More Awesome Than You!

So I was kinda curious about something. I have this ADD problem with the sims at times. I'll spend a great deal of time and energy creating families and households and neighborhoods from scratch. Then, when the kiddies of all these thoughtful families go to college...pfft. Nothing.  I give up on the whole thing. Part of the problem is that I want my simmies to pair up in college, get their future life planned out.

Question is: How do you choose which sprog ends up with what spawn? How do you decide what sex they're going to be interested in?

I ask because I currently have one male young adult who is OBSESSED with the girl I consider to be his sibling. They were raised in a multi-family lot, his parents were two lesbian women and her parents were two male partners. They were born around the same time, and poor little Hector has been farting hearts over Pandora since he was old enough to realize that farting hearts weren't just a weird thing his parents did at each other. I keep trying to adjust their turn ons/offs in an attempt to lessen the two bolt attraction, I even shoved another playable female onto Hector, but he doesn't seem to be having it.

He's a sweet kid, but Pandora is a romance sim (I thought it was fitting, considering her name) and I don't seem him being happy with her for long once the ACR settings wear off. =p

I like to pair them up as teens.  I use TJ's crystal ball to find out who might be a likely candidate. I like it because you can set it for only playables or by age groups.  You could use the crystal ball to find out who they would be attracted to while they are still teens.  Let them meet and build the relationship first and if all goes well, start the romance in college.  If I can't find someone while they are still teens, I will wait until they are in college, but I still find that crystal ball very useful.

Whoever they seem most obsessed with as teens is usually who they end up with. Otherwise, I let them pick a dormie.

On very rare occasions, I will make a CAS sim special for somebody.

I'm doing a Legacy (two, actually, concurrent Uglacy and Prettacy with identical Founders), so I tend to micromanage the relationships as best I can.  That said, the best laid plans of mice and men et cetera.

This generation (the fifth), I have five Sims in college from my main households--Indy and Chad, Prettacy spares; Rocky, Uglacy spare; Coco, Uglacy heir; and Dora, Prettacy heir.  Plus three extra Sims--Cam and Jordan, first cousins of the Prettacy crew, and a SimSelf who's been dating Chad since they were teenagers.

I know which genes I want to breed into the main households this generation.  Therefore, I know which male Sims I want to hook Coco and Dora up with (although there's a bit of a pit stop for Dora due to plot reasons).  Should be simple enough to avoid trouble, right?

So what happens when I get to college?  Indy and his ten outgoing points autonomously flirt with Coco, with whom he was best friends, causing them to fall in love.  Not part of the plan.  5 of the 8 are Knowledge Sims, so they throw bolts for each other just on general principle, and most of them are Outgoing enough to stalk and flirt autonomously.  Dora started stalking Rocky, also not part of the plan.  Then Cam showed up and started throwing massive Swoon/Heart-Farts for Rocky despite his gender preference being female (and I don't mean a gossip heart-fart "Someone said Rocky is hot", I mean, "Ooooh Rocky is hot" fanning himself weak-in-the-knees SWOON heart-fart), and he and his three outgoing points start following Rocky around like a little lost puppy.

The only long-term couple I have, Chad and his SimSelf girlfriend, are actually loyal to each other, despite having bolts for other Sims, but Chad is so shy (one outgoing point) that, despite the three bolts he has for his girlfriend, rarely does anything on free will with her other than tell (non-Dirty) jokes and Play Catch.

I had a plan.  It was a nice plan.  I liked my plan.  And it went down in flames approximately two days after moving them all to Uni.  For everyone BUT the heirs at this point, I am totally winging it and hoping something good comes out of it.  I mean, Cam and Rocky are sort of cute together, except for Cam's Stabby Death Nose and the fact that Rocky is Gen 5 Uglacy and his mother is Loki Beaker turned into a woman.

Well, as you can tell from Matytown, I generally let them decide who they want. Whoever they roll the "get engaged/married to..." want with is who they get. All else be damned!

I'm currently debating the wisdom letting one of my family spawn fall for a Tiki village local, considering when he's not around she tries to steal her sister's fiance. And she's supposed to be the GOOD sister. Stupid family sims in Uni... they're so LOOSE.

I have the same ADD issue with playing the sims as you do. The second generation rarely makes it to college before I get bored and delete the whole thing. I've vowed not to let myself do that with my shiny new MATY hood (Gen 2 is still all toddlers/babies/unborn except for the very first babies born, who have just aged up to child, so I don't know if I'm going to keep my vow or not).

For gender preference, I randomize with the ACR adjuster (I adjust the gay/bi percentages according to the gender balance of the 'hood). I plan let them pretty much choose partners for themselves. Like nekonoai, if a sim rolls the get engaged/get married to want, they get engaged/married, unless a couple gets pregnant, then it's a shotgun wedding for them.  

In my attempt at an Alphabet legacy (original rules, merged with psuedo-apoc at one point) that got to Gen K, at Gen D the heir married a girl who was, for story purposes, sort of his sister. She had been adopted in by accident by the avatar of the Oversoul, the all-knowing mime. Well, I had the mime move in the lot with her, then move out and leave the child. So according to the game, she wasn't related. She was a lot younger, but sparks flew. Then, after she and the hubby had passed, their children died in a lightning-meets-pool incident with all the other family members save the toddler heir and her great-grand aunt. Great-grand aunt proceeded to drink the 'hood as part of her quest for immortality and the Oversoul took revenge. Hence, the apocalypse. Urban Paradise was extremely odd.

College bores me to tears. For those that roll college, I only actually play two semesters. Freshman first semester to get the GPA (which I don't make them study for unless they are low on ASP and have the wants), then Senior second semester to get to graduate. This also works because college is 3 days in normal 'hood equivalent, so the whole time is extremely imbalanced. 2 semesters isn't as far off.

For their sexual orientation, ACR takes care of that (now automagically!). I get about 20% gay and bi. Romance sims seem to be more inclined to be bi, but that could be an odd quirk of the dice roll or something I didn't notice was added as a feature. And unfortunately I keep getting gay Family sims, which sucks as I don't use adoption (yet).

As the 'hood started from one sim, intermarriage has just become a possibility. I was hoping to avoid it for another generation, but the sims seem to have something else in mind. If anything but Pleasure or Romance, they are going to get married when they find their three-bolt, across the board. If they don't have a three-bolt, then I pick the best two-bolt and wait for them to want to get married. If Pleasure or Romance, they need a three-bolt (Pleasure can settle on a two-bolt) plus the want has to be mutual. I have a GC-Fortune couple that is a two-bolter and rolled the want to get engaged, moved in together, and never did have the want to get married.

Most of my sims find their match at college, or realize that they have a thing for daddy's work buddy while at college. Sometimes they don't, and I have them visit the fishing hole, Atomic Arcade and Vrooom! Autos as adults until they meet someone. And sometimes I start screaming at them while they are teenagers because they won't get off their damned cousin!

I'm really hoping that Gen 5 consists mostly of girls, because my 'hood is very boy heavy at the moment and the current townie teens are 90% boys. YAs are mostly girls, and adults are about 70% male.

I just feel bad for poor Hector, Pandora has no interest him at all, but he keeps following her about. Hopefully his sister Aurora will have better luck.

When my game was working, I spent most of my time designing houses / lots and Sims, then winding them up at letting them do stupid things (within the realms of stupidity allowed after Pes hacks nip the worst of it in the bud). Then I take pix of the mayhem. That tends to be more fun for me than breeding or killing them, but, again, my game has a bad habit of not working long enough to allow extended gameplay even when my schedule is free enough to have time to play.

Unless I have pre determined from childhood for storyline purposes, to determine what sexual orientation a teenage sim will be, I use TJ's crystal ball and click on the "I'm desperate and I don't care" option. I gives IIRC, 5, maybe 6 sims that your sim is compatible with. If my active sim seems to be more compatible with sims of their sex, then gay they will be, OTOH, if they roll more opposite sex sims, then I choose the straight option.

