More Awesome Than You!

True entrepreneurs do not run businesses.  They start new ones, build them up, then sell them.  This works in the game as well.  Here's how to do it.

I started with the Larson brother and sister from the family bin.  These Sims have only the normal §20K starting money, and only about 4 skill points between them.  They are both fortune Sims. You could do the same thing with CAS Sims, but keep in mind you'll need two, as one can't handle a business by himself.

I bought my Sims a 2x2 lot, put up a very basic house.  I bought the cheapest toilet, shower and fridge to get the aspiration points.  I also bought a phone.  This left my Sims with enough money to purchase one of the tiny §5K lots in Bluewater, although you could build a small store yourself if you wish.

My Sims called a taxi and went to the lot.  They had §3,300 left to stock the store, which they did, with various decorative items from medium to high price range.  They immediately started greeting customers and doing sales interactions.  And racking up customer loyalty stars. They couldn't even restock any items until one of the customers made a purchase.  But the business went well, with both Sims selling, one running a register as needed, the other restocking as needed.

Eventually I got the business up to level 3.  I returned all remaining stock back to the catalog for refund, and found that my Sims had made about §5K for the day, probably about 16 Sim hours.  They went home, then my Sim got on the phone and sold the business for §15K plus the cost of the lot and building.  That was about §20K for about 16 hours of work.  And no skills.  Note that each business level is worth §5K if you decide to sell the business.

The next day my Sims did it again, with the same lot.  Again, they ended up with §20K from the profits and the sale of the business.  Getting a business to level 3 isn't very difficult at all, and you get to keep the perks you earn at the business so they build up over time.  And you gain badges for Sales, Restocking and Cashier.

The real goal here wasn't to make money selling stuff, but to make money by building up a business and selling the business.  Entrepreneurs do this in real life, and the goal is to sell the successful business at a decent profit.  You might be able to sell stuff for lower than normal price just to build customer loyalty faster, altho I haven't tried that yet.

Of course, once your Sims are successful, the §5K per business level isn't worth that much, but it's still good for §20K a day if you want to work it.

Hook

Also remember that employees add to the sale price.

You can majorly rack up the price of any lot just by hiring 7 towniees. Don't need to ever pay them or have them come in, but the skilled labor drastically raise the value.

Ack! That's just too easy IMO. Sneaky though.

Thanks for the insights, Hook!

What i would have done iis open business at home to sell the deed (all you need to do is open business, get someone to buy the ownership deed and close business)
this way u make quite a bit more with only a little bit more effort.

In that case, there is a even cheaper way to do it, just open a beauty salon, set the price for make up to $1, u dont even need a salesperson and customer will fill the buy bar on their own faster than you can do makeup
and since the price is lower than redicolously cheap, they get a big bonus after the makeup (you get bonus loyalty boost if stuffs you sell are really cheap, and u get loyalty hit if customer bought something that is too expensive) you business ranking goes up in NO time. I managed to get a beauty salon's business ranking to 7 in half a day with one sim working (no salesperson, no employee)

You don't even need to open the business. I've made profits just buying the community lot, then jacking it up to "Ridiculously Expensive" and then selling it off at more than I paid for it to some hapless townie.

I did this and as far as I'm concerned, it's a cheat. In fact, it's so damned easy to do, I feel it's akin to using motherlode. You can literally buy any business, jack up the price to double (ridiculously expensive) and easily sell to some random townie in a couple of minutes without ever having gone to the damned business and lifted a finger. And as has been noted you can even jack up the price past double by calling on the phone or hiring in person a bunch of employees with lots of skills and badges. Even though those employees have never gone to the business and you haven't paid them a cent, it makes the price go up.

I sold one of my businesses for double in about a minute to some townie teen with very little effort on my part. If you really want to do this, why not save yourself several steps and just hit motherlode.  ::)

I think this 'feature' is way too overpowered and it's more than sufficient to be able to sell your lot back to the town via the phone and get back it's market value plus the value of the lot. The fact that you can double or more any amount of money in a minute or so with this ' Entrepreneural Spirit' is just more evidence to me that Maxis is pandering to BBS kids and cheaters who want everything super easy and want it right away.

