game without the hack installed will break the payment setups. I think this is *still* not mentioned in her d/l thread .. I learned it the hard way, so be warned.

[LFox]

Speaking of Monique's auto payment mod is there an easy way to pass on the notebook to someone else?  My mayor turned to an elder and was half way to death so i decided to hand his power over to his daughter.  I couldn't see a transfer ownship option anywhere so i literally had to remove all payments and set them back up for his daughter.  Thankfully i don't have many lots yet but i forsee it being a big problem later.

[witch]

Give it to a vampire to do.

[LFox]

Give it to a vampire to do.

Yeah i was thinking of giving it to a servo or some other non aging type.  But there really is no way to change ownership is there?

btw does anyone else have high taxes on businesses?  I got a robot factory and a farm, and i currently have taxes set to 1k a week for the first 5k profit so small businesses aren't effected.  Once it hits 10k they have to pay 25% on every 5k profit they make.  So far the farm is turning out 10k profit a week and my robotics factory with its new workers is probabably looking at 20k or 25k.

[LFox]

I just noticed something with Monique's auto pay mod it's double charging.  For instance

Sim A recieves money from Sim B
Payday for Sim A arrives, Sim A gains 100 dollars and Sim B has 100 dollars removed
Rent day arrives for Sim B, Sim B pays 100 dollars and Sim A gains 100 dollars.

The result is that things are double billing.  Instead of paying 100 dollars Sim B is effectively paying 200 dollars because BOTH houses are doing billing transactions.  I even went as far as to test this with a brand new pair.

I noticed this when i was wondering why my sims had LESS money than required for rent since i stopped on Sunday and made certain they had enough for the rent.  However by playing my mayor the money for rent was then deducted leaving them below the amount they needed to pay rent the next day.  The only way i can see around the double billing for a player is by splitting the actual billing amount in half.  Honestly when i installed the mod i thought that it took money from Sim B but Sim A gained nothing instead when the day arrived for Sim A they then gained the money listed and would be the case even if Sim B hasn't been played for weeks.

[ingeli]

Very interesting. I recently restarted my medieval hood (the old one wasnt really clean from start and I wanted a different main hood terrain also) and these are so far my basic rules:
- No careers - not until we get to the 20th century at least. All sims either have businesses, work in someone elses business, or are farmers. I have an Inn, a tailor, a barber, a grocery store, a wagon maker store ect
- No school. The nuns in the convent have a small school for some selected kids. Rich kids are home schooled, poorer kids dont get any education other than the farming badges, ect. Ill check out some of the hacks you lister, I mainly used simlogicals instution sign to stop the transports to come.
- Only boys from certain families can go to uni. In uni there is a college for military, and one for priests.
- I have a main hood that is a village with a rich land owner family that owns several of the community lots. Some are not owned though, like the pond, which is a swimmingpool in disguise.
- The downtown will eventually be the bigger hood, its a port with a castle and city streets, medieval style.
- One other rural hood but more suburblike will eventually have lots of suburbian houses, old style.
- Now adding the BV tourist hoods is what I am working on. One will be a mountain village with an Inn and some winter activities. I wish sims could live there, also, sighs. One will be a tropical island far away where some sims go to trade and have a plantation, maybe. I added Carrigons hack for longer vacations, because trips to the tropical places did NOT take one week back in these days.
The Far East hood will be a city where ppl go for trading and to study ancient knowledge (like the monks in the monastery, they will make pilgrim travels there) All details are not done yet, but this is the main idea.

I am less controlling than you are, moneywise and such, but thanks for a lot of ideas how to improve the set up. The old hood had 900+sims and like 3-4 generations, I want to take this one a little faster into the future, but they do tend to get LOTS of children, so we will see how fast..

[Zazazu]

- No school. The nuns in the convent have a small school for some selected kids. Rich kids are home schooled, poorer kids dont get any education other than the farming badges, ect. Ill check out some of the hacks you lister, I mainly used simlogicals instution sign to stop the transports to come.