As far as who they end up with, it's usually the first sim in line on the crystal ball pop up who gets chosen. If they happen to be mega fugly, then I tweak them just a little with the makeover option on TJ's blender and make it stick in SimPe.

Oooh that's a good idea. I may just have to download that now...

I use ACR for sexual orientation, balanced 80% straight, 10% bi, 10% gay.

Who they end up with is based on their attraction score in ACR.  I usually have my playables date around long enough to see who they're most compatible with, and the one they like best they settle down with, that is, if they're the settling type.

I set everyone bi and use the crystal ball to meet their five 'desperate' matches. Romance sims get to remain bi, and everyone else gets set to prefer the gender of their best match, typically set at or shortly after the marriage to said match. Exceptions can be made where needed, to make things more interesting, and not everyone gets a partner. I have one single Sim who is turned on by servos, but the only servo in the hood is the one he initialised. (Which I've set in SimPe as his 'son'.) He has several two bolt matches, but none that interest me enough to pursue. He's had two alien spawn, and he's on track to age to elder next session. He's had a good life.

I have another single Sim, born in game, and randomly selected to be a romance sim. One of the grand vampires came up as a match for him while he was at uni, and I just couldn't resist. I affectionately refer to this romance sim as 'Potato face' as his head resembles a sack of them, and the vampire in question has such a different face, though alike in its extremeness: he has a very pointy nose. But I didn't want to marry the vamp in, so the romance sim has remained unattached, spawning with the vampire almost immediately on returning to the family home. (And, just because, I made him a plant sim, so he's had a plant-baby as well.) I'm thinking I'll leave it at that for him, another happily single sim.

My play style seems to be constantly evolving, my born in game sims have been in play long enough to have children of their own, which is new for me. But, as to the question, I typically use TwoJeffs' crystal ball for matches. It can be set to ignore playables/NPCs/Townies and so on, as well as age groups, so you get just what you're looking for, if you want to set them up with, say, a playable adult.

I'll also recommend TJ's spiffy crystal ball.  I don't always hook up the playable sim with whichever sim the crystal ball picks out for them, though- only if I have trouble finding him/her a mate through more conventional methods (hanging out on comm lots, throwing parties, calling the gypsy, etc).  I usually use it just to get an idea of who to look for; it just feels too "cheaty".

I don't use ACR or anything to randomize gender pref, but I do a pretty good job of keeping the gay/bi population at 10-25% of the total population, depending on the neighborhood and how crowded it is.

Which neighborhood I'm in also determines who playables are allowed to marry; each neighborhood has slightly different rules for various things.  In most neighborhoods anyone is fair game, but in the ones that are getting crowded (Pleasantview & Desiderata) other playables are given preference for population control.  In Veronaville, I'm playing "family feud"-style; no playable sim of any one of the 4 families (Monty, Capp, Summerdream, Tricou) are allowed to marry a playable from any of the other 4 families- and inbreeding is encouraged, royalty-like.  I'm only just now starting the 3rd generation, though.

Assuming that I haven't already set in motion some pairing in the Teen age,  most of my Sims pick their mates in University. From this,  I usually only judge from the following criterea.

1. Is the potential mate already working in one of my Businesses? If No, then...
2. Is the potential mate active enough to Run? If yes, then...
3. Do I mind the facial features of the Sim?

Sexual orientation is based on what I feel like giving a Sim, as I don't use ACR. I don't particularly pay attention to attaction. And  because I want to have a significant minority of  Green-Skinned Sims,  every Sim who is descended from  Adam Black is getting a custom-made full-blooded Alien Townie as a mate.

I'm still playing my original neighborhood, Pleasantivew, and almost every Sim I routinely play is descended from one of five families: The Roomies and the Vergonyes (My favorite Sims 1 Families), the Blacks, the Blues, and the Yellows. None of the Pleasantview premades have married in, though Townies, Downtownies, and University Sims are allowed as mates.  Seven generations from Chris & Belle Roomies at this point. There's a ridiculous level of longevity in this neighborhood, which I attribute to Katelyn Roomies' takeover of Faustian Biotech, and establishment of  the Zeitstall Labs Cowplant Facilities.

Thrown-together Family Tree here (http://www.notovny.com/sims/Roomies/#view:START).

I totally have to steal your tree-making software. I've been doing it manually in Photoshop (http://i232.photobucket.com/albums/ee18/ZazazuAbubu/CurrentTree.jpg). It sucks.

This is fantastic.  I'm going to put together a family tree of Pleasantview!  Thanks for the link!!

One of the first families I played extensively was a Romance/Family couple, and it worked out pretty good. You just have to make sure the slut doesn't get caught. Or you could let them hook up and let him get his heart broken. They don't have to all be happy all the time.

In Strangetown, Phillip was all hot and bothered over Meadow Thayer as a teen, who was Romance.  I grew her up with him, let him have a relationship with her, and of course, he caught her red-handed. He survived and went on to meet the town she-nerd, with whom he had a nice little life. (Meadow ended up as caretaker of the Olive Specter Memorial Museum and Mausoleum.)

I sometimes have a pairing in mind, but I usually don't force it.  The pairings they develop that I didn't expect can help keep the game from being too boring.  My singer and guitarist were supposed to hook up, but the singer was three-bolts for the aspiring politician, and the guitarist got along better with the trailer-trash queen. Rock star and mayor in the mayoral mansion, professional busker and perpetually unemployed, perpetually unfaithful tramp living in the Trashiest house in the hood (I love trashy CC); that was more interesting than what I'd had in mind.

Sometimes I'll break up a beautiful three-bolt relationship simply because they have incompatible Interests and can't have a decent conversation, which annoys me.  I rarely go searching for the perfect three-bolt mate, anyway.  They can get along fine in a one or two-bolt relationship if nothing else presents itself, and I find it more realistic when they have to choose the best they can get out of the sims they meet in the regular course of their lives. 

A want to get engaged/married means nothing to me; I decide whether they're going to be respectable, or just live in sin. The busker/trailer tramp got married; the mayor/rock star lived in sin (made sense to me.)

With CAS sims, I know who's going to be straight, gay or bi as I'm making them.  With others, it's sometimes off the gender of their first best friend as a kid/teen. It's pretty random, actually. And I play with preg for all genders, so no one has to get left out of the gene pool.  Unless, of course, they and their mate have truly incompatible face templates and I don't want to look at succeeding generations of fug.

As for the Uni-is-boring-problem, I deal with it by not allowing all the kids to go to college. The ones who are fortunate enough to go to Uni get sent off as early in their teens days as possible.  Some have to stay in the main hood, slogging through adolescence and teen jobs with no hope of higher education. Then I play the main hood and Uni in  synch, so I'm not spending an interminable amount of play time in Uni; about six days per lot while I've got college students. 

Most of my Family sims drop out of Uni as soon as they've found a mate, as I'm convinced the only reason they ever want to go to Uni is to trawl for Mr. or Miss Right.  Then they move back in with the folks and wait for their Twu Wuv to graduate and come to take them away from it all.  Knowledge sims are sometimes actively discouraged from relationships during Uni, as I tend to see them as academically obsessed.  Fortune sims have to make buttloads of money, Popularity sims have to join the Secret Society, etc., before they are allowed to graduate.

Sims who don't go to Uni get upgraded with the Lot Debugger only when they have a) reached the top of a career, or b) fulfilled a lifetime want.  I consider them graduates of the school of hard knocks.

Oh, wow notovny.  Thanks for pointing out that family tree site.

