More Awesome Than You!

Is there a way to activate all of the "encourage" options so that sim parents can undo some of the severely lopsided personalities of their children, rather than being limited to encouraging only those attributes they as parents possess?  I like cheating as little as possible and don't want to resorting to an outright cheat like the InSimenator to do this.

Grandparents are your friends? I mean, unless you want to change personality points with boolprop (definitely cheaty), try looking around at other family members. Grandparents can encourage kids who come over for a visit.

For various reasons I've never been able to keep a neighborhood around long enough to actually produce some grandparents (i'm still working on trying to graduate my first batch of students from college for the fourth time now).  I hope one day to be able to create a modified mirror that will allow sims to encourage themselves into a new personality, but until then I'm looking for alternative ways to balance them out.

Aunts and uncles also have encouraging power.

None of those either... same reason as above.

My approach to sims has always been to start a neighborhood, nuke its inhabitants, and build a bunch of my own sims.  After a few test neighborhoods I started one that was supposed to be my one and only neighborhood that I had absolute control over.  The whole neighborhood was wiped out in a freak accident.  I tried again, but this time I overpopulated my neighborhood and set it aside for a while.  I'm trying two new experiments in sims.  The first a neighborhood with all default characters and their babies, and only one playable family and their descendants (usually only one baby allowed per family, unless twins change that, then one lives a childless life).  The second is a neighborhood free of the crappy default characters, four families each allowed only two children per generation (none of this "multiply and replenish the hood" philosophy that clogged my old neighborhood).

Bottom line, I've never developed a neighborhood enough to have these kinds of relationships.  This is why I don't run for mayor in real life... all of my towns either blow up, burn to the ground, or are swept clean of life in an undesirable way.

Sounds like you should try playing a legacy, just to get you past Gen 2.

That's what I've decided to do, I've never made it past Gen 2. This time I have ONE family. I usually start with an assortment of lots, by the time the kids move out I have 10 lots to play and it starts becoming a task to play them all equally.

Also starting that way, I tend to have boring nuclear families, instead of the more interesting storylines that happen during play.

Yes, you need to get a family to Gen 4 or 5 before you get interesting fake wife twists, and people with 3 bolts for their great-aunts.

I typically restart neighbourhoods frequently, and are always usually themed. At the moment, I started eight families off with the prior hood first generation characters as toddlers. The smart milk bug is awesome. No townies at the moment, though a few generations on I'll have to generate to keep a legacy going. My best experience was doing the Asylum challenge and in the end retaining the hood long after completion. Planning new hoods appears to be my specialty, just not keeping interest in continuing a concept.

Squinge made an Encourage Anyone hack which can allow friends of the family to help out.
http://www.insimenator.net/showthread.php?t=15986

Thanks for the lead.  I was dreading having to dig through his whole catalog to find something like this.  I'd still rather have parents able to encourage all traits (on both sides of the meters), but this will have to do until I can actually learn modding and figure out how to make my daily affirmation mirror.

Well, the quality of a "lopsided" attribute is often a matter of opinion in many cases, but encouraging is intended to work in this way. It's pretty hard to encourage someone to do one thing when you yourself insist on doing the wrong thing!

Aww, no "do as I say, not as I do"?

That never works out well in real life anyway. Your kids just grow up to be lying hypocrites like you.

Maybe though, parents can learn from their frack ups and encourage their kids to do better/the opposite?  I didn't know this is how the game worked since right now, I've only got babies and I haven't been able to play past that yet.  If we're going for what's realistic, parents should be able to encourage their kids to do everything, not just the qualities/skills whatever they have, but the effect of said encouragement should be stronger with those attributes the parents actually have. Then again, I know people who turned out to be the opposite of what their parents encouraged them to be, having had (the parents) those attributes.

Question:  I've seen this referred to countless times but am not sure what it is...what's a Legacy family, actually?

http://www.legacychallenge.com (http://www.legacychallenge.com)

By "lopsided" I mean personalities that are going to lead to behavior that will annoy me if I don't control their every move, and even then require some cheats to override other obnoxious stuff.  Maybe it would be easier to randomize all baby personalities as a matter of policy from now on, since in my real family none of us four child bear any personality resemblance to either of our parents or to each other.  Realism, and all that crap.

I do tend to want to make all sims uber-active and uber-neat (except emailers, when I had my gutful of slobs), and to encourage them not to be too mean, and not so playful that they can't meditate... but then all their personalities start to get more and more similar.

I tend to lean towards the uber-active as well, because there's really no drawback to it. Not to mention the inability to actually get anywhere is enough to inspire homicidal rage. The other personality traits I'm indifferent to, as they're largely zero-sum. Except niceness. I like my sims to be MEAN! MEAN, I tell you!

If for some reason that hack doesn't work  out for you, you should know that older siblings can encourage younger ones also. And they can continue to encourage their younger siblings pretty much forever, I think.

If you don't mind cheating "just a little" then you could create a CAS teen with the "right" attributes and force him or her into your family in any variety of less than perfectly honest ways. You could also create a CAS aunt or uncle or grandparent, for that matter.

CAS grandparents always seem to pop their clogs so quickly. You need to make a really happy one and keep him/her topped up with elixir.

I'm so happy to see I'm not the only one who never gets much past the first Gen.... I've finally started my legacy family for exaclty this reason.

/me laughs.

Pop their clogs!

That's a new one.

Is it a myth that grandparents get faster results when encouraging children?

No myth.  The bigger the age difference between the encourager and the encouragee, the faster the encouragement goes.

You'd love my second generation then. From perfectly nice, adorable sim-parents, I had 8 kids from different families, all with good personality combos, except they were all MEAN. 1 Nice point for each. Had to do something about that of course :D hehe