More Awesome Than You!

I mean other than the obvious (looks etc), of course. I want to make one of my sim a zombie but I want to know first if there's something I should know in advance, like whether or not he'll be able get married and have children, and if he'll pass down his zombie genetics (I hope not!). This is a sim that I like so I want to keep playing him the way I play my other sims.

Also, same question for aliens. I haven't had an alien before and plan on having one. I do know they marry and breed and pass down genetics, but other than that is there anything I should watch out for?

Back to the zombie -- I read on another thread that the amount of money you spend will affect how the zombie turns out. So if I want the zombie to be as similar as possible to original sim, I have to pay the grim reaper 9999 simoleons -- is that correct?

Yeah, max the payment out, and the sim will look exactly the same. I don't know much, but I do know that they can die.

Thanks! I don't want them them to look the same actually. I just want them to retain original personality, aspiration, interests, and skills. And maybe existing relationships.

If you max out the payment it won't be a zombie, it will simply be a resurrected sim and no different to what it was before it's death. 

You need to spend between §988 and §4,125 on a resurrection to create a zombie.  If you want to minimise personality point loss, then go for the higher end of that range.

From the Prima Guide*:


Aliens are just like regular Sims but with green skin.

Hope that answered your question. :)

*The Prima Guide can be wrong, so don't blame me if this is all L&P.

Arrgh. I'll still be able to cheat with the personality points. The no breeding part is the problem. Thanks guys anyway!

Zombies are horrible.  The walk is so slow and no amount of personality tweaking will make them run.
They don't age, they don't breed, they have lousy personalities and lose all their skills in the resurection process.  They're what the nazis would have called useless eaters.
They're fun for about five minutes, but since they last practically forever, the whole thing gets boring pretty fast.

I suggest you zombify a townie to get the feel of it.  Don't experiment with a sim you like.

Zombies are not appreciably worse than other lazy sims with shit personalities, but personalities can be remalleated using an inversion resurrection or encouragement. The movement rate will remain atrocious, and getting the ninja teleport is a must if they are to remain playable. For the most part, this same applies to all other non-running sims.

This is a not-trueity. The point-loss results are the same regardless of how much you spend. Spending greater amounts of money will give you either the flawed "reverse personality with minor loss of skills" resurrection, or the perfect resurrection.

OK, I've decided to make one. All my lot sizes except the community lots are 3x3 so I should be able to handle the slow walking by strategic placements of stuff. I've experimented with one of my available sims (didn't save it) and it didn't look too bad -- in fact, the mug shot looks kind of cool. I'll create a new family for this and leave my existing sims alone. I do want this (and one alien too next time) because my current neighborhood is too sickeningly wholesome. Thanks for all the helps!

Off-topic question -- is there a non-cheat trick to get a higher probability of alien abduction? I saw that some houses in Strangetown have 5 level towers to put their telescopes on which makes me wonder if that's the way to get the aliens.

Not that I'm aware of. If you have FreeTime there's a lifetime aspiration bonus thing that makes alien abductions more likely, but other than that non-cheat abductions are rare. I think it's like a 5% or 2% chance, but don't quote me. I just had one not long ago after months of gameplay. There's no special way to get them, they just happen.

No, the elevation of the telescope makes no difference.  There is a scripted abduction at the Curious brothers' house in Strangetown, as part of the scenario when you first play the lot - the reports you've heard of abductions happening at the Curious house are due to the scripted scenario and not due to the height of the telescope.


If you have Free Time, you no longer need a hack for easy abduction, as it's much easier to get your sim abducted now.  Before I had Free Time, I was using TwoJeff's hack for more frequent abductions (http://box156.bluehost.com/~aestudi1/forums/inteenimater/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=25).

If you want to cheat for an instant abduction, turn on debug mode, then shift-click on the telescope.  There's a debug option for abduction and your sim will be abducted immediately if you use it.  When he returns a few hours later, he will be pregnant.

I use a replacement Pollination Tech (the other parent of alien babies), as I find the offspring of the original don't breed well.  There are quite a few replacement PTs at MTS2, however the one I use is from Laverwinkle Sims. (http://laverwinklesims.com/index.php?topic=17.0)

The only times that my sims have gotten abducted, was when using the more expensive telescope, and each one was on ground level when it happened, doing just regular stargazing.