The simlogical sign is a must-get. I'm using it now for switching all the kids to private school (because if I have to do the headmaster scenario again, I'll scream). Then familyFund'ing the family less $8,000 for each kid. I decided $5,000 didn't hurt enough. This gen looks like it's going to stick at just four kids, but by next gen I'll have enough for sim-me to move in and run the school that Lilly ('hood founder) is going to endow. She and her hubby work on the mainland in a restaurant, since they both were super-high up in the culinary career. Everyone else works on the island, either keeping the public beach clean and teaching tai chi, or working at Kennedy's convenience store, or writing cheesy romance novels (Kennedy's wife).

900 sims? How long did a rotation take, a year?

[Fuzzbucket]

Hi, this looks really fascinating, but I had a couple of questions, if you wouldn't mind helping me out a bit.

First thing is, how did you do bars before OFB? Is it possible to do that on a residential lot? Is there some sort of "pay bar" thing, or did you do it some other way?

The second question is, I notice you use familyfunds a lot. But what happens when one person moves out and starts their own family, but the two families have the same name still. I'd think that would make it hard to use familyfunds for just one of them. Is there a way around that?

[pbox]

ingeli -- love how you tied in the different EPs (Uni and BV) =)

Fuzzbucket -- the pre-OfB bar I did with familyfunds: with some of the bars, the cheap pre-NL ones I believe, only residents of the lot can make drinks (the guests can't help themselves), so I had my bar owner put out drinks and whenever one of the guests took one I familyfundsed him +10§. It's not quite as tedious as it sounds like, because you can do ctrl+shift+c / up arrow / enter, instead of having to retype the damn thing.

I did have NL at the time though, so I can't tell whether this works without NL. Later on I hired a barkeeper with Cristianlov's All-In-One NPC, I'm not sure anymore whether it made a difference regarding the payment; meanwhile the bar is an OfB business.

If you use the familyfunds cheat, you need to be aware that it only affects the lot you're currently on -- so if you want a consistent economy, any businesses that rely on familyfunds will have to cater to tourists/townies/NPCs only.

But what happens when one person moves out and starts their own family, but the two families have the same name still. I'd think that would make it hard to use familyfunds for just one of them.

Yes, you're right. I avoided that with strategic marriages =) you can also use the LotDebugger to change the last name of a sim before you move them out (say, from Smith to Smith II), that way your households will always have unique names.

But I'd be careful with familyfunds anyway .. when I realized that it doesn't affect budgets outside the lot I'm on (which is what I was assuming), I had already fucked up my economy quite a bit .. money orders are probably safer, or "hard currency" (objects) that you put in and out of visitor's inventories, or Monique's AutoPayments.

[Fuzzbucket]

Thank you for your answers!

I would prefer to use something other than familyfunds, but Monique's AutoPayments seems to require all EPs, and I only have Nightlife and Pets. That would be fantastic if it worked, though, because as it is I'll have to do taxes manually. Thanks for the tip about money order! I'd never downloaded it before, but I just did. That should make things a lot easier.

[pbox]

Monique's AutoPayments seems to require all EPs,

It requires OfB -- at least the first version did, not sure if she updated it meanwhile and threw away the old one. She never keeps her older versions around (§$%&#) .. but if anyone needs the OfB-only version, I think it's posted somewhere in the d/l thread at mts2.

[pepsihamster]

I know this is an older thread, but its very interresting. And since I am trying to start a hood with an integrated economy... I would like to ask if pbox or someone else who would know, can give me a hint with how many tiles of land have to be planted by the farmers in order to sustain an x amount of people in town. Just some aprx numbers would be a huge help.

The farmers would grow all the produce that everybody in the town would buy.
And can one rely on, with great certainty, that growing crops in a field rather than in a greenhouse (which my sims would not be able to afford) will be doable. Or what are the risks of the town going to starv? Just so I can calculate the number of farmers that will have to try and keep them fed. I don't presume hail will hit every farm in town at once.
Those of you who have some experiance, please tell. 

[pbox]

I can't really give you a formula .. at all. Because there's not only the amount of produce that factors in, but also which sims come and buy it -- and that's determined by their financial abilities .. I have two or three families that are better off than the rest, and they come and shop in the home businesses considerably more often. I can happen that a sim has an empty fridge at home, and you play all your farms for two weeks, and they never buy anything simply because the game thinks they're too poor or out of randomness. You can, of course, try to actually keep track of who needs food and then summon those sims to the farms and Show Item to them.