Sorry but it just really made me mad when I found out you could do this and it made me feel really dirty and cheap like I had just hit motherlode and that's a cheat I never use. I think I'll have to have that sim donate some money to 'charity' to clense myself now.  :P

Heh, it's just one more in a long string of senseless abuses, just like the move-in/move-out exploit that got squished by No 20K Handouts.

First of all, you're not going to sell *anything* for double at 9 AM on your first Monday morning right out of CAS.  No sales badges, remember?  You only start out with §20K, and you still need to build a house.  If you're worried about turning a business over in minutes simply by jacking up the price, why not worry about any other item in the game?  There's nothing special about a business, except that they tend to be more expensive.  *IF* you have the money to buy an expensive one in the first place.  And you have to be a damned potent salesman to sell anything at "ridiculously expensive," especially something that's a high ticket item to begin with.

I hired two employees with decent badges, but I didn't see any difference whatsoever in the sale price of the business.  Do I have to hire all 7?  If I can buy a cheap business, then hire 7 employees, then sell it for more than I paid for it, then it's a little easy, but not out of line with real life.  If there's a trick to it, what's the trick?  Besides selling the deed to a townie at an inflated price, of course.

This technique is intended for a CAS Sim first starting out.  After that they will have racked up sales badges and such.

Hook

9 AM, no. Give me a few hours to work up my sales badge, and you damn well better believe I will. :P

Field studies have shown it is entirely possible to survive on an empty lot devoid of furnishings. :)

Maybe, but I am more awesome than you. :)

Raking in a sales badge is like napalming fish in a barrel. It's the easiest badge in the game.

Pescado pretty much summed everything up. Sales badges are not exactly hard to get. And I believe the manipulate perk can be passed on to someone with no sales badges. This 'technique' as far as I am concerned is an exploit at best and an out and out cheat at worst.

And yes I know 'don't use then' bla bla bla, but I'd just rather not have such ridiculously easy gameplay available in the first place and I think others wouldnt either (hence the need for hacks like no20khandouts, expensivenpcs, harderjobs etc).

Personally, I wish Maxis would have just made a separate 'sandbox mode' for all the cheaters and gimmee everything now types and left some challenge in the regular game without all the cheats, loopholes and exploits being available.

 8)  Cool tips, Hook.  Thanks!

to be able to sell anything u have to open business first, i was talking setting up a real estate business at home

The Manipulate perk is also not unconditionally good! Besides, it's more a non-technique, since you flashy-thingy your customer.

<laugh>

Technically, yes. But you can basically just 'start a home business' just to sell a lot deed you just bought and then close the business down after that. It's not like you have to really run a full bustling business per say to sell the deed.

Motoki, the whole game IS a sandbox, moreso that any other game in the "sim" line.  All their other games had scenarios which offered more or less challenge.  You could win or loose.  There are no such concepts in this game.  No way to win.  The closest you'd come would be to do well or do badly, but both have their own rewards.

I mean with this current "feature" we are discussing.  They had fun discovering it could be done.  They are having fun discussing it.  But once you have done it a couple of times, whatever fun value has been extracted from it. Some people love discovering exploits or ways to "beat the game".  That's their fun. Gamers :)

But in the context of this game it's pretty irrelevant, since the game has been designed with buit-in exploits to begin with, because it is a sandbox and the idea is to allow you do do whatever you wish.  So Maxis has never even given any consideration to preventing exploits and making the game "balanced" because those concepts don't apply here.  And even if they had given any consideration to preventing exploits, people would have found a way around them, so why try, when it's so irrelevant anyway.

So I'm having fun setting up business that seem to integrate well with my sims personalities.  One of them is an artist of some renown and has set up her art gallery.  Another wants to be a mad scientist, so it seems appropriate that she is tinkering with robots.  So I just discovered I could be instantly successful by selling the business.  Goodie. But I don't want to sell the business because I am investing all this time setting it up the way I want.  So I could familyFunds myself a cool million if I wanted. and I could max out all my skills.  And I could give myself a gold badge in everything.  Put myself into the top of my career.  and then what.  Go watch tv I guess, because the game would be pointless at that point.