The telescope does not make a difference, although there are hacks for the expensive telescope that can make it more likely. The multi-PT hack on MTS2 includes cloned red and blue expensive telescopes with higher abduction odds.

The telescope does matter in an un-modded game.  Only the expensive telescope allows abduction.
I don't cheat to get abductions, but I've had something like 15 abductions since the base game.  None were off the cheap telescope.  I pretty much skill all logic points off telescopes, which is how I get some, but not too many aliens into my game.

Going back to the bit about zombies, I heard (but have not tested) that influencing them does not use up influence points.

How often do you have your sims use the cheap telescope? Unless you know this with certainty from conducting a controlled experiment, you shouldn't throw stuff like that out. 15 expensive telescope abductions is a correlation. It does not indicate cause and effect, or tell you anything about the cheap one. How do you know this isn't limited to your game, or the result of sado-randomness?

Been done. Three years ago, in fact.

http://bbs.thesims2.ea.com/community/bbs/messages.php?&openItemID=&threadID=566428f752bcf91a1b2928a82c9640c3&directoryID=25&startRow=1#b02bfecb39c8bd80bdb459500d00dfa5

Yea, I've always known (not sure how) that unhacked, a sim will pretty much never get abducted from the cheap scope.  I purposely put them on lots where I don't want any chance of an abduction to happen.

Shiny!

Back before I found out about the wonderful world of hacks, I had an alien abduction in the middle of the day - my first actually.

So if they were wrong about the abduction times....

I can't say I've ever had an abduction from the cheap telescope either, but then until I hacked my game silly I only ever had that one midday abduction.

Aren't you only able to look through and instead of stargaze during midday?

Actually you can never get an abduction from the cheap telescope because the abduction code specifically checks for the expensive telescope's guid and will not run otherwise, unless of course they changed the code in FT to accommodate the knowledge aspiration reward thing.

You can't start stargazing during the day, but if your sim starts stargazing at night, and the action is not cancelled, in my experience the game will not change the action to "look through" but will retain the stargazing action until cancelled automatically or by the player.  In my game, it is therefore possible (provided that something like filling the fun bar, need for terlet, etc. does not kick him off) for a sim to still be stargazing after the sun is up.

I think that's been changed with FT.  Sims now seem to stop automatically at 6AM.

Hmm.  Had not noticed this, but then usually my sims are either abducted (TJs higher odds hack) or have to sleep or use terlet before sunrise, so I have not seen this transition since I loaded FT.  I will have to check it for my own edification.  Cheers, Gwill.

I think it has been changed also. I had a sim stop stargazing at 6am on his own when I was playing last night, his motives and stuff were fine.   

"Summon Aliens' appears to be available at all hours of the day & night for those sims with that benefit.

As noted, aliens behave exactly the same as other sims.  The downside--the only downside--is that you get horrible freak babies until some of the less-attractive genetics (like hugely oversized eyes and no noses) breed out.  Me, I made sure my alien families had cosmetic surgery machine career rewards (and a spare in the dorm I use in University), so that they could shrink their eyes down and get some sort of nose.

As far as getting a sim abducted without hacks, I wouldn't count on it.  With FT, knowledge sims can gain the ability to summon aliens, but that greatly reduces the chance of pregnancy (I've had one sim get abducted 5 or 6 times now, and he's never come back pregnant yet).  The only sure-fire ways to get aliens into your neighborhood are to play the Curious family in Strangetown or attach La Fiesta University to your neighborhood and play Stella Terrano, then graduate her. 

I now use a replacement, less fugly, pollination technician template to reduce freaky looking aliens.  It is entirely possible that, if this were to happen in real life, the alienspawn would be freaky looking.  However, where I have the option, I don't see why I should have to look at that in game.  Somebody posted a template here somewhere.

I need to get one of those, yeah.  It would probably be impractical at best (and likely impossible) to change the way genetics worked just for human-alien hybrids so that it wasn't possible to get human coloration with alien features.

