More Awesome Than You!

An odd request, can anyone give me the default motive decay rates from The Sims 2 for each age? I want to compare them to Sims 3 (though I'm not sure where to find the Sims 3 rates, I'm sure they're somewhere) and possibly "port them over". Something about the motive decay in 3 seems poor to me, and I'm trying to figure out what.

Try gamefaqs.com. They might have a FAQ about that. I think it was in the original Prima guides as well. If you want to trust that.

I can't find anything on gamefaqs except for how many hours it takes for a motive to get from fully to empty. I could do the math, but that doesn't mention what ages it applies to, and I know different ages have different rates.

I do not trust prima, either.

You can rip them from SimPE yourself. I documented Energy and Bladder here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,9892.msg271797.html#msg271797).

In comparison to TS3, Bladder in TS3 is somewhat higher, and motive decay stages are now all nonlinear, instead having various stages where the rate changes. Toddlers, babies, and elders have their own rates, everyone else shares a single rate, unlike TS2 with Superchildren, and the typical sim will piss itself in 15.5 hours instead of 19.2 as in TS2 + Seasons. or 16 as in base. The TS2 rates and the TS3 rates for base are somewhat similar, but worse than TS2 with Seasons.

Energy in TS3 is 10.6/hr down to -60, 6.3 afterwards. meaning your sim has about 15 hours of energy before starting to whine like a bitch about it, and another 6.3 hours before passing out. Energy in TS2 is 9.16/hr for Seasons-NonSummer, 7.5 for Seasons-Summer. Energy decay is CONSIDERABLY worse in TS3 than TS2, especially since there is no longer an anti-sleeping personality attribute like Active that reduces the whining even more.

The other rates are somewhat less important. Hunger in TS2 and TS3 feel about similar, at the typical one-meal-a-day routine, Fun in TS2 and TS3 are not comparable because they do not function the same, Comfort no longer exists, and Social was always too highly variable to assess anyway.

In TS3, social motive decay almost never happens, at least in my game; and anyway, I'm starting to think it might be better to wait for sims 4 than to bother trying to fix all the crap that EA threw at us.

What makes you think TS4, if it eventuates, will be any better than TS3?  If anything, I would expect TS4 to have more shit that needs fixing than what TS3 has.

Well, sure, if I buy and install The Sims 2 again. Unless these values are built right in or something.

Social Decay works about the same as it does in TS2, but almost any social action recharges it massively.

And you're kidding, right? TS4 is slated to be a disaster. They're going to make it an ONLINE game.

Social needs to be reworked so that actions give a small amount of boost. Harder actions (actions that take more conversation to reach, like the special romance ones) would give more.

Hunger has needed to be fixed since hte game came out. An apple fills your hunger completely. A lobster does the same. The only difference is the mostly inconsequential moodlets that either gives/doesn't give. In The Sims 2, cooking different quality meals meant different levels of hunger boost- which is much preferable. Why should I bother making an expensive lobster that requires ages of cooking experience when the moodlet it gives me will do nothing more but push me even FARTHER over the "constantly gaining happiness points" threshold? It's easy enough to pass that already.

An apple should give maybe 10 hunger (normal quality, maybe 50 for perfect?) Soup from the fridge should give 25. Waffles 50 (100 for best quality). A burger 125 (200 for best). Lobster a full 200. And a boost for all of them when cooked with actual ingredients instead of magic hammerspace ingredients from the fridge. That way, the best quality food would be filling if cooked by a good cook with good ingredients (optional), but a poor cook would have a harder time filling their hunger without wasting money/time/having to eat 20 apples. This is a game, after all, it needs to bring back more of these difficult elements. The whole game is about advancement, advancement to make things easier and branch out and afford you more fun things to buy/do/afford. But a lot of the things in 3 avoid that.

But a mod like that...I wouldn't know where to begin. Of course, I have already made non-ingredient meals cost more, so that's a short step towards makingt hings more game-y.

Untrue. You have to eat TWO apples for that.

Not quite. Remember that damnable lobster in TS2, the one that gave LOUSY hunger satisfaction despite being level 10? Yeah, those values were basically arbitrary. And frankly, the new system is somewhat more realistic: I am not better filled because I ate a more expensive meal, my wallet is simply lighter. I will get about the same amount of calorie value whether the food is prepared expertly or badly. Or just eaten raw, really.

That same question existed in TS2, only not only was the lobster more bothersome, more expensive, and just as difficult, but also stood a good chance of burning down the kitchen every time and GAVE LOUSY SATISFACTION.

