More Awesome Than You!

Does a hack exist, or would it be possible to make one, where the promotion bonus is eliminated or greatly reduced?

You are a hard taskmaster.  These poor little simmies already have to work so "HARD" for those little luxuries and you want to take that from them.  Shame, shame, shame.

Maybe it would make more sense if there was some sort of facility to "Donate to Charity".  There are a few things floating around that enable you to just get rid of money, but it would feel better somehow if it was a proper option on the phone menu or something. 

The game is so financially trivial it's not funny. In a single days work a sim can afford the most non-car expensive item in the game. I'd like working to be relatively on par with painting and raising old people for insurance, after all working gives free mood boosts and chance card chances.

It IS possible to get rid of money with a number of hacks such as JM's money order, but I'd rather they didn't get the surplus money in the first place.

Besides it's make more sense if instead of getting promoted they just get a new title and (worthless) stock options  :P.

Well, I do have a hack on the test directory which makes jobs in general harder and meaner, so you can't just start at level 9 and rake in a bazillion dollars at once. Would that sound more like your thing?

Does it lower the chances of being promoted?

In the perfect world (for me) the sim would EITHER get a bonus OR get promoted for good performance, not both on the same day. Less optimal but still acceptable would be reducing the chance of promotion and/or the promotion bonus. Starting at lower levels is good too, altough I do want my sims to be more impoverished at the start too. Oh, it'd be nice if bills were large enough to cause cardiac arrest as well (maybe not literally, altough it'd be funny!).

Starting at lower levels!  I dunno about you but I can't see many lower jobs than drive through attendant, (Slacker Career).  No special PhD's required for that.  (Is there)?? ??? 

When a Sim graduates from Uni, they will automatically start off at the higher levels of jobs found on the computer if they have enough skills. If their skills are maxed, then that can be as high as Level 9.  That's the point of the harderjobs hack.

Edited for spelling.

Do they start at a higher level if they get their job from the newspaper?

Not really sure.  I think so, but I hadn't tested it out.

If anyone is wondering why I would want it to be financially harder, it's not just because I enjoy torturing my sims / myself, I feel it'd make legacy "challenge" (and prosperity and so on) more interesting, because as it is generation zero earns "more money than can be reasonably spent" and all subsequent generations live in luxury. Heck if I had it my way they'd start with a mortage rather than money and pay 3% interest a day. Actually I should hack inge's mortage shrub to my likings...

... woohoo. There, costs $10,000 and charges $300 a day, since I've never modded anything in TS2 before I now feel a tiny bit more awesome than I was.

So, you have "challenges" in quotes because you don't really play them as strict as they should be?

Mainly because the challenge is based on tedium & repitition rather than being clever. I always prefer to mix it up, like for a prosperity challenge I might have an email family (because some sim seemed ideally suited to the open-air lifestyle) and a mafia family and if the mafia wants to whack another families sim I'll do it dagnammit. And there's no freaking way I'm actually going to take the time (or keep the notes) to score the things and I'll reloooad if I want tooo. I somehow doubt a legacy highscore would earn me any respect or self-worth anyway.

Frankly, I'm frustrated by how darn easy the game is, especially with NL dates which are "Aspiration on Demand", University Perma-plat was bad, then came dates! I respect that it's easy for the non-hardcore players, but it's not just easy, it's trivialized! And it has become more trivial with each expansion, as if EA is deathly afraid of adding anything remotely hard! I think I might have to start playing alternating want/fear days to raise the level of sim-suffering to tolerable levels. Sims need to have bad days too!
</rant>

I don't think they ever meant this game to be a challenge on any level.  The way I look at is, it's an elaborate dollhouse for older teens/adults where you can dress your little dolls and put them in fancy houses and have them carry on with their virtual lives.  Some people like to be good to their sims, some people enjoy torturing them.  So people like to focus on the housing aspect.  There is a little bit for everyone ( that is into the game anyway).  It's completely open-ended.  But what it's not is a game for "gamers", so challenge is pretty trivial.

So any restrictions to increase the level of difficulty will have to be put in by you.  What you could do for jobs, is you could make your own careers.  This way you could determine your own level of salaries, bonuses, ect.  It's pretty well documented with tutorials and even a plug in for SimsPE (I think).  I speculate that it might not be so hard to start from a base career and just modify the areas that are of interest to you. 

Oh and you can always get rid of money now, with the new hack for NL.  familyFunds name amount sets the family fund amount to whatever you specify.

That's because it's inherently the case that every expansion will make the core game get easier: If every expansion introduces more items, in order for those items to remain competitive, they must be superior to the existing options. Which means that the game grows steadily easier as you get better and better tools to tackle the basic challenges with. It would be nice if these new scenarios were actually HARD, but can you imagine the bleating of thousands of sheep if the scenario were sadistic? Why, some people think the headmaster is hard!

Given the nature of sim-fears, I think this essentially amounts to deliberate torture as opposed to merely "bad". The real answer is that sims need to somehow be more competitive. If the game were more zero-sum, in the sense that, like in real life, your gain is someone else's loss, you'd have to make some more serious choices about what your sims should do.

I have a tendancy to get too much money for my sims houses, some are millionaires, no challeng ethere,...so yeah,a charity on the phone would be awesome...but for now i'm contemplating just leting a generation or two be complete slackers and not work!
K

The problem with that is that working is less effort than not working. If your sim works, he spends a goodly portion of the day not having to do anything. If he doesn't work, he now has to do something instead.

well, maybe when OFB comes out, i can make a business that is isn't profitable.....it would be nice if there was a work for charity job..doesn't pay, but maybe gets skill perks..but if i have a bunch or romance and pleasure sims, they dont' really need to work, their happy just "getting around" the neighborhood heheehe
K

The problem with that is that working is less effort than not working. If your sim works, he spends a goodly portion of the day not having to do anything. If he doesn't work, he now has to do something instead.
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This is one of the most annoying gameplay situations for me.  The only way I could tolerate having a sim at home all the time is 1.) if the sim is pregnant and sleeps most of the day, and 2.) back in sims 1 when they could queue them up to farm all day long on fast-forward. 

Macro-Clean and Macro-Garden really help for stay-at-home sims, or sims who have too many days off (another feature I really dislike) because you can fast-forward, but they don't make moola.  The money trees are gaudy, loud, and have been known to crash my game when too many are on one lot and they all regenerate at the same time. 

Gah.

Heh, a definitely not for profit business, like running your own soup kitchen?

