More Awesome Than You!

Made this poll because I was curious about how everyone else played TS3, and because I have no idea how I should play.

On one hand, I enjoy micromanaging my sims, so I dislike it when households age without my input; but on the other, I get bored playing TS2 mode, because then I'm obligated to play EVERY household in order to keep the neighbourhood in sync.

Just wondering how everyone else is doing it.

Doing epic at the moment so I can play with the new things I've not seen yet. Will drop that back to normal and let babbies happen when I've finished.

I play with a custom long setting. Babies are 2 days, toddlers 5 days, children 9, teens 15, and then something like 40/50 for both the young adult and adult stages. I still want lots of spawn to happen, but also want to have plenty of time to mess around with the careers and what not. Normally once the household has children, I only play rabbithole jobs, that way I don't have to micromanage them + spouse + 3+ children at the same time.

I prefer TS-2 style with all age settings on Epic/max length, except for the baby stage, which is 1 day (I don't like changing diapers and being woken up in the middle of the night in real life, much less in a game). Then I mostly rely on cakes to age up when I feel it's appropriate.

Customised lifespan with extra-long teen & extra short adult stage that balances out to a normal lifespan. Did have it set to mirror reality somewhat but found the teen stage too short and the adult/youngadult combo insanely long. Plus all those grandparents (and great grandparents) having babies at the same time as their children & grandchildren was driving me nuts so I dropped the adult stage back to a week and set my hacks up so that there's no tfb close to elderhood and that pretty much squashed the issue entirely.

Rule of 6 Normal or Long is what I use in my game. If you're getting weird age relationships in your game, you should use Rule of 6, which will make the aging stages proportional to their real life versions. Otherwise Creepy Bizarroness is guaranteed.

I was using rule of 6, but found that adults kept breeding up until the day they eldered up, leading to the situation of grandkids having babies at the same time as their grandparents. Also the teen lifespan was ridiculously short, leaving them unable to achieve any game fun besides having a mood swing.

YMMV of course, but I found lopping off the majority of the adulthood stage & stitching it onto young adulthood instead minus a week that went directly to teens worked out well for me.

Yes, this occasionally happens in real life, too. The "Elder" stage in the game starts at the RL equivalent of 60. This matches the real-life values where people have managed to achieve natural pregnancy as old as 54, the last stage of the Adult age.

It's the equivalent of 6 years, same as real life. I have heard that if you have one, it will be your longest 6 years ever. Perhaps you are playing with "very short" aging stages.

The Rule of 6 values, as such, are calibrated to be completely and utterly realistic, whereas the original rules are grossly distorted and will produce extremely unnatural relationships eventually, as these distortions magnify themselves over time.

What Pescado said.

I've run a rule of 6 game with a doubled length - ie teenhood is 12 days long.

There's no need to "double" lengths, you just yank the "Scale" slider from in-game. That what it's for. If you think the aging is too fast, the solution isn't to edit the proportion values, which were chosen to keep ages similar to the way they were in the base game, it's to enlongenate the aging scale.

So, in other words, you want to arbitrarily introduce non-rule-of-6 values for absolutely no reason, destroying consistency. Yes, you're real clever. This is why you get to be in the Dome, you know.

I used to extend it, but I guess I got bored because now I'm on normal.  :-\

You and normal do not appear to have any relationship whatsoever.

I turn aging off completely.

Extended / Long, but customized. Used the Rule of 6 as a base, adjusted the Young Adult through Elder stages to my liking (short Elder, Young Adult longer than Adult), multiplied each length by 7/6 so each new phase starts on the same day of the week as the previous, then doubled it all. Some hint of realistic age lengths, and it's long enough for me develop some form of attachment- like between a human and a small pet- but not so long that their lives turn into a grind.

I use a ratio of 1:1:3:4:2 rule of 6, but doubled.

Baby has 6 days, Toddler has 6 days, Child has 12 days, Teens have 36 days, Young adults have 48 days, Adults have 60 days, Elders have 24 days. Roughly lines up with real life rule of 6. Pretty much only doubled it since I like to rotate.

6/6/12/36/48/60/24 =/= 1/5/6/6/18/24/12

I suck at math.