More Awesome Than You!

I'm going to try to finally take a stab at creating a romance sim and following it through till the end.  I have the romance mod and i want to eventually get a few sims into a open relationship.  What things should I be on the lookout for and how would be the best to start?

Probably the best way to start is with Macro.../Socialize.../Romantic if you have the AutoSocialiser installed. After that, I have no idea.

You need JM's Romance mod to take away some of the slapping ;D.

I haven't experimented with it too much because I dislike tormenting my sims. Just read the RTFM again, and it removes "spazzing" of sims for random reasons, and "cheating" only counts if you're caught by a partner in a committed relationship. Nonetheless, it still doesn't go far enough for me. I'm non-monogamous in real life, and my partners know about each other and approve - the three of us spend time together socially, and they even do stuff together without me. However, I think the only way I could make sims of myself & my partners without slapping would be to make us all Romance sims, and that's not right - they'd both be Knowledge sims. Or I'll just have to make sure that none of us are engaged or married in the game (I assume that "steady" in the RTFM refers to the teens' "Going Steady"?) so that we don't count as being in a "committed" relationship :-\.

In general the "cheating" stuff in TS2 annoys me. Cuddling on the sofa is NOT cheating!! Or put it this way, if it is, I've cheated with about 20 different people, some of whom were of incompatible sexual orientation. I know that no-jealousy mods exist, but I'm allergic to mods from random sources, and I want no-jealousy to apply only to certain sims in certain relationships. I mean, I'm not jealous about one of my partner's other partner because their relationship predates ours, but you bet I'd be jealous if she suddenly got involved with someone new that I didn't even know...

You have to be very careful not to be caught cheating - that's the main issue.

Without cheats:  choose the wife work at days, and the husband work at nights - two different carrers. They will have different days-off, so you can fulfill their romantic wishes.

If you don't want them to cheat too much - you can send them to same job (preferable slackers). They can't bring friends home from work, and they always come with the main wish - "woohoo", no matter with whom...:). When they have days off together, you can invite the lover to the community; take care that the clothes rackes are in a room with door, thus you won't be disturbed when doing public woohoo.

With cheats/hacks:  The most comfortable situation is, when there is no jelousy. Now you can woohoo in front of your spouse, and she can do it that too - and all are happy...:).
Download the hack "nojelousyatall" from Mod the Sims 2 (search nojelousyatall).

The second thing you need is  buyable community object in residential houses. You can find it too in MTS2.
The romance sims likes to woohoo in tub, then in bed, or public woohoo. Buy a clothes rack and a booth, and keep them in your yard, close to the bedroom. After work, the spouse can fulfill all 3 wishes, and the husband will be satisfied, and won't ask too much to cheat.

I had whole romance neighbourhood - once I played without cheats, and once - with hacks. I have to say that I enjoyed it much more to play with the hacks...:).

Forgot one important tip:
Always engage and marry the romance sims, in spite of their fear of it. But do it wisely: ambush them to see when the fear of engage/marriage is off (it frequently is off, because of the woohoo wishes, lol), and then hurry and engage them. They will have bad memory, but won't pay aspiration points. Again ambush them, then marry them quickly.

Again ambush them, and try for baby...:).

By the way, they are awesome parents, and are mad about their kids.

Well, I usually don't have any problems engaging Romance sims, because when I engage them, they're usually still knowledge sims. :P

And when they're Romance sims, they'll still get a green memory if they get married to someone rich. Married Rich Sim trumps Red Marriage Memory.

I hope you mean "mad about their kids" in a non-creepy way . . .

Romance sims can generally be quite happy when monogamous, especially if they roll a career related LTW. WooHoo is a powerful want and easy to get if the sim in question lives with their partner.

You mean for the one day it will take you to GET to that career LTW? :)

I mean, you already start at L9, which means it takes one promotion, one day of platinum, to get it permanently. After that, their mini-wants become mildly irrelevant given that you have more ASP than you can shake a stick at.

I'm annoyed at the kids of romance sims getting pissed off and trashing the relationship with their parent if the parent hooks up with someone besides their other parent.  Also trashes their relationship with the person the romance sim hooks up with.  Makes me wanna smack the little whiners.