Macro-anything is really helpful for stay at home sims, because it keeps them from bugging you with either stupid, destructive, and pointless noise, or screaming from low needs. In fact, as I write this, my game happily plugs along as my sims macro-college-rampage, skillinate, and power idle without the need for my constant intervention.

Definitely something of that nature.

Oh yes.  College rampage rocks my box.  Without it I'd probably turn this game disk into a dog toy. 

Yeah this bugs me too, I kind of like the teenage stage because they actually have some serious fun-drain and then need to build fun up again, and their jobs suck. Work should bottom out at least 2 or 3 of Fun, Comfort, Hunger or Social (I cede sims should pee at work). Some careers should be fun (like artsy ones), some comfortable (like business?), some social (like Politics) and some get free food (culinary). And ones like criminal/science should suck at all motives, but pay fairly well. And there should be bad days, that randomly hit motives extra hard.
And what's with kids getting free all-you-can-eat breakfasts at school?

What kind of sick capitalistic communistic anarchist utopia do sims live in?

There needs to be more sucky dead end-jobs. Maybe with OFB, we can create sucky dead end jobs for people to work at.

As for fun drain....meh. Fun drain is nothing when you have the Sport of Kings.

I think it'd have been cooler if different sims reacted differently to their jobs. The "free food at work" effect is largely to prevent the distinct possibility that your sim may end up DYING at work like in TS2, and, of course, bag lunches. Most workplaces with extended work hours do tend to give workers time to eat so they don't starve, because workers that starve to death have to be replaced, which adds to training costs. But hey, not all jobs suck that badly. Only some jobs. Which seem not to have made it into the game anyway.

Once again, the entire "don't starve to death" thing. Otherwise kids would come home and be taken by the SS before they had a chance to actually eat. That's not to say school is at all fun, and invariably is a fairly large fun sucker, but you adapt to this surprisingly fast. Even if motive drains for work were increased, you should know by now how quickly a sim can bounce back from pretty shitty shape to full green.

I wouldn't mind small meals at work, but the "I had all you can eat at school/work so wont need dinner" bit seems a bit strange to me :).

I've noticed teenagers can easily starve to death when going/sneaking out  ::).

edit:
Oddly, I'm not actually a sim slave-driver/task-master, I mostly let my sims be lazy free will bums. Now, the reason I like fun-drain is it lets my sims engage in fun social activities without being plauged by ADHD. This is why i like the teens, their fun is rotten by the end of a long days school, homework and work, and they can spend the evening with their friends playing pool, smustling, group freestyling or whatever. Heck, sometimes I even let them watch TV.

What, and ruin my future OFB business vending ritalin?

Well, maybe you could diversify into depressants, to cure my sims of their persistant happiness.

There's a banking computer by Monique over at MTS2 that lets you get mortgages for your sims (adds to the bills), the sims can invest money and donate to charity.  Combined with JMP's no 20KHandout hack - I find I can keep the sim poorer for longer.

It does get boring being able to afford everything.  I normally modify careers so that the payroll doesn't doesn't help.  And I add more "stress" to the jobs in hopes that the sim'll need a good fix when they come home.  I don't know, I'm retarded.  ;D  That and Inge's mortgage shrub and Monique's computer really hurts them. Poor things.

No20khandout is my all time favourite hack.
There is too much money in the game, and all of it belongs to playable sims.  Maybe I should start transfering money to random townies so my sims can occationally get the chance to marry a rich sim without having to first move them into the househod and out again with a share of the funds (or even worse, "motherlode").

I was utterly disappointed on how easy University was, even with a CAS moron.  Also, the rest of the game was even easier.  Anyone with an Art Major could be level 9 in the Slacker Career.  That means a lot of time at home and a lot of money.  Not to mention the LTW system that just makes the game really boring.  I'm also surprised that people still need money cheats at all in this game.

I really like Pescado's hacks that actually put sims at a disadvantage such as the no20Khandouts.  It's awesome to have sims that are poverty-stricken and not being able to have proper bathrooms.  Along with his new hack allowing sims to not get promotions as easy, the game might actually be a challenge.

Every time you mention that I think of Frungy.

I don't agree that expansion can't help but make the core game easier.  For example, if downtown Dates consumed real time instead of producing a time-warp that takes place instantly, they would be pretty much like any other aspiration raising social activity.  New objects don't have to be better, just different.

I'd be happy enough with the rewards from college being just the extra Want boxes.  Having 6 Wants instead of 4 doesn't make the game significantly easier, but it certainly makes it more fun.  Oh, sure, there are more potential rewards, but most Wants are crap.  The extra Wants and the 2-lock rule lets you pursue two long-term goals instead of just one.  The Family Sims remembering they want their present pregnancy while pursuing the 10-kids Want comes to mind.

I'll chime in and say I like the no20K handout as well.

 - Gus

Yep, me too, together with the 'money order'.

The biggest thing that bugs me with the finances is just how cheap the houses are, relative to other stuff.
Maybe this is a national thing?  In the UK we don't build houses with partition walls, that sort of stuff is reserved for offices, and even then the price would be much higher when you add the labour cost.

Perhaps raising the price of walls would be a simple solution, with Inge's mortgage shrubs to get your sims housed initially.
Not many ppl I know own their houses outright.  We all live on credit nowdays  ;D

It would be easy to fix this (without having 2-4 hours suddenly disappear for any Sims still at home). After you send your Sim home from a community lot (either a date or just on a lot), the game could remember how much time that Sim spent there. When you return to the home lot and that amount of time has passed, then that Sim would return home. In the meantime, you could still make sure the other Sims in the household were passing time like normal while the Sim that went to a comm. lot is still "at" the lot.

*squees* at random Zoq-Fot-Pik reference

Sims needing ritalin, now that would make for an interesting challenge..Count me in

That is a pretty good idea.

For finances, I wish sims could go into debt.  There should be some aspect for borrowing money and then having to pay it back to a banker or something.  Like let them buy/build a big house that they can't afford, but they'll have to find a way to pay for it.  A big bonus at work would mean a lot more of you were 20k in the hole, that's for sure lol
Don't ask me how going into debt and paying it back and all that would work, I haven't thought that much out yet. ;) 

It's too late for this to happen now, but they should have started things out being more expensive..or at least added more expensive things in the last two  EP's.  The cars were a let down..I figured with them it would be easy to throw away some of that excess money but not really.  A college graduate sim with a college degree required job at the highest level can easily buy one of the most expensive cars after 2 days of work.

What gets me about finances is that if you have more than a few thousand, you really never have to work at all, unless you want a nice big house. I'm playing around with a Sim who has about 15k (leftover from roomate who died) and a small house. I decided not to get him a job, and his money is going down extremely slowly even with a maid. He'll easily make it all his adult years without worries. It seems to me that without a job, and not a huge amount of money, there should be more financial concerns. Thats why hacks like no20khandout are invaluable...