I think basically the real fundamental hole is selling businesses to townies: If you sell a business off to a townie, it will be guaranteed to rake in an outlandish sum of money because townies, essentially, are the open cycle in what could otherwise be considered a nearly closed ecosystem: After all, it doesn't matter what outlandish price you sell a community lot to a PLAYABLE sim for, because selling an item to a playable sim is essentially zero-sum, other than the bothersome maintenance and upkeep it creates when selling an item, since in order to recoup the money wasted on this item, your sim must then pawn it off on some other sim, a bothersome exercise for the non-store-owning. Lot properties, however, lack this level of nuisance.

You said it there. When you completely "beat" the game, you have nothing else to do. That's why the game is intended for sims to work hard to gain all the skills, and got to top of their career, etc. to reach perma plat state. Therefore we do need balance in gameplay and some sort of goals even though it is a sandbox game. Yes cheats are everywhere and some people like to use them, maybe to see what it is like, maybe for writing a story or making a movie. That's why I'm working on my house rules too to make it interesting. A successful business is the goal for OFB, at least for me, and I will refrain from using easy exploits, like this one here. And I think Maxis should have given it more thought. If they fail to do it, the community, especially our JM, will do something to balance it, or make it more reasonable, such as no20khandout.

angelyne: I don't want a sandbox game. I want structure and goals and to earn things. I can appreciate that some people like to have access to everything from the get go and be able to do anything and I can see it's uses for storytelling and making movies and blogs to share and such, but that's not what interests me. For me even if I chose not to use shortcuts, having them available cheapens the game for me and makes much accomplishments seem far less.

The Movies had a sandbox mode and a regular gameplay mode, though as I said I could see uses for the sandbox mode and why it might appeal to some people, it wasn't for me and I never touched it but I did appreciate very much the fact that they kept both modes separate and didn't mix the two.

If Maxis had simply given each towniee a limit on purchases based on how much money they have (remember, you can ask and they give you an answer) lots of the stupid loopholes would be closed. They can regen that money whent hey leave, but you wouldn't be able to pull stupid shit like selling 20 TVs to a single towniee in a single visit.

Thats why lots of CAS sims >>> towniees.

I agree, the whole unlimited townie funds is kind of ridiculous. Both from a realism and from a gameplay balance point of view, though most balance because who am I kidding there isn't much realism in this game, it makes no sense that 50+ sims can afford a 1 million simolean lot deed.

Oh and I DID make a whole bunch of CAS sims that I never play to function as townies but it's driving me up the wall now since they are clogging up my job list every day and have no badges or skills.  >:( But that's a whle 'nother issue I suppose.

They are the best employees though. You don't ahve to pay them for extra skills and badges. Train them for one job and thats that.

Fundamentaly I agree with you Motoki, because we have a similar play style; don't use cheats myself, at least never to make my gaming easier.  I'll use cheats to customize it the way I want (i.e. a hack to change the appearance of maxis townies), but I manage my sims needs, mood, aspirations, career etc, the hard way.  The "cheatiest" thing I have is the teleport bush, but I don't use if I can call a sim instead.  That's the reason most of my hacks are from here.  I like JM's style.  He write hacks that correct bugs or nuisances. Some of his hacks make the game easier, but only by eliminating tedious micro-management. 

But Maxis designed the game without our input, so I don't worry about it <shrug>  I just make up my own rules when I play.

Sanmonroe, I thought about that.  I think the reason they choose not to impose limits is because that would be too limiting.  In real life, you have thousands of potential customers in any fair sized city.  In Sim life, you have only your small pool of townies.  You'd quickly bleed them dry if they were on a "budget", then you'd go bankrupt.  In real life you wouldn't have a customer who buys 10  tv's, but you potentially COULD sell a tv's to 10 customers in day.  That's the way I see it.  Your townies represent a large customer base.

But let's say you didn't want that, all you would have to do is make all your townies playable characters.  Then you could pretend your live in a small town.  You have to restrict yourself to mostly service type business to be realistic and you'd have to play all your characters in turn (otherwise they would become broke), but that could be fun in itself.

what about using the badge juicer and a die to assign badges.  It would take some time, obviously...but it would be random.  a 4 sided die would actually work well.  1-gold; 2-silver; 3-bronze and 4-no badge.  I have no idea on how to make cas sims into townies.  I don't know how to use SimPe or anything like that, but if I DID, that's how I would randomize talent badges.

