More Awesome Than You!

I am working on a mod to alter the way the game works with Decay rates. As it is, the game is just too easy for me. This is my main problem with it. Your sim can eat one apple and be good for two days, for example. Motives drop too slowly and fill too quickly and there's no reason to improve any of your furniture or even pay attention to your sim.

So to start, I'm messing with decay rates.

By default, decay rates GO SIGNIFICANTLY SLOWER the lower a motive is. From -100 to -81, the hunger motive drops at less than 1 per hour. But from 100 to -31, it drops at almost 12 per hour. What this means is that a "starving" sim can "starve" for over 20 hours before they die. This is closer to realism, but it's also totally destroying the whole "gameplay" thing that, yes, is hidden in the game behind all the immortal sims who are fully satisfied from a damn apple.

In my initial test I made hunger drop at a constant rate. That way, when your sim was at 0 hunger, they were absolutely halfway to starving instead of 40 hours away from starving. In this experiment, it took 16 hours for my sim to go from 100 hunger to starving to death. That was with a decay rate of 12 per hour. So I need to make the rate a little faster if I want sims to have to eat more than once per day.

The thing is, should the decay rate be constant? Or should it slow the higher the motive is? Meaning if a sim eats food, and becomes full, they stay full for a while- perhaps with a decay rate of 10 from 100 to 60. Then when their motive is below 60, it goes to full speed (20, perhaps? That means 8 hours until starvation), meaning the more often you eat the less often you have low hunger motives. I'd also probably make negative hunger motives show up earlier so that you are encouraged to keep your hunger full and not let it go below the halfway mark.

I guess what I'm saying with all this explanation is I need ideas. In a harder more sims-1-style game, how would YOU like the motives to work? Constant rate? Slower when full? Negative moodlets showing up earlier? What do you think of these ideas?

Here is my test file which changes nothing but the Hunger and bladder decay rates to be constant (for all ages including baby, toddler, and elder, though the rates are different for them). Hunger drops at 12 per hour and bladder at 15. Hovering over the motives with AM installed tells you the current number and the rate of drop. This is to get a feel for how much faster the motive drops when it doesn't slow down.

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?1xfcl1345ckghg5

That is how things worked in TS2, too. Sims take significantly longer to drop dead from starvation than they took to get to starving in the first place because...

Because yes, STARVING TO DEATH IN 16 HOURS IS RETARDED.

Why *SHOULD* they eat more than once per day? That's way too often as it is! I, myself, only eat maybe every other day or so. No wonder Americans are so fat.

Hunger is FINE. If anything, sims still are overly obsessed by food. Really, the motive decay is fine. It's either fairly close to TS2-standards, or in some cases, slightly worse.

Bladder drops fast enough as it is. If you look at the numbers, sims last 15 hours before they piss themselves. That's actually worse than it was in TS2 by a small margin. If you make it much higher, a sim would be unable to withstand even a standard plane trip without pissing itself. Maybe some people have that problem, but I'm sure it's not the norm.

Really, the difficulty was NEVER WITH THE MOTIVES IN THE FIRST PLACE. For anyone who isn't a child, managing to stay alive is not really an achievement and shouldn't be. The reason the game is easy is because it's too easy to "succeed" rather than "fail", and failure at life means more than simply pissing yourself, which, unless you have the incontinent trait, is easy enough even for Celestard to avoid.

Yes, and making motives drop faster makes it harder to succeed.

This is how Sims 1 was. I went back to Sims 1 after getting frustrated with Sims 3 being far too easy, and realized the reason it was too easy is because of the motives. in Sims 1, you spend so much time managing motives that you rarely get a chance to work on skills (Although that was more because cheaper objects took forever to raise the motives, and less because of how fast they dropped, but I can't go through every single object and change these things.) If you have a job, it's even worse. You really NEED to buy better stuff to have an easier time. But in Sims 3, motives can all be filled in a very short time and then you have the rest of the day to make 10,000 simoleons with no troubles whatsoever.

So I'm trying to make things drop faster so you have to spend more time dealing with motives. I don't want my sims to be able to stand and fish at the river for 15 hours straight before they finally have enough bad moodlets that they refuse to do it anymore.