For deciding who gets to go to Uni, I follow a few easy rules.  The sim must:
- be Knowledge or Fortune aspiration and/or
- have a Uni career LTW (I have a hack, from here I think, that enables those) and/or
- have a twin that meets one of the above criteria and/or
- be heir/ess and/or
- have a parent with the "graduate 3 spawn from college" LTW

All that means that, oh, maybe 75% of my sims make it to college.  If a sim that does not meet the above criteria consistantly rolls the Want to go to college I might send them if the college isn't already overcrowded, but they will probably be dropped or flunked out.

I just roll for Uni. I think it's 50% who go and graduate, 25% who don't go, and 25% who drop out at some point. I'd have to look at my script.

How do you extract the character thumbnails to use them in the family tree?

I think they are the SimPe thumbnails for the characters.

Yep, that's exactly what they are.

Slow way to do it:

1. Open SimPE.
2. Open the Neighborhood Browser. Load the Neighborhood.
3. Open the Sim Browser. Find the Sim you want,  and open him or her.
4. Hit the More button, and open his or her character file.
5. Select the jpeg/tga/png image resource on the tree, and then in the resource list.
6. Click the button that says Export and save it.
7. Go back to step 2, and do the next sim.

A faster way diverges at the third step.
1. Open SimPE.
2. Open the Neighborhood Browser. Load the Neighborhood.
3. Open the Sim browser. Find the Sim you want, and note the character file name. Don't close the Sim Browser.

4. Open a Second SimPE session.
5. Navigate to the Characters folder in the appropriate neighborhood, and open the character file you noted.
6. Select the jpeg/tga/png image resource on the tree, and then in the resource list.
7. Click the button that says Export and save it.

8 Go back to your first SimPE Session, and find another Sim you want in the Sim Browser. Repeat from step 5.

Using the latter method, I eventually could extract a character portrait every thirty seconds or so.

I have dice rolls for almost everything, except for dating others. When I decide that I want them to get a first kiss, a date, or a spouse I just have them check out nearly ever person of the correct sexual orientation that they see until they find someone they have at least 2 bolts with. If, however, they don't seem to find anyone, I call on the Gypsy or have them go for whoever they have some sort of attraction for.

I have a huge Excel file for all of my dice rolls. College attendance is affected by family worth, and sexuality is affected by gender. I researched dropout rates and sexuality and fudged the numbers for my purposes, but most stuff was made up off the top of the head. The only thing I didn't make* was the list of the different types of businesses for the adult page.

Screen captures of my dice roll sheets:
Teens- http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=TeenRolls.jpg (http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=TeenRolls.jpg)
YAs- http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=CollegeRolls.jpg (http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=CollegeRolls.jpg)
Adults- http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=AdultRolls.jpg (http://s2.photobucket.com/albums/y19/Ravenwaift/?action=view&current=AdultRolls.jpg)

*I may have stolen more ideas than I remember, but this is the one I'm sure I took from someone else

Those are really interesting. 

I do the same thing for niceness as a turn-on, and I have a bunch of teeth/freckles/scars/beauty spots as face masks to use.  I was always so disappointed that they didn't put niceness and other personality features as turn-ons and turn-offs.  Especially since being attracted to niceness or playfulness makes so much more sense than being attracted to glasses or full-face makeup???  I use hats for a turn-on for playfulness.

I'm a control freak with my Sims, though I've made efforts to cut the apron strings. I roll for aspirations, turn-ons/turn-offs, and sexual orientation. Mates are decided on a combination of chemistry and shared interests, fugliness be damned. (After all, a pair of Sims may be hot for each other, but if they can't hold a conversation without big red minuses popping up and fingers going in ears, forget it.)

Ah, that's what I like: a sim player with OCD.  Me too, me too.

I am such a control freak that I have controls for controlling the controls.

I don't purely roll for these because the results would be totally random and out of character. Instead, I have a set of deterministic criteria I use. The final outcome is thus nonrandom, controlled by me, and yet not controlled by me.

What criteria would those be, if you don't mind me asking? I'm curious.

Same here.  My criteria: family sims have to be at least a little bit nice; popularity sims have to be outgoing and playful; fortune sims are serious, outgoing, and not lazy; pleasure sims have to be playful and not too nice; romance have to be mid-range nice/mean, outgoing, and not too serious; knowledge sims have to be serious, neat, and not too outgoing.  Secondary aspirations are entirely character based too, and are chosen according to personality, how they were raised, and what kind of wants they roll.  Most of my sims don't choose a secondary aspiration until college or adulthood.

For me, that would get boring fairly early on, having all the Sims from the same Aspiration having the same general personality.  I never rolled for Aspiration before I started my Legacy, and since I've had to roll, combinations have come up that are unexpected but that totally work.

One of my favorite Sims ever is my Gen 2 Uglacy heir: a Family Sim with one nice point.  Try it some time; it shouldn't work, but it totally can.

All of my Knowledge Sims have been outgoing, because most of my Sims are.  I don't see shyness as being an advantage to a Knowledge Sim.

The only thing I change at this point, is Pleasure Sims who aren't Playful.  I've had 6 Pleasure rolls, 5 of whom had or have 3 playful points.  The sixth had 10 playful points, and he was a happy little goofball.  The most recent serious Pleasure Sim was made a Grilled Cheese Sim because I refuse to deal with anymore serious Pleasure Sims.  Even wfsanity can't help them.

See, this is precisely why I DON'T use a singular criteria like that. I have a whole bunch of OTHER criteria I use, which are NOT directly correlated to personality: Interests, family background, number of family and friends, relations, all these are tallied up to create a final result.

Well, outgoingness works against Knowledge because outgoing sims have high social decay, and most knowledge-based pursuits are primarily solitary in nature. Outgoing knowledge sims thus tend to wind up a bit crackers.

Pleasure sims that aren't playful is practically a contradiction in my criteria. The aspiration is basically entire silly and not at ALL suitable for Serious Cats.

I also base aspirations on interests, friends, family, and stuff like that. A sim spends his entire toddlerhood glued to the logic building toy? He'll be a knowledge sim, unless he's really outgoing, then he'll be fortune. Youngest in a family of seven kids who hate each other? Probably not going to be a family sim.
I also determine what jobs they'll have (and what LTW I'll force them to have, messing with aspirations, interest levels and personality points until I roll it, then fixing everything) according to past experiences and what jobs family members have had. Burglar broke in while the kid was playing with his toddler toys? He'll grow up to be Captain Hero. Both parents are visionaries and they own an art gallery? The kid is probably going to want to do something different with his life..

Popularity teens with one or no nice points. They want desperately to make friends but are incredibly socially inept.

I haven't found that at all, and I've had six Sims in the last 5 generations who have 7-10 Outgoing and rolled Knowledge, and they've been perfectly happy.  They easily max Charisma as toddlers; they'll sit at the rabbit head until they're ready to drop.  Across the board, they autonomously max Logic on the chessboard, and family meals tend to be enough to keep their Social high enough that they're willing to skill non-social skills.  Of course, my Sims are also overwhelmingly Serious, which helps.  I have a reasonably Playful Knowledge Sim at college right now, and he Maxed 7 Skills mainly by draining Dormies and Mascots for the Level 9-10 skills, because his Fun tanked so quickly.


I haven't had any mean Pop Sims (only 3 Pop Sims total, and they've all had 6 or more Nice points), but I HAVE had 2 Romance Sims with 1 and 2 nice points, and they were fun.  "Flirt with me!" *rejection* *flamey thought balloon* *angryface* *noogie*  "Kiss?"

I have a strange affection for that combination.  It doesn't matter as much as it should, though, because it's so easy to make friends in the game.


Heh, my favorite romance sim is the same way.  I love her angry ways.   ;D

I do not worry about whether they are compatible but rather on what they are like when they around each other, I tend to pair the most unlikely couple just to see if it will work.  I do have 2 families in the 5th gen.