Surely you jest. Are you suggesting that someone should have to eat 15-20 apples to constitute full? I dare you to try it. Go on. Eat 15-20 apples for me. Let me know how many you manage before you throw up.

Based on the fact that your suggestion is not only unrealistic, but also nonsense, I am going to ignore it.

Yeah, I don't recall saying it was realistic. This is a game. A game where things should be hard and get easier as you advance in skills/work/earnings. And food being horribly unfilling at lower qualities (but satisfying when good qualities) would help that idea along.

The thing I find annoying about food is that a sim could live forever on nothing but lettuce and suffer no ill effects, while a human being who tired that would quickly become severly malnourished.  We need variety in our diets, and more importantly protein.  I have no idea how one would implement something like that into the game, but the current system seems irritatingly easy.

On the subject of energy, I miss the espresso from ts2.  In ts3, there is no way to recharge energy other than sleeping.  Coffee is worse than useless due to the abismally short duration of the moodlet and the "buzz crashed" that follows.  The best I've seen so far is the mixed drink in LN that gives the "Wide Awake" moodlet, because at least that's a 5 hour moodlet so it's a bit more worthwhile.  And WA's Meditative Trance Sleep only speeds up energy gain and does nothing about the rate that energy is lost again once they're awake again.

SRSLY?  Are they trying to match the unparalleled success of Sims Online?

EA wouldn't dare make TS4 an online game, lest they suffer my wrath.  The online storytelling is bad enough.  No more neighborhood stories :'(  Anyway, I imagine EA would learn from their mistakes and make an excellent game next time around.  The lousy TS3 is hopefully just a overconfident backlash from the perfection of TS2.

Riiiight.

TS3 is miles ahead of TS2... except for the bugs holding it back. If EA just focused on fixing some bugs, the game could be much better.

Either way I would never go back to TS2. Those loading times and immortal neighbors just don't satisfy me.

You talk as if TS4 will be here relatively soon. Unless you do plan on waiting that long.

I agree that TS3 is better in many ways - like graphics, features, and sim customisation - but the playability just isn't there.  TS2 took everything that was great about the original sims, and added so much - the life progression, genetics, etc., and the awesome storytelling feature.  In spite of all the great features that TS3 added to the game, it messed up in some major areas. 

TS1 and TS2 had each family in its own save, so if you wanted to play a different family, you could do so without interrupting your other saved families.  In TS3, you can no longer do that, and this is a very big deal.  You can only control one family ever, while the other families are dragged along through time, either forced into AI-directed lifestyles (often unwanted) or ignored until they whither and die.  When I think back on how much fun I had in TS2 playing the different families and having them age together and picking out who would end up marrying each other, it just isn't the same anymore, because I don't get the time in with the other families, and I don't really feel connected with them.  And of course, the storytelling feature is gone (Online doesn't count, because you have to quit the game, and you don't get the fancy music while you're writing the story).

This problem was caused by the open neghborhood.  I had to listen to glowing reports of this wonderful feature of the game, and I knew all along that it sucked.  I love my sims having their workplaces right there in town, and I love having my sims visiit other sims, but I hate having the sims in my household scattered all about town so I have to zoom back and forth to find them.  It is very time-consuming in what is basically supposed to be a time-management game.  The open neighborhood was not necessary for the workplaces to be in town, nor was it necessary for visiting other sims.  Do you know what it was necessary for?  So you can go joyriding with your sim as they drive around town.  That's right.  We lost our precious Sims game so some racing fanatics could come and see how cool the cars were, and then leave again.  TS3 could easily have been programmed with separate lots, and it would have been a way better game. They could've had a Universal Time Scale for the neighborhood, and different time zones for each lot, so you could play out the lives of all your chosen sims without losing touch with your sims on other lots.  One lot at a time people.  You'll have plenty of time to see what's going on in the rest of your town; just focus on one lot at a time.

I personally wouldn't buy it, simply because I don't game so I can deal with real people, I do enough of that during the day. I can see why they'd think it might work this time round though, the numbers of kids on Social Networking sites indicates if it's done right, it'd probably make them a huge amount of money. It would probably just not be with the current set of players.

I'm thoroughly convinced that you have no idea what you're talking about.

Joyriding with your sims? I only spend about 5% or less of my sims time driving around, and I usually switch to another sim while they head to their destination anyways. I don't even buy a car if I don't have to, and let them taxi instead.

And you can play multiple families. Awesome Mod itself fixes some of the annoyances with multiple families by retaining lifetime wishes and inventories when changing the active family, and it also lets you designate a household (or multiple) as sacred, so they don't get messed up by story progression. Plus the feature to change the whole game to TS2 style aging.