I think the bills aren't nearly high enough; there should be something like rent which is around $1000 every billing cycle; more based on size of house and/or #of Sims;  not $128 every billing cycle for a smaller house. And service fees aren't expensive enough either. A maid or gardener should be something that not all Sims can afford.

I lived for a long time in the Bay Area, Calif. Sheez, talk about sticker shock every time rent or mortgage was paid. That's what I'm talkin' about.

I have the harder jobs hack, but it's still not been that much effort to get them to the top of their careers fairly speedily.  The first batch of Uni grads are mostly there now, and their offspring are now teens, almost in Uni themselves.

With career chance and promotion bonuses, all of the families have renovated houses and nice furniture.  With all the rampant spending, it's not been that hard to keep their liquid assets down to only a couple thousand Simoleons.  That's sure to change though as they continue on with their careers.  :-\  I've also taken to sometimes taking away funds with the familyfunds cheat.

Well, obviously, when you can get away with paying all the serviceworkers Mexican-style wages, it's easy to hire them all.

Maybe I should make them cost 8-10x as much! After all, the NPCs should be making a living, too, and sadly, the $40 a day you pay them is pretty lame. Maybe if you had to pay them 8-10x more so that they were actually earning a credible salary....OUT OF YOUR POCKET....

Why would the number of sims themselves directly matter? A house is a house....and that's the things: Rental bills (like in Uni) *ARE* much higher. But sims own their houses, they do not rent them, and thus their bills seem considerably lower.

Yeah, see, you're renting, or (*stares in blank shock*) borrowing money from them damn usurers. Bloody loan sharks. I've never borrowed money from them in my life. What I couldn't afford, I did without. If that meant being effectively HOMELESS, well, so be it. You'd be surprised how cheaply (and effectively!) one can live out of a beat up used jeep. Sure, I could of *spit* BORROWED MONEY, or RENTED SOMETHING, but frankly, I was repulsed by the very idea. And this is why today, I have money: Because my money stayed in my pockets and didn't go to someone else. Remember: Thrift is a virtue.

But it occurs to me that the reason sims earn so much money and keep it all....is because of the...complete lack of income tax. Mmmm. Income tax. There's an idea. I could make an actual income tax. That $50K chance card won't feel so great when you find out that you now owe $30000 in income taxes.

I would definitely use a hack that made service NPCs more expensive. Income tax would also be an interesting idea, if it's feasible. I like my pretty pixel people to have more or less happy lives but it's gotten dead boring to not have any unpredicted crisises, even when I always take chance cards and don't micromanage.

That wouldn't work real well in Canada in the winter, believe me :)



I like that.  A mod to pay income tax according to the family salary.  death and taxes.  Now our sims wouldn't be able to escape either heh.

I also like the idea of a mortgage.  To be able to buy a house, a sims would have to be able to afford a downpayment and then the mortgage payment.  If they can't afford a downpayment, they would have to rent.  I know you disapprove of both, but they are an infortunate fact of life for many.  And to be consistent we should do away with that ridiculous 20k that starting sims get.  You start off like most people do in life, with zero, unless you have parents who are willing to help out.   This would be great.  And sims would have the choice of living in a beat up jeep and save enough money to pay for a house, or rent something right away. 

Awesome. Raising bills and NPC expenses, and adding taxes for rich families would go a long way to keeping the financial side of things interesting. Would it be possible to have a weekly tax based on how much was earned (or networth change) during the week?

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to increase the drain side of thing rather than reducing the income, helping to avoid stagmentation.

I can use the mortage shrub (hacked to $10000, 3% interest) and familyfunds to start off families in debt / poverty.

There are also some inventory exploits, for example having university students bag everything that isn't bolted down in dorms and the SS lot. Of course I can always just abstain from this except when it makes sense, for example I ofen end up with orphaned teen families (this has almost nothing to do with taking delight in parenticide!), and it sucks when the teens move to college and lose all the value of their house, and then they can't afford to move back into it after uni. But I can at least use the inventory to let them carry all their possessions around as they transition between lifestages.

In theory, yes. There's a few corner cases that have to be covered, such as move-ins, but it's certainly theoretically possible to assess an income tax.

I would love to see this implemented!
...for my sims to come crawling home in a taxi at 5am from a long night downtown and then struggling to make it to work without passing out ;D It's not fair that they regain the time spent away to recover from their indulgences!
Then any sims left at home while, say, their partner was out could invite another sim 'friend' over for company  :-* ...yeah, I play my game like a bad soap opera...

Anyway, I'm guessing this isn't possible with a hack?...

You're right.  We would be as rich as our sims if we had big bonuses, and no taxes and no mortage to pay and no debts. (man I wish !!)  How much stuff can you buy, especially if you have a small lot.  Taxes and debts would make the game more realistic.  You'd have fortune sims getting deeper and deeper into debt trying to feed their addiction, and then going into into aspiration failure when they get repossesed. 

It's be nice if we had different types of loan bushes with various % rate.  You'd have one called Mortgage, then one called credit line with a 7% interest rate and then a credit card with like a 29% interest rate.  You could sink deeper and deeper into debt as you had bushes.  Unfortunately there is no bankrupcy in the game.  Too bad.

Also it'd be nice to create a couple of low paying careers, the working class type.  Maid, Janitor, Cashier, Waitress with long hours and low pay.  You could play a family that's struggling to get along. It makes for interesting scenario possibilities

Taxes are a sort of amusing thing for me.  It all started when I was about 7 and we had to tell our teacher what our fathers did for a living.  When I told my teacher that my father worked in the tax office, she said "Oh, so he's the one who has all my money, is he" and I had no idea what she was on about.  Then when I was a little older and understood slightly more, I found it extremely puzzling that my father had to pay income tax when he was collecting it for a living.  I just couldn't get my head around that one at all.  He tried to explain it to me, but I insisted it wasn't right and he shouldn't pay any tax (this was all basically because he said he couldn't afford something I wanted for Christmas).  The funniest part though was when I went self-employed and my Dad kept ringing me up to basically say "You can't get out of it, you know".  I couldn't even lie about what I was spending on 'essentials', either - he knew what was in my house. 

Having said that, I do think tax is a good idea, but it might be confusing unless it's country-specific.  I'd want the right rates for the UK and also LET 'EM PAY COUNCIL TAX.  Damn crippling thing that it is.