I do find that while in college if you do not actively try and fail in things for a short period it can get boring unless I use the extra time to get into a frat/fraternity.  However, in college I have made a person to be "owner" and use Paladins check book to give that person the tuition and make it higher than they get in scholarships so they have to work or their parents send them money to make the payment. ( I believe it was Darcee that gave me this idea in a past post.  Each university has been renamed and has an "owner".)  I also use Monique's computer undated to FT (by Charvaik) for giving some children money for college when thier parents have it.  But this only works as children when they turn to teens the option is not available. 

I also made one of my sims as a teen fall in love with Marsha Mellow (TSR Challenge) and get her knocked up as a teen so while he is in college he has to make a "child support" Payment each semester until hes out and they get married for they are engaged. I have put them on hold till APT comes out so Marsha can be in an apt while waiting on him to get back.  He has twins with her one girl and one boy.  He is also in college in the same dorm as his twin sister.  So this pair has next to no money between tuition and child support to spend on anything extra.

I do watch my sims to see what their personalities are like so I can use insim or paladin's items to fix their wants/life time/aspirations and hobby to match.  I use Inteen so the teens have to actually spend time as a teen before they can go to college and for knocking some up which happens.  That way some dreams of college may not happen.  I have even left the child with the teens parents while she was in school then resumed her duty as mom when she got back.  It was almost heartbreaking to watch them not want to leave grandma/pa :P

I come up with all kinds of things like this to make their lives more interesting.

(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/crapola/kittenkiller.jpg)

Wow, most of the people here seem to love being very hands-on with their sims...

I'm so shallow. In my neighborhood, only the pretties get to breed with other pretties. When it comes to Uni, I generally pool all the sim teens of a generation in a dorm and more or less see what happens. Sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised when three bolters that met five seconds ago retreat to a bedroom and whoo-hoo, other times I change a sim's personality so that it fits with the spouse I have chosen for them in my infinite wisdom. Sims who annoy me ---dormies most of the time, but sometimes playables too--- have a close encounter with a cow plant. Uni is very useful for me, as it allows me a time to cull the sheep.

Maybe the only special feature is that all my sims are related to each other somehow. I've had aunts marry their nephews because they were of the same age and their families got unlinked back in the beginning of the game 3 years ago. Then there's all the infidelity and bastard children of several sims to mix up the family tree. My favorite sims are a pair of twins conceived during a one-night stand with a townie. I ended up moving the townie in, then I had her picking up a newspaper to start a new life as a full-fledge playable elsewhere, since the male sim was already married.

Another favorite is the elder knowledge sim that lost his whole family in his old age. According to the plot in my head, that's when he went crazy, made himself a plantsim and had a spore child. Spore child turned himself into a human teenager with strange voodoo powers he picked up through the special doll, and he's currently wooing the daughter of one of the twins from before.

Currently, some households are in a fourth, and others in a fifth generation. I try to keep both gens in sych, but I don't worry about it too much.

The second generation of my hood is just starting to turn to teens, and I'm having the problem of none of them being particularly attracted to each other  :-\. With generation 1 (and most other hoods I've played) they choose their mates with very little direction, so this is new for me. On the bright side, maybe a lack of bolts will mean that they'll be able to keep their hands off each other and won't end up with so many children. I've got a bit of a population problem (Two families are regular clown cars and only one family has less than two children), so I'm going to have to do a Trial By Fire to determine who makes it out of Uni alive because I'm not playing all those lots.


My hood's one romance sim that bothered to show up on any community lots never did anything half amusing. He and my selfsim met and proceeded to roll wants involving each other nonstop.

I have popularity sims without nice points. They're not socially inept, they're just completely ASSHOLES. They're the best. It's actually the nice-10 sims that are socially inept. The mean ones aren't inept, when they choose to piss someone off, they did it deliberately. I mean, who's more inept, the person who chooses "Insult" and gets a negative reaction, or the ones that keep chosing "Hug" and getting the same negative reaction? At least you know the mean ones did it on purpose!

Also, mean sims are awesome. I mean, how do you beat this picture?
(http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/awesomeland/reloaded/1797.jpg)

See, I always picture it as "I want to be friends with you! Yay! I shall noogie you, that would be fun!"




"Huh? How come you didn't like that? I liked it."

Mean Sims who are Outgoing frequently get negative reactions with hugs...
(http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g187/cutelarvanerd/sims/snapshot_35657af9_9566fcd3.jpg)
This is approximately three seconds after hitting "play" on my Asylum.  They each have one nice point, but the blonde also has ten Outgoing.  The brunette... eh, not so much.  They did eventually become friends, which is somehow more disturbing.

I once had a Mean Sim who liked to use Argue as a Flirt.  He could never figure out why his moderately Nice girlfriend always double-minused it.  I've noticed that for two Mean Sims, if they're friends, Argue is actually a positive interaction on both sides.

Mine do that, too, it seems to be the mean sims' equivalent to a mating ritual. I once had two of them meet on a community lot, and they fell for each other immediately. It went argue - swoon - annoy - hit on - poke - friendly hug(!) - shove - heartfart all the time. When they parted, they had a relationship of -100/-84 but still swooned over each other. Quite heartwarming, these 3-bolt enmities :D.

ETA to add my current game play:

As everyone's wants panel is clogged with 500 asp. hobby shit now regardless of their aspiration, I play my current hood "TS1 style" which basically means there are no wants (I keep the panels hidden all the time). Of course for that, I can only use sims where I just don't care if they are miserable (or enjoy it), so there's only EAxis made ex-townies in the hood. It turned out pretty entertainining, e.g. when I let Marisa Bendett sell a picture so she could earn some money (I had an altruistic moment) and she lost it because of a "sell crappy picture" fear. Too bad she's dead now - she had a "smite" accident because her non-stop "panhandling for simoleans" annoyed me. I miss her aspiration failures now.

Normally my sims are all the same, nice, clean, active. They normally look similar and all have only positive relationships with each other, blah blah blah. It's no wonder I get tired of a family before the 2nd generation is fully grown.

After wasting my entire work day reading Awesomeland yesterday, I decided to play with a mean sim or two. Fighting and enemies are so much more fun than everyone getting along. In real life I don't like everyone I know, so why should my sims?

As for deciding who marries which sim, if it's a created sim it's normally the first person they think is hot that they can build a positive relationship with. For their children, it's usually just someone random. If they bring someone home from school, that's usually who they grow up to marry. Sometimes I use the crystal ball, set it to desperate and pick whoever I think is the most attractive sim.

I have 2 hoods that I play reasonably regularly.  My personal hood was founded by my self-sim and a bunch of self-generated townies.  Personalities are whatever the game generated and I do not change them.  Sometimes I get a parent to encouragificate a child, if the child has a particularly annoying tendency, but usually I just leave it alone.  Sims have better things to do.

In my MATY hood, sims get whatever the person said their selfsim was supposed to be like.  If unspecified, I try to make them slightly different from the majority (most MATY folk claim to be knowledge sims - I personally am a great fan of knowledge, but figure I will learn things anyway and so aspire to other things).

I choose mates/woohoo partners for sims in a number of ways.  Some sims "scope" for a date, while others get whoevever is ready to hand, walking by, etc.  Some sims get to date, while others ease into a relationship through casual interaction, ACR, or something else.  Sims do not marry in my hood unless they are really in love, and roll a want for it.  I also hook up MATY sims if a MATY person has lobbied me for a particular relationship and it sounds lulzy to me (Invisigoth).  My two hard rules are 1) that Emma will not woohoo/marry/date Pescado, and 2) There is no Goopy!

For friendships, I generally follow what happens in the first few "chat" interactions.  If a sim gets consistent red minuses, I may move straight into a macro-socialize-unfriendly routine.  If they seem to have everything in common, I will macro them to friendship (if a friend is wanted or needed).  The way this works out, by way of example, is that the one spouse may like Frankenbeasley a lot (Assmitten), while the other spouse may consistently fight with him (Kutto).  Makes for interesting social gatherings.