They can? Asking them how much money they have just gives an apparently random number of $ signs with no apparent correlation to how much money a sim actually has or doesn't. I should go and get a translation table of what the hell that's supposed to mean, really...

That's what I'm planning on doing when I get the gumption up to play MY town. We have only three of stores including the local Gasthaus (or guest house/inn), and their proprietors do all kinds of things on the side. They help the farmers, one even trains horses (just the basic stuff), help with building, heck, our baker even operates a sort of shuttle. He drives all those without a car or license to the 'big' city (8000 inhabitants vs. our 365) to go shopping. He only charges for gas and gets small gratuities for that though. Our farmers sometimes even pay in chickens, eggs, milk, etc.

Our Vineyards sell their own wine in the markets, as well as the grapes. They open up their wine cellars to the tourists. The tourists love the fact that the cellars are hewn right out of the mountain, something I never really gave a second thought about. It's only logical, it's cool and usually dry inside of the mountain, something wine needs. Our Innkeeper is also the district forrest ranger.

But on the whole, that's why I don't have the insim. I don't trust myself not to use the thing to the point where I deprive myself of the fun of playing. I can picture it clearly: "Just this once, this is an emergency, I'll never use it again...., etc."

re: asking townies how much money they have.

I know when you move them in they bring in varying amounts of money up to 20,000, but I think that's based on their job level, if any so I think when you ask them about their income it also is more refering to their income as well rather than their spending money.

angelyne: I hear what you are saying about a limited customer base, but I still think something should have been worked out to balance out the huge income you get from big ticket things vs the small ones. It's way too easy, IMO, to sell the big ticket stuff. It kind of makes it pointless to sell the cheaper items. In theory, the balance is supposed to be that the cheaper items net less profit per sale, but you sell many more of them much easier and faster. In practice, it takes only a dazzle or 2 to sell any item, even the most expensive and outrageously priced.

I've kind of learned to live with it by augementing my mom and pop shop with expensive items that fit the setting (paintings for sale in restaurants, fountains and statuary in flower shops etc) but it would have been nice if they worked on the balance a little more.

LOL yes that is me too! That's why I hate cheats, they are such a temptation. It just nags and gnaws at me and calls my name to be used like a little devil whispering in my ear.  ;D

I believe this is actually a completely random number with few exceptions:  NPCs claim they are bringing $1,000 when they really bring $0 and the Mr. Big and Ms. Diva NPCs always bring a HUGE wad of cash with them, often if not always fulfilling "Get Married to a Rich Sim" wants.  I've only married two Mr. Big's so I can't recall if both of them broke $50k or not.

Asking seems to give me fairly consistant results, but I have so few true NPCs that I know what they actually have. Perhaps towniees are broken (OMGWTF?!?! Maxis would never do that!!!).

Would be interesting to see the table info if you want to pull it up.

If they said "one $ towniees have a max of 1000$ to spend per visit, two $ have 5000$, and three $ have 25000", it would make things much better. There would ahve to be some sort of exemptions rule for deeds though. Although, the selling of deeds for marked up prices is so sploitish it would be better if you had to sell to a playable sim or just for the base value to the comm.

In fact, this would be an awesome hack.

The minus you get on customer loyalty far outweighs the benefits in some situations.

I suppose you could use it on a good friend who's in the shop with high loyalty points and get him/her to buy the most expensive object in the place then sell them a bunch of cheap crap to bring the loyalty back up though.

Dazzle works just fine most of the time though.

I had two townies move in recently with over 1,000,000.  That was a bit of a shock!  they moved house straight away!  Maybe my game is messed up!

good way to think of it, but I agree, the economics ought to make more sense.  Big ticket item stores usually sell a lot less items per day than flower shops.  Running them ought to be risky!  Maybe what we need to do is connect how fast the buy bar fills to the price of the item.