Unless you're one of those people who actually got a kick out of playing TS2 with a strict rotation pattern and heavy micro-management due to a lack of universal aging, TS3 is clearly better for those of us to want to play the game rather than work at the game.

I never did understand this need for playing households in rotation except for storytelling purposes. The moment you start micromanaging everything is the moment it stops being a game, and becomes more like a chore.

My gripe with TS3 is (among other things) the fact your household isn't aware of the neighbourhood's existence. Your sims will not autonomously go to the park or a nightclub without your prompting and so, to all intents and purposes, you are still playing an independent lot, cut off from the world. The difference is, the rest of the world is no longer static, but it still makes it frustrating and dull if you're playing anything other than a single-sim household as the other members will merely stay at home, rolling wants to do things beyond the lot instead of actually doing them.

Eh. Couple things from one who had a strict rotation pattern and micro-management (which I prefer to categorize as a punishment program):

1. TS3 vanilla is a micro-manager's nightmare. TS3 with Awesomemod is actually better in many ways because I can get the feel of a neighborhood growing together that I was going for with my TS2 rotations, use TS2 aging or age on/age off to keep equal play on my families, most of which I'd hate to miss actively watching grow, while having Awesomemod control them from making many of the decisions I'm to make for them. Uppity little things cannot start thinking they control their own lives. That's the sort of thing that allows a crazy people-drinking sim and a bunch of adulterous Romance sims to annoy the Oversoul to the point that it nukes a 'hood, leaving all the remaining residents as grilled-cheese-craving zombies.

2. You say "chore", I say "rich culture with clear distinctions from the ordinary". Sure, I could let all my sims just do what they want, which, due to EA's rather unimaginative programming will leave every sim growing up happy, reaching the top of their chosen career, having several spawn, and dying rolling in dough. Or, I could create a seemingly arbitrary matriarchal caste system mixed with aspects of polyamory and the dichotomy of clowncarism and strict population control, where sims may want what they want, but if it is not allowed by their birth situation or the few ways they can work with the system, they shall not have their pony.

There are still a few things I need to have my perfect game. The possibility of multiple spouses, which is entirely not an option with the game coded as it is and I suspect never will be, and some way to lock a sim from being able to get further promotions.

Exactly.


But micromanagement and storytelling are the key features that make the sims what it is.  TS3 claims to "have something for everyone" , but they are neglecting those players (a large percentage) who enjoy the original micromanagement-style game, and storytelling.  Anyone who doesn't care for those things would not be missing anything were they to be included, but those of us who do are missing out.  Part of the problem is that chosen sims are not distinguished from NPCs(townies) in any way.  If you enjoy having the AI take over the lives of your neighbors to avoid the chore of micromanagement, you could set all sims to "townie" and only control your one family, but TS3 is not giving us that option.

While it's true that awesomeMod and other mods can weed out some of the annoyances, it is far from perfect.  No matter what you do to eliminate the problems, there always seems to be one more thing.  You can turn off story progression to prevent unwanted move-outs, but then your sims grow old and die without having any children. You can use TS2 aging for rotation play, but families will still progress on their own, even if you don't want that.  You can use Twallan's Relativity to slow down time so you can contorl many families at once, but you end up spending all your time switching households instead of watching your sims.  I tell you, the whole game is flawed.  You should be able to focus on one family at a time AND have universal aging, and there are ways to make that possible.

Or, if you hate TS3 so much and think it should be like TS2, you could, you know, play TS2.

Really? and what exactly is YOUR wrath that they will suffer? I am sure they would be shaking in their collective boots at thought of suffering YOUR wrath if TS4 was an on-line game.

If you prefer TS2 so much, go the hell back and play TS2, TS3 is TS3, NOT TS2.  There are ways to make TS3 play very similar, but if you don't like those, then go back to TS2.  I for one like TS3 the way it is, probably because I never played multiple families on rotation, even now I just play one family, but I do keep one or two other families marked as sacred so I can jump in and out of their lives from time to time to torment them, but generally I play one family all the way through.

There were so many things I hated with TS2, the frozen time at home when your sim left the lot (except for Uni), such as when sending a sim to run a business with OFB and send them home at the end of the day and find the time and everything else was like they never went to work, etc.

If you allow the same TS3 run that TS2 had, then there will be more stuff packs, which may or may not add anything interesting, and several more expansion packs, which will always generate the "I hate this, I wanted this" debate/argument, but each one will add something to the game, how much it adds will just depend on individual taste.