As to the rest, I play on rotation.  If I have not tried gardening or want to build a greenhouse, the next house on the rotation usually gets this.  If I want a Vampire, I will pick a likely sim and work on that.  I have recently loaded PETZ and now want a werewolf - the family in this rotation can haz one.  This way, my sims all have different activities and develop individual traits which keeps things interesting.

I choose astrological sign with RandomStuff. I don't care about tweaking. Playables in Silent Crossing also had skill points randomized by TJ's college adjuster. No encouraging is done. They are what they are.

I don't have that many townies in any particular age group (just upped to 10 kids in the last townie aging round; before it was 5) so the same teens always show up at the teen club, and the same YA's at college, etc. By adulthood only the most shy playables haven't met every eligible townie. So it's easy to know who they have the most chemistry with. Then I decide who marries without wants, etc, by the rules I talked about before. (This is all TI...Silent Crossing is a whole other animal, and romantic actions with townies are not allowed and gross. I have to figure something out with their turn-ons to make sure there isn't accidental fraternization).

I don't do anything with friendships, unless a sim rolls a want to befriend Sim X. Most everyone ends up being friends if left to their own devices, with a few exceptions. I've had the odd sibling who didn't get along with anyone else, or a marry-in who wanted to kick the ass of every townie she met. Actually, I've had that twice.

Not that anyone cares, but I have just started a new neighborhood with one founding family whose members will breed with the entire standard Pleasantview townie cast, and no one else, for a few generations until I run out of them or become bored.

I mostly did this because I haven't played Pleasantview in awhile, and I miss those quasi-celeb townies. Mark me down as unashamed. "Sandy Bruty's gaping maw!"

I do not plan to add any further CAS families to this hood.

p.s. Notable NPC's are also going to be allowed to be breeding material. So big-mawed-maid Lucy and Erica Japalapalawhatsits are in too.

I usually take what the game sticks them with, too, except for Active; I encouragificate for more active all the time. I hate those damned slowpoke sims.

See, this is why Jolrei is my BFF :D

I tend to just go with the flow of what my sims want and relationships/love is built on ACR and TJ's crystal ball. My sims get to date their 'one sim'. Whether they stay with them is another story!

But Emma and Goopy BELONG together!

Only in Awesomeland :P

Warning: This post contains Way More About My Sims Than Anyone Wants To Know.  You've been warned.  There's also a Too Long; Didn't Read version at the bottom. ;D

Anyway, since I started getting nerdy in another thread, I'll finish here.  I write stupid little vaguely sci-fi stories as I play the game, most likely as an offshoot of some D&D-related tendency.  It's a sort of tattered patchwork, cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things, but it makes playing the game more fun.  Here it is in a nutshell.  (A giant, hellishly verbose nutshell.  I'm bored at work and feel like typing a lot, apparently.)

The general consensus among researchers is that some twenty-odd years ago, a great event known as the Convergence occurred: three little-known astrological stars lined up in perfect occlusive harmony, and the world as Sims knew it ceased to be.  The new world has been folded together with the Otherworld, a domain of strange fey Sims and mysterious beasts, the Elemental Planes, and a shadowy realm known as Nevermore, inhabited by all kinds of vampires, werewolves, and in fact pretty much anything that's ever been in a scary movie.  To make matters worse, the Convergence flung an Antaran Hive Ship light-years across the galaxy into neat geosynchronous orbit with Sim-Earth.  Unfortunately, the celestial forces were not kind to the ship, an ailing model of suspect provenance in the first place.  Mere days after they arrived, the Warpspace Transubstantiator blew out, nearly causing a catastrophic hull breach.  Antaran escape craft have been crashlanding into the surface like clockwork ever since, bringing the prolific greenskins and their robotic servants down planetside.

The modern world is a fair sight different than it was a mere 30 years ago.  The Convergence completely rewrote the surface geography of the planet, completely upended almost every Earthling governmental structure and, perhaps most tellingly, stranded untold thousands of faeries, elves, beastlings, elementals, aliens and robots on the planet.  To make matters worse, the years following - known as the Collapse - were scarred by mortal wars and marked by the emergence of a zombie-creating plague, shadowy incursions by vampires and spectral beings, and scattered but rising reports of werewolves stalking the countryside, savaging all they came across.  Slowly, and in spite of the doomsayers' predictions, order has begun to take hold once again: Earthlings, long numbed to the strangeness in their daily lives, have begun to rebuild their shattered world with the aid of their new neighbors.  Emeraldvale, a small town in what was once California, is the site of one such reconstruction effort; unhindered by such concerns as government and moral authorities, the shell-shocked citizens have begun building anew, slowly assembling a motley collection of houses for themselves that bear a sad similarity to their previous suburban dwellings.  Their fertile soil - and a little elven knowhow - have enabled them to become a nearly self-sufficient town, lacking only in high-tech facilities and raw materials for manufacturing.

Another nearby town, Viper Canyon, found itself almost a ghost town before the Convergence, but in the years following the Collapse, the new inhabitants of the town decided to make the best of a bad situation and converted the now-deserted factory floors that once lined the canyon walls into living spaces and greenhouses. These days, Viper Canyon has become a thriving city, having reopened many of their discarded manufacturing facilities and boasting of an active civil defense unit, the Pit Vipers.  Travel is still something of an impossibility for many, but the Pit Vipers have managed to root out enough of the bandits and monsters in the nearby area, creating enough security for the citizens of Emeraldvale lucky enough to own biofuel-burning cars - or repaired Antarian skimmer vehicles - to visit the Canyon, whether to seek employment or simply wander around, remembering what it was like to live in a real city.

No one knows what the future portends, not even Faerie royalty or the most astute Antarian scientists, but local prospects are looking up, for the first time in twenty years.  Two brothers recently reopened the once-dead Rattlegulch Mine outside of Viper Canyon, taking out fresh veins of iron, copper and Adamantium, a metal long absent from the Earth.  There's even been talk in the Viper Canyon assemblyhouse of forming a new government, a New California Republic, as it were, guarded by the Vipers' growing security force and fed by the lush fields in Emeraldvale and the surroundings.  The few that remember the horror of waking up in the Convergence, finding the world an entirely different place, and those who listen to the far-off rumblings of war and plague still fret over the coming years, but for many life as normal has returned.


Backstory crap out of the way, my actual playstyle is pretty random.  I hate loading screens, so Emeraldvale sims are basically stuck in their lot unless I feel especially frisky or am allowing them their one ceremonial pilgrimage to the Town Square (my one community lot :p ), where they hang out (and have their needs cheatingly refilled) until they've met a suitable number of their neighbors that I suspect they'll find at least one two- or three-bolt sim in another house to get their romance on with (and sufficient friends if they get a city-slicker career, of course).  All sims are bisexual until they settle down preferring one gender via repeated romantic actions, so I do have quite a bit higher precedence of gay sims than would be realistic.  My sims are also largely female, mostly for convenience purposes; I like boobies, I guess.  ::)  A standard household is usually two girl-sims with a token male thrown in*.  Generally speaking, sims do not breed, because children are icky and bothersome; the youngest sims that exist are Teens and I am generally loath to let my actual sims age into elders.  Created elders are not allowed to die, generally speaking, unless I've decided I hate them or feel like trying for a ghost.  There are currently three pets in the entire neighborhood.  EV sims generally make shit with the various hobby items and stations (no robots, though; those are solely the domain of the Antarans.) and farm the hell out of their backyards, because I rarely bother buying them food.  Four sims own cars, all fortune sims of varying degrees of richness - which explains a bit of why all the carpool cars look the same, neh?  Several tinker sims have recently converted pre-Collapse junk vehicles to the new biofuel standard, though, so the mobile, city-job-having population is on the rise.