I think me not having any townies makes OFB harder for me and closes most of these loopholes to be honest.  It's impossible for me to sell any item over $300 to anyone except for the 1 or 2 townies that slipped through the cracks because I nuked them all.  Essentially, Pescado's hack that disallows playables on a lot actually makes the game easier when you think about it.

I just knew OFB would have crap like this, because there's no way to spend 20k if you already have the best of everything.

Yes but in the case of selling the deed to the business AT the business, or just opening up a fake dummy home business just to sell your deed, customer loyalty doesn't really mean squat and there's really no downside to manipulating.


That's a really old bug dating way back to the original base game IIRC. Jase made a fix for it called the no lottery move in fix here:

http://mysite.verizon.net/aestudios/sims2/

He labeled it as EP2 and 3 compatible though so I don't know if it fixes it for just the base game or not.

Well, hey, I'd never use the action if it wasn't good for SOMETHING. Plus the animations are hilarious.

Ok, I just gave the "sell the deed at Ridiculously Expensive" tactic a try.  I found out a few things.

First of all, it took 4 dazzles and a maniuplate.  This requires 5 business level perks plus a gold sales badge.  And just where are you gonna get these right out of CAS?  You aren't.  So what do you do right our of CAS?  Use the Entrepreneur strategy. Which is what I suggested in the first place.

Buy the cheap business lot, sell something, get up to business level three, shut down, sell your inventory, go home.  You can sell the business over the phone, or set up a "dummy business" and try to sell the deed at an average price, which is still more than you will get over the phone.  This probably requires you have a gold sales badge, which you might not have yet.

Do it again the next day.  Get level 3, which gives you enough perks to use minipulate.  You should have the gold sales badge by now.  THEN sell your deed from a home business for an insane amount of money.

But how "insane" is the amount really?  Setting the price to Ridiculously Expensive only makes it twice as much as you'd get otherwise.  So a business that cost me §7748 to buy (I'd modified it a bit, added a restroom and expresso machine) at level 3 would sell for §22,461 over the phone.  I took a slight loss because I was on the lot when midnight rolled around and I got hit with depreciation.  Setting the price to Ridiculously Expensive only doubled it to §44,922.  The phone gave me §14,713 profit.  Ridiculously Expensive gave me §37,174 profit on the sale of the business.

If you haven't noticed, dazzle takes away some energy from your Sim.  Manipulate takes some of everything, and quite a bit of energy.  After the sale, my Sim was pretty much energy depleted, having started with full green in everything.  Three dazzles, then a manipulate, then another dazzle closed the sale.  Without resorting to the Energizer, your Sim won't be able to do many of these transactions in a day.  And right out of CAS, they don't have enough points to buy an energizer.  This sort of tactic can make your Sim a lot of money, but isn't that unrealistic, assuming you don't use stuff like the Energizer.  You might actually make more per hour by selling stuff at a reasonable price.

As for Passing On perks, it takes for-freaking-ever.  It's probably faster to do the Entrepreneur Scenario a couple of times.  Also, a CAS Sim with no money, no skills, and no friends might have problems getting someone who can pass on the perks.  

This scenario is useful for someone starting out, not someone who is already well established.  My recommendation stands.

Hook

Well, you took 4 dazzles and a manipulate, but that's not necessarily the only combination that will sell. Gold sales badge == easy, you can get it in a few hours just making lame attempts to peddle aforementioned lot without it. You can do this out of your empty home.

So on something worth 22.5K, you sold it for about 45K. That's doubling your worth in a day, less if you don't actually bother with the process of running a business. Let's say it takes you a day to build up a sales badge, which is typical, during which you can still spam your customers in an attempt to sell, you will double your worth about once a day. 22.5K -> 45K, 45K -> 90K, 90K -> 180K...

In practice, you can get faster turnover after the first day since you can just immediately buy one and sell it again right away, with little downtime since you already built gold sales (easiest badge in the game).

Oh, come now. Motive replenishment is old hat already, as is gaining massive amounts of ASP in a very short duration. You're not seriously suggesting this is a real obstacle, right?

Or a CAS sim, if you just want money, can buy and sell lots for a big profit as fast as you can use the phone 7 times per lot.

