Niceness affects how likely sims are to do a lot of romantic interactions. Playful and Seriousness affect things like Serenade and (I think, have to check) Squeeze, so a sim with an extreme trait in one of those should theoretically be more affectionate. Being outgoing also affects it. I'd have to look it up in the Prima guide, which is usually pretty good about the specific numbers involved in those little charts. Not good for actual strategy, but fairly good for the info needed to build a strategy. Or is that "strategery?"

Hmm. I'll put this on my list of "things to be tested."

1. YA pregnancies/abductions.
2. Effect of personality on autonomous affection.
3. Some other stuff I can't think of at the moment.

That's roughly what Prima has to say on the subject. The reason that romantic interactions tend to spread Plagues is that (at least for me) an average smooching session lasts several interactions, and if it involves woohoo it almost certainly takes an hour. Anything that causes sims to spend a few hours in close proximity will spread the plague. So parties are a BAD idea with sick sims.

And I've had sims be sick without getting the little pop up for them, or otherwise knowing that they were plaguified. Parties tend to amplify this effect, since a large number of sims can get infected without your knowledge, if even one visitor is sick.

Yup. Gotten the singles add, the "Your sims would have wanted you to move more into the house," and "You weren't *trying* to kill them, were you?." Heh heh heh.

The main way the sims "die" in my current neighborhood is that if teens sneak out while hungry, they are likely to starve right after they come home, because apparently sims have nothing in the way of all night eateries. This is one reason why I'd like to have NL: I can actually control them on dates, so they don't DIE! Gah. And I had a plague that claimed or almost claimed the lives of a handful of sims. I didn't realize that anyone had it until they started keeling over, and at this point basically everyone had it so I had to quarantine everyone and go about stomping it out. Rather tedious, because apparently sims don't get immunities to things once they had them, so they just kept passing it back and forth. Now I don't save when someone has any sort of disease that I know about. I still miss things occasionally, but I haven't had an uber-plague since then.

It's not just duplicate sims that are a problem. It's phantom sims that don't actually exist in the neighborhood but still have character files because the sim you moved had to have someone to refer to in his family tree. It's much easier, especially with a sim like Nervous who is related to a fairly substantial number of people and has some pre-existing relationships, to just remake him in SimPE rather than actually moving him.

And, I think that the game usually botches the process of moving and imports a bunch of character files that have nothing but random junk in them.

The more character files = the more sims there are to search through using the crappy Maxis made sim-search routines = the more likely your neighborhood will explode and do other weird things when you do something that activates these routines, like using the phone.

Interestingly enough, babies do tend to favor their fathers in appearance, but particularly humans tend to notice their resemblance to their father and remark on it more than their resemblance to their mother.

What in the world would you get for Brandi Broke's kids if you DNA tested them? And what the DNA of alien spawn look like?

The point is that you can make one sim who is not mean and does not like to scowl, and everyone else will make his life miserable for dramatic effect.

This business about the number of families: is this a game issue or a personal preference? Is it the number of families or the number of sims that causes the game to explode? I can see how having a large number of families would make gameplay rather slow if one was keeping them all in synch, but does it have any negative effect on the game's internal operation?

The bunny is very useful, because its mere presence on the lot raises the sim's social.

Yes, it does. Haven't used the painting myself, but the bush can summon any sim in the neighborhood (multiple times, in fact, producing bizarre effects) move them in, and make household sims into townies. It's quite useful, especially if a teen or child dies in an accident and has to be resurrected on another lot.

Yeah, I know. It's just a bit of an annoyance that there's no way to do it in-game. <sigh>

Yeah, it's funny that Americans don't seem to realize that most people who use English also use punctuation. Bit of a culture shock online, for many people in this country. ;-)

France is the same way. For school and train schedules and such, 24:00 time is used, but in most conversation, 12:00 is used unless there could be some confusion. A very reasonable method, too, since you don't have to spend hours pondering what exactly those abominable acronyms actually mean. PM? AM? Who comes up with this stuff? It means something like "post" and "before" in Latin. Demented!

Life is all about finding the punchline.

Say, that would make a good motto.

You've forgotten the true purpose of rugs: to light a whole room on fire at once! Ah, the joys of overlapping objects.

Well, sharpening CDs is really more useful if you're going to use them as cheap concealable shuriken, rather than ammo. And they are fairly good for that purpose, as discussed above.

Wow. That is a rather good point.

MMORPGs annoy me in general. They, like every other computer game I've heard of that sports the title "RPG," are not worthy of the designation. A game where the GM/DM cannot chuck stuff at unruly players is not an RPG.

And a game where players you kill don't STAY dead is no fun. If I'm playing a CE assassin pretending to be a LG paladin in a good aligned party, when I stab them all in the back I want them to be DEAD, dammit! Resurrection is no fun. That's why I like the way Arcana Unearthed/Evolved handles ressurection: you have to tell people your "true name" for it to work, but if your enemies discover your true name you are screwed. And if you get resurrected six times, your soul is altered enough that you no longer have a unique true name, but a generic racial one, so anyone who wants to can find out what it is.

And besides, if you need to kill an annoying player as a GM, you're not being creative enough. Much better to place him in the hands of Dr. Boris's (Unlicensed) Medical Facility, or a variation thereof. (And I mean no offense to Boris. It was just the first Russian name I could think of.)

Yes, a picture or description would be a good thing.

When I play Sim City 4 (haven't done it in a while, since my CD's broken, and I'm not sure if it's worth replacing) my cities just sort of naturally grow in various directions, with no real rhyme or reason to them. Sort of like a slime mold. And they stay fairly safe, healthy, clean, etc. Maybe it's because I've been playing Sim City games for almost 10 years? It's not terribly difficult: this building makes crime or whatever go down, this building makes this other thing go down. Add in budget balancing and a fairly dense and well connected road system (I understand why emminent domain is a major road building tool now. Boom!) along with perhaps a decent bus system, and you're set.

EDIT: Oh, yes, and I usually give family sims the Ecological Guru job, or I use it to abuse the career system by switching careers a lot and making obscene amounts of money. Knowledge sims who have maxed out skills usually get most of ther ASP from romantic interactions with spouses or from aliens. Heh heh heh.

Hmm. Well, I can't think of many specific books, but I know that there are a significant portion of SF literature that deals with societies in which gender changes are fairly