More Awesome Than You!

My neighborhood is a tiny custom neighborhood that I used the DeleteAll Characters cheat on and started it with 30 sims.  Half I made playable, half are townies.  They have married and reporduced and are now entering the 3rd generation.  BUT, about 2/3 of the births are boys.  Since I started playing this neighborhood in August, I've only had 10 girls born from 33 births.  In the past few weeks, I've only had one girl and 6 boys!  Right now my town has a group of teenagers that only has 1 girl in it.  My boys are going to have to date and marry townies, I just know it!  Problem is, there's a very small selection of townies thanks to JMP.  :)  I loathe townies, dormies, and the rest of those Maxis-made riff-raff!  ;)  My Sim-sons are too good for them!  LOL 

I know this is common and happens a lot.  I guress I'm just venting.  Or maybe someone knows an easy way to pick the sex of the baby while Mom is pregnant?  Or maybe give a male baby a sex change?  LOL  I tried with SimsPE once, but the baby kept tranitioning male anyway.  :(

If you're getting a severe imbalance, you can try saving right before births and reloading if it doesn't produce an outcome that is satisfactory.

Out of curiosity, do you save just before the birth occurs and then if you don't like the sex of the baby, exit without saving then reload and go through the process again?  And maybe again, and again, until you do get the sex you want?

This generally has worked for me - and did again last night when my Bisgrove newlyweds had their first child.  A boy, but I wanted a girl and after the second try, Claire was born.

I usually just let it roll. Males tend to have a longer shelf life if you expect to breed them in a time-synchronized neighborhood, and stick around for a bit longer. Ultimately the excess sims become vampires.

What exactly causes this? I just started a new neighborhood a couple months ago and only 2 births out of 21 were male. Insane. I never reloaded because I wanted to see how carried away the game could get.

I heard it happens when one sex outnumbers the other in a hood, but how off balance can a new hood be? I only made 6 CAS's to start out, 3 male and 3 female.

Yes, I've done this.  On one poor birth I did it 6 times before my husband said, "Honey, how would you feel if someone shoved your baby back in and told you to do over until it's a girl."  LOL  I've tried it several times, and they are ALWAYS born boys.  I've tried using your randomizer too, JMP, before the birth, in case part of the pattern was the "twining" effect going on.  Didn't help.

It's a statistical effect of randomness. Each birth has, I'm assuming, a fifty percent chance of being male and a fifty percent chance of being female. This does not mean that half of your births will be female and half will be male (which is, for some reason, what most people think it means) but rather that, well, each birth has a fifty percent chance of being male (or female). It's the same principle behind coin-flipping (if you assume that you're flipping in such a way as to create a roughly 50% chance of either side landing up) -- if you flip a coin only ten times, you're very likely to come up with one result quite a bit more than the other, but if you flip a coin ten thousand times, your results would look a lot more even. It has to do with the population size -- if you have a larger population, you're less likely to have sampling errors.

Personally, I've never had that lack of gender balance in my game. In the short run, yeah, there's usually a bit of imbalance, but it has always corrected itself over time.

Old folklore from the BBS argued that the baby is always the opposite sex to the one who decides to try for a baby - so daddy asking begets girls, mommy asking begets boys. When I think about it, I had a Legacy family who's mother was a family sim (Marylena Hamilton).  She had the 10 children want, and each time she threw the have a baby want, I got her to ask.  She had seven sons (including one set of boy twins) and no daughters.  Her hubby was a knowledge sim, he never had the baby want, so he never asked.  That's as close as I've got to testing the theory.   

The few times I've had to replay a birthing scene in the ordinary game, the baby's sex usually alternated, (so the first time a boy, next time a girl).  Even when I rolled same sex twice, the babies were different, so I do think that the genetic coding is random. 

Sounds like an old simwife tale to me.  I am convinced it's simply random. It could also be that their random generator suck.  Not all software random generating routines are equal :)

Kristal why don't you just made yourself a bunch of new townies.  Or create a new family of roomates, put them on a empty plot with a phone and computer.  I spent something like 4 days trolling the net, looking for good looking sims to put into my game (lyran.net and MTS2 were my main source).  I don't just put them in my game. I extract the content of the file into a folder, load them up in BodyShop and remove all the custom content (they would be appalled seing all their hard work being discarded no doubt), replace them with default skin, hair and eyes (not Maxis) and then create them in CAS. 

Just think of it as immigration :)

You have to save before the window comes up that says "There is a new family member on the way" or something similar. Otherwise the gender has already been decided.