Exactly. LTW maxes out the mood bar for the rest of their lives, which basically means that they can do romantic-type stuff whenever they aren't starving to death.

The behavior involved here is actually rather incomprehensible and warped my mind trying to even figure it out. We eventually cracked it and wrote it into something more sensible in the Romance mod.

Thanks to the romance fix I started letting one or two romance sims hang around the neighborhood (for variety reasons). Before that I had a majority of knowledge sims, one or two popularity sims, a fortune sim or two, and zero family and zero romance sims. I still don't have any family sims, they go on my nerves, and badly.

JM, what is TOS?

G.

A TOS is the official-sounding ninny-nonsense "terms of service" that sites like to have to make them sound big and pompous. They're long, bloated, consist of a great deal of blather, and everyone insists that people read them even though nobody ever really pays that much attention to them because they're so full of legalese that your eyes glaze over before you hit the button and you just nod and hit the "Yes" button.

Naturally, they threaten you with dire consequences of some vaguely specified nature if you violate these terms. But in Soviet Russia, TOS violates YOU!

Naturally, we here don't take such things quite so seriously, so I previously had just left it blank, but Boris suggested that funny tidbit instead. Like I said, nobody really pays much attention to that stuff anyway, so we'll just ban people either completely arbitrarily, or in Senate motions. We'll have fewer problems that way, anyway. At least when people complain I'm a completely arbitrary dictator, I can point out that we knew that from the beginning.

I would not have expected it to be different JM. :D

Aside from that, I rather know who I am dealing with from the outset. I can't stand it when people pretend they are something that they are not. I prefer the "what you see is what you get" person, at least I 'm not left guessing whether I inadvertantly stepped on some toes. That's why I like you, whether you like it or not, as long as you don't expect me to gush. I don't do gush, hero-worship or fanclubs.  ;D

G.

The only gushing I prefer is the fountain of blood when I punch you in the face.

Punch me in the face? I think I prefer getting kicked every now and then. Aside from that, come on and try if you can stand the echo. :D

Running off and hide my face. No gushing from me. :-X

You can't desert me Katze, you have to stay and aid your compatriot. I'll report you to our government. So there. ;)

G.

"I hope you mean "mad about their kids" in a non-creepy way . . ." (Oddyssey)

Of course - I like babies, toddlers, and childs...:), even Marsha, lol.

Really, they love their kids more than any other aspiration I know. I even got a romance female who suddenly made a wish to have a baby - I locked it as fast as I could! She never showed a fear from a baby, and I gave her 4 kids...:). But she was an exception in my romance neighbourhood.
 
I think the simulator liked this family, because I got the woohoo clip each time they woohooed in the hot tub - only this couple, all the others didn't have a woohoo clip...:).

When the kids grew to adults, I always saw one wish concerning the kids. Each day I used to invite one or two sons/daughters and keep the relations high (100/100).











>

Don't worry veilchen and Katze, JM recommended a lead pipe that goes "KRONG" so I know will protect you with such.  And since I ALWAYS WEAR BODY ARMOR, I should be mostly protected myself.   ;)
Chris

I find the romance sims more fun to play than any of the others.  They make great parents, great aunts or uncles, and fantastic grandparents!  (Even when the baby's parent is actually a step-child!)

I ran a semi-open relationship in a Greek house with four gay male sims (using the romance Mod in the game) where two got fits of jealousy, the other two didn't, a bit like real life, really, I guess!  Just had to make sure the jealous ones weren't around at crtain times, ie at college, in the hot tub, writing termpapers, whatever would keep them busy in another place for long enough.....

The Romance males in my game are all great parents and grandparents, too.  I have Family Sims who show no interest whatsoever in their grandchildren, not springing-up any wants to do with them at all, whereas all Don Lothario wants is more grandkids, or to see the ones he has get engaged or married.  He rarely has woo-hoo wants anymore and only then if I play my bordello and he happens to pop by for a quickie.  Then again, he has been resurrected, so maybe while he was on the other side he 'saw the light'.