Yes, but TS1 had no aging, so you had all the time in the world to skill, stupid shouty vole.

I don't know what I said that made it seem like I don't know that.

The goal here is to make it so that sims can't be level 10 of all skills and get to level 10 of 4 jobs and have a megamansion with one lifetime. The goal is to make it so sims can't constantly grind for skills and simoleons with 2 hour breaks to boost motives when they aren't sleeping. I thought some people may be interested. If you are not, I do not really...care.

You know the TS1 motives weren't actually that high, either. TS1 was still "one meal a day". In fact, the only difference was that sims peed even more. But the real reason TS1 was "harder" is simply because of the fact that sims were permanently moody and that was the only thing in the game, rather like TS2 without platinum mode. It wasn't the decay rates at all, merely that sims would bitch and moan about even the slightest less-than-perfectly-full bar. TS2 reduced this, and TS3 reduced this even more: Now sims aren't really concerned if they haven't peed in the last 5 minutes, as long it's not really bad. If you want to make it HARDER, just crank the difficulty multipliers in AwesomeMod.

The other reason TS1 seems harder? Dumber AI, and no Supreme Commander to handle your micromanagement for you, because I hadn't written anything for TS1. If we were still PLAYING TS1, there would be a Supreme Commander there, too, and you'd be moaning the game was easy again. Maybe you just really like difficulty-through-pointless-micromanagement-because-the-AI-is-really-stupid. Or maybe you're just a shouty vole.

Anyway, not a download, so moving out of the Pudding Factory.

Set the lifespan to "shorter" and turn the skill and job difficulty up. Voila. Your sims are now permanently stupid and stuck in a dead-end job for life.

The difficulty modifiers only apply to skills and jobs, dont they? With those upped, all that changes is I spend the same amount of time constantly grinding for skills, but it takes more grinding. So it's still super easy to get your mood up, and then you grind forever. :\

'Cos doing it all manually is just so much fun.

But that's difficulty for you. Does it really matter how your sims are doing it? No matter what you change, it's still simply a matter of turning on Supreme Commander and letting it run. The procedure doesn't change no matter what you do to the values.

Well, yes, it very much does.

What you're proposing is making everything the same, but making the grinding take longer. The difference thre is you don't make as much money because you can't get promoted nearly as easily, so you take longer to get more stuff, which doesn't make things any easier. Bigger, better house = no real change whatsoever. Working to build a bigger home is meaningless.

What I am proposing is making the grinding take the same amount of time, but limiting how often you can grind by making the motives more urgent and something you need to deal with more often, and once you DO get more stuff, it gets easier to raise your motives, so you can grind more often. Bigger, better house = Faster, easier moneymaking. Working to build a bigger home has meaning.

I implore you, open The Sims 1 again and note how gradually you start to get better things, and the impact those better things have on how much easier it is to raise your motives. The Sims 3 does not work this way to nearly the same degree. Better stuff doesn't matter all that much because you can raise the biggest motives in no time (hunger, bladder, hygiene) with barely a difference between objects of higher or lower quality. That difference would be more meaningful if the motives had more of an impact on what you could do and when, as opposed to your sim only caring about anything when they're literally starving.

I've stood and fished at the river for 15 hours straight before and my mood never goes down much. You should try it sometime: it's very relaxing. Maybe if you did that you wouldn't complain about stupid things in games that don't seem to bother anyone else in the world.

Aren't there already incentives to buy better stuff? For instance, a poor night's sleep, tastes like fridge, burned food, cold shower, clogged terlet, not to mention the significant differences in time spent sleeping, cooking, showering, etc.? It's the ease with which you can purchase premium items that's the problem. If it was more difficult/took longer to make money then each fab new item -- and the impact of it's perks -- would represent more of an accomplishment, right? But, oh look, Awesomemod has difficulty slides for just such a thing.

And if that's not enough, there's at least one mod that makes your bills larger.

Yeah, I fucking know. I made it. And I spent quite some time working out the details tod etermine just how much harder the bills would make the game.