For me, it seems that the closer it is to the birth time when I last saved, the more difficult it is to get the opposite sex.  If I last saved, say 4 to 5 sim hours before the impending birth, I seem to stand a better chance of getting the gender I want on my first reload.  But if my last save was within an hour or two before the birth, I may have to reload 5 or 6 times and STILL might not get the opposite sex.  So, from my experience, leave a little time between the last save and the time the baby is born.  I use the Insim to keep an eye on how many hours my sim is pg, and usually save when she/he is about 70 hours along.

And, of course, the lot debugger is essential for randomizing the attributes of the baby.  Once I found out how to use it, I can't have a pregnant sim who's close to birth do without it.  I had too many "clones" in my famililies before I started using it.

Hmm, I don't know, I always save right before the birth, often at the last few seconds possible, and I still get a good variety of genders at reloading. I don't know how the longer wait would affect it in any way? Probably just coincidence.

Probaby right, IgnorantBliss.  It just happened often enough and was really frustrating reloading over and over again trying for the opposite sex, so when I tried this and it worked I just stuck with it.  It may be a glitch in my game that's causing it, but I figured it was worth mentioning just in case it's happening to someone else.

My Ecological Gurus don't get paid vacation time for days they're pg that they wouldn't normally work, either, but it seems like everyone else's do!  So ... you never know ... :-\

I do this also, and will eventually get what I want, or give up and decide that the fortunes have other ideas from mine for the sims involved. Saving with more time before birth could possibly affect the seed for the random number generator if you do different things in that 'window' of time. But no one except Maxis really knows how their random generator works. If even they do.  ;)


That, I'm afraid, is the basic problem. And there is no way for us to fix it.

Just so you can have some pink nurseries, why not create a couple of CAS families with a couple of girl toddlers each? ;D

I had a Legacy family that spawned 7 generations of girls as firstborns and sons as secondborns, but I figured it was just the balance thing and luck. Not sure who did the trying for babies, though it was always the family Sim if there was one and my stupid Legacy Sims all ended up being Fortune, so I guess it may have been the dads!?

This one (balance theory) was disproved when I started a Prosperity Neighbourhood (del all ugly characters first) and rolled a neighbourhood of 18 Starting Sims, only 5 of them male (3Teens,2Elders) I didn't respawn anyone but had female maids despite calling back (tried immediately and later, neither worked) and paperkids of each. Imagine my shock when the first 3 babies born were boys.

The only times I've reloaded for a specific gender is if I've lost a baby already born due to a crash and I want the same kind back, but perhaps I should do it more often.

Somehow I've found that custom hoods are weird where maids are concerned, I had one with two male maids (unusual) and one with no male maids.  I wonder why it seems to affect custom hoods?  when I moved Kaylynn into the game once, she was replaced by a female, so the balance of 2:1 in Pleasantview was maintained.

If it makes you feel any better, my Brandi Broke now has 11 children (5 births, 1 married in, and 5 adopted).  They are ALL boys.  And I'm not retiring her uterus till she gets a danged girl.

I've had times when I'd get all girls, and times when I'd get all boys.  This has resulted in second generation boys marrying and having children with third generation girls in my neighborhood.   :-\

Well, you could put all the boys into gay relationships, use TJ's mod for all sexes pregnancy, and see what happens then!

In my first Pleasantview, Kaylynn was replaced by a (ugly) male maid, though.

In my original Pleasantview the births alternated without exception until twins were due, then I had 2 of the same sex together (one being the first twin).  The same pattern then continued again and this happened the entire time.  Now I've restarted Pleasantview, exactly the same thing is happening.  Seems that everybody's game is different, although I have no idea why.

Maybe it's Maxis attempt to randomize?  so the balance of male:female is maintained, but not necessarily in the same game or on the same PC! ;D

I usually save at bedtime on the third night of pregnancy, so I know that she's going to give birth sometime in the middle of the night.

I've only created CAS sims twice since starting this neighborhood.  The goal was to keep the population down.  In my prior exploding-fireball neighborhood, I had been happy enough to create a new CAS family when the whim hit me.  I think that the unchecked population growth contributed to the neighborhood's quick demise.  So I have been very careful with family planning, killing off the Maxis-made sims and running JMP's no-regen hacks, and not opening CAS.  ;)  But, if this continues, I'm going to have to do it. 

I pause and save the moment the sim goes into labour, then reload if the baby born wasn't of the sex I wanted. If it's still the same results after a few tries, I use the lot debugger, re-enter lot, let the labour proceed a couple of seconds from the last save, then pause and save the game again. Repeat if necessary. That usually worked for me before the new family member message pops up, and I've had the good fortune of not being stuck with a baby of the wrong sex and having to re-plan future marriages :P.