I used the one available via this thread:
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,10129.msg304165.html#msg304165

The thread also discusses other templates available as well.  I am not sure it is possible to avoid getting alien-coloured sims with normal human features, or human-coloured sims with alien features, due to the genetics.  I like my aliens to look somewhat alien, but not so much that I find them ugly.

Thanks!

And alien color with human features is actually pretty cool.  It's the reverse I don't like--normal human skintones with no nose and gigantic human eyes.  It's like the neighborhood is being invaded by black velvet paintings of Third World orphans from the 1970s.

It also says the odds of abduction are 5% which casts doubt on the other conclusions despite all the work that obviously went into the study.


That's more convincing. 

Shame Pescado didn't mention the telescope type in "Myths and Legends"  An update of that exploding some new myths would be really great.

It's been a while since I read that whole thread, but what makes you think that figure is wrong?  Except for the addition of Freetime, I don't think abduction odds have been modified since base game.

The study says 5% per night.

Pescado's Myths and Apocrypha article says 0.05% per Stargazing cycle   This is the 5-6 minute  loop of the Stargaze animation.  Back when that was posted  at Variousimmers,  I worked out the cumulative chance of experiencing at  least one abduction, assuming  you Stargaze from 7PM to 4AM, and that the Stargaze Animation was exactly 5.5 minutes long, checking once per animation at the 0.05% (1 in 2000) chance.

This works out to just under 4.8% per night.

So does stop/starting stargazing increase the abduction chances?   I thought that was another myth, but I guess it's a "yes" if you can actually break into the stargazing cycle and "no" if not. 

Thank you for explaining what a stargazing cycle is.  I've been quoting Pescado's Myth post for years without understanding the key parameter.  So how would you describe the odds of getting abducted after stargazing for a whole night?  This clearly describes the odds for any one stargazing cycle:

Notovny describes the odds of stargazing as 4.8% per night (7pm - 4am), in contrast to TreyNutz's 5% figure.  He notes that he empirically (by experimenting within the game) found his odds to vary between 4.5% and 5.1%.  With all due respect cwykes, throwing out TreyNutz's findings because he doesn't know how to do error analysis seems like a pretty high bar for the sims.  ;D

Pescado's colorful characterization of the odds is descriptive but if you knew someone who didn't bother looking every single time they cross you'd have to suspect they have a death wish.  Even very low odds can add up if you perpetually expose yourself to those risks.  As a comparison, the odds of a sim being abducted in one single night of stargazing is about 5x greater than the odds of having your car stolen this year.  Ask yourself how long you'd be willing to go without theft insurance on your car.

I don't deserve any respect for being stupid Seelindarum  :-[  I spend a lot of time posting for newbies and forgot where I was.  When I see or have quoted at me empirical research from the exchange, I'm sceptical especially if the research is old.  I've tried examining how things work in game and it sucks as a method  (food prep. btw).  OK empirical evidence is important for IDing problems, but reading at the code tells you how it really works and it's sometimes not at all what you were expecting. 

I had it firmly in my head that Pescado had debunked the 5% everyone non-awesome quotes and the true odds of getting abducted were 0.5%.  I never engaged my brain to think about it, never mind research it.  So discovering that there is a very short stargazing cycle and that the cumulative odds take you back up to something like the debunked 5% is a serious "head desk***" for me.  Now you've all explained that the Prima guide 5% turns out to be right for the wrong reasons, I'll go back and read the rest of TreyNutz research.  Then I can go post for the people I've been misleading for a long time.......

So what colourful phrase can we apply to the overall odds of getting abducted for a sim who spends night after night glued to that scope? This isn't colourful, but is it true?

"Your sim would have to spend every night of his adult life stargazing for the entire night to have a high chance of getting abducted and if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life as near-elders can't get pregnant."

Yep.  Cumulative chance of achieving at least one abduction with 28 nights of 7PM to 4AM stargazing under the same assumptions is 74.1%.