I would really like an income tax hack.  It would make the game more realistic, and with a bill increase it would mean the second generation would actually have to work for a living.  Hey, that scholarship money in University has to come from somewhere.

Speaking of university ........why is freee??????  They don't have to buy books and they keep collecting money...... and private schools are anotehr thing ...you hav eot pay to go to private scholl but our simmie's go for Free???  would be nice if they had ot pay for these things too.

I just assume taxes have been deducted from my Sim's wages before payout.
That's how it works in Norway anyway.

That's how it works in Oz too...but I can't buy a 3 storey mansion after working for a month or so and I doubt I'll ever be able to within my working lifetime actually!  :D

Well, insead of "payroll, income tax" then it can be like property tax, that doesn't get taken out of wages...And i have said that before about the private school, it should cost money!, my broke ass sims shouldn't be able to afford to go..or have a maid for that matter, or nanny, they should be broke, no niceties!  hard to keep them that way for long though.
K

I could make private school concatenate itself onto your bills on a per child basis, if you want....Does an extra +$500 per child per billing cycle sound good?

500 a week for private school - Yes, it sounds great.

I always thought that must've been in the original spec. for the game.
What with them stupid memories about how the parents are shelling out money for it.

A week? No, per billing cycle! Twice a week!

Doh... yes 1000 a week is even better.

If you think in roughly the terms of a sim day is a year, that's still a great deal.
That'll be about 3k for the whole of there education.

Make it 3k a week? Or tweakable.

It cost us roughly 4000 per year to send daughter to a private high school so at least that!

Oh my!  My eyes are so blurry I'm never going to make it through this whole thread tonight, but wanted to say I had a similar idea to this the other day.  When your sims have more money than they can use, no problem--simply make a few bad business investments and that should pretty much take care of it.

I'm with Pescado that sims staying home is harder than having them go to work every day because there's not enough for them to do.  I downloaded those garden objects from VitaSims the other day and am going to see how that works out, once I get my game put back together, that is.  I'm hoping the money they can earn won't be a ridiculously large amount, but might be enough to support a family if they want.  Above all, I'm hoping it gives some of my sims a bit less spare time.

I'd use that hack.
I guess it's easier than somehow paying the headmaster cash when you get accepted.  That would be cool though.

Interested. So I started digging for how to make private school costs money....

And as it turns out, it's already SUPPOSED to cost money, but due to several bugs in the code, the entire functional tree (which already exists!) that is responsible for charging the bill....never gets invoked. Experiments are currently being conducted into how this can be fixed.

Also, nobody seems to have noticed because by default, the actual bill is a pittance of $25/day. Woo.

25 Simoleans per day?? A mere pittance!!!

Make it a crippling amount J.M.

3000 simoleans per billing cycle sounds about right.

Remember there are private schools and then there are private schools. 

The private school system in Australia is a wide spectrum of schools.  At one end of the spectrum are the very expensive ultra-prestigious top-notch private schools - the type where you have to put your children's names down at birth, and no doubt they give priority to the offspring of former students.  At the other end of the spectrum is a large Catholic school system, where fees are structured based on parents ability to pay.  I've known sole parents on benefits who sent their kids to Catholic schools with minimal fees.  In the middle are a range of other private schools.

Translated into game terms, Alexander Goth would probably go to a very prestigious private school, the Broke kids would go to a low-prestige private school where fees are based on ability to pay, and the Pleasants and Dirk Dreamer would probably go to a medium level school.

I like playing first generation CAS sims, but I also like sending their kids to private school.  If I create a CAS family with children I'd still like to have the option to send their kids to private school, in spite of the fact that their parents are in low level jobs due to the lack of a degree and non-existent starting skills.  I'd like the option to choose the level of private school from one of three levels (maybe with reduced mood benefits for the less prestigious schools?) but I don't know if that's possible to mod.

I'm pretty sure that pushes it well into the "Usurious" range. Currently I'm test-driving it at 10x the original pittance, $250/child/schoolday. Which is well within the affordable limits of any family that doesn't totally suck. And if you totally suck that much, you're PROBABLY NOT GONNA DOWNLOAD THIS.

I think even the Broke family could manage to afford this.

Anyone know of any hacks that allow you to select which kids get into private school? Instead of having all the kids on your lot ending up in private school?

Also... exactly how does the harderjobs hack work? What exactly does it do to make jobs harder? Does it reduce the amount of money you make? Does it increase the requirements? Which ones? Skills? Number of friends? Long-term Job performance (i.e. do you actually have to fill that meter up before you get a promo)?

Ste

The amount of money you make is unchanged, but you can no longer skip the first 8 levels of a career track, nor are you always guaranteed to reach the top, because some jobs have a limited number of vacancies, in some cases a very HARD limit set by cold hard facts, and if a sim already occupies that job (Mayor, for instance), YOU CANNOT HAVE IT UNTIL THE OTHER PERSON RETIRES!

It's possible to sneak in via chance cards, but if the limit is rigid and inviolate and you fail to make promotion, you will instead be demoted down to the nearest open slot.

My last post was responding to the idea of 3000 per billing cycle *shudder*.  250-500 per billing cycle is more what I had in mind.

At 500 per billing cycle (1000 per week) my CAS families that have 2-3 children would still have to make choices - private school or add/upgrade objects.  Which is good - I like the idea of meaningful choices in the game.  In the real world parents do make sacrifices to send kids to private school.

Ahhh... very nice. Yes, I thought it was quite retarded for sims to have more than one Mayor in game. :P Truly more awesome indeed!

I'll throw my hat in for adding/fixing the private school expenses, as well as the income tax and/or property tax idea. I'll have to check out Inge's mortgage shrub thingie, although I'd prefer global hacks just cuz I'm too damned lazy about setting things per lot. Hehe. :D And how bout, in addition to this, making Taxis ACTUALLY COST SOMETHING! What's with the Free rides? Sims should pay per ride, to comm lots from home or other comm lots, and back home. And god forbid, if they actually don't have any more money to get a ride back home, then they have to hustle, freestyle or perform music for tips just so they could get back home. Otherwise, too bad, they starve to death or pass out on the comm lot and they're stuck until they can afford a trip back home. Lol.  ;D

Ste

The problem with that is that A: You can't starve to death on a community lot, because the motives have a lower bound to prevent that (they won't even let you pass out), and B: Should a sim manage to die on a community lot, the game breaks because there is nobody to go home and thus save the outing.

Plus, in real life, you don't get stuck on lots when you can't afford to pay a taxi, you just walk. Then I'd have to code both the ability to walk home, and the benefits and drawbacks of doing it.

