More Awesome Than You!

Just wondering if it's safe to move a family from the main neighbourhood to a sub-hood. (I know moving to another hood leads to a string of VBT's)

Also, can the main hood stay in touch with the subhood over the phone and vise versa?

Normally I would think it should be ok. Sims in my main 'hood keep in touch with their friends & relatives in the different subhoods via the phone all the time.

One possible thing I'd like to warn you about with moving your sims. I have found that if one of the sims is pregnant that weirdness can happen when moving them. Once I moved a pregnant sim from Pleasantview to the Downtown subhood. She gave birth about 12 simhours after moving her into her new place and to my surprise the father of her baby was now a random Downtown townie she'd never met. I do not know what caused the glitch. I moved her the correct way, by first having her move out of the house via the computer and into the sim bin. Then I moved her into one of the Downtown homes. For some reason this broke the pregancy tie with the father of the unborn child (who lived in the main neighborhood) and substituted the townie.

I've read of a couple other incidences of this, and I think this could be related to the Seasons problem with Sam Ottomas' pregnancy. Moving pregnant sims within the main 'hood or subhood that they were already residing in seems to be ok. But moving them from the main 'hood to a subhood and vice-versa (or from one subhood to another, like from the shopping district to Downtown) does seem to have a good chance of messing with the pregnancy.

Hmm interesting, thanks for that warning.

Moving sims between subhoods is fine, as long as you do so through the sim bin. Never put families into the lot bin. The only glitch about subhoods is moving sims through "Propose...Move In". It seems that the game miscalculates the moving sim's money, and you get odd amounts coming with them.

Not only can they stay in touch by phone, but Sims can visit via invites for lunch, dinner, parties, etc.  I have a subhood set up for the elder Sims, based on retirement living in Florida.  No snow. Just sunshine, heat, and humidity. 

Do you play your elders too, Ziggy? I tend to think the elders are too boring to play by themselves - I generally keep one kid in the house, and let the elders take up space. I think I might stop playing if I had an entire subhood of elders...

Yes, I do play them, Annan.  The elders that have a ton of money and a big house stay put until an offspring graduates from Uni and moves back home.  The elders then buy a retirement retreat and move there (but keep on working at their jobs). 

If they have more than one kid, they will pull out Paladin's checkbook and send a check to whoever didn't get the house just to keep things fair between siblings. 

Seasons and BV added enough extras to make for some interesting scenarios, plus sometimes they are a relief to play after the chaos of my Uni dorms (I play a rotation). 

I like elders. They tend to roll nice big value wants; they're usually permaplat, but they can buy all sorts of aspiration rewards for their kids, and besides, I like getting points. They're also great at childrearing. I just wish they had a wider selection of clothing.

Neriana, I use Motoki's Clothing Equality mod so that my elders have more clothes to choose from- http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,1243.msg42640.html#msg42640

Thanks cabelle! Unfortunately they'll still be stuck with EAxis clothes, but this is certainly an improvement.

All About Style (http://www.all-about-style.com/index.html) has some nice elder clothing, Neriana - if you don't already have their stuff.

You can use SimPE's clothing scanner to elder-enable your custom adult clothing en masse; it can be found under Tools > Scan folders.

Ever since Seasons, I've had a "florida" hood with a resort where I stuff all my elders once their kids come back from uni.  I put them all on one big lot with all facilities and I have a servo running around doing all the dull stuff.  Then I just let them get on with it until they die while I play other things.

Thanks for the suggestions, Ziggy and Rowan. I forgot about All About Style.

Yes, and yes. In fact, the game doesn't even really entirely realize that subhoods are even distinct, by default. You need something like Localwalkbys before a sense of locality starts to emerge.

Yeah, we don't recommend leaving them by themselves, they get pretty dull on their own. Any sim that doesn't have anything specifically to grind for gets pretty dull. Although the Lot Sync Timer's "Skip Day" option offers a REALLY fast way to emulate grinding through an extremely uninteresting day, advancing the clock 24 hours with emulated job incomes and rel-normalization (no STR decay, emulation assumes you do all the boring automated buttwork).

Hairfish has some elder clothing too, based on Maxis meshes but they are really nice.

Female Elder (http://www.hairfish.com/mermaidcove/html/2clothing_femaleelder.html). Male Elder (http://www.hairfish.com/mermaidcove/html/2clothing_maleelder.html). Elder Outerwear (scroll to the bottom) (http://www.hairfish.com/mermaidcove/html/2clothing_allages_SNSouterwear.html).

I like elders.  You don't have to bother with getting them up the career ladder, so you can have more fun with them.  I find them quite challenging to play if they are not permaplat.  If they are grandparents - they are very good at encouraging kids to be nice, neat, active or whatever.  I made a lot of elders for Meadow Lawns and had them working as employees in owned businesses.  The toughest to play was the Livesey's - 8 poverty stricken elders in a big house with no money and unachievable LTWs.

I've picked up a lot of elder clothing I like in the free section of TSR. I've got too much to recommend any specific creators.

I find Seasons has greatly upgraded Elders for me. Gardening and fishing is what I mostly do with mine once they are retired. (Don't know if that's considered a grind, but keeps mine busy and their family's fridges stocked.)

That's what a lot of mine do, as well (they typically have gold fishing and gardening on my more woodsy lots). That and pass on business perks if they owned a business. They can cover pretty much any station while another sim learns the ropes. If there's a crafting business going on, I put them in a corner to produce mass quantities.

I haven't had a retirement home since the vanilla game. That might be something to revisit. A bunch of randy widows/widowers stuck in a home together.  :o

If you want to add a touch of realism, you might want to fix the male/female balance so there are more women than men (the WWII effect on top of normal survival rates).  My mother in law has been on a number of Saga holidays - she didn't mention any randy old ladies, but says randy elderly goats in search of love, a new housekeeper/wife or anything in a skirt are usually in evidence.