The stock game is pretty much made to FORCE you into this path, by mutilating every sim you're not controlling actively RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT, so you can never let go. There are even crazier schemes like "keystoning", but these are extremely counterintuitive and would confuse the living crap out of you.

This is the single most annoying statement I've encountered on any sims forum.  I see it over and over again.  It drives me nuts.  Here's another way of looking at it:  TS4-beta has made vast improvements over every aspect of TS2, from CAS to careers to graphics to a lot of other things, but the problem is, despite all of this, I am unable to play TS4-beta in the way that I am accustomed to.  I am looking through the store window at this new and improved version of TS2 that I really want to try out, but it's for display purposes only.  Even so, I would be playing TS2 right now if I hadn't lost all my game data shortly after I installed TS4-beta.  I had 21 weeks worth of neighborhood story, and I am not about to start all over again from scratch. 

Wait, there's already a beta of TS4?  Isn't it a bit early for that?  You know, like three years early?  And anyway, I agree that if you don't like TS3 or this so-called "beta," you should play TS2.  They are different games, and they are both good in their own way.  If you dislike one, there is nothing stopping you from playing the other.  Take it from me- I'm a confirmed Sims 2 fan.

Cwurts is calling TS3 "TS4-beta", Jebbuschrist. It's passive-aggressive shit. There is no TS4 Beta available.

TS2 was a sea change from TS1. I'm sure there were some people who saw TS2 as a bad change when it first came out, and even some to this day who prefer TS1. The same thing is true with TS3. For me, yeah, there are a lot of things I miss from TS2, especially the tighter control I had over promotions and OFB features. When TS3 first came out, I played for a few weeks and decided that while it was prettier and I liked the new CASt abilities, my fully-EP'ed, hacked, and cc'ed TS2 was vastly superior. It wasn't until right when WA came out that I tried TS3 again. And now, with a couple EPs in and a powerful awesomemod and plenty of crunchy Build mode cc, those things about TS2 that I missed...I still miss them, but not enough to outweigh those things I like in TS3.

TS2 and TS3 are different games. If, for you, the scale tips on the TS2 side, play TS2. Nothing wrong about that. Nothing wrong with missing features of TS2 (or TS1). But expecting TS3 to give you everything you had in TS2 with a prettier bow around it, that's a bit unreasonable. And seriously, that and your judgmental criticism of people who play differently from you make me think you're just a Negative Nellie.

Cwuntz is the guy who tries to play every family in his TS3 neighborhood simultaneously while bitching about how difficult it is to do so.  I think it's safe to assume he is insane.

Agreed.  I thought one of the selling points of TS3 was that YOU DON'T HAVE TO PLAY EVERY DAMN FAMBLY.

I play as many as 16 families simultaneously, using awesomemod's sacred feature to keep them from misbehaving too badly and a very simple rotation with aging turned on for only one family per rotation. It's not that difficult. In some ways, it's actually easier than TS2 because I can have freer interaction between the families and if I get sick of a particular household, I can just stop playing them and they'll maintain continuity.

A plan and a couple toggles every rotation is probably too much unfun work for Cwurts. Perhaps it is simply too confusing for his wittle bwain.

Not really, mechanically, TS2 and TS1 are very similar. They even share a similar underlying language.

You had tigher control over promotions in TS2? My understanding is that TS3 and TS2's promotionary system are more or less exactly the same: Fill bar, get promotion. The OFB "features" are not strictly necessary in TS3 because you no longer need to buy a community lot merely to be able to play it and save on it. Although the ability to run a business has evaporated, it wasn't really NECESSARY, anyway, and certainly not the most interesting use of OFB's lot features.

In my opinion, if you're going to call a game a sequel, it has to be a streamlined version of the same game, not "a different game".  My complaint is that some of the things they considered extraneous and left out were integral parts of gameplay, and that is something unbecoming of a sequel, in my opinion.

I was of the impression EAxis considered Sims 3 a prequel for Sims 2, so how does that fit into your thinking?

That is the definition of a remake, not a sequel.

Coding perspective. I'm talking about a basic gameplay perspective. Looks were much different, sims aged, we could create our own neighborhoods. There were aspirations.

I could prevent the filling of a bar in TS2. If I didn't want a sim to get another promotion, I simply had to keep them one skill point shy. In TS3, even with a sim who has no relationship above acquaintance with their boss and coworkers and is well below the happy-face level for skills, eventually they will get a promotion if they keep showing up for work. No TS3 sim ever gets stuck at the lowest levels. Someone has to be a grunt.