Which means more likely than not, you'd end up walking anyway. I for one can't imagine why Maxis *DIDN'T* just let sims walk to community lots, seeing as it would have involved a hell of a lot less objects, things that can go wrong, and sims seem to have no problems walking all over the place anyway...

OK so..you're saying 250/per school day/per single child which would = 1250 per week per single child. That's ok with me...multipy it by each child on the lot.....fine, no probs smart arse awesome one...I'll download it..my sims can afford it

Well that's definitely a big improvement! Might make those career LTW's mean something!

$250 per child sounds good. It might be a challenge to actually get an orphaned teen through private school. Well, not really. But I could pretend it would make it a challenge... actually I think a teen could afford that with their dead end job alone. Maybe it does need to be higher...

Nope. No way. Dead End Teen Job will not pay enough. He might be able to pay PART of it, but definitely not all of it.

Hrm... didn't think of that. Per child gets kinda pricey... and what sucks is, if you have multiple children, you can't seem to choose which ones get in. If I'm not mistaken, if you successfully complete the headmaster scenario, all eligible children (meaning children of age i.e. child or teen) get automatically sent to private school. Any chance you could do a selection for this, similar to the carpool hack, so we can play "Sophie's Chioice" and pick our "favorites" sons and daughters to go to private school only? Currently, I have a house with 6 teens! This will definately be a crippling financial burden if I have to pay per teen. :P So... if it comes to that, I'd like to have a choice as to which ones actually go, rather than shipping them all off to private school. That way, I only pay for some of them. :P

Ste

That strikes me as manifestly unfair.

Isn't that sort of the point? How do you *HAVE* that many teens anyway? 6 teens seems to be about a stretch of 18 days if you spawn them back to back, slightly less for twins, but twins are only 10%, so figure statistically there won't be more than one set, still 15 days.

Eh, you could just wait until they get kicked out from non-payment. What exactly are you spending all this money on anyway?

I'd like to pay for private school as well.  Not just to get rid of the excess cash, but it makes a lot more sense and would add to gameplay.

Aside from those rational reasons, my parents couldn't afford to send me to private school so damn right my sims should pay through the nose for it.  I walked thirty miles to my state school uphill both ways IN THE SNOW!  Well, rain.  Okay, I live in a sub-tropical paradise and I caught the bus.  They should still have to pay school fees.

Yeah, I have need to use some of this cash my sims are piling up. Because once you have everything they need, what ARE they using that money for??

And actually not all age eligible sims are automatically accepted into private school. They to have at least a C in school.

<is rather amused that while you deny your sims what I consider necessities, like, oh say, bathrooms and food, you build hacks based on treating them all poorly equally> ;)

I'd love taxes and increased wages for maids and all and private school costs. This all sounds great to me.

So you're saying you lived in a jeep until such a time as you could afford to buy a house outright, not a downpayment, but the entire amount out of pocket? Either you're making a lot of money or that was a rough several decades ;) The mind boggles.

Well... that's kind of the point. Have you seen "Sophie's Choice" or at least heard of it? I only saw parts of it, but I know the general story and what ultimately she had to make a choice about. A bit morbid, but hey, life is unfair... then you get raped by wild boars... and then you fall asleep in your food, wake up, piss yourself, pass out in your own pee, wake up again, and starve to death. :P


I get the point, but I wish it wasn't an "all or nothing" situation like it was with the taxis. Plus, parents tend to roll up individual wants for individual children to get into private school. So if I did have a choice, I could send them off one by one to actually satisfy those individual wants when they actually roll up.

And this was a CAS borne family, that initially started with two teens, two children, and two toddler twins. This family was created to reflect the actual family of one of my IRL friends. Unfortunately, since I couldn't have his three older sibs be adults, because the game is stupid and doesn't let adults be siblings to younger sims in CAS, and I didn't want to have to bother futzing around with SimPE, I decided to start off the family with all the children at younger ages. Since I can't really stagger the ages any more than the 3 available stages in CAS, I was forced to do it this way. I figured I would just use the Elixir to try and properly stagger the ages in-game.

Not all of the children went to private school anyways. I suppose I could wait and move out the older sibs to Uni before doing the private school thingie.  ::)


Ahh... well that brings up a few questions, because I forgot to ask about this:

So, sims can get kicked out of private school? How would this normally happen in game? By failing out? How low does the grade have to get? Is D sufficient or it has to get down to an F?

What happens when a sim gets kicked out of private school? Do they automatically get "demoted" to public school? Can you have those kids re-enroll by doing the headmaster scenario again?

Can a sim get kicked out of public school? If so, what happens? Do they just not have school at all? Is there a way to re-enroll?

Will the private school expenses be a separate bill that you can theoretically "forget" to pay, and thus have your sim children get kicked out? Or will it be lumped in together with the everyday bills? If so, then will expulsion be automatic or random? How many missed billing cycles would it take for expulsion to occur? The same amount as it does for the repoman to come?

I guess what I want to know is, if the bills are not separate, then are the consequences twofold: repoman And private school expulsion? Or will it be randomly selected between the two? In "real life" I'd be able to make a choice whether I wanted to pay my housebills or keep my kid in school, but if the bills are lumped together, I was just curious how the game (or how the potential hack) would handle the consequences of being late or remiss altogether.



On an related tangent I saw something really weird the other day in my sister's game:

The repo man came to her house, and appeared to be reposessing stuff with his repo-vacuum thingamjig, but he actually didn't take anything. He was running around, aiming it at blank walls. It didn't look like she lost anything, and there was no option to Macro.../Pay Bills or Kill Stuck Bills on the Lot Debugger. ??? Is this one of the apocalyptic foreboding harbingers of an approaching BFBVFS?  :-\ Or just some Maxian random ::) bug? It was kind of funny to see, the fact that the repo man didn't actually take anything. And I don't mean anything of value, like he normally does (like kitchen sinks, empty counters, and college diplomas ::) when I have perfectly expensive stereos, TVs, and telescopes). He literally took nothing unless blank space is valuable for some reason. *shrugs*



Ahh... see, once again, it is just way too easy for sims to get good grades in school. But I guess that's alright, since children barely go to school for one week, and teens barely two weeks. It still is kind of super easy to get A+'s in school. I think there should be a dependency on skill as well. Maybe logic? The max grade that a sim can get should depend on this. :P

Ste

I didn't actually spend that much time in the country. Most of the time I was overseas on business.

And yeah, you could say it was a rough several decades. But hey, that's a small price to pay for seeing the world, meeting new and interesting people, and then killing them.

Nope.

D, I think.