As a general rule, the more promiscuous the Romance sim was prior to becoming an elder, the more interest he will take in his grandchildren. This occurs because of want pool depletion vs. relative weight. All of the elder-family wants are non-aspirationally-specific, so anyone can get them regardless of aspiration, and tend to be worth more than woohoo. Thus, they tend to trump the mere "woohoo" want, and if a romance sim had a promiscuous adult life, he's exhausted many of his power wants as well, so that leaves only the Elder Wants. Fortune Sims, on the other hand, can never get too many $4500 paintings, and those are of sufficient power to bowl over the elder want trees. However, Knowledge sims get it the worst: Since a knowledge sim will basically have exhausted every single aspirationally-relevant want except "commit suicide" and "see dead people",  an elder knowledge sim who doesn't have permaplat can get very SOL, wanting things from family members that don't live there. or else they'll want to commit suicide. Makes them a real pain in the ass to play because, well, nothing they want involves playing them, but you have to play them in order to maintain time sync and end the story.

I never bother about time-sync.

I stress about time sync as my families were all friends in Uni. They each had a handful of kids and so I marry them off to each other, then they have kids or their younger siblings growup to be married off with their peers. So time sync is very important in my game. Messes with my mind when a Sim has grown up, got married and had babies and you know her best friend is still a child.

Well, I do eventually grow them all up, just don't grow them past adult!  I do keep the parents a couple of days older than their children, though.

I've just started a new n'hood, I made three families and hope that's enough to populate the gene pool and provide some interesting crosses. I will time sync these, three's not too many to manage I think/hope.

Yeah, Knowledge sims can be kind of annoying. They tend to get obsessive about romances, and it really sort of annoys me that skills are the only sort of "knowledge" they can get. Their the only aspiration whose main wants are basically finite, or dependent on random events. Which is ironic, because knowledge is not finite. That, and they tend to get obsessive about things, and will act like retarded Romance or Family sims for long stretches of time.

Say, though . . . I think I may have thought of an actual use for those damn scissors. Suicide! Still rather random, but doesn't involve the long periods of whining involved with starving, the collateral damage of burning, or the inability to plead if they drown.

I keep my sims roughly time-synched, mostly because I only play them for a couple of days at a time anyway.

I think it's easier to time-sync in a neighbourhood you create from scratch, as you can place your houses in some kind of sequence and make it easier to play them in turn without making copious notes!

I just note the number of days in the description. If a family splits, I write the new family as (number of days the old house was at when they left) + (number of days they've lived as their own family). And sims have to be synched before I merge them.

That's what I do. But to look at them, the father looks the same age as his kids! I have some middle-age costume makeup to help fix that.
I had Beau Broke come home from school with his half-brother's grandchild. I had to age both him and Ben. It does get confusing not aging them all the way, but until (if!) there's a "middle aged" group, I'll keep doing it the way I am now.

It's a pity Maxis didn't include the "number of days in house" which was in sims1!

I have three families Witch and find them easy. I have just introduced two more families and its starting to become just a pain in the butt now.

I've got at least eight or nine. Time synch is fairly easy for me, mostly because I don't mind if the dates are off by a few days. Just enough to keep it reasonable.

Perhaps I need to lighten up alittle with my families. As soon as a kid has a birthday, I literally race to the next house to grow up their friend or sibling.

I have a custom town where these families live, no townies, so its only them visiting each other. Thats when you really notice the time sync issue.

I found with just having three families who had alot of offspring, that I had to print their family trees as I was planning to hook one sim up with another, only to discover that they are in fact related :o.

There's no real harm in sims marrying second cousins. That's roughly the RL cutoff for major risks from inbreeding, and sims don't have genetic defects anyway. Though I'll bet someone has suggested them in the BBS.

I couldn't help but think of "Cletus" from The Simpsons when reading your post Oddessy! Are you familiar with the "slack jaw yocal"? I think he married his second cousin and had 20 kids. This episode was on last night here (a repeat obviously).

I don't really watch the Simpsons, so no. It's probably not the greatest idea to marry your second cousin, but most cultural incest taboos start relaxing around that point.

I'm not quite that conscientious. I tend to grow sims in batches, maybe play for a few nights until there are some college ready kids, then the next house and so on. I don't mind if teenagers are friends with children, sooner or later they'll all be adults together and I'll want them to be friends anyway.