Well, my current neighbourhood has nearly forty households (some related) plus a few at Uni as the teens get their skills up and move there, it was an old, almost fubared hood which I revived and removed townies and dormies from manually, and has now reached 264 files (no Downtown actually added yet) and so far is running perfectly well, and there doesn't seem to be a problem with births all being one sex.  So my opinion, for what it's worth, is that adding a couple more CAS families won't drastically damage your game, but may well give you a better boy:girl ratio with future babies!

If you are interested Krystal, I have saved my families before playing them, so I have a clean copy of them.  I have a family of 8 unrelated girls, every one prettier than the other.  They all have default skin, hair and eyes, so whatever you choose as default in your game would be picked.   

I also have a family of 8 unrelated males, but I'm sure you don't want that !  Another family is 7 teens, 5 girls, 2 boys and an adult. I have named them the Brains, the Brawns and the Bambino family lol.  They formed the basis of my new townie population.

Aww, Angelyne, that's very nice of you to offer.  :)  I do pretty well making CAS Sims: it just makes me nervous doing it after I've had to start over from scratch twice already.  LOL  But thanks anyway. 

ZZ:  That's about the number of sims I have in this neighborhood, also.  I have 292 total residents, which includes downtownies and other Maxis-spawned sims.  I have been keeping the population down because I want to see this one go past the 3rd generation, something I have yet been able to do.  :)  But, yeah, one or two CAS families wouldn't hurt.  Just didn't want to go there.  I created two UNI students over the weekend and moved them into the dorm with my present group of students, and so far they are making friends and seem to be fine.  :)  Maybe tonight I'll make a new family with some little girls. 

I usually do the same thing, but occasionally I lose patience with the randomize/quit/try again cycle, after I do it half a dozen times or more without success.  I have resorted to "sex changes" twice now, when I kept getting boys instead of the girl I wanted.  It's actually not hard, if you do it when they are babies.  Go into SimPE and select the baby using Sim Browser.  Make sure the "Treat as male/female" indicator is set the way you want.  Save changes.  Now open the baby's character file in SimPE and sort the list by type.  Go into each of the "property set" records and change the gender flag to what you want it to be.  Commit.  When you go back into the game, the baby will be treated as the new gender.

Karen

I usually let them have whatever comes up, though occasionally I've restarted if I had one gender in mind for a plotline, and it's never straight-out refused to change. However, I have run up against the so-called 'randomizer' in a stretch of girls, then boys, and then fairly recently a run of Twins for Everyone!!1! So, yeah, I'm not too impressed by Maxis' randomizer, though that's a known issue. *grin*

A couple times, when I've forgotten to save before the birth and I reaaallly want a particular one, I've gone so far as to delete the 'wrong' kid and do a hacked immediate delivery pregnancy so I can restart if I have to, but I don't do that often since it's a pain to edit all the telepathic memories of every relative :P

Interesting. I've tinkered with the "Treat as male/female" indicator once or twice just for curiosity's sake, but have never gone as far as to mess with the property sets. That actually changes the sex of the baby?? It grows up looking like the opposite sex? Or they just behave like the opposite gender?

The child grows up as the new gender.  Absolutely indistinguishable from babies born in-game the regular way.  If you turn the baby from a boy to a girl using this method, as far as the game is concerned the baby *is* a girl, period.  I've done this twice so far, and the two Sims are elder and adult now, respectively.  They look and behave absolutely normally.  You would never be able to tell they were born boys.

Karen

Wish I read this properly last night lol.  I was trying to recreate a sim last night so I had his parents pop out a couple of kids. Eight hours later they had 72 girls and not a son in sight.  Now THAT'S inbalance.

So, just by changing a few values in SimPE, they become instant transsexuals? No need to fiddle with facial structures or whatnot? Amazing!! Sorry, still trying to wrap my brain around this new information ;D.

Exactly.  If you do it while they are babies, you don't even need to bother with the Change Appearance afterwards to fix their hairstyles.  They grow up totally normal-looking. 

Karen

Wow. This is just... wow. Glad I followed this thread long enough to find this out. Thanks :D.

Wow!!  I had tried this before, but I didn't change anything except "Treat as male/female".  The baby never did change it's gender.  I didn't know I had to change the property set values on the character file.  Very interesting.  River Valley will soon have some females!  :D

That is so not right. I would not want to end up with some of your "ladies".

ROTFLMAO!!!!