Yes, and presumably so, although I've never tried it.

A child that fails school gets taken by the SS, along with all the other spawn regardless of their grades. If you have things like the SS Hack (children will not be taken unless good kids are outnumbered by bad ones), or they are teens, then they just have an F. You can't actually drop out of school. If only it were that easy. :P

It appears to operate much in the way paying the maid works, when I reconnected and enabled that function. If you cannot pay, the kid whose turn it is to pay is booted out with a dialog.

Maybe he was stealing your wall lights?

Did your sister recently delete some meshes? Sounds like some paintings were stolen, which the game couldn't draw anymore.

I take it while you were overseas you had actual accommodations of some sort? Presumably that the business paid for?

Actually maybe this explains the no bathroom/starvation thing. You're just recreating your young adulthood, cleaning up in gas station bathroom sinks and stealing leftovers from people's plates in restaurants?

If I didn't have to go to work, I'd spend some time trying to figure out how long it'd take (disregarding the business-supplied overseas food and decent beds and showers) to live in a jeep long enough to earn enough. Say you make 20K a year (to make it easy, round numbers - I don't get along with numbers) but that's before taxes and you still have to buy gas and some food and clothes (if you've a decent job) and repairs for the vehicle and... what else?

Maybe that should be the next challenge - sims can sit in cars. Can they sleep in the car? They could sleep on the sidewalk tho, or on the floor for YAs. 'Cept you'd need some way to save them and you can't save on community lots or park a car in front of someone else's house in a residential lot. And it'd have to be a reasonable cost house - none of this "make sims life easy" stuff.


<laugh> that's one way of doing it. Me, I took a cue from English nobility, skipped the hard decades stuff, and inherited a house. You just have to choose the right family. And then kill them.

Tho I got less of the traveling the world stuff that way.

Why? It is not guaranteed that a child will have good grades - send them to school in neutral to bad moods and/or don't have them do their homework and their grades stay the same or fall. If a child is sick and has to stay home from school, they lose a grade. Sounds perfectly reasonable and realistic to me, considering the game does not emulate any sort of disability and all children can be considered base normal. It's kind of our own fault if we micromanage them to the point they always get good grades, as not a lot of real children are nose to the grindstone types and always do all of their assignments or are always in a good mood.

Why would you have them stay home merely because they're sick? If anything, you should send them to school so they don't sit around  whining and moaning at you. They can't do all that tiresome and annoying coughing and sneezing if you kick them off to school anyway. Plus food costs extra, but school gruel is free.

I dunno about THAT. There's still the effects of mental retardation from lack of smart milk.

What else would they do? I suppose you could intentionally ignore your assignments and not go to school, but then they still have to do SOMETHING. Standing around in silent misery isn't exactly an interesting activity.

The basic gist, and don't read this if you haven't seen it, but you want to, and don't want the movie spoiled for you:

It's a movie set during WWII, where Sophie I believe is Jewish, and sent to a concentration camp. She has an affair with one of the Nazi officials, who pulls many strings for her and does favors for her. However, one of his favors is to give her a choice. She has two children, and she gets to save only one from being executed. Obviously kind of a hard choice, for someone with a heart and compassion. Not that you are lacking in either... but the tendency to kill new and interesting people that you meet kind of speaks for itself. lol. :D Then again... you did keep the hugging in your hugging hack... so I suspect, underneath that cold, harsh, ruthless killer exterior lies a big ole softy assassin. ;)



Ahh... forgot about the SS worker, what with having your sshack and all, and it barely being hard at all to fail out of school or even get average grades. :P Too bad you can't just have kids that fail and suck at school, without necessarily being taken away. Does an F automatically get your teens taken away, if the good kids still outnumber the bad ones?

Let's say, in my household of 6 kids, if I have one teen that I want to have an F average, for role-playing purposes, do they automatically get taken away? Or is there a couple of days leeway before the SS worker shows up?


Wait... doesn't the maid get paid at the end of her shift? So... for private school, will you have it just auto-deduct for each kid, as they arrive home, but only on the billing cycle days (i.e. Tues and Thurs only)?



Hrm... maybe it was the wall lights. lol. She might have had the house set to show no walls or only exterior walls, and maybe that's why we didn't notice. Still, it was pretty dumb of the repoman to forego the car and go after the wall lights in the garage instead. ::)


I don't think so... but I'll check and ask her. She really didn't have any paintings in her game, as far as I knew. The only ones she did have were the recolours that I did a long time ago. And I didn't use any new meshes, only the Maxis ones. It's probably the wall lights. She probably didn't notice either because it was a lot she downloaded rather than made herself, so she probably didn't even know that there were wall lights to begin with.


Wait... so can you still send sims to school/work sick and they won't die when they come home? :P


Wait again... are there long-term visible/noticeable beneficial effects of using smart milk??? Will sims who have used smart milk actually act smarter? Or do you just mean they had/have an advantage because they probably managed to build up all their skills faster, but there is no significant change in behaviour?


Yeah, children especially can be annoying when they don't have anything else to do. I suppose you could constantly skill build. But I still think there should be a cap on the grade you can get based on something like logic, which theoretically passes for sim intelligence. ::) Not everyone gets A+'s in school. That's why there are nerd schools like the one I went to, and regular ole schools for the rest of the average schmoes. :P Your grade shouldn't necessarily depend on the mood you go to school in. I knew plenty of dumbasses and average schmoes who happily enjoyed being at school, but didn't exactly care about their grades. At best, the cap should be at A. Maybe sims with no logic can only get a C/C+. Sims with higher logic can get a B up to an A at max. Sims with a lot more logic can get an A+. If I have time, maybe I'll toy with this myself. :P

Ste

Although this makes perfect sense in real terms (I was surprised the first time I got my second mayor), it might prove a problem where townies are concerned.  I recently moved in YOUR true love, a downtownie, and she turned-out to be the mayor, and as she was literally only just at the start of adult, being a downtownie, it will be a long time before she retires.  For those with SimPE or other facilities to analyse townie files, this is no problem, but those without such advantages won't know who the mayor is in this sort of scenario.  Does the mod actually take townies and so on into account when deciding there is already a mayor or whatever?

I also noticed that a test mod for higher NPC's has sneaked in.  Exactly how much are they going to be costing with this in the game?  Will it vary depending on the financial status of the family or be higher for everyone?

I play them... like they are real children. SURPRISE! Other people play the game differently than you because they would find your method dead boring!

When I play a new hood I usually wait until the 2nd generation have LTWs before I stick the LTW Variety Mod in my game, so that there's a family history to draw on.