Buy- 1 call
hire 5 employees - 5 calls
sell - 1 call


Or instead of using silly exploits (which all the deed sale setups seem to be, poorly planned exploits), just save yourself 20 minutes of clicking and use motherlode.

Sure did, but in order to unlock some of the special buildings and sets, you'd have to beat the game first! Not much of a sandbox really. Oh and the game SUCKED! Very good idea, VERY poorly manifested!

I'm not sure why they consider the employees to be valuable, since you cannot, strictly speaking, "sell" employees. They're not slaves, even if you pay them like they are, and thus shouldn't actually contribute the value of a property.

Veilchen, I'm coming to live with you!

Sure, come on over. Just be prepared for the downside: everybody will know your business. ;)

You can use the telephone to call and hire employees and may find someone with a gold sales badge to hire. Promote them to manager and you can control them. Someone with a gold sales badge and another silver badge to two more bronze badges has enough experience to be promoted to manager. Even if there isn't someone that fits this when you call, you most likely know who in the neighborhood fits this bill if you've been playing the game for any length of time. Or you could even try to hire some random sims that come by and see what badges they have.

Also as Pescado said, the gold sales badge isn't hard at all to get, in fact, it's one of the easiest. You just open a 'home business' and sell a bunch of little junk or even your furniture and just work on selling. It really wouldn't take long, even for a CAS sim. It was the first gold badge my CAS sim got in his home business and I really wasn't even trying too hard to get it either, if I did I probably could have gotten it even sooner.

Speaking of which, I am waiting for someone to make human trafficing and black market baby hack lmao. I suppose we could use SimPE to change the appearance of a servo, but then they would act more like an android and I'm not sure their appearance can be changed until after they are acitivated. Hmm.

Why would you have to make 5 calls to hire 5 employees?

When you call to hire employees you can hire more than one at once.

Methinks someone has been reading the Prima guide instead of playing the game. I have seen no evidence of employees adding to the sale price of the business.

Of course, if someone should post some actual numbers, I'd be very glad to read them.  See what the business sells for without employees, hire some employees and see if there's a difference.  Actual numbers from playing the game would be nice.  All my information comes from playing the game.

And as for saving yourself 20 minutes of clicking, why bother getting your Sims jobs when you can simply motherlode them to oblivion?

Hook

I wouldn't call it "true entreprenuership". And I'm betting that once you've profitably built up your business, you'd make more money than if you just kept creating and selling. You don't see Bill Gates or Mr.Buffett constantly changing businesses, after all. And they've been swimming in dough for decades.

The employees method does seem quite cheaty. Definitely sounds like a more convoluted motherlode method.

I read on the BBS that if you use the Sim modder to change servo's age to anything other adult, they take on human appearance, and when you age them back to adult they retain it.  Voila. Android. Haven't tried it personally.

My word!  I'm nearly rolling on the floor laughing here!  Haven't you who disdain all those cheats ever heard of a little restraint? ;)  I have my game absolutely full of cheat-type objects and files, and with the exception of using them to fix up Townies and such and for working around in-game bugs hardly ever use the things.  I do use a lot of JM's mods because generally speaking they 'fix' things and I have to admit, I'm a bit hooked on that Macrotastics>clean thing. ;)  Until recently I also had the 'call everyone' mod that allows your sims to call any sim in the neighborhood.  The only reason I had it there was so if they should've met a sim and didn't (like the case of a cop coming to a burglary) they could.  I only deleted it because I got tired of click-click-clicking to get to my sim's friends when I wanted to make a call.  I think in all the time I had it, I let one sim call someone he'd never actually met yet.

At any rate, I've enjoyed reading Hook's adventures with this whole entrepreneuer thing!  I'm not sure but I think one of the new LTWs for money sims is to own something like five businesses, right?  Can they own these at one time or do they have to buy and sell businesses to fulfill that want?  (Sorry, I just installed OFB last night and am so far having a horrid go at it--and I usually figure out everything so quickly! LOL)

It's not just a matter of restraint for me. Well okay sometimes it is,  :P but mostly I do okay and don't give in even if the evil voice tells me too heh.

