More Awesome Than You!

I don´t know if this post is in the right place. I´m so sorry if not.
My problem is that every time a sim is pregnant, she always give birth to two new baby sims. I didn´t type 'force twins' comand. And i also uninstalled any hack that would produced that thing in my game. As i didn´t get any results, i tried uninstall and reinstall tha base game and the expansions again. But the problem is still here. I removed all the custom content only to make a prove. I´m at that point that i don´t know what to do next. ???  Any ideas about what is happenning in my game? Any help? What more can i do? Please, help me.
Thanks in advanced  :-*

Which expansions do you have?

I have all expansions pack, but the new free time one.

are you letting them eat cheesecake?  The cheesecake from OFB greatly increases the odds of twins.

Another thing, just exactly HOW MANY births are we talking about in a row?

2? 3?  20?

I have had entire neighborhoods that are 'twin prone' and I never run any hacks that would increase twins or get you more than twins as I detest twins and would never want trips or quads.

One neighborhood in particular, when I first started populating it, the first 4 houses all had twin births - I was beginning to think I had something wrong when finally the 5th house had a single birth. whew.  anyway, the 1st house that was built/populated in that neighborhood turned out to have a twin producing male (yes, I know it's supposed to be genetically carried on female side)... but that male sim got around (he was a pleasure sim) and he not only produced 3 more sets of twins with his wife, he impregnated 3 other neighborhood women with twins - total sets of twins he produced was 7...and no single births.

So again - just how many sets of twins in a row are we talking here - and was there ANY sim in common with all the births on either side?

No, the sims have nothing in common. And the number of children that the sims give birth are two. I didn´t know that one sim could have more than two babies at the same time.
I save the game in the moment right before the birth. When the twins are born i abandoned the game without saving and i tried (i did it a lot of times) again for a different birth, but it comes again two children.  :'(

No, that's not what sewinglady was asking. She was asking how many pregnancies this went over.

It went over all the pregnancies i had in my neighbourhood. About eight pregnancies, more or less

You also didn't answer the cheesecake question.

And try again without CC. But you have to try again before the Sim gets pregnant, not after. TWINS ARE DECIDED AT CONCEPTION NOT BIRTH. (why do I feel like I'm back in twinzr2cute days?) unless you force the cheat or have them eat cheesecake.

I don´t think the cheesecake has nothing to do in my case. Anyway, next time i´ll play i will try to remove the CC and triy a new pregnant and let´s see what happen. i will let you know. Thanks all of you.

If they are eating cheesecake, then it has everything to do with it.  ::)

Oh, God!  LOL.  I'm having really unpleasant flashbacks to those days right after OFB came out.  :)

Bottom line:  Unless you have a hack (like Twojeffs' Triplets and Quads or Cheesecake Fix hacks) that prevents it, if you have OFB installed, EATING CHEESECAKE WHILE PREGNANT WILL GUARANTEE TWINS.  Note the word "guarantee".  That's 100% chance.  Always.  Every single time.  If you don't want twins EVERY TIME, do not ever let your pregnant Sims eat cheesecake, or else go find a hack that will prevent it.

Karen

In the OP's defense, s/he used a double negative. So cheesecake has everything to do with it.

As further defence: it does sound as if English isn't their first language. If it is then, um....

I don't think the EP realizes they used a double negative. ;) If they did, they wouldn't still think there was a problem. Not being a native English speaker does excuse the double negative, but not the ignoring the simple truth that eating cheesecake causes twins, so if the Sims are eating cheesecake, this is the answer to the problem.

That's very true. I think I give the benefit of the doubt too often. I was thinking along the lines of either, the OP either hadn't expressed the fact that their sims have not eaten any cheesecake clearly because it's not their first language, or that they hadn't really understood the whole thing about cheesecake causing twins 100% of the time prior to this thread because I suppose the explanation is a little complex if your English isn't 100%.

I'm clearly overthinking this now. Time for bed I think.