Viper Canyon is the Downtown, the sole sub-hood I have set up.  I tend to divide my playing time between the two 'hoods fairly regularly.  It's named after the preset map, fairly obviously, and populated with factory-looking lots I downloaded off of MTS2 a long time ago.  (Emeraldvale is populated with my abortive efforts at house design.  I blame my sims, of course.  They're a lazy bunch, with nary an Architect among them.)  They're played in much the same way, though they mostly have ordinary sim jobs (with a lot of Military and Police careers) and have the option of buying stuff.  They also have their choice of several comm-lots for their pilgrimage, from an exciting work-study trip to the Rattlegulch Mines to an equally informative visit to the City Hall... or even a shopping trip to the Bazaar, where sims can get their largely barter-based economy on.

In general, all the townies are Earthlings (and indeed they are most of the actual Earthlings in my game... who wants to play a boring human?), though I added a few prototypes of the major races when I nuked Goopy and his ilk.

*(I actually have backstory reasons for this, too, but like the rest they're pretty wacky. Elementals are genderless but adopt a favorite shape for convenience purposes; it'd be pretty pointless to attempt to breed with a being that is pretty much made up of fire/air/water/etc.  Sounds painful.  They can breed amongst themselves, but given that they are immortal, they rarely feel the need to do so.
Antarians have a gender system similar to honeybees: the vast majority of them are neuter female workers, followed by occasional male drones (who do most of the research and childrearing, having no other purpose in life than sitting around looking pretty for the Queen) and one or two Queens per colony shard.  Drones occasionally harvest DNA from workers who have caught their eye, largely for excelling in a particular skill or trade, but don't worry about the poor workers; most of them find the harvesting procedure to be quite enjoyable.  Queens, who are activated females, take recombinant genetic material from the drones (which they in turn enjoy quite a bit), merge it with the colony's reference pattern (the Queen's own genes), and produce eggs that they can either incubate and birth themselves or implant in practically any sim, from a willing Antarian worker to a human male.  Hence, pollination.  (The egg induces a special nutritive cyst to form if it isn't somewhere it can implant neatly, such as a worker's uterus, so the process is eminently survivable for males... but wholly unpleasant, from most accounts.  They are Ceasarian births by necessity, though lately the elves have shown some promise with their largely painless aetheric translocation techniques.  One or two babies and/or parents lost to the aether per year is still a fair sight better than the current success ratios on medically-assisted birth procedures.))

Anyway, I'll quit rambling now. At this point, I'll be surprised if anyone actually reads this. :)

TL;DR version: In order to retcon in all my crazy faerie/alien/beast/robot sims, I have constructed an over-elaborate backstory for my neighborhoods.  I play in a very lazy fashion that aims to minimize time spent at load screens while maximizing my enjoyment in making sims reach their little minuscule goals over and over again.  ;D

Usually with the first generation born they tend to be het, after that it snowballs for deciding sex. I'm just stuck on sims carrying on their genes right off. After awhile though (could be the generation after, could be four down) I find myself actively deciding "Nope, not for you!" But then again, that's been not really happening ever since I discovered the "same-sex pregancy" hack and not gone cold turkey from it. However, I do notice my Romance sims have a tendency to be Bi. I think its because I just want to get that LTW of 20 Lovers over and done with, I swear I get too often. This time around though I'm just going to toss a die for the future generations to come once the current ones are done with college, and onwards. Het, Bi, and Homo will each get two numbers and whichever number it lands on will, thus, be that sim's sexuality.

In the case of pairing off, I must admit I try starting them off young in highschool for finding a good match. If there's a double bolt right off, its safe to say that will be the mate, 'less there's some competition. Or that LTW of 20Lovers, 501st Dates, 20 Woohoos. If that's the case, then its after that sim has completed his/her LTW (with the exceptions of the sims that have the personality of "Nevermind! I could get away with it!") and pick which one bolts highest. Otherwise the picking occurs in college, either by messing around with the one bolts that came along to see about upgrading their bolt or being on the look out for another Sim that s/he has better chemistry with. Some though do just find themselves hitched to a single bolt, but lord help that couple if someone higher came around.

This has been such an interesting thread to follow!

I have my main neighborhood which tends to start bloating at about generation 3.  That's when I get simpotence.  At that point I usually begin a new neighborhood with one CAS and then make friends with/move in all the townies, marry them to each other, and then get bored with them.  (Once I created the Isle of Dan and every female townie had one child by my CAS Dan. Dan was very busy keeping up with all his children.)  I go back to my main hood and some form of "newness."  In the past I have used the MATY plague, a band of roving gypsys that moved in on existing lots and bedded the residents, alien takeover, and cowplants next to the sidewalk on every lot (gosh are sims dumb!)

This time my "new" tactic has been death to random sims by dice roll.  Using a list of all my sims, I rolled the dice through the entire list and marked them for death.  When I am done I will have eliminated about 30% of my neighborhood. 

I try to ensure that 10% of my neighborhood is gay to keep with national statistics (US).  With ACR I hoped they would choose for themselves, but apparently I still have to guide them.  I do use the random generator for a lot of choices, but I dislike using randomness for some choices, like sexuality, because gayness/hetero just doesn't fit everyone. 

Same with college.  If my sim wants to be a rock god, what's college got to do with it?  Just dive in there and make music. Usually my knowledge sims go to college, and those who want to have careers in appropriate fields.  Unlike Maxis, I don't think an artist needs college, but an Education Minister sure should have a degree!  And college has a cost of 5,000 simoleans/semester.  I dash them through college as they earn the necessary skills for an A

I personally love it when a sim with very little charisma wants to be mayor!  Makes it challenging.  I have also incorporated some 'rules' from a previous similar thread.  A sim with less than 8 outgoing points cannot practice charisma without a want.  Same with body (6 points required) and cleaning (5 required). To teach homework to a child the sim must have 4 skills acquired by studying (cooking, cleaning, mechanical).  Making smartmilk requires 8 in any skill.  Or they can have the new parenting skill for homework or smartmilk. (Meadow will finally be able to make smartmilk!)

I also use the lot sync timer to keep my families aging together. 

I found with The Sims that my interest flagged tremendously once the advertising for Sims2 got heavy because I couldn't see the point anymore.  I'm starting to feel that way again with the up-tick on Sims3 info.  So far I haven't seen any irresistable reason for buying Apartments so perhaps I will just spend time getting a garage sale together to get enough $$ for a new 'puter to run Sims3!  I can't believe I am still running Sims2 with expansions on my 5-year old emachines (Radeon 9000 video card)!

So far, there's nothing good I've heard about TS3 that's really THAT great compared to TS2. TS3 is not gonna be the huge leap that TS2 was over TS1. It may even be an utter flop. There is basically nothing in TS3 so far that we can't REALLY already do in TS2. That neighborhood aging thing? Guess what? It would be entirely feasible to code such a thing in TS2. Except that it seems to be a firmly DO NOT WANT thing.

I had decided that a particular couple in my game would be childless by choice. It just seemed right for them: they were both Fortune sims and the woman was the youngest (youngest set of twins, anyway) of seven children. So I'd set ACR to never try for them, but neglected the Risky Woohoo odds, which are about 10% in my game. Oops. I got hit on that couple, then on her sister's house, both with risky odds.

My gay sims don't have children as I don't have same-sex pregnancy. There is no adoption yet in TI (I may be setting it up, I'm not sure..depends on how far the Way of Cheese drama goes). So gay sims don't have kids. It's kind of sad for the Family/Family gay couple I have.

I already do neighborhood aging, but without EAxis telling my townies to marry each other and take themselves out of the dating pool.

I already do neighborhood aging, but without EAxis telling my townies to marry each other and take themselves out of the dating pool.
[/quote]

That leaves me with 2 questions.  1) How do you age your neighborhood, and 2) In Sims3 will a byproduct of aging the neighborhood together cause townies to marry each other...