I simply have my sims go fishing when they need extra food. I probably have too few farms right now to sustain the hood, but there's no way I could actually tell -- it's just  a gut feeling I have because many of my sims eat a lot of fish.

[seelindarun]

I play my farms a little differently.  The village market is an off-site business which is owned by the monastery, and my farmers pay a tithe in produce to supply it.  The business isn't played for profit or stars, 'cause it's a monastery after all. The advantage is that families can get food when they need it, rather than spending money on excess food when what they really need is another bed for extra spawn.  With this setup it's pretty easy to see how much food is being consumed by the non-farming households.

I only have 3 farms which till 24 outdoor plots each (they go fallow in winter), and roughly 6 families depending on them but so far there is a huge surplus.  Those 3 farms could support twice the population I think.  This 'hood is still relatively young, so it will be easy to let the dependent population grow before adding another farm. 

A couple of things which greatly affect the amount of food you need is how many sims work outside the house, how active they are, and the quality of their cooking surfaces.  If your population is relatively small (i.e. 20 sims or less) these factors don't get averaged out and you'll see big variations from one generation to the next.

[pepsihamster]

I have just gotten the OFB EP and haven't gotten around to actually playing it yet, as I have been setting up a new hood without twonies... I am now trying to set things up with playables and farms, shops to start an integrated hood, which is very time consuming and a lot of fun.
I have played families with greenhouses before, but that was just for fun because they didn't depend on their produce being sold for money.

My plan is to have some farmers that will produce all the groceries, sell it to another guy who will own the grocery store, and the people of the town will come in the shop and buy what they need. I can see how it can be a problem if they don't show up though  I could take the families to the shop when I play them, if they need groceries, but I don't know in which way that will count on the shop owners side. Will he be making earnings each time I play a sim to come to his shop? Or is it only when I play his shop that he will make earnings? With the inconsistencies of the game on other things, I wouldn't be surprised at all, if that were the case 

Those numbers are great to know seelindarun, just for aprx use. Now I know if I have to have 2 or 10 farmers, with 10 or 50 tiles...
I suppose in the beginning some of the sims will have to get some kind of newspaper job in order for things to get started. As a long term goal, they would all be employed at the different businesses of the town or own one. Will be interesting to see, if that will be possible.

And as you said pbox, they can always go fishing if things get short. Hopefully the pond will not freeze over too often in winter. But maybe it will be more likely that they run short in spring, before the next harvest. By that time the weather should be on their side. Soo many things to consider when planing, he, he. Thanks so much for your input.

[seelindarun]

Pbox plays home businesses, which can't be visited by playables when they need food, so he has to try to anticipate who needs food when, otherwise there is no way for families to get food when they run out.  If you run a green grocer as an off-site business, it's unlikely that any of your families will go hungry for even one winter, as long as you don't sync up the seasons on all your farms.

The grocer will get his money from playables who visit on their own, even if you never have him go back to the business.  When I play the monastery, none of the monks go to the market to work.  They are busy running the school and orphanage, but they get the proceeds from any family who shopped for food during that play rotation.

[pepsihamster]

Thank you! 

[pepsihamster]

The Mayor family built two tiny empty houses to rent out; the 2 poorer families moved in there (5.000§ is actually quite OK when all you need to buy is some furniture), the other family bought a piece of land and built a house themselves (that one is the farm now). I only build new houses if my sims can afford it .. either as a private investment, or as city-owned buildings financed from tax money.

Hello pbox, could you explain to me how you set this up, please. In which way can the mayor family or any other family buy lots and build houses on them, to rent out to other sims for housing?
I thought if you want to buy another lot, you would have to sell the one you have and move to the new one. So how do you do this. There is obviously something here that I have missed   
I would love to do this in my hood - have some families build houses for other sims to rent.
I am so glad you wrote up this thread, because I have found the usual "build a house, go to work, have kids, die" rutine rather boring. It is much more fun to play an integrated hood, where you have to make everything work together.

I thank you in advance.

[blackcat]

I guess she used these hacks by Monique http://modthesims2.com/member.php?u=9825
Look into Tenant&Landlord and Automatic Payment

Though these hacks have not been updated in a long time, so be cautious!!!

[Lion]

Automatic payment is working fine all the way through FT. I use it all the time. Not sure about tenant/landlord. I haven't used in ages.