You guys are having an astoundingly difficult time understanding that I don't want grinding to take longer. I want grinding to take just as much time as it does now- but to be interrupted by motive issues. Like in. The sims. 1.

You know, you could mod it so the grinding would take longer and achieve much the same effect you're looking for.

Yes, but if it was difficult to buy better items you would by default spend more time on your motives. It seems like you want career/skill advancement to take longer, but only due to the fact that your sim is, say, incontinent. There's no one forcing you to power play your sims. Have your sims waste time socializing or watching tv, and have them choose the least productive work tones.

If you like TS1 so much, why not go back to it, forget TS3, and just leave this forum?

And wouldn't a pricing mod, that changes the prices of everything to make it larger, or the amount earned from everything lower, and then some mod to make bad moodlets worse, and Shimrod's 'No Elated' mod, all in combination, sortof do something like what you're ranting about?

Also, people made billing mods before you did, and probably did a better job, seeing as I've noticed a few complaints about your shifting TV mod crashing people's games, and I'm almost willing to bet your billing was as haphazard.

The witch has been casting spells again?

Ha ha, anyway:  I don't think it's the rate of decay that needs to be tampered with.  The decay rates are perfect.  It's the rate at which motives are filled that is the problem.  I would like to see a starving sim have a light snack and stave off their starvation for a few hours without significantly filling the bar.  I would not like to see my sims go to work with a full stomach and come home on the verge of death.

That's just the thing. THese solutions are just not doable. You show me a program that can batch edit objects, or open every object at once and let me click through and change them and save them all at once, and I'll gladly multiply the prices of everything in the game. But at present that would take an unbelievably ridiculous amount of time. It's just not plausible. I did it already to every single tree in the game- and it took me hours, thanks largely in part to how s3oc does not hold a cache and has to load all the objects every single time. Doing it to every object in general? It's not going to happen.

Unless somebody can come up with a magic multiplier that auto-spends twice as much money on everything or something. I asked Pescado to look into such a multiplier and he had no interest, unfortunately.

As for motives filling too fast, that is also EXACTLY the problem. The dumbest, most incompetent sim can fillt heir hunger in an instant. Cooking skill is abso-fucking-lutely worthless except for moodlets. Things like that. But nobody seems to know how to fix that. i've wanted to retool the way hunger works since the week the game came out but have no idea where to start. I'd love it if an apple only filled 5 hunger and meals filled more or less based on the moodlets they gave. But nobody has really looked into this to get something like that to happen.

Moryrie- "I've seen people take issue with one of your mods, therefore I assume based on how sandy my vagina is today that your billing mod probably sucked too." One person reported an issue- one. And I could not reproduce it. Nobody else experienced it. It was an issue on their end. The only other dissenting comments on the TV was yours where you cried that boohoo you did it first and to other TVs.


Anyway, whatever. It's my idea. I want to do it. I think I'll enjoy the game more if I can't spend the whole game day skilling with no interruptions. I just thought other people might agree and would have some input. Apparently the input is "Thanks for trying to make the game a little more difficult, but fuck you, you are retarded because I don't like that idea."

That's people who reported it to YOU vole. I've had the issue reported twice to me. Perhaps because I actually maintain my mods, where it seems you do not.

As for it taking hours.. what project worth doing doesn't? Also, its easier to bypass s3oc entirely and do it with s3pe only. Especially since you seem to edit your OBJDs incorrectly anyway.

So...people are going to you to report issues with my mod because you made a similar one and they just happened to know this (but used mine instead despite yours doing more)?

Are you retarded or do you actually expect me to believe you?

No. In both cases they'd forgotten they'd had your mod installed, didn't do a complete check of their mod folders, assumed it had something to do with my packages, and was causing crashes every time they attempted to go to the TV category. They PMed me asking me if I had issues, I said no, told them to try taking out mods... your TV shifting mods were the culprit.

(http://www.zgeek.com/forum/gallery/files/6/9/9/eatingpopcorn.gif)

Of course, all this comes down to one thing: Your idea of increasing the difficulty is simply to add more grinding. Whether it's grinding motives, grinding skills, or grinding cash, ultimately the difficulty does not change, only the level of tedium where you repeat the same sequence of actions repeatedly for less and less gain. Unfortunately, this is not difficulty, since motives is a solved problem already. Throwing in more of an already-solved problem does not change the fact that the problem already has a trivial solution, implemented in a publicly available algorithm. Even if you turn sims into diabetics with narcolepsy, the problem is still a solved issue.