I don't like a lot of the family sim LTWs, so I usually reroll them.

These two factors combined mean that I end up with most of my 1st and 2nd generation family sims wanting to be Captain Hero.  In the harderjobs mod, is Captain Hero one of the jobs that can only be achieved if all other Captain Heroes have retired or resigned?

And....what exactly does that entail? Don't real children spend most of their time attempting to learn something that they will use in their adult lives? Although in most cases, nowadays that seems to entail building their "Video-Game-Playing" skills. But there's no such skill in TS2, which is why sim-video-games are immensely uninteresting. I mean, what else would they do? If it's not something you can get better at, isn't it immensely boring? Thus, like real children, sim-children are happiest and most productive when working on their skills.

Captain Hero is not a singular position, but there are practical limitations on how many superheroes occur. You can, however, achieve it via chance card from a lower-level position, so it's possible to sneak and create your own opening. But then, family sims are ungodly awful like that, given that most of their wants tend to involve destructive levels of spawn.

Stories are more important me than getting OMG 100%, so I play kids - all sims, actually - like real people with personalities deeper than what the game can give them. They interact with other people, play with them, act out things appropriate for the story I'm building. It's like role-playing - and no, I don't mean the sort where one rule-lawyers as much as they can to get a munchkined character and argues over all bad dice rolls.

Not that I'd expect you to know what real people do, Pescado.

I'm definitely going to argue the point when someone complains about an aspect of the game not being realistic when it is realistic when one plays sims like people and not maxiumum efficiency automatons.

Hey, my sims do that, too. Observe all the cool things they do in my More Awesome Than Yours Neighborhood. Like fighting. Fighting is a very important activity because it builds up the all-important fighting skill. And this is why, even though it may seem to others that fighting is a purely pointless and destructive activity, to me, fighting practices an important skill. You've got your Cooking, Mechanical, Logic, Body, Charisma, Creativity Cleaning, and, of course, Fighting.

For some reason, you keep mentioning all these things I never do, then can't actually come up with a good reason why you bother to do these things or why they benefit you. I strongly suspect your lot in life would be better if you simply did what I told you to do, just like the sims do. Because I am more awesome than you.

My sims are not automatons, they just have highly effective leadership.

This is how I usually play:
-Babies I grow up immediately to toddlers: pregnancy lasts so long I've decided it includes this lifestage.
-Toddlers get assigned to the FFS eye in the sky.
-Children learn to know their relatives, make initial friends, and by letting them play autonomously some I find out what personality they're like. This lets me decide at teen age what aspiration to give them.
-The teen stage is the major skillbuilder, whenever there's time left. Teen age lasts forever anyway. At four days left, if a teen has rolled the want to go to college, the parents have the want, or I have just decided they will, the teen goes to college. If they aren't college material, I play out the remaining four days, thus the YA lifestage is taken from the teen lifecycle.
-Adults are the main gameplay.

The only lifestage I have little use for are elders. Unless the elders life with children, in which case they bring in income for the young parents or act as babysitters.


As fpr fighting: you're kidding when you say it's a skill, right? AFAIK only dance and pool are actual hidden skills. (And #of paintings is a counter, which makes me wonder why there is no "sell 100 masterpieces" LTW in the game.)

I just read their personaliy panel. There's not exactly a lot of things for kids to be doing anyway, and making initial friends as children is actually ineffective, because children are seriously lacking in any effective interactions and have difficulty conversing with anyone else. It is much more effective to attack the problem by phone from another lot to avoid using up your child's time, since the relatives probably have all the time in the world.

Also, there's the "smart milk effect" to consider: That 300% learn rate doesn't stay forever, and may be lost at anytime, and you'd best make as much use of it as you can before it fades for some reason.

Plus, children are the only stage where there's actually any pressure. Maximizing all skills as early as possible is the name of the game.

That's largely because they've accomplished just about everything there is that's worth doing. They're extremely boring living there alone, so I always stuff them in so they can support the grandchildren. There's just not enough amusing elder-specific things to do, like complaining about those damn kids, the "In my day..." speech, and soforth.

The Fight Club uses the sim's record of fights to determine his combat experience bonus. Otherwise, no, it's not a skill by default, and thus was equally pointless, pretty much completely random, so there was no definitive measure of success, and thus before the Fight Club, I never actually had any fighting, although I certainly wanted to. However, my sense of practicality is amongst my more dominant traits, and you can be sure anything I undertake has a purpose to it.

I'm sorry, I wasn't aware you needed it spelled out in short words. I do these things (like have kids not always do their homework or not always be in a good mood or stay home when they are sick) because I think it is more realistic and that is more fun for me.

Your parents just let you stay home when sick? Why, did the school make you do it, or did they dock your grades anyway? Because if I were you, I'd show up until they decide to grant you an exemption. You'd lose points for it otherwise. As for not doing the homeworks, remember that if you pile up more than 2, you start losing points for it. You have to consider whether the loss of points for doing so is worth the benefits you gain from the time you free up by doing this. In most cases, not really, because you tend to end up having to do them anyway...or have they stopped teaching people that procrastination is not a virtue and may be punishable by death?

So what is the purpose of building up a nonexistent fighting skill? What is its primary function and why? What is the end goal other than just for your personal amusement of watching girls beat the crap out of each other? :P

I feel like I am missing something. Then again, maybe I am not. Not that I am knocking the fight club or anything, I just don't understand the notion of developing a "skill" that serves no useful function or beneficial gain in a society such as the sims, other than to make enemies, which is fraught with more annoyances than amusements as I do not find enemies to be of any useful benefit.

The primary function of the fighting skill is to make the fighters more likely to win the fights. And also because fights make great screenshots. And it amuses me. But I am still efficient about it! There remains benefits to this course of action. As opposed to what Renatus is doing, which, as far as I can tell, amounts to doing nothing in the name of "realism", and I for one, am at a loss to comprehend how it is realistic or logical for a someone to simply deliberately choose to remain upset because he's hungry, needs to pee, stinky, etc., when the answer to the problem is right in front of him. It boggles the mind.

There are annoyances to making enemies? I thought it was hilarious. Plus it's not even happening on company time most of the time. BlueSoup doesn't actually have that many fights while I'm playing, all the fights only happen when I'm not playing and she just visits.

And there *IS* a benefit to making enemies: Being enemies suppresses several behaviors, including the "drag home from work" action. If your sim hates that other sim, he's considerably less likely to befriend another pesky townie, which in turn becomes a maintenance drag weight. And is not at all entertaining, to boot.