It's just that, even if I don't ever cheat or take a shortcut and have no intention of ever doing so, to me knowing that I can, that the option is available cheapens things for me and makes my accomplishments feel less. I just don't get as much satisfaction or feeling of reward for hard work but rather I just feel like I took the hard way and purposely made things more difficult for myself when I didn't need to.

I know there are people who play and are very good with creating their own structure, stories, rules, boundaries etc, but I personally would much prefer the game lay that all out for me. I don't usually make up too many stories for my sims because it just feels like me making it up and it's not a surprise because I know the story. It's kind of like, why read a book that you wrote if you already know the ending? I'm sure some people would but I wouldn't.

I guess it's just a personality thing. *shrug* I do still enjoy the game to an extent, but I do feel like over time both from the community and from Maxis itself, the cheating shortcuts and exploits have gotten more numerous and popular and that Maxis seems to be catering to some extent to an immature BBS crowd that wants it all and they want it now. At the same time, I also do appreciate hacks and custom content that make the game more of a challenge, like some of the stuff Pescado has done (no 20khandout, expensive npcs, harder jobs etc).

But Motoki, if the cheat exists and you don't use it, then you should definitely NOT feel your accomplishments are less.  After all, you did it without cheating!  I don't like exploiting every 'feature' in the game.  I do like some of them but not all (for example, I've never used that one aspiration reward that lets your sims suck skills from other sims--if I'm going to cheat their skills, which normally I don't [it's already plenty easy to gain skills, especially on second-gen and further sims], I'm just plain going to use a hacked object or such).

I sort of do have a storyline that develops as my game plays, but generally speaking it's one that develops on its own, not one that I've manipulated, other than perhaps tweaking turn-ons to make another sim more desirable. ;)  Like you, I like the surprises.  For example, I had one sim I had all set up to marry one of his professors--a pretty little red-head.  Nearly his last day at Uni he met a Dormie, one just as ugly as he was, and instantly they were head-over-heels.  It made for a much more interesting twist in the storyline. :)

Right now I'm wishing I could figure out how to exploit some of OFB's options, though! Ha!

I dunno if that was directed at me or someone above me, but I for one wasn't complaining. The employee bit is certainly a method I'd never use though, b/c I don't like the cheaty-ness of it. I don't use cheats if I feel that I won't get any fun out of them, and if I do feel as such, then I'll use them. I sort of play as 'a day in the life', and I do scenarios and the bit, and see what happens. And for me it's no less fun to play this way.

Like with filmmakers - they definitely know what they're going to film, the beginning, the end, everything in between. But for them, its no less fun being a filmmaker. Knowing what happens doesn't decrease the enjoyment for them. And that's what I like about the Sims, in fact - the power to be filmmaker instead of audience member. And if you prefer to be the audience member, perhaps a different game would be better for you? I mean, aren't there tons of games out there that set the boundaries for you?

No not really. I like roleplaying games but decent ones are few and far between. Most are on consoles that come out of Japan and are trite and overly cute. I don't really care for action game much, if I did it'd be a lot easier to find games I liked. :)

I don't think it is so odd- entrepreneurs do sell new businesses all the time if they can convince someone that is has a good business model or a base of customers to exploit. Isn't this sort of thing that drove the technology/internet bubble? Anyway Hook, I like the idea.

I went into my game, and moved the Larsons (starting with $20,001) from the Sim Bin into the Ranch Retreat house (cost of $10,857).  I purchesed the Wall Phone ($75).  This started the Larson's out with $9,069.00.  I then purchased Little N' Local Business in Bluewater, through the phone for $5,126.  I then immediatly sold back Little N' Local, at a cost of $5,126, the exact purchase price.
Then I re-purchased Little N' Local for $5,126, and called and hired 5 employees, all of varying badges and skill points.  I then called and sold back Little N' Local, at a cost of....$5,126.  Leaving me with a net change of income of.....nothing.
Apparently having employees makes no difference in the value of business.

So my twenty minutes of clicking and 3 phone calls generated me $0 extra cash.

Good to know Twain ;)

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=Entrepreneur

Entries found:

1. A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.
2. A risk-taker who has the skills and initiative to establish a business.
3. Someone who organizes a business venture and assumes the risk for it

"Organize" "Establish" See a pattern yet?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneur

"...a person who undertakes and operates a new venture..."