But if you want a hard game like that? You don't need to change any of the motive decays. Just play the sim with the traits you seem to already want it to have: Give it Incontinent, Narcolepsy, Stupid, Grumpy, and some other negative trait. Then tell me the game is still too easy.

Absent-Minded, so that it randomly fails at any given task unless you watch it every second of play.

Notice that he does not propose that it be made more difficult to have gay incest with your sim step-son.

Hey Vole, thanks for trying to make the game a little more difficult, but fuck you, you are retarded because I don't like that idea.

Well, technically that wouldn't be incest.  Just creepy.

By jove, you've got it.

Perhaps what you are looking for is more like TSM where your sim's motives with the basic furnishings climbs slowly. While I understand that you want to make the game harder, what you are propsing would make it harder all the time. Which would be unlike TS1 where you got to a point where the furnishings you could afford make grinding needs much easier.
Perhaps you would be better off making default replacements for a small selection of furnishings to reduce the motive refill and only furnishing houses with those items.

TS1 wasn't really hard, either. Buying crap would simply delay your progress, so you simply learned clever coping mechanisms for dealing without. Almost always, these methods are better than the low-grade trash. Just like how TS2 had its own "fun" trick, where, instead of buying fancy entertainments, the fastest and most effective fun restorer was kicking the crap out of a cheap plastic flamingo. TS3 makes this even easier, since it makes the crap items utterly unworthy of even considering: If better items are available for free use simply by LEAVING YOUR LOT, using the open world effect, there is no reason to ever buy them.

That's how it already works. More expensive usually means faster motive restoration, basic crap works poorly and it takes an eternity to restore motives.

The problem I'm having is the motives seem to drop so slowly to begin with that the length of time it takes for stuff to restore your motives is negligible in comparison. For example, totally made up numbers, if the motives dropped so that you had ~8 hours of free time in a day, you'd have 16 hours of motive-fixing and 8 hours of whatever. This is how it felt to me in Sims 1/2. But if they dropped so slowly you only needed to dedicate 16 hours of motive fixing every 40 hours, you've got 24 hours of free time to do whatever in between- that is how it seems to be to me in Sims 3. That's 24 hours of free time in 40 hours instead of
14 hours of free time every 40 hours. With such little free time in the second situation, buying new stuff makes things much easier because it gives you more free time. But with so much free time in the first situation, buying better stuff only serves to make the easy even easier instead of making the mildly difficult easier.

I mean I haven't sat here and done all the math to figure this crap out, but I know this much- Hunger, Energy, and Bladder dropping with specific durations is more desirable for me than Hunger, Energy, and Bladder slowing down as they get lower based on the moodlets you have from them. I already made the mod, I timed Hunger so you need to eat twice a day and Bladder so you pee 3/4 times a day, and in a few days of play I found myself having a lot more fun, because my sims had to be attended to more often than once per day per motive per sim. That is how I like to play- I like my sims to EARN their skills, earn new stuff, and earn an easier life. Not start with an easy life and make their way to an easier one. That's the whole reason I've got a bills mod that means they can't even spend all the money they start with on their house like in the base game. My sims have hard lives when they start out. They dont have 100 simoleons in their wallet and then earn enough money to pay for 6 weeks of bills within the first two days.

I think everyone here is completely aware of how much your sims' lives suck.

It's so hard!

I have often wondered how the game play would go if the motives were inter-connected.

If full bladder then comfort decreases rapidly.
If starving then bladder decays more slowly.
If having mega-fun then fatigue/low comfort/ hunger is more easily ignored.
And others that I am too tired to remember at the moment.

I am guessing that the moodlets in TS3 may have already done this, (I have not studied them)
but in TS2.. might be interesting to experiment with.

You make your sims spend their lives grinding, and then you complain when their skills are too high and they are too successful.  You are complaining about the result of your own actions.