Which is why I made a point of explaining exactly what "guarantee" means.  Even people who supposedly do understand English perfectly seem to have a hard time grasping the point of the cheesecake/twins thing.  It was beaten to death -- thoroughly -- back when OFB came out, but some people apparently still are not aware of it.

Karen

I´m so sorry about the confusion I´d created and the double negative. I think i´m going to fail my next English test  :'(  As you can see, English is not my first language. It is Spanish which is much easier than yours.
So, what i wanted to say is that my pregnant sim didn´t eat a cheesecake during her pregnancy. I hope that is gramatically correct  :-[

Some premade sims and random townies apparently have a token that forces twins in all pregnancies.  Is it just this one couple, and is one of the couple a townie?  There are a few in Pleasantview and the N001 pre-made townies that have it.  If it is happening to all the pregnancies, then this is obviously not the issue.

Are you certain?  There are some pretty sneaky sims out there who will make themselves cheesecake while you're not looking.

Just to clarify here:  was it 1 sim, or 8 different sims?

If it was just the one sim, she may have the "twin" token.  This is a token that sims are assigned randomly, and once they have it, it's permanent.  It increases their chances of having twins.


The number of babies a sim is pregnant with is determined at conception, not at birth.  If the sim is going to have twins, then exiting without saving isn't going to change it to a single baby - unless your last save point was before she became pregnant.

I hate to doubt so much shouting, but if twins are DETERMINED AT CONCEPTION then why is it possible for Brandi Broke to have either a single baby or twins?  (Or so JM says in the Myths post.)  I was under the impression that baby number was determined when the sim pops a second-trimester belly.

I could not find a post which states that. However, since the OFB cheesecake it is possible to change it from a single birth to twins after conception. What is not possible - without hacks, cheating etc. - is to change it from twins to a single birth. So generally the number of babies is determined at conception, just as the gender is determined at birth. If you use any form of pregnancy scanner you find out the number of children instantly after the first hour. 

This is what JM says in the Myths post:


Pes said that Brandi is pollinated at game startup, not before game startup.  It is at this moment that she conceives, and at this moment that the possibility of twins is decided.

Oh hai, u have too much RAM (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,11007.0.html)

 :P

ROFL  :D

It may be that this is just EAxis sadorandom at work again.  If your sims have twins randomly once, they will now have twins randomly every time.  In my hood, for example, if simEmma has risky woohoo on a sofa, she will always become pregnant, it seems.  Lucky Emma.  ::)

(Not twins, thank God!).

Hopefully with the recent addition of FT, this will break the cycle.  I'll have to wait until the end of her current pregnancy.  :P

Ooooh. I had one of those with ste's risky woohoo. Everytime my sims did it in a photobooth they got knocked up.

What if the randomizer has always the same sequence or starts always at the same number, so the first birth each gameplay is bringing twins?

(no native speaker writing)

You can break this type of cycle with the Lot Debugger - rerandomize at start of each gameplay session and that should eliminate the first birth effect.  If you get twins every time after that, it is because of something else.

I know.

If the random sequence starts at a different value for every neighborhood or installation of the game, but at the same value every time you start the game...

THEN some players could have a twin-firstborn-effect.

Unfortunately I don't know whether the first condition is given.

The first condition is not a given -- the sadorandomizer in the game starts with the same value every time, AFAIK.  That applies to all neighborhoods. That's changed only by forcing a randomization yourself (in CAS, the long way) or by using the re-randomizer on the Lot Debugger.

Despite reading rather a lot about it I never quite got that whole re-randomiser thing on the lot debugger, what exactly does it randomise? I know randomises something to do with births to eliminate the first-born effect but I never quite understood what. Is it the personality points? And by first-born effect does that mean the first born in every family, or just the first sim born everytime you reload the game?

I only ask because I have only used this option once and I couldn't really see what effect it had. I haven't noticed a lot of sims born in game with the same personality (I think in one family a twin had the same personality as her older sister, but that's the only time it seems to have happened).

the randomizer effectively rolls the dice you see when you are in CAS. These sims never get "saved" perse but instead move the standard sim rotation forward.
first born effect.. same personality , same genetic combination from the parents so on
this is what it fixes. It is possible to still get very alike sims, but the rerandomizer keeps it from happening every.. single ..time.