I ran a lot of stores, ticket businesses, and restaurants. I also designed logos and kitch specifically for them, adding to the uniqueness of my neighborhoods. It was a huge part of my revised BACC play and my own personal caste system, where only Business/Blue caste sims could own businesses, but since they were barred from any crafting activities that Creative/Orange caste sims could do, there was necessary mingling and cooperation between the castes.

I think we're slowly getting closer to some of the shinies we had with OFB, and though it will be a challenge to arrange in TS3's open neighborhood and true time, I think an OFB-like EP will eventually be released for TS3.

Sure, in the movies.  In the gameworld, a sequel is a game that is redone with enhanced features and improved gameplay.  A remake would be called an 'emulator'.

.

If the term 'prequel' in this case extends beyond that of just the back story, then that would explain a lot, however, I question the logic of EA releasing the prequel of a game after the game it is prequeling.  It seems pretty shady and cash-grabbing to me.

Many people would argue that Sims 3 does have enhanced features and improved gameplay, thus making it a sequel.  But then again this definition of a sequel from you is different to your earlier definition
Improved gameplay and enhanced features is not streamlining a game.  A streamlined version would be a version with extraneous crap removed making lighter and maybe faster.  The versions of TS2 which were released for the DS and other handheld gaming devices would be a streamlined version of the game.


I disagree, I believe an emulator is used to simulate a particular environment, usually reserved for older games where the OS is either unavailable or non-existent, such as playing pac-man or donkey kong, those and many other older games will not play on a PC unless you run an emulator to create an environment the games will run in.

Give Jeromycraig a break.  He thought he was being helpful.

Oh look. It is trying to be funny.

Cartwheels and pyrotechnics or this sooze will remain unimpressed. NEEDS MOAR CARTWHEELING.

I dunno, cwuntz has a point - after all, the paradigm for sequels among commercial games is "this game, but more so" - generally some kind of generically new content is added, because otherwise it's hard to justify making a completely new game, but the major changes are all minor tweaks to the fundamental concept. Certain things which were problematic in the first game get adjusted to better suit the players, new features are added to improve the "depth" of gameplay, but it's still fundamentally the same game. Sometimes independent developers - especially those offering the games for free - will make major changes and tie the new game to the previous one only in terms of storyline, but it makes sense that companies like EA wouldn't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, no? Still, by this definition, TS3 is a sequel, which is exactly what it's supposed to be, so I have no idea what he's whining about.

But no, an emulator isn't a remake; an emulator is more like "digitally remastered on DVD" and the like. A remake is... still called a remake - they are rarer in the video game world, but they do exist; the version of MULE that was played as a #grah game for a bit was a remake of the original, for example.

Only remakes in video games I can think of off the top of my head were the text based and bare bone pixels King's/Space/Police Quest games that got upgraded to the point and click VGA graphics. Oh, and the Pitch Black xbox to 360 remake. Which had a mini-sequel built in.

My point, in case it's not painfully obvious by now due to endless repetitiion, is that whereas a proper, well-done sequel matches its predecessor in every respect while surpassing it in many ways, TS3 did not live up to these expectations.  TS2 had story mode (the feature with pictures and captions) both in-game and online; EA found it prudent to have storytelling features online for TS3, but left it out of the actual game.  One has to exit the game, manually upload the photos, and piece it all together on the website.  This is a clear step backwards.  Then there's the universal aging.  In TS2, each family had its own game file, and remained safely tucked away (in stasis) while you played other families; in TS3, as you play one family, the AI has control over everyone else and makes them do things without your consent.  Unless you only ever play one family, this breaks the consistency of gameplay, so that you don't have full control over any of your families, and when you go back to them, they will never be in the same place you left them.  This problem gets worse the more families you are trying to control.  Some players are happy to relinquish control of some of their sims to the AI, but not everyone feels this way.  The game is sorely lacking for those of us who prefer to run multiple families AND have consistent control over them, and this violates the often repeated TS3 slogan "something for everybody."  Introducing universal aging was a bold move, and EA didn't implement it very well.  Instead of moving in a direction that reduced the variety of gameplay possible, they should have been more meticulous in their programming so as to include all forms of play that were possible in TS2.  It is like that thing about not shiitting on the pot or something like that - do it right or don't change it at all.

We get it, go play TS2. TS3 is a sequel, whether it lived up to your expectations or not.

FTFY.

Oh will you just shut the fuck up already, please.

Your doctor called.  He said to go back on your OCD meds.