On the "good objects are too easy to afford" issue, the answer is simple.  Don't buy them good objects, even though they can afford them.  Edit and save the neighbourhood before you play it to remove the good objects from public lots.  Replace quality objects on public lots with Kewian-based objects or take them out completely.  Take out the shelves with skillbooks in the library (or take out the library completely).  Remove any other skilling lots, too - we didn't have skilling lots in Sims 1.  Use the saved version of this neighbourhood as a template for future neighbourhoods.

If your sims are grinding skills too fast and getting promoted too fast, then make them do non-skilling things: socialise more, or hang out in the park doing bugger all.  If being friends with co-workers and their boss is a career metric then make them become enemies.  If socialising will build their charisma, then only socialise with sims who are best friends already, or socialise by fighting.

If you are incapable of controlling your urge to grind your sims unless the game imposes a limit on you, then maybe the tweak you should consider making is to adapt the fatigue from the athletic skills to apply to all skills.

EDIT @BaronElectricPhaseTS2 had that.  If sims were "in the zone" they were less likely to drop out of an activity due to moods dropping.

Moodlets don't inter-connect motives but their whole purpose ois to have an effect similar to what you're talking about. Even if a sim is hungry and bored, they'll still use a skilling object as long as their overall mood- affected heavily by moodlets- is good. So if a sim who is vain and likes the outdoors goes outside after looking at themself in a mirror and there's music playing outside, they'll gladly work out even if they're hungry and bored and possibly even tired, because all they mostly care about is the overall mood.

That's basically how things have always worked. Sims generally will do the action you require of them unless a motive is critical. Certain critical motives impose negative moodlets in addition. And, what, you pee four times a day? Do you have some kind of health condition, or just a really puny bladder? If you want a sim like that, give it the Incontinent trait.

I suspect most people pee at least four times a day.

You know, most people who aren't Pescado and haven't upgraded various body parts through black market purchases and home surgery kits.

Which isn't actually true, since they'll still stop if a motive runs low. What this change DID make was that sims are no longer subject to constant irrational mood swings which start the moment a motive is somehow not perfectly full. In previous editions of the game, a sim was NOT HAPPY if they hadn't eaten in the last 5 minutes. This, of course, is what caused sims to engage in seemingly obsessive behaviors aimed at fixing non-problems while ignoring actual problems. The change to moodlets has altered this behavior, because now a sim isn't immediately compelled to eat something the moment they are not perfectly full: It doesn't bother them until they are actually HUNGRY, like NORMAL PEOPLE.

The flip side of this is that sims no longer consider life seated upon a comfy reclining terlet parked in a shower with built-in TV while being fed through a tube, parked next to a bunch of other similarly configured people, the peak of existence. But you know what? NEITHER DO ACTUAL PEOPLE.

Four times a day? Seriously? No way. If you are peeing that many times a day, you're pregnant, diabetic, or something else, and you are the person who keeps ruining road trips by making us stop every half hour.

So *that* is what is wrong with my life?  Oh well, so much for efficiency! :D 

I bet you'd be surprised by how frequently you empty the ol' bladder.  A lot of times you go do it without realizing.  Why don't you come over to Oona's house, and we'll run a few tests together.

Kids and their enormous bladders. 5-6 times per day is probably average. If you drink a lot of water, even more. I know someone who went 12 times a day and wasn't diabetic, but just really liked beer.

Also, I challenge your road trip math. My four times a day would only result in you having to pull the car over once every six hours. You can drive from LA to San Francisco in that time without visiting a single rest area.

I can down 2-3 sports drinks and a liter of soda a day, but I only "go" once or twice a day. 12 times is just insane....

You're a bladder infection just waiting to happen.

Your future Type 2 diabetes will even all of this out for you.

I don't drink that much every day, but I could if I didn't restrain myself. I guess it's better than being an alcoholic anyways.

Would golden showers count in the daily tally?  ;)

Oh look, it's edgy.

Ask it if it will play Two Fairlights, One Cup, then we'll see how edgy it is.

I drink a lot of water, and I pee a lot, maybe once every hour and a half or so?

God, finally. Now that we know how much you pee we can get on with things.