More Awesome Than You!

Last week I started a new neighborhood that ended up having 7 playable elders - 4 were originally adults artificially aged up and then their life durations changed in SimPE to match those of the 'legitimate' elders. Technically, they should all die on the same 'date', since I am keeping them synchronized. However, tonight while playing one of the families (2 elders, their adult daughter, and her teenaged daughter), while the grandfather was at work I checked his needs to see what I should have him do after arriving home, and noticed a long string of 'age transitions' in his queue. This was both puzzling and disturbing as he was supposed to have some time left, as his life meter had some empty space in it. I canceled out the age transitions, and other ones that came while he was at work, and he arrived home intact.

He didn't get any additional prompts to age transition after he arrived home, went to the toilet, then went to sleep. The night and next morning progressed normally, and got a logic skill point on the chess table before I sent him out to his surgery dummy to get a mechanical skill point. I turned my attention to his daughter and noticed that she suddenly had 'cry softly' in her queue. Sure enough, he was out on the back porch looking dismayed, and his daughter and granddaughter were sobbing as the Reaper took him away. His wife barely seemed to notice, even as she took a huge aspiration hit (guess what was in her fears)... after he died she calmly walked out to the front porch and promptly fell over in aspiration failure. I played into that day's evening before saving and quitting, but she stayed alive.

Of course I took a look at them in SimPE - she somehow went from the default 17 days in her age duration to 18, while her husband went from 17 down to 12! I have no idea why this happened - the man was a knowledge sim, usually in gold aspiration but never below green, never got sick or went into needs failure of any kind. His wife, on the other hand, is usually in low green to low red because she wants things far more expensive than they've been able to afford. The main difference I can think of between the two is that he was working at about level 6 or 7 of the medical career before he died, while she stayed at home, painted, and generally kept up the house. 

Could working full time have shortened his life? I didn't think sims could gain or add days after their transition from adult to elder, and his life meter showed that he still had time left. I don't plan on resurrecting him - except for when I'm testing something, what happens to these sims happens - but this was a disturbing surprise and I want to find out why it happened, if I can.

I haven't a clue, but I've noticed some odd things happening in the neighbourhood memory since NL.  The adult Ivy Copur in my current (revived) hood has apparently met nobody in the neighbourhood at all, according to her memories, but other sims have memories of both "Ivy Copur got joined union" and Ivy Copur got married"!  (Not just one, they have both!)  Now, if that had happened, then Ivy would either be living in a house, which she isn't, or sitting in the bin with a partner waiting to be moved into a house - (I don't normally have my sims marry someone who isn't living on their lot already, makes weddings too hard to handle!) and she isn't doing that either!  So somehow I think the game has taken two other memories and added the wrong name!  Maybe the same kind of thing happened with your sims, except in thier case it wasn't the memory section but the life expectancy section that got randomly altered!

I think, since I don't bother much with death among my sims (too close myself to find it FUN!) I would have boosted his aspiration and made him drink loads of elixir!

I don't think that working full time shortened his life. All my elders work full time and they haven't been dropping off before their time.

I've noticed that elders' life meters will fluctuate quite a bit at times.  One day it will be nearly full, the next it will have lots of time left.  I assumed at the time that they would have more time if they were platinum.  Which means an elder who was platinum but changed to gold might have his life meter shorted.

I didn't do any tests on this to be sure, but that's what I usually saw. And going to work in platinum always seemed to give them more time to live.

Hook

Even elders that have the same aspiration level at the moment of turning into elders and transition at the same time, are not guaranteed to die at the same time. The elder life span, in general, can vary from 9 to 31 days. The default elder age is 10 days, but based on their aspiration at age transition, up to to 2 days can be taken away from that (bottom red), or up to 10 added (platinum). But, to still keep it partly random, a random number of 1-10 days is added on top of these numbers. So, at most, and elder that aged at the same as another, at the same aspiration level, can live 9 days longer than the less luckier one.

My elder lifespans will also tend to fluctuate and I've been paying enough attention at times to watch the meter actually go down.

I know I had a husband and a wife elder couple once and judging by their meters they were scheduled to die on the same day. At 6 pm on the day I assumed they were going to die the wife's bar did indeed move up to full and she croaked.  I had the husband selected at the time, and when 6 pm rolled around, instead of his meter becoming full, it actually went back quite a few days and he lived about another 7 days.  It's also happened with a few elders since...although I still have no idea why.

