More Awesome Than You!

I don't know if I'm imagining things but I appear to be experiencing much faster energy decay with BV installed. Sims are sleeping through until 6am as normal but by 6pm some of their energy bars are well into orange and some verging on red. Pre-BV I wouldn't expect them to get tired until 10pm allowing them the evening to do things. I do have a couple of adventurer career rewards in the legacy lot but the increased energy decay also appears to affect sims in other rooms and outside. I'm wondering if it might be activity related as, oddly enough, sims that go to work seem to have a more normal energy decay rate.

I've noticed that as well.  Makes vacations a real pain when all their needs decay so rapidly. 

If you have Seasons installed, be sure to check which season it is (as Winter decays energy more rapidly). It's strange, but working always boosts the energy motive. I noticed that quite some time ago.

Of course working boosts the energy motive. They're probably taking a nap at their desk.

I haven't noticed a significantly worse energy decay, but perhaps your sims need MOAR ACTIVE POINTS. No active points = useless sim. MOAR ACTIVE POINTS!!111

eevilcat, he said the same thing to me when I brought it up in #grah one day. I still think their needs are dropping faster then before. :P

Your sims are just lazy fatasses. My proper sims never die by a mere 2200. Without the constraints of work, they'd be running on 28-hour days.

It was winter, but affected sims included the Pescado selfsim with an active of 8, my selfsim with an active of 7 and the current legacy heir with an active of 6. I think that something has increased energy decay as I wouldn't expect them to be collapsing on their feet until at least 10pm. As a general rule I send my sims to bed by midnight or 1am at the latest. The increased energy decay has definitely only started happening since BV and, in winter at least, the effect is very noticeable. Maybe EAxis screwed up the winter modifier for calculating the decay.

You've clearly implemented it wrong. I'm an active-10. :P Need MOAR ACTIVE. 10 or BUST! ACCEPT NO KEWIAN-BASED SUBSTITUTES!

I will continue watching for thus, but I haven't observed sims collapsing unusually early, mine tend to work just fine.

I haven't noticed any energy decay change in BV, either, but I never play winter.

I noticed it tonight too. I have five playable Sims in a dorm in midwinter, and their energy is plummeting like crazy. Their active points range from 6 to 10.

Very odd.  I have the opposite going on.  Energy seems to decay normally in base and uni lots, but it decays very slowly in holiday lots.  This makes some sense, as I imagine the sims are nicely relaxed and having fun and just have more energy.  On the other hand, I suspect that the beds in the hotels (even the expensive ones) are crap, because they sleep forever to fill up the bar again once it's down. 

Mind you, that might be logic as well - I've been to a number of resorts/hotels that looked good on paper, but had really lousy amenities.

Yes, same here Jolrei. Eevilcat's post made me curious, so I checked it out. I too have a decline in energy decay in the vacation hoods, and normal decay on home/uni lots. So something appears to have been messed around with, we just seem to have different results.

It might be worth mentioning that the particular home lot I was playing is also a home business. The usual ticket machine, pay lots of money to use our facilities sort of thing.

EDIT: The lot has now rolled round to spring and the energy decay is back to what I would expect. I still think that the decay rate in winter is suspiciously high. As a rough guide sims were reaching a tiredness level at 6pm in winter comparable to that at midnight in spring.

It's kind of odd that energy decays faster in winter. Do people really get tired faster just because it's winter? In the past, I've found it was generally the opposite, that the cold and lack of sun are more invigorating, as I can think faster without overheating my brains.

Vacation Benefits can affect your motives so be sure to double check that. If you have SimPE working, check for the token. Fire Dance and Tai Chi may have certain effects on motives. The only global change I could find was that Sea Shells can affect the bladder motive.

The Seashells are particularly sadistic because the Prima Guide publishes the lie that they decrease bladder decay, when, in fact, they do the opposite. And with them, Brynne has an accident on a nearly hourly basis. :P

I've noticed that the Hula and Slap Dance decay their energy like mad...enough so that I wish someone would make a mod to slow it.

I really love the idiocy of the Slap Dance though, so I make sure everyone in the hood ends up learning it, regardless if they've been on vacay or not, and have them do it at any moment they're not busy.

Anyway, my point...are your sims doing a lot of dancing? Because that could be it.

As long as I get enough light, winter is more invigorating for me, too. I tend to sleep deeper during the winter, and heat really saps my energy.

As for my sims, I haven't noticed any difference in non-winter decay. Can't speak for winter as Queen's Cove doesn't have winter.

Ugh, light. IT BURNS!
/me hiss at sun.

It's fall in the 'hood I'm playing now and I noticed the faster energy decay. I'm not making them do anything out of the ordinary. Nobody has been on vacation yet, so there are no silly dances sucking the green out of their bar. By 7pm everyone is in the yellow.