"High chance" is qualitative, obviously. ;)  Sometimes it's useful to think about odds in the reverse: if you have one particular sim you want to be abducted for a storyline, there's a 95% chance your story won't go as planned the first night.  By the time he approaches elder, there's still a 25% chance that your story won't get made.  That seems like a pretty significant chance of failure to me, so I'd be making other plans.

However, I mostly don't care which sims get probed.  I'm just after some local colour in my 'hood.  In that case, my tolerance for failure is pretty high, so a 25% chance that I won't have any aliens born in the first generation is fine.  I'll just make sure my sim has a son, and he'll quite likely be the lucky one. :D

In truth, I play 4 or more houses in rotation all the time.  If I send some random sim to the telescope most nights in each household I play,  I get at least one alien born every generation, and some useless abductions.  But then, I'm amused by that. :D  Big developed 'hoods will have more aliens, and a bigger normal population, so the proportion stays roughly the same.

As for respect, it's sort of a holistic thing.  People accumulate it slowly for others based on the totality of their words and work, not just a single declaration or post. :)

Isn't this "gambler's fallacy"? The way I understand it, the odds do not increase the more you stargaze:
According to this, each cycle independently has a .05% chance, not a cumulative effect that increases the odds over time. No matter how many times you flip a coin, the odds are still 50% either way and do not change depending on the past results. Even if you randomly flip 10 heads in a row, the next flip has the same chances of being heads as the last 10 trials.
I'm not very good with probability math, so I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the chances of abduction over 28 days are quite a bit lower than 74.1%. In fact, I'd say they're .05%.
Looking at it this way, you probably do need a hack or cheat if you ever want aliens in the neighborhood.

(Note: I'll reiterate that this statement is based on non-cumulative odds. If it increases over time, it's obviously going to be greater the more you try.)

No, it is not the gambler's fallacy.

If what I was doing was figuring the odds over one stargazing cycle after having spent 28 days stargazing, you would be correct. But that's not the question I'm answering there.

The question I'm answering is "What is the chance of achieving at least one abduction, during 28 nights of stargazing."


If I flip a coin once, I've got two options H and T. The chance of getting heads 1 or more timesis 50%.  If I flip a coin twice, or use two coins, there are four results possible: HH HT TH TT.  The chance of getting heads at least once is 75%. For three coins, it's 87.5%, and so on.  For each individual flip, the odds remain the same, but the more  times  you flip the coin, the more likely you are to have a rare result show up in the string of all the results you get.

I'm not looking at any individual roll of 0.05%, I'm looking at the chances of succeeding one or more times when I roll against 0.05% odds 2749 times.

n = (28 days * 9 stargazing hours / day * 60 minutes/hour ) / (5.5 minutes/stargazing cycle) = 2749.09 cycles.

The probability p of getting an abduction in one cycle is p = 0.0005. 
The probability q of not getting an abduction in one cycle is q = 1-p = 0.9995.


The potential results can be grouped into two categories: No Abductions at All,  and One or More Abductions.

The probability Q of getting No Abductions At All in 2749 cycles is Q = q^n  =  0.2529.

The probability P of getting One or More Abductiions  in 2749 cycles is consequently P = 1-Q = 0.7471, or 74.71%.

That coin toss stuff brings back lots of memories of maths and stats lessons!

Another question, if you don't mind...
Why choose to quote odds for 7pm-4am rather than 7pm-6am?  Is the chance of getting abducted really lower after 4am or is it just that sims don't have the stamina for more than 9 hours of stargazing?  I guess active sims can manage longer than lazy sims.

TreyNutz2 says "TIME: The earliest I had an abduction in my testing was 8:56pm, and the latest was 4:16am.... I have read reports of abductions as late as 4:30am."

I agree, btw, that Free Time changed something for sims who are stargazing at 6am.  They used to keep "stargazing" in their queue until they stopped, but as of Free Time "stargazing changes to "look through the telescope" at 6am.  Sims used to go on earning logic points after 6am, but I guess they were no longer "at risk" of abduction or we'd have heard about 10am abductions by now surely!