Thanks, folks! I didn't know that their life spans could fluctuate like that after they transitioned - I haven't played Elders much at all since last February when I still had a legacy going, and they didn't seem to do this. I don't know if something was introduced in the expansions or if my other elders were even more boring than I thought, but I'm glad I know what's happening. I like it when the game actually manages to throw some randomness at me to make things interesting that ISN'T the result of a bug! It also explains why, when I last played Strangetown, that horrible old Olive Specter had a full life meter but refused to drop dead until I, um, forced the issue (Nervous needed a good house for Pascal and his alien son to move into when they got married).

I tend to think that Maxis changed the boundaries for their own elders!

I just get them drinking elixir! 

But the one that got an increase afterhis wife died!  That's wierd - it tends to be the case that human males follow their wives pretty quickly - so maybe he was just so happy to see the back of her?

I changed Nervous Subject to Norman Specter and had him move in with Olive!  I also improved his appearance!

That's because males have a shorter life expectancy, and thus given similar ages, under normal conditions, will probably be overdue already.

I don't think their life expectancy necessarily changes when the meter moves, the meter for elders seems pretty much random, or otherwise we'd always know when to expect them to kick the bucket.

Yeah, the expectancy doesn't seem to be completely tied life meter, considering Mahinder died with a good four or five days left on his meter - hence my confusion. His wife, Sunitha, took a pretty big hit to her aspiration meter, so now I'm wondering if she'll actually last for the next five sim days or if she'll follow him soon. They weren't terribly attracted to each other, but they got along quite well and Sunitha often rolled up a want to kiss Mahinder before he went to work. *sniff!*

Her being a fortune sim, though, means she may not mind too much as she will get a lot of mileage out of that 20k simolean insurance policy...

Makes me wonder if the other elders in the neighborhood right now will end up kicking off earlier or later. As it is right now, they're expected dates of death are just about when some of their kids are coming home from college... family drama! Sad, but I play for the story, so no elixir... well, except maybe for one romance elder that I find hilarious. She's a saucy old lady.


He got re-named Nathaniel Specter in mine, and also got a makeover. :) Giving him a decent hairstyle and better clothes and correcting the most ridiculously cartoonish aspects of his face really improves his appearance.

I've noticed other people mentioning this happening, but it never has in my game and I've had a very large number of elders.  I don't see how it can happen, because the age duration is set once they transition and it's always the same in SimPE whenever I check.  Sometimes the bar can appear to have quite a lot of days left when in actual fact it's just the one (in the same way that a toddler due to transition has a large amount of space), it depends on how many days it started with.  The bar is the same size regardless of whether the elder has 10 days or 30 days left, it just moves at a much slower or faster pace.  But if you changed it yourself in SimPE and know for a fact that he had the same number of days as his wife, I can't honestly see how it could have altered.  I wish they did alter in my game, at least it would add some randomness to the proceedings.  It sort of spoilt things for me once I knew how to work out what time they had left.

I suspect if a married couple has both partners scheduled to die on the same day, one is given more time.  I saw this with the Oldies when I first started playing.

Hook

I've noticed with married elder couples too, where one has a longer expectancy because of transitions, but because the meter doesn't count down anymore, but counts days lived, the meter will move the same until the first elder dies, and then it rolls back on the second to account for the time the second one has left. I always assumed it was so we couldn't predict exactly how many days any given elder had, perversely enough - and I try not to look in SimPe either, so it'll be somewhat of a surprise, though if you have one elder on a lot it's pretty easy to predict when from the meter.

The thing is, Mahinder and Sunitha were made at the same time in CAS as a married couple, and their life bars looked exactly the same - mostly filled with a bit of empty space at the end. When I noticed all of those 'age transitions' in his queue, his life bar wasn't filled. That's what puzzled me - in other elders that I've had die, their bars were filled when they hit the 6 p.m. transition time and keeled over. Since Sunitha's bar was in the same place I half-expected her to die as well, but she did not.  I'll undoubtably find out the next time her house is up for playing - might be the end of the week, since I have some college students to play now and families that come ahead of hers in the rotation.