Uhhh, JM?  I hate to have to break it to you like this, but my Self-Sim was born a male.  Hope you can get over this.  :P

Maybe once I horribly kill your sim...

Uhh, just kidding?  Yes, that's right, I was just kidding.

Please don't hurt me.  :D

If you simply treat your male sim as female, I would imagine he will grow up looking male and have a female voice and be able to have babies.

99% of my births happen at around 3 - 4 a.m. because I usually make my sims woohoo before then go to bed.  The moment the mother starts lifting the covers off of her and starts getting out of bed is when I save.  I've had a lot of success with this.  Some sims are more stubborn than some, but they eventually bend to my will.

If its a second birth I randomize the sim generator with the lot debugger as well.  I've had a few families that had kids who had identical personalities before, and that was just boring.

Here is a picture of one of my Sims who had a sex-change as a baby.  As you can see, there is no way to tell she was born a boy.

(http://i45.photobucket.com/albums/f81/karenh3/ashley.jpg)

Well, it's odd, but the first baby I had in this session was born to two romance sims, one Taurus, one Aries, his adult kids are Gemini and Leo.  The baby is Pisces, which I didn't expect at all!  And he was born about ten sim minutes after the third bump (although she'd been wandering around the hood to remind me about her, looking as if she'd already got it!)  Dunno what to do with her now, though - she has 3 LBs for fiance (the father) and two for his son!  Guess another trip into SimPE is called for!

Hmm, can the sim be considered a hermaphrodite in this case :D?

I know this, if you treat as female when  they're half of a gay male partnership, so they can have their own child, whereas before they may have had 2-3 LBs for each other, while the "female" one is "female" there are no LBs, although they'll still happily woohoo, and still get the hearts etc.  As soon as the birth is over, and you change them back, the LBs return!

Ooh, learned something new again. Makes me wonder what happens if you neutralise the sexual preference of the male partner, then flirt with the 'female', which direction would he lean towards, and if that would bring back the lightning bolts? Do you know?

Oh, I imagine that would work - after all all the other turn-ons would be the same!  I just never thought to do it when I treated one sim as female.  The interesting thing, though, was how many Romance sims among their friends and aquaintances who were hetero-oriented suddenly got the hots for him!

Hahaha, and I would imagine their pick-up lines would be something along the corny "You know how you could look at someone everyday but never really see them?" ;D

 ;DLOL!  (I made one of mine Family while he was having the kid (both Romance sims, didn't see why Ty should go through the pregnancy and get no pleasure from it at all!  However, this was pre-NL, so I don't know if that would have totally killed the romance if I'd done it post NL!

Since installing the OFB patch, I can't get boys.  Instead of my births alternating like they used to, now they're all girls.  I had a set of twins born before the patch that were boy & girl (to my Self Sim) and since then, no boys at all.  I've had two sets of twin girls and several single girls, and even though I've reloaded twice, Wanda Tinker has had twin girls both times (making a third set).  I even got her to eat cheesecake in the hope that it would produce at least one boy, but it just gave her an extra girl.  According to the census tool, there are quite a few more females in the neighbourhood than males, so it doesn't make sense that the game would keep producing more females if it was trying to retain a balance.  Out of the current toddlers & babies growing up, I have only one male out of 10, so quite who they are going to get together with I don't know.  Looks like I will be seriously depleting the male townie & dormie pool.

I have 6 more pregnancies still left (one twins), so if they're all boys it will even out, but I have the horrid feeling they're not going to be.  I prefer to take what I get and not mess about changing the sex, but I think I am going to have to.  I'd never even tried reloading before until Wanda.  I shall have one more go and if she still gets girls I'll have to resort to SimPE.

The SimPE method works really well, so I would definitely recommend it if you're frustrated.  It's a lot quicker to change one baby's gender in SimPE than do the reload/birth/randomize thing over and over and over again.

Karen

i haven't finished this whole thread, but just a note-in case it hasn't been brought up-Squinge at insiminator is working on a mod that lets you choose the gender. Last time i checked-he was still working on it, but if ya get too desperate-you could try it when he's done with it. i would want to use it for when i'm wanting to replicate a rl family.

Wanda Tinker did manage a boy & a girl on the 3rd attempt, so at least I know boys are still possible.  Still doesn't really explain why I've had so many girls one after the other, though.  I knew about Squinge's mod but I don't want to be tempted that easily!  Would be handy for real-life families, though.

yeah-that's always the problem for me too-if it's there-i'll think "what the heck!" n ruin all my fun by cheating-lol!  then i'll wonder why the game is so boring all a sudden-bruddah!  :P