Aha! That's why I'm getting slightly different results than you for the 28 day odds. (The difference isn't enough to matter for gameplay purposes. It's only relevant to math geeks.  ;D )

There are either 2744 or 2772 cycles in 28 days.  Not 2749. This is why:

(9 stargazing hours / night * 60 minutes/hour ) / (5.5 minutes/stargazing cycle) = 98.18 cycles/night
0.18 cycle * 5.5 minutes/cycle = 1 minute

The end of the 98th cycle occurs at 3:59AM. The following night, the stargazing starts over at the beginning of a new cycle, so the extra 1 minute is lost.  OTOH, if the abduction check is made at the very beginning of the cycle, or if the complete cycle is executed once it's begun, it's possible for that 1 minute to effectively become a 99th cycle. But there are an integral number of cycles per night; either 98 or 99. No fractional cycles are carried forward to the next night, which your calculation is doing.

True. However In the long-gone Varioussimmers thread twoJeffs mentioned that the stargaze animation was 5-6 minutes long,  so I just went with 5.5 as a reasonable estimation, though having not timed a lot of them myself, I don't know whether the true time is closer to 5 or to 6 minutes (or even, come to think of it now, whether twoJeffs just pulled the number out of thin air.).  Given how important that number winds up being over thousands of repetitions, though, I suppose there's a case for just throwing the raw number in there.


I blame treacherous memory.I might have had a reason to just do  7PM to 4AM, based on vague recollection of a long-gone thread at varioussimmers.  But going with 7PM to 4:30AM results in numbers even closer to 5% with the 5.5 minute assupmtion I'd been using.  So at this point, I'll retreat a bit from probably unwarranted precision and call the odds of getting abducted once or more times in a full night of 7PM-4:30 AM stargazing to  "about 1 in 20" and  the odds of  getting abducted once or more times in a full adult lifetime of such stargazing to "about 3 in 4."

I'd been wondering how exact the 5.5 minutes was.

I just enjoy playing with the numbers. Looking at the range of possibilities, I get:

Assuming 4:00AM to be the latest possible abduction time
    5 min/cycle --> 5.3% per night; 78% per adult lifetime
    6 min/cycle --> 4.4% per night; 72% per adult lifetime
 
Assuming 6:00AM to be the latest possible abduction time
    5 min/cycle --> 6.4% per night; 84% per adult lifetime
    6 min/cycle --> 5.4% per night; 79% per adult lifetime

Meh. So the answer is somewhere between 4.4% and 6.4% for one full night, and between 72% and 84% for 28 nights. I can't quarrel with "about 1 in 20"  and "about 3 in 4". That's close enough, and easier for most simmers to understand.

*shrugs* Like I said, I'm bad at probability math. I'm really good at algebra, but I could not follow that proof you did at all. For some reason, calculating odds wars with my intuition, just confusing me. Anyway, I stand by my conclusion: you're better off using a hack or cheat if you want aliens.

Your intuition should help more with probability than algebra. ;)

Think of betting on a single 6-sided die.  Betting on any given number for a single roll gives 1 in 6 odds.  Suppose now that you are allowed 10 rolls to pay back on your bet, that is, if your number comes up in any of the 10 rolls, you win.  All of a sudden these odds are much better, no?  It is certainly possible that your number will not come up in any of the 10 rolls, since randomness is at play, but intuitively you know that your chances are much better if you're allowed 10 rolls as opposed to just one.

This is because it doesn't matter which of the rolls produces your number.  We're not asked to predict which roll will produce a win.  We're asking a different question: will we win on any of our rolls?  Novotny's proof answers the question: how probable is it that all 10 rolls consecutively fail to produce our number?

Your intuition says that if you roll 20 times, it will be even less likely that you'll fail all of the 20 rolls.

If you're willing to have a sim stargaze every night of his adult life, you'll most likely get some poor sim probed by the second generation, if not sooner.  No hacks necessary.

If you have already flipped a coin twice, and it came up tails both times, and you ask what the probability is that you will get heads on the next flip, the answer is 50%. It doesn't matter if you just got 10 tails in a row, or 100, or none.  The odds for any single flip are always the same: 50%. You are right about that.