For #2 - they said that townies will take houses, grow up, have children, and marry. "They" being EA in some of the fansite interviews. You can check SnootySims or the cesspool that is TSR.

For #1- I have notownieregen and nodormieregen. I have a spreadsheet of all my townies and their age groups, plus their last round aged. When the eldest playable of a generation hits teen, all townies but half the adults (the ones that aged last round) and the current teens get summoned to my 1x1 holding zone lot and selected/aged. New teens of course get their aspirations picked by RandomStuff.  Old teens are added to college by going into one of my college 'hoods and sending them to college, then plopping them in a dorm and using Inge's teleporter to make them back into townies. Elders meet Grimmy. I then spawn some new kids from the townie creator.

I like a lot of randomness, so I don't hand-create new townies or pick their outfits. I do switch face templates between five sets I have, so each "generation" of townies comes from a different set. It sounds really complicated, but I have it down to less than half an hour now.

I'm not nearly that organised. I've got a couple of hundred townies, because I get bored seeing the same faces, and I wouldn't know who half of them are. I did do several sets of default faces during the process, so I have a little variety. I even did a Maxis set and there are only about two I've seen that had those real frog faces - now fixed.

I like the FT feature of picking  sims to age up when a sim ages, if I'm sick of them, I age them up - or if they're a partner of one of my sims who is becoming an adult.

I like the idea of a cowplant on the sidewalk, I need some randomness and I want to start the town cemetery. Louis Aspir lives on! Dammit.

JM I'd be interested in trying something where the rest of the hood aged and changed. Partly I get sick of hoods because there are only some families that are fun to play and some are really boring. I didn't like the idea when sims 3 first mooted it, but I'm coming to see there may be some advantages to my style of play.

I can see great potential for borkage in the idea that you can turn aging off in some TS3 lots.  I can see me playing 5 lots with aging off, and all the non-played sims age while I am playing each of those 5 lots - so they age 5 times as fast.  So the brought-home-from-school friend of the child in household 1 will be screwing the kid's mother by the time I get to playing household 1 again.

And what's to stop those non-played sims in other households marrying one of my non-aging sims while I'm playing another household, and moving them into their lot where aging is on?

So many interesting and well thought out ways of playing Sims2 have been posted here! I am so less organized and creative.

I have pretty much kept my game with happy family sims who have kids, pets, learning, and fun. Everyone gets along in my Simland. That was until recently. I added a male sim I made. He, Robin Bay Banners, is a family sim who I made a romance sim as secondary aspiration. He is pretty darn good looking and does not act like a family sim at all.

He just wants to woohoo every female he meets which now tallies at 16. They swoon for him and he for them. Happily married or single, it doesn't matter.  I just allow the sims to pursue their wants. He just might rock apart the happy simworld, he is already creating problems with getting caught by the many current lovers.

I don't have an interest in Sims3, so I won't be 'getting it'. Not interested in Apartment Life either. I would rather continue to use Emma's Apartment lot. Just need to make sure that I do not have toddlers living with the wrong mothers. That just doesn't work well at all, I've found.

Most of my families have a lot of things in common, based on how I play:

1- People tend to be of the lighter skin tones (I don't like the last two darkest skin tones in The Sims 2...)

2- A higher-than average amount of blondes and redheads (because, well, I like blondes and redheads, and given their recessive-trait nature, I feel I need more of them to continually pump into the system, Nwabudike Morgan style)

3- I usually have some form of goal for Sims I create, so I usually use the college-adjuster to select a lifetime want I want for them. Sometimes I'll go with what the game randomly assigns them.

4- Sims usually go permaplat, then find a lover (usually a townie that doesnt look butt-ugly) and have a kid or two.

5- All kids go to university, asap. Some people here don't like the baby stage, but my Stage of Annoyance is the teen stage. You're trying to keep their mood high to get good grades, but school + job tends to drag them down really easy, and the whole Headmaster thing just irritates me.

6- Quasi-generational: when every family that is going to have kids to send to university do, I play university until everyone graduates (or close to it), then play the home lots again to age the parents a bit, then move them back into the home lots or have them start their own houses.

I tend to play one family or work at one project obsessively and then switch onto something else.  I couldn't play on rotation.  I've built whole neighbourhoods, written stories, built sets of lots & a TSR challenge.  However, the things I actually have most fun with are the surprises or the new things.  I've had enormous fun with the TSR challenges - OK partly because it suits my "obsessive" play style - but mainly because the families are different kinds of sims to those I normally make and the challenge targets usually involve things you don't normally do except by accident: Servo/sim woohoo, orphan uni scholarship, run away from home...  I've made challenges of my own and had a lot of fun with those.  I'm stalled on re-making some of them as TSR challenges.

some of the surprises I remember ......
- discovering I'd created a romance servo by accident..
- risky woohoo's effect on sims who really didn't intend to become parents then or ever..
- broke old lady fortune sim getting 3 bolts for Mortimer Goth who appeared with the welcome wagon
- finding my new pleasure sim with ikea house has a 3 bolt attraction to a rich romance sim who got his face slapped 5 times in one evening
- Consort Capp dropping dead during the HM visit just like Patrizio Monty did years ago.
- pregnant alien lady in her underwear dancing during the HM visit to their badly designed maxoid house.
- my first ever non-scripted alien abduction.

My parents all encourage niceness and activity if they can and some neatness, so my sims tend to become samey even if they weren't to start with.  Born In game sims tend to be samey than CAS sims anyway because they start out with more personality points.

Sheesh.  All you others make me feel incredibly lazy.  I used to put a LOT of thought into storylines, and all that.  But lately I have been feeling ugh, and my sims suffer for it.  I am a building maniac though.  I graph out almost all of my houses before they are built in game (and have over 300 plans I believe).

I build my sims fantastical houses (the whole $20K start is useless for me) move them in, and then make their little pixelated lives as miserable as possible.  All of them, save for one - Amadan.  I think I may have an unhealthy fondness for him, even though he is a manwhore.

Lately I've been mostly building, decorating, and arranging custom neighbourhoods, but when I do play, I'm a bit of a control freak. I alternate between the Maxis 'hoods and my custom ones, as I tend to get bored easily. My custom 'hoods are generally themed (sci-fi, Victorian, medieval/fantasy, etc.). I only have one, ATM, a sci-fi/space theme, because I like playing sims that look like space-aliens or androids and, in a sci-fi 'hood, things like woohooing a servo just make a lot more sense.

When starting a 'hood, I choose a template, terrain type, etc, add the necessary subhoods (using empty templates devoid of sims), add/build/remodel buildings, as necessary, and then plop down some neighbourhood decorations, especially downtown. I make my playables, then my townies, and place them where they belong. I don't like for my sims to be overly perfect, so I often choose some of the uglier face-templates but then prettify them just enough that they don't look like sideshow freaks. I have no rhyme or reason for their personalities, and tend to assign their aspirations based on looks (he looks like he'd be a mad scientist, she's definitely the artist type, etc.). Townies get offbeat turn-ons and turn-offs that are least likely to give them bolts for the playables. Conversely, playables get easy-to-match attractions, such as being turned on by black hair and glasses, turned off by facial hair. I do admit to often teaming up incompatible personalities and zodiac-signs, because it creates a much more interesting dynamic. As for gender preference, I randomise ony the townies' gender preferences, as my playables tend to be straight, for breeding purposes. Matching up mates depends on when various sims are born. If Family A has a baby, then Families B, C, and D should have babies, too. I match them up from there, based mainly on gender and genes, though personality and aspiration often play a part in the final selection process. After that, I just sort of let go. I do play on a rotation, but not a strict one. For example, if Child A grows to a teen, then Children B, C, and D must do the same. Otherwise, I don't care that much about synchronisation.