I don't see the connection between the randomizer and twins, because as far as I know the sequence determines appearance and personality, but has no connection to the number of children born. Or am I wrong?

Twins are determined at conception. However, in Brandi's case, "conception" apparently can occurs "when you load the lot": I.E., she's not saved that way, a scripted event controller makes it happen immediately. There's also that cheesecake thing. And no, baby quantity is determined at conception, although hacks, cheats, and after OFB, the cheesecake thing, can influence it.

J.M., I had heard ages and ages ago (I think it may have been the Base game's prima guide) that claimed that new neighborhoods have a higher chance of having twins at the beginning to help with a population expansion. Is this lies and propaganda or sadorandomness at work?

The randomizer ensures the twins don't have the exact same personality as one of their parents.  It has no effect on the number of babies, as explained elsewhere.

As I understand it, the 'first born effect' means that any baby born first in a play session will have the exact same personality as one its parents. It doesn't refer to the 'first born' in a particular sim family. The old way of preventing that was to go into CAS first and create (but not save) some random number of sims.  The re-randomizer does that without having to go into CAS. It ensures the first baby born in a session will have a more randomized personality rather than an exact duplicate of its parent.

My understanding is that it doesn't have anything to do with cloning the parents' personalities. The game's sadorandomizer is set at the same point each play session. That ensures that the first born child will be genetically randomized properly. However, it resets if you stop playing. Therefore the next play session it starts "randomizing" from the exact same point. Meaning that all children born afterwards will have the exact genetics and personality as the first child.

[edited to take out an unneccessary sentence]

My understanding was the same as jsalemi - the first born effect affects personality not genetics. 

Genetics are determined by...searching for Pescado quote....
"Firstborn effect only affects personalities. Tendency to constantly spawn boys or girls is apparently an related artifact of a poor random number generator, but unrelated to this. Same story with twins. Identical children tends to be caused by homogenous genetic pools in CAS sims, where if your sims spawn with dominant facial features and none of these clash, the outcome tends to always be the same as a result, because your kids inherit all the dominant features."
from http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php?topic=3827.msg108706#msg108706

That post is rather old though.  Perhaps, a new conclusion has been drawn since then.

I had proof of this recently...

I'd a preggers sim give birth to twin girls. This is a family that already had too many girls and tended to make particularly poor ones at that. They had no boys, however, so, I did something I never had up until then, exited the game w/o saving, and replayed the birth, with similar results, only it was boy/girl this time. I decided that still wasn't good enough, exited w/o saving, Again. Replayed scenario, Again. Bingo! Hmmm...a singleton male?

Disclaimer: k, this is where I admit to using the Kitten Killer, as well as Two Jeff's quad mod set to "random"...obviously, I realized that the quad mod randomizes the number of babies 1-4, I just, for some reason, thought it was set to occur at conception as well.

As an aside? Not to be flippant or dismissive, but 8 births hardly translates to "always" and is well within the bounds of a normal distribution, though irritating I'd imagine.

Well, I could very well be wrong about the genetics, but my main point was that the "first born effect" does not mean that children are personality clones of their parents, but of the first born child.

Here's a simple breakdown of randomization:

The Sims 2 picks random numbers from a long list of numbers. Example: 13, 12, 57, 2. Assume that goes on for a long time.
Now, a baby born with number 13 might be serious, neat, and lazy, while a baby born with 12 will be serious, sloppy, and lazy, while baby 57 might be playful, sloppy, lazy. Supposedly it starts at a random position in the list so you get a random baby; however, this is broken. Instead, it always starts at baby 13, followed by baby 12, then baby 57. When you quit the game and open it again, it resets to baby 13, then baby 12, then baby 57. Thus, if you don't run the randomizer, you always get baby 13 as the first baby born every play session.

Now, of course, baby 13 for couple A might be totally different than baby 13 for couple B, because the parents have different personalities, but the idea is that if you have a baby to couple A, then save and quit, then have a second baby to couple A, it'd be exactly the same personality-wise.