But if you are going to flip a coin multiple times, and ask what the probability is that you will get heads at least once during those multiple flips, you are asking a completely different question.
   - If you flip a coin once, there are two possible outcomes: H or T. One of those includes one or more heads, so the probability with one flip is 1 in 2, or 50%
   - If you flip a coin twice, there are four possible outcomes: HH, HT, TH, or TT. Three of those include one or more heads, so the probability with two flips is 3 in 4, or 75%
   - If you flip a coin three times, there are eight possible outcomes: HHH, HHT, HTH, HTT, THH, THT, TTH, TTT. Seven of those include one or more heads, so the probability with three flips is 7 in 8, or 87.5%.
   - If you flip a coin four times, there are 16 possible outcomes: HHHH, HHHT, HHTH, ... (you try listing the rest). 15 of those  include one or more heads, so the probability with four flips is 15 in 16, or 93.5%.

See how it keeps getting larger? This is why the overall chances for success are greater with multiple tries, even though the chances for any single try never change.


Yes. But not as much better off as you think.

Depends on how you feel about your sim wasting their entire fertile life stargazing from 9 to 4 with less than 100% odds. If I want my sim to have an alien baby, I generally want it near the beginning of the adult stage with the other children. So for storyline purposes, I'd still use a cheat. I'm very partial to the higher odds telescopes.

Memory and assumptions get you every time...  This is getting closer, but I'm still reaching on the window of opportunity...... what do you think?

"The odds of abduction are 0.05% in any stargazing cycle (1 in 2,000 every 5-6 mins).  That's from stargazing with the expensive telescope (the cheaper scope doesn't have the code for abduction on it).  Your sim can probably only manage about 9 hours of stargazing a night (7pm-6am) before collapsing from needs failure, so his chances of getting abducted are about 5% or 1 in 20 per night.  Even if your sim spends every night of his adult life stargazing until he collapses from exhaustion, he has only about a 3 in 4 chance of getting abducted, so if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life.  Remember near-elders can't get pregnant."

1. Yes it would be good to stick the exact length of the stargazing cycle into the math - you can't argue sensibly about the exact answer if you are doing the maths with approximate numbers. 

2. Incomplete cycles - it's probably correct to include incomplete cycles as the dice is rolled at the start of the cycle. That's not going to make a big difference to the overall answer though.

3. What's still bugging me is the window of opportunity for abduction because it makes a big difference to the answer and because it's a basic fact about abduction.  If a sim could do 11 hours of stargazing instead of 9 you'd be closer to 90% than 74% over the long term.

I came across posts about abductions from the electro dance sphere the other day.  Is that for real or was there some long fixed bug causing sims to disappear from the dance sphere?

You're trying for a canned paragraph to use as an educational aid elsenet, right?  My $0.02 worth:

The first sentence is confusing. People won't understand what a "stargazing cycle" is.  I'd start out with the information about which telescope. (Also, I assume the information about how any sim, male or female, teen through elder, can get abducted, but only adult males get pregnant, will have already been covered.) Then I'd say something like:

<i>"There's a 1 in 2000 (0.05%) chance of getting abducted every 5-6 minutes while stargazing. If your sim stargazes continuously all night long, that adds up to about a 1 in 20 (5%) chance for the night."</i>*

Then your last two sentences about lifetime odds are fine.

* Yanno, on second thought, I'm not sure it's a good idea to go into the 5-6 minute thing at all, even without calling it a "stargazing cycle".  It might be more productive to say there's a 1 in 200 chance for one hour and a 1 in 20 chance for all night. It kinda depends on who your audience is. For typical BBSers, I'd keep things very, very short and very, very simple.  For people who comprehend sentences more than four words long, you can flesh it out a little more.

I think exact percentages aren't so important.  It's now reasonably established that 5% odds of abduction per night is the correct figure, as advertised.  Even if you do precision math on numbers extracted from game code to get a more exact figure, you'll still have operator error and intrinsic randomness.  You can argue sensibly with inexact math because abductions are coded to be random.  In fact, it would be very unusual to get precisely 3 abductions for every 4 adult male sims who stargaze their whole lives.  You will have players who go 4 generations without an abduction and then get 3 in the space of a sim week, and some will get an abduction in the first sim week.  That's not borkage, that's the random number generator being suitably random.