One thing I do find with 3 families is that there isn't always a decent choice of mates. With Inge's 'make me a townie' teleport bush I can add in characters I don't have to manage. I killed all the Maxis townies before I started with deleteAllCharacters. Worked a treat!

PS I had a family based on the Cletus model in sims 1, haven't done it yet in sims 2. Pity there aren't some recessive genetic abnormalities in the sims.  :P

Or buck teeth...

I've always tried to play my houses in turn, as I like to time synch things as well, but sometimes you get a bit carried away, especially with a family you really like.     

I keep details of all my households in a book, and devote a double page to a household. I list things like Aspiration, LTW and personality points for each person, and if someone moves out, I put something like "See Page 30".

I'm currently playing 5 days per household, and am nearing the end of one cycle through all the households. For my next cycle, I'm thinking of putting all the page numbers (from my book) into a hat, and doing a lucky draw to see which household I play next. For my next cycle, I plan to play three days per normal household, and two semesters per University household.

My biggest problem is that I don't bother playing the pre-made households (Curious, Beaker, Grunt etc.). I seriously couldn't be bothered with the likes of Vidcund, Loki and PT9. I should probably bite the bullet and do something with them after my current cycle. I managed my first (fireless) swimming pool pool simicide last night. It's whetted my appetite for destruction. This is bad news for you, Vidcund Curious!  ;D

I just like creating new sims, so I have rather lost count of the households I have!  Don't think this hood will survive for very long if I start growing all the adults up and letting them die!  And since I get quite attached to my sims, I shall probably just leave the hood in limbo and go start another when it gets too full up!

My sims never seem to die either, I get distracted with family offshoots and end up with bunches of elderly around that I never play. I think I've only ever seen two sims die naturally. My sims didn't even die unnaturally until I started listening to you people.  ::)

Well, im one of those rare people who actually let my sims enjoy free will (as long as they dont do anything darnfold stupid while im control freaking on the rest of the household....)

Anyways, i play my hood in turns.
I do the same thing in all houses, first they are played through getting a mate, and getting preggers. Thent he next round of house visits are delivering the kids, and growing them through todlerhood, 'till the eldest kid becomes a child. The next round is growing childs in all households to just before they become teenagers, and then all turn teenagers, all grow thu that stage, all go to college, and then all go through getting a mate and getting preggers. Every house follows the same timeframe, so when im through a turn, all babies/toddlers/kids/teenagers/adults will be basically the same age etc.

I also let my elders die of old age. No life elixir for them, i quite enjoy the insurance payouts  ;)

I just take the view that since they are sims, not human beings, and since the game itself allows them to live forever, then why not?

By the way, I always play with free-will on, and though I'm sometimes annoyed at the dumb things they do, sometimes, too, I'm totally amazed at something (which I realise is a result of random programming) they do.  For example, last night  I sent David (a Fortune Sim teen who was in the red quite a lot to buy himself a mobile phone to cheer himself up.  He got the phone, then spotted Leonie Mitcham, another teen, ventrilofarting poor old Herb Oldie.  He went up to Leonie, shoved her hard and made her cry, then gave Herb a hug!  (He did know him, of course.)  I thought that was quite amazing, especially as he was feeling a bit disaffected himself!  She had a go at him a bit later, and he just kept up the antagonism without any prompting from me!

Never seen that before, that's nice.  I was hoping something similar would happen in my game recently.  When one of my YA's was sobbing her heart out because she'd caught her steady boyfriend in a clinch with a dormie, her brother was standing just across the hallway and must have picked-up on it.  Did he go over to his sister to cheer her up?  No, he just followed the perpetrator of the crime downstairs so he could push him on the swing.

They do some odd things, don't they!  Leonie was at the mall again upsetting people, and Don Lothario was quite happy to sort her out!  He made her cry, which she always does if she loses and argument!  It's very odd, her stepsister is Cassandra's daughter, Desiree Durham, and she never upsets anyone, just wants to get to know them!  Her mother and stepfather (Desiree's father)  never go around upsetting anyone, and I certainly didn't create her in CAS as a nasty sim, and her aspiration is popularity!!!!!  I just think she's still sulking because when her mother moved in with Max, she gained a step-sister and step-brother and wasn't an only child any more!