I understand the fight club's intention to build the skill; I mean I don't understand the point of fighting in the first place. But now that you have explained that it's simply for your enjoyment, that simply enjoy watching sims fight over and over for no apparent gain benefit or reason…

And, I don't have townies so, not bringing them home is not an issue for me. All of my sims are created by me because I want them there.

We each have our own playing style and while I don't understand your continued enthusiasm at watching sims fight, as in turn you dont understand someone else's playing style because its not your own, there really isn't any difference, you have your way and others have theirs, it doesn't make it right or wrong. Whether you or I understand it or not.

Yes, whereas my neighborhood dates from a time before we could reliably delete anyone, and has accumulated the bulk of all the added people Maxis feels we absolutely must have. Thus, I'm sort of stuck with them, and indeed, they provide a function: An outlet for my sims to be abusive when I am not playing them at the moment.

Well, not quite. See: My style has my sims engaging in some kind of action which is not harmful to their being, except when I intentionally torture sims, but when I torture sims, I still torture them efficiently, to extract the maximum amount of torture value from them. Renatus, on the other hand, seems to sit there and do absolutely nothing....and I honestly cannot grasp how this is entertaining, given that they don't *DO* anything. I guess some people have an interest in watching paint dry, I suppose.

Pescado, I obviously haven't been using short enough words for you. It doesn't seem anyone else is having nearly so much trouble with reading comprehension (although do speak up if you are). I click, sims do things. This happens many times a minute. The isntructions often are not maximum efficiency behaviours, but are certainly what I want them to do at the time.


Pescado, were you born this dense or did you have to take lessons to acquire the skill?

You know what; I just realized I am in a highly argumentative mood today.

If a person wants to have their sims interact nicely with other sims or do some other role playing to full fill the players story line then so be it, it is not akin to watching paint dry simply because you see no value in their ideas or storyline.

I see no value in your fighting all your sims simply to make enemies so you don't have to bring some townie home, when generally that townie will now plague you with stolen newspapers (not that that matters much), kicked over trashcans, and interrupted outings etc. Whereas other people may have a storyline in mind and are developing a plot or character for that storyline, it doesn't make their ideas of game play any less valid simply because it's not the way you do things. Face it, you have your style that you enjoy and others have theirs.

Besides I thought you killed all the townies off by now with the cow plant. And…by the way, aren't you creating a lot of useless memories with all the peeing etc?

:P

No, only some of them.

Who, townie memories? They get mindwipes when you move them in anyway. Brynnes and Kewians? No, they're useful memories that serve to define the character!

In a second- or more-generation house, or a household you cheated the objects into, skill maximizing is not hard at all. The career rewards make skill building so extremely easy that even a CAS teen can achieve the max-all-skills LTW before heading off to uni, and still have time for a first kiss...

Yes, but it's not about merely DOING it, it's about doing it UNDER THE SPEED RECORD.

Since the speed record is currently effective maximization (saving only a hair for max all skills LTW) comes BEFORE the teen transition, as a C-0 (about 3 hours shy of C-1), if you take that long, you're already slow.

Jumping in the middle of the WOT just to say Hell. Yes. to the income tax hack and private school pay fix. Amen.

So when will you grace us with this new hack? Don't know how long these usally take to develop, so just asking! :D
Karen

EDIT: ALso, am i retarded (entirely possible) but I can't find the harderjobs hack anywhere, is it available?

Try here (http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/ffs/nl/test).

Please do not download from the pre-testing directory and expect things to work right. Those things are for FFS staff and designated testers only.

*wanders over, notices yellowpee.zip*:

Yes. What Pescado said. "Yellow pee" is for FFS staff and designated testers only. *smug nod*

You gotta pee some other color like the rest of us punks. :-)

My sims pee-ed yellow before your sims even thought of it.  :P

Yes please - financially harder would be good.
As I'm still playing base game only, I don't have LTW and permaplat and I guess my game's harder without them!  It's still too easy!

Re - getting into private school - kids below a C grade don't get in.  The HM came and visited a house with loads of kids and two didn't get in because of low grades.   

re fees - In RL you can get scholarships into private school sometimes - can you add those?  The kids all take a test and the top few get a scholarship - you could work it like a chance card or do reduced fees for kids with X skill points.  Thing is, private schools need to demonstrate good grades to keep their rep high - and they can't do that if the only kids there are rich and thick - hence scholarships - plus all the old boys donating money to show how rich, generous and socially responsible they are.

I just love that fees are there in the code,but not working - really cracked me up!

There's a lot in the game Maxis never finished...

*'Family' motive
*'Power' aspiration
*'Big Boss' NPC with scenario
*Weather with many tie-ins:
-A lightning storm power outage scenario complete with reward (was supposed to lower bills).
-Sims checking for rain, running from it, etc.
*Washable windows
*Multiple assigned 'casual' outfits

Jordi, suppose you look at it another way - Maxis set up the core features for later add ons and expansions. Big Boss will be used in Open for Business, and Snooty has the links for the newest two add ons, Family Fun and Glamour.

Regarding the Big Boss scenario, over a year ago one of the websites (I think Gamespot)  had pre-release TS2 photos that featured sims doing things that they are only starting to do now.  Two I distinctly remember - 'Meet the Boss' where the sim had to impress him and one that reminded me of Makin' Magic which showed a sim that had shrunk after drinking a potion.

I heard there was also a thirst motive. Thus all the water drinking availible.
I heard (but have never seen) that sims can wash them on their own if they are neat and have no pressing needs.
Woah, I need to read more on the expansion. I had no idea that was going to be implemented.
Not so sure that the add ons will change motives or ability to wear more than one casual outfit though... I think changing things like that will be left to expansions and the add ons will be only object related. Like there is Santa now, but he's probably coded into the cookies, so object related.
I bet that we'll have a vacation style expansion, it was at least mentioned in a survey, and I bet it has weather.

Gawd....Vacation was IMO the most boring expansion pack! If it is a future possibility, it would have to be packed with lots of shiny and new stuff to get me to shell out the money for it!

Having said that......weather intrigues me though  8)

Heh, I loved it. Mostly I thought the souveneirs were cool. Finally the sims had knicknacks, without them being custom objects. I love knicknacks. I also liked the break from the grindstone. While I might not work them as hard as Pescado, my sims do work pretty hard. The ability to get away was a nice change every now and then. I always made sure to win the golden awards and sent everyone postcards.

expensivenpcs.package eh? can we see a expensivencars.package package soon too? :)

Hell yeah. More expensive private schools and npc's would rock, bills triple their size would rock, and cars that are more expensive for an initial purchase and add to the bill for insurance would get me so happy my toes would tingle.