I would argue that in practice a 90% chance of abduction over 29 days is indistinguishable from 75%.  Why?  Because human experience is simply not that sensitive to probabilistic outcomes.  The player who got an abduction in the first week will have the impression that 5% odds per night really isn't so low, the player who waited 4 generations will feel that 5% is intolerably low, and it will not matter whether the exact figure was 4% or 6%.  You may want to do the exact math to defend your credibility ;) but there isn't much more practical utility to be gained by it.  In the end, it comes down to play style.  What purpose does the player want abductions for, and will it be reasonable to wait possibly a very long time for it?

The electrodance sphere results in abduction and pregnancy if the sim had been abducted by telescope before.  I use this often as a way to extend the fertility of stargazing males.  Teens can get abducted but not pregnant, however they are eligible for sphere abductions as adults.  If you prepare a CAS teen to stargaze through his full teen and adult life stages, the odds for abduction rise to about 90%, based on the same assumptions as above by Novotny.  I've not tried a sphere abduction since BV, but it worked as of Seasons.

*Also of note, I suspect that YA sims cannot be abducted.

Thanks for your input Giam - I do find that summarising helps me get it exactly straight in my head, but yes I'm looking for a canned paragraph to trot out when the subject comes up elsewhere.  I'll add in another sentence on the EDS thanks to Seelindarum.

I think the length of the cycle needs to be mentioned because I've seen posts saying stop/starting stargazing increases the chances of getting abducted.  I guess that's because the odds are calculated at the start of every stargazing cycle, so breaking into the cycle would give you more chances of getting an abduction.   I'd have thought 5-6 sim minutes was too short to bother myself, but if you keep queuing up and cancelling stargazing, maybe you could double or treble(?) the number of dice rolls in a night.  All that is assuming you can break into the cycle.

I don't think it has been established whether the odds are calculated at the start or at the end of a cycle.  Back on that BBS thread, I think Treynutz did do a preliminary investigation as to whether the odds really are greater if you stop/start the stargazing, but I think it was too little to be conclusive.  Given how long it takes sims to dock and un-dock from any task, I'm not sure you really can increase the odds much, however that's pure speculation on my part.  It looks like an experiment for you, cwykes!  ;D

No way!  I'm an analyst not a scientist and I suck at experiments.  The attempts I made in game to see if counters actually did make a difference to food quality and skill gain, put me right off!  Looked to me like you earned skill quicker on cheap counters, but Prima guide says expensive counters are better.  Turns out it's to do with animations not time.  I gave up at that point!

Here's a new version of the canned para.  You're right - there was an "if" in front of bit about the cycle...

"The odds of abduction are 0.05% in any stargazing cycle; that's 1 in 2,000 calculated once every 5-6 mins.   Your sim can probably only manage about 9 hours of stargazing a night before collapsing from needs failure, so his chances of getting abducted are about 5% or 1 in 20 per night.  Even if your sim spends every night of his adult life stargazing until he collapses from exhaustion, he has only about a 3 in 4 chance of getting abducted, so if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life.  Remember near-elders can't get pregnant.

Your sim must use the expensive telescope.  The cheaper scope doesn't have the code for abduction on it.
The height of the telescope makes no difference (Pescado)
A sim who has been abducted once already can get abducted again while using the Electro Dance Sphere."



Unknowns -
1. can sims be abducted at the tail end of the stargazing period  c4.15 - 6am?
2. how much stargazing can a sim do in a night?  preferably a range for 0-10 active points
3. does stop/starting help? When in the cycle are the odds calculated?  & can you restart quickly or does backing out take so long that the cycle would have finished anyway.

I might look and see how long a really active sim can stargaze of if he has snapdragons to hand.

I've had two abductions after 5am, unfortunately I can't say definitively whether those two stargazing cycles began before or after 5am.  I usually just park a sim on the telescope and triple speed as the rest of the family sleeps...

So I was right to suspect that the 7-4 thing isn't actually the window of opportunity for abduction.  That means I really do need to check out the stamina issue.  Stargazing 7-6 would up the longterm odds of abduction by 22%.