Microsoft wasn't Bill Gates first venture.  He's now a tycoon, not an entrepreneur.

As for making more money operating a business once you're established, go for it. I even mentioned this at the end of my initial post.

For most people, this will be the first time they've ever heard of this concept.  I've been studying it since 1979.  And if making money selling a business is gamey or cheating, then why does a business even *have* a value?  The value is from the customer loyalty stars.  Relates closely to goodwill in real life terms.  Some people are good at starting things, others would prefer to buy a turnkey operation that's already established.

Until someone can prove to me that the "employee method" works, and give me numbers and exact details that I can reproduce in my game, I'm going to have to assume somene's full of it.

Hook

PS. I'm not having a go at you, idtaminger.  This is directed at everyone.  I just based it off your quoted comments.  Hope you don't mind.

Who cares, I just want your VC money. Hand it over, Hook!

Hook: You just aren't going to let this go until you have the last word and prove yourself 'right' in your mind, except for the fact that I never said you were wrong per say, just that to me it felt like a cheap cheat because it was so easy and it could have been balanced a little bit better.

But okay, yeah yeah whatever, buying and selling businesses in OFB is The Entrepreneural Spirit.

There. Happy?  ::)

Thats odd since I swear that my first furry shop raised in value by almost 20k when I added 5 employees with badges, since I updated the price immediatly after. Will have to play with it later and see.

Actually when I saw your initial post Hook it made me think of in RL when people "flip" houses. They buy a fixer, do some remodeling and sell it for a profit about 6 weeks or so after they've bought it. Some people actually make a good living from it.

I had one of my Sims buy the bookstore today.  He paid $57,500 or thereabouts for it, which entailed getting a $50,000 loan.  He went there with his fiancee and they ran it for several days without staff until it got to Level 10.  I put the deed up for sale, starting at Ridiculously Expensive (a townie actually showed interest, but lost it again).  They both had Gold Sales by then, but in the end they had to sell it at average.  The first townie to look at it bought it (very quickly) for just under $100,000, so they made a decent profit.  It's now up for sale again at $37,500, which means the game has presumably stripped it of all content (I HATE that, why don't they give us a choice?).  The townie has no memory of purchasing it and obviously doesn't hold the deed, even though the game said she was the new owner.

Anyway, it was an easy way to make money, but maybe I should have let them train up a manager so they could have raked in a bit more cash.  I still think that overall the expansion is too tedious, I think more could have been made of it really.  All the emphasis seems to be on customer loyalty rather than how much is sold, which makes no sense to me.

Fneh. Buying and selling a business? Try scamming, in the form of buying and selling an empty 3x1 lot. An empty 3x1 lot can be acquired on the market for about $1400. Now jack the price up to about $50K and sell it. In less than 24 hours starting from a cold start with no sales badges, I had made over 100K in profits just peddling that piece of swampland....and that was when I was just feeling out how outrageous I could get.

Cabelle: A friend of mine as work does 'flipping'. Of course, it takes her and her husband a while to find the right house that's a good value, time to fix it up etc etc. It doesn't happen overnight like in the sims though I'm sure they wish it did.  ;)

Ancient Sim: The selling off of the items and changes we made to the shops is annoying. I wonder if Inge's things stay here shrub would also work for community lots. Also, if you sell to another playable sim supposedly everything about the business stays just as it was though I haven't tried it yet.

I really like the idea that you can buy and sell community lots and businesses.  I have a real estate office in my hood, and any sim that wants to own a community lot must buy from there.  I don't sell to townies, that does seem too much like cheating to me, since they can't own the lot and once you get your money it is back for sale again.  You could sell the same property to the same townie several times in one day.  But selling to other CAS sims that I play makes the game interesting.  I can't make the prices outrageous, because it is coming out of the pocket of another sim I play.  But my "realtors" make a pretty nice profit.  I sell empty lots and established businesses.  My sims can't just buy a lot from the computer for cheap.  They have to get it from the real estate office.

Whether it was his first venture or not, it was certainly a "new" venture. And he's a tycoon now, but noone's a "tycoon" when they first start out. Starting Microsoft was pretty entrepreneurial, IMO.