I've played another normal i.e. non-business home lot in winter and that was fine; energy decay was what I would expect. I'm wondering whether it being a home business had an impact on the energy decay or whether it was due to a couple of the sims going on vacation during the winter. My 'hood has all four seasons in the correct order.

Yeah, and I'm pretty pissed off about it, too. Har, har, har.
/me kicks the seashells

We all need to pool our resources and buy Brynne a bigger bladder. :D

I couldn't even read that without getting tongue-tied.  :-X

Do you mean the seashell jewelery they can find on the beach, or do you mean the actual sea shells they find?

That was my intention. :D Sort of a 'we sell seashells down by the seashore.'

Ok, I've done a little more investigating with this and have noticed an apparent increase when someone in the household has been on vacation. The increased energy decay seems to start happening after the vacation benefits wear off. The benefits I chose included the extra want slot, refreshed, productive, industrious and je ne sais quoi. I suspect that the productive benefit is the most likely offender as that affects needs.

I will do some more testing... I currently have my test 'hood stuck in eternal winter. ;D

...but never Christmas.  Best look out for big talking lions at this point.  ;)

I wonder what happens if you choose the more productive, and the refreshed together - do they cancel each other out?  Or have I got it wrong - there's one option that causes slower decay in wants after a holiday anyway.

There is one bonus that actually hurts your work performance when taken: It grants a temporary boost to it, but when that boost wears off, you lose the boosted work performance...and if you were at max already, you will LOSE this if it falls off while you are at work, even if you didn't benefit from it at all because you already had maximum. This can completely hose your promotion schedule.

Heigh ho.  Normally my sims' promotion schedules are hosed anyway, as I have an uncanny ability to choose the detrimental answer on any employment chance card that comes up.  Consequently, I can have a police chief with 5 maxed skills and a full performance bar who is suddenly busted to police recruit, thus not making it to captain hero for another several days.  I can live with the performance bar decline.

Frankly, I think it's unrealistic anyway - after a holiday, I always feel LESS like working in the office, not more.

I've been reading various threads for about a half hour today so far (maybe 45 minutes) and today's responses to my previous posts appear to have a high probability of informing me that things are "clearly" other than what I would think.  I'm not convinced this points to a critical lack of self-awareness.

I personally think I need moar holidays.

You'd think that, but according to your previous statement, you'd be wrong: If you felt LESS like working after a holiday than without one, then you should not be given one since it is clearly bad for morale.

As for more relevant things, here's the full debunking table:

As is indicated by this table, there is no winter effect, but rather, a summer effect. Also, active plays a HUGE role, with 10 active (+ rates) having a much slower rate of energy loss per day!

Even more interesting were the numbers simultaneously uncovered for bladder decay:
Seasons themselves do not play a role in bladder decay: However, the presence or lack of the expansion pack DOES, and the effect is particularly pronounced in Elders and Teens. Oddly, for reasons that elude us, child sims actually have a lower rate of bladder decay than any other age category under any condition. This does not seem to mesh with the way the real world as we know it works (isn't it always the kids who need to go first?), and suggests that someone at EAxis has a very disturbed mind.

Perhaps all the elders have incontinence problems, but that still doesn't account for child sims having low bladder decay.  Counterintuitive, I agree.

I'm missing something on the interpretation end - does this mean that presence of the Seasons EP increases bladder decay, or the other way around?  (My confusion between SZNS and !SZN)

It bespeaks of some strange EAxian fetish to see grown sims pissing their pants, yes. This accounts for why in all the various stories on the exchange and elsewhere, you basically rarely hear of any child sims pissing themselves: They have nothing to do, so are less likely to find some fascinating distraction to fixate on instead, AND their rate is MUCH MUCH LOWER.

The presence of the Seasons EP reduces it (lower decay values) across the board. The actual season itself has no impact at all. Although you'd think it'd be higher during the summer from drinking more.

Duh! I never suspected that, and I should have. I have, after all, extensive experience with Eaxis' sims games. I thought my game threw up on me.

As an aside, regarding kids and bathroom breaks. I remember all those trips, where 2 miles up the road, one of mine would invariably say: "Moooom, I need to go to the bathroom." in the whiniest voice possible.

Ahh, the memories. I hope their kids do it to them, then I can sit back and laugh myself silly.

You have invoked The Ultimate Parenting Curse! Behold the power of, "I hope you have kids and they act just like you!"

(I know it works, my parents used it on me and well, yeah.)

Hah, it doesn't happen in the sims. Child sims have bladders of iron and it's the teens that piss themselves the most (outside of elders, anyway)!