I used to micromanage my sims, but since the advent of ACR and Macrotastics, this has become largely unnecessary, and I tend to use a more hands-free playing style, as of late. I am consistently amazed at how thoroughly my sims manage to fuck up their own lives. Then again, I'm often amazed at how easily people can do this, as well.

I just recently moved and had to leave my old hood behind, but I started playing a new one pretty much the same way I did the old one, though this time I had two founders in seperate houses instead of one.

Started off last time with empty templates, and one sim. In the end before I had to leave that hood I was about in the 7th or 8th gen with over 50 playables, all directly linked to that first sim.

I play on rotation basis, with pescados lot timer. If I play house 1 for three days before I get bored, I then play all the other ones the same. I make sure I send the kids off to uni at the appropriate times, so theres a bit of popping around sometimes with teens who are a few days apart. Usually what happens is I get attached to one sim in a house, and pretty much ignore all the others while micromanaging that one sim. I'll usually pop in once a sim day on the other sims panels and queue up a bunch of stuff, and then let them do as they will. Sometimes I'll be bored with one gen and try to get through it quickly as possible, while in another gen I'll spend a month real time on it mucking around with them. I tend to favor romance sims as I love the drama they leave in their wake. When my last hood got pretty substantial I started moving the elders all together in a group home type setting to make room for babies since I used the twikki island lot for the hood (I like small hoods) and was running out of space for houses. The college graduates had nowhere to go but back home, and in any case having more than 20 houses on rotation was proving to drive me mad! So at that time I was trying to intermarry them all to cut down on the amount of playables.

I had one sim be a farmer and supply food, using pescados money sending thing as payment, and teleporting them over to give the food (though this time around I have the packing station thing) Same thing with a pet breeder. I'm also considering making a "maid" and "repairmen" be playable sims and port them over when things need fixing/cleaning/whatever.

When kids age up I use dice to randomize them, and this time around I'm randomizing their gender preferences (even playables) to just add more drama/hilarity which it already has.

As for uni I don't even really play it. I hate it so I just cheat them through it, slap em on a lot and adjust the lot timer for however many days they were supposed to be gone, and then eventually get them into the rotation (or ask them to move into an old house when it gets on the same day the college graduate is on).

I tend to let them choose their spouses, though I have been known to intervene when I want to merge two particular households together for whatever reason.

The worst thing is that my computer I had the old hood on is in storage, and I had forgotten just how boring the first two gens can be until things really start exploding and being interesting. I started this time around with two different founders because I wanted to see which line would be more prolific down generations. But man is the nearly empty hood boring at first!

Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. I love to keep track of the playables. I have a program that acts like a wiki that I edit, with a page for every playable (and any townies that donate their genetic material but aren't moved in) detailing things about that sim. I have seperate pages with the pictures I took with captions for myself as I get down to generation 5 and say "hey, doesn't this sim act a lot like that one sim way back when? Let me check..." and a detailed family tree made in photoshop, along with lots of misc info on my sims. I dare say I almost have as much fun working on the "database" as playing! I get a little OCD with it I think.

Posted by: lefty
"Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. I love to keep track of the playables. I have a program that acts like a wiki that I edit, with a page for every playable (and any townies that donate their genetic material but aren't moved in) detailing things about that sim. I have seperate pages with the pictures I took with captions for myself as I get down to generation 5 and say "hey, doesn't this sim act a lot like that one sim way back when? Let me check..." and a detailed family tree made in photoshop, along with lots of misc info on my sims. I dare say I almost have as much fun working on the "database" as playing! I get a little OCD with it I think."

That sounds like a pretty cool program.  Know where I can get one like that?  I keep track of my playables too, badly.  My desk is covered with scraps of paper - but only because the notebooks weren't working out.

For a year now I have developed my Windlebridge hood. Its set in historical sim times, late medieval/renaissance, now on the verge to some kind of 18th century maybe. I have almost 1000 sims, oldest families are about to get to 5th gen. I play them in "classes" and groups: farmers, landowners, miners, villagers, castle inhabitants, fishermen ect - all with their rules and I generally don't allow marriage between the wrong groups/classes. There are no openly gay sims in this hood yet - there will be in the future.
Sims are most often family or popularity sims, but all sorts occur. Knowledge sims go to convent/monastery, if they are not rich. I want to develope a large working class for factories and such.. I add slowly with each rotation, mixing building with playing.
I keep a website/blog (http://portal.charlamov.com/windlebridge (http://portal.charlamov.com/windlebridge))for the hood built on a database - mainly for documentation. I use GenoPro as a genealogy program to show the faily ties.
I tend to use more randomness now when the hood is more developed.

http://notebook.wjduquette.com/svntrac.cgi/index

Just a warning, the program is pretty limited and sometimes gets on my nerves, but I've been using it so long I've gotten used to it. you could probably google something like "personal wiki" to get something better. To give you an idea here are some screenshots of how I have mine set up for my current hood, though I'm constantly revamping it as I play since the hood is so young:

(http://img397.imageshack.us/img397/6629/onepi1.th.jpg) (http://img397.imageshack.us/my.php?image=onepi1.jpg)
(http://img397.imageshack.us/img397/2323/twoxx3.th.jpg) (http://img397.imageshack.us/my.php?image=twoxx3.jpg)
(http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/5086/threeld5.th.jpg) (http://img144.imageshack.us/my.php?image=threeld5.jpg)
(http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/8201/fourmk3.th.jpg) (http://img297.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fourmk3.jpg)
(http://img297.imageshack.us/img297/6484/fivepf4.th.jpg) (http://img297.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fivepf4.jpg)

though of course you can set it up however you like. For ease of editing the family tree I save the image as a psd to the main folder so I can easily manipulate the images in case I need to move them as the children marry have kids etc.

I wish I had access to my old stuff, it was crazy detailed.

Ugh, I'm anal about relative age. I write in my notes the exact day that college students have to come back to keep on sync and adjust their number of days in their first independent rotation (Aaron Vitelli keeps showing up at his cousin's house when he's supposed to be in college still, the naughty boy) just to make sure that no one is the slightest bit off.

Other than one attempt at a true prosperity challenge (which died in the second generation), I've always started with just one sim. 90% of the time, that one sim is female.
I love group homes for elders! I think that Apartment Life is really going to make that work, since you could just make apartments that are a bedroom and bathroom and have everything else be community space. If I have a group of elder townies, I throw them in the home and they proceed to have a near-orgy since they've had their entire lives to create relationships.

My current 'hood is aimed at absorbing the 28 townies I started with (including dormies) so I do guide a little bit more than before. I ended up changing a gay townie girl to straight because she's my favorite, Manishka something-or-other, and I needed more eligible women to marry to my typical plague of boys.

I'm trying to keep the number of offspring lower than I had in Teardrop Isle, because that 'hood got way too busy too fast. I had fourteen sims in the third generation in TI. I have seven in the third generation in Coggeshall Village, and one is decidedly gay (with three yet to decide which way they lean). Much better.

My main problem right now is that the 'hood is so huge as far as playable terrain is. My map is out of control. But the terrain is really different than anything I've done before as I designed it from a bitmap in Photoshop just making brushstrokes and filtering to death, importing to SC4, and sculpting a bit to make the paved areas nearly all flat. It made for some really cool mountain ranges:
(http://img409.imageshack.us/img409/5343/snapshot0000001e55af6caxd6.th.jpg) (http://img409.imageshack.us/my.php?image=snapshot0000001e55af6caxd6.jpg)  (http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/1223/terrainspt2.th.jpg) (http://img137.imageshack.us/my.php?image=terrainspt2.jpg)

http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/ (http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/)
This program seems to be interesting. It has many options like pictures, events, nice family trees and even to-do list.
http://genealogy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ (http://genealogy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/)
This is where I found it, it's a review list of similar programs.