Does that make sense?

Yes, it makes perfect sense to me...and I believe I have seen it time and time again in birth after birth...so pretty much all my neighborhoods just back that up.

I don't need to add my longwinded explanation of babies/twins, do I?  I got so damn tired posting it over on the BBS that I finally saved it as a word doc so I could just copy and paste.

It's mainly for the noobs and under 12's over at BBS who don't understand how the game works for twins (prior to OFB and cheesecake) and also don't get that just having the same two sims try for twins over and over isn't very likely to get you twins. 

The children were I forgot the firstborn effect are clones. They don't only share the same personality they look identical too. Plus while it is hard to tell with regard to the facial features, when I reroll at birth (and sometimes I want to get a particular outcome) and have sims with equally dominant custom skins and eyes, the sequence is always the same, first custom skin A with Eyes B, second.... The only thing that can change when I quit (the game) and restart the sequence is the gender.

Hairstyles always change for me.

I tested it with one configuration (I forget if it was just basegame or basegame + Uni) and didn't have the effect.  I have no idea why not.  Later on (I'm pretty sure this was once I had installed NL), I retested it and got the following results:  as long as I completely reloaded my game in between, the first born to each couple was identical in terms of genetics and personality.  So were the second and third (...identical to the other second and third children, respectively).  These were single births via InSim.  Gender obviously was fluid.

I was actually doing the test to try and reproduce my first experiment--because I had six kids in my first legacy, and I don't know that any of them shared a bit of genetics, and this was before I knew about the firstborn effect.  So I wasn't rolling the dice, I didn't have the lot debugger, and once I did hear about it, I tried it for myself and didn't get the results.  I eventually started randomizing anyway, and then I reproduced my experiment and got the above results.

Twin frequency is just bizarre.  Only alien abduction?  Twins.  My second legacy?  Only one single birth so far out of seven pregnancies.  However, I do use trips and quads.  At least two of those sets were natural, though--I've started checking with InSim for shits and giggles now.  I don't have OfB so they're not sneaking cheesecake on me, either.  I've been wondering about that elusive twin token theory and if it's heriditary.  The founder oopsed me with ACR and naturally conceived twins.

I've had a terrible run of twins births lately. It happened three times in the same family (with two different women) then in one CAS-created family then in an older family twice.

I give UP. My previous computer ( a PowerMac) was a terror for the twins plague. This one, a modest dual-core MacPro started off OK but now seems to have caught Twin Plague Syndrome.

If you are using the random version of trips & quads, you may want to change the odds that TJ set. I think the odds he set are something like 25% odds for twins. I have it set to 7% twins, 2% trips, and 1% quads.

Psst, your computer specs can't cause twins. You might think they can. But they can't.

I may check it at some point.  It's mainly this one family, though.  For a long time, I was getting singles constantly with the hack in, and it was so frustrating.

Perfect sense! Thank you so much, that was the clearest explanation I've ever read and I finally feel like I understand. The last paragraph was particularly illuminating since it made everything you said in the first paragraph (which is information I've read time and time again) fall into place within the game.

Previously from the information I was reading it sounded as if everytime you reloaded the game and a baby was born it would have a baby 13 type personality that would be identical to every other baby 13 born in the game no matter what the family and I always thought this didn't make sense within the genetic structure of the game.

Now for the first time I'm actually noticing where the first born effects have occured within my game and I'll be using the randomiser from now on.

Fighting a losing battle, there, Tarlia. (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,11007.0.html) We've told her before.

Oh dear. I saw that thread before, but it got even worse since then.

I've been playing the same hood since the base game and there are definitely stretches where I'll have a ton of twin births in a row, I think three or four once. Now that they're synched I can't look back at the list and pick out the trend so easily, since some were so far ahead, but it was a definite trend. I also have one family in which the kids are twins with an older single sibling, their father's a twin with an older single sibling, and HIS father was the same. I'll be disappointed when that trend ends, as it must :P