Ahem.. well, seeing as this is agreeably some more poor programming (even if it's (perhaps..) meant as a joke)...

...any chance of you releasing a hack for this? 'Cuz that'd be pretty Awesome.

A hack for what?

Slower bladder decay, I think.

You just showed a table showing that children have bigger bladders than they should... unless you can think of something better, perhaps just swap the teens' and the lil tykes' bladder motive decay rates? I dunno, you're More Awesome Than me - you figure it out.  :P    That would be very appreciated (at least by me); I've actually noticed my teens pissing a lil too frequently, though I thought it was my imagination...

That'd simply swap the problem to a different age category. Based on the CURRENT values, the obvious solution is to simply make the child rate worse, but it's questionable at this point given that this has existed since the beginning whether it's worth the effort.

Motive decay rates are really only half of the story. To get the complete picture, you really need to compute the average combined motive decay for interactions as well. I think once you factor in the effect of the high energy decay from interactions with children, you would tend to see the bladder as actually decaying much faster. It's all a matter of how you view the data.

That's why I didn't bother to dig up the decay rates for things like Fun, Comfort, Social, etc. Those tend to be greatly affected by interactions.

For the most part, very few actions directly impact the energy and bladder motives. The only thing which impacts energy are things like Craftbenches and the Dances. All of the energy-draining actions are readily apparent precisely *BECAUSE* they disturb the natural order we expect as produced from the above table. Similarly, practically nothing that isn't immediately apparent impacts bladder decay rates: It's even more constant than energy. As motives do not "crosstalk", in that the decay of ANY motive is functionally independent, the bladder decay motive is NOT much faster.

Case and point: Which sims are always pissing themselves when left to mismanage their own lives? It's NOT children, that's for sure. Child sims practically NEVER piss themselves, it's always TAE. While elder incontinence is not an unexpected outcome, teens and adults, not children, are the next victims. The numbers don't lie. Should this be changed? Well, the obvious answer is to make the child rates worse than the the successive age categories, but honestly, we've lived with this so long that it's probably not worth the bother this late in the game. Unless you really want it so kids retake the top slot for pants-wetting.

That would be how it should be...

Meh. This is where I wish I actually had the extra time to devote to learning how to do all the technical stuff you guys/gals know... I probably could learn how to modify code, and well, had I the time to learn.... I probably 'waste' enough time as it is just playing the game and reading these forums... if I were religious, I'd say God bless you all, but.. just imagine some appropriately  similar and secular form of acknowledgment.

Meh, I might make it a one-function quickie Undiscovered Shiny.

Yes I noticed since I installed the Seasons that energy would go down faster in winter and fall. As for the bladder it seems for me that in summer it goes down faster

You imagined it, then, because the winter/fall/spring energy rates are the same, and bladder rates are apparently season-invariant.

I'm pretty sure that I haven't imagined it. I was getting something like a 5 hour time difference between when sims needed to sleep in winter and the subsequent spring. It was in your face obvious otherwise I wouldn't have raised the issue in the first place. Are there any other season related factors that affect energy calculations? I'm almost wondering if there is some sort of cumulative effect related to the length of time the game is played which might explain why going on vacation has such as a big impact. Even a short holiday can add several hours elapsed gameplay time that you wouldn't do playing through a normal 5 day winter season. If there is some sort of cumulative time-elapsed effect within a season then going on a vacation could impact energy motive decay calculations.

I had a trawl through some of the BHAVs to see if I could spot any anomalies and while I can follow chains of BHAV calls from a starting point I found it very frustrating not being able to figure out where a BHAV was called from. Is there any way to do this? (Like looking for calls to a particular function in code.)

Anything which unnaturally impacts or desynchronizes energy can affect this perception, but winter itself is not the cause: Going to a community lot will desynchronize energy, as energy is burned without time being elapsed. Drinking coffee will affect energy, raising energy outside of its natural cycle. Freezing will also depress energy, so if your sim turns into an ice statue, he will also lose energy. And, of course, the obvious craftbenches and dances can also impact energy. Winter itself has no additional effect.

I remember in the lead-up to Seasons they mentioned monkeying with indoor vs. outdoor motive depletion.  Not running Seasons 'till I get a better graphics card so I can't tell, but has that been implemented and if so to what degree?

No, and none at all.

That's discouraging, I was looking forward to the outdoor motive boost to balance the sudden need to actually put stuff inside. So you could have a family living on the lawn and getting rained on, but still happy just from being outdoors.

Temperature extremes affect how FBA works, which in turn causes erratic temperature coping behavior. You could view that as a kind of stimulus-response, if not a motive-behavior.

Temperature does not directly alter FBA, but certain actions are programmed to alter their advertisements for better or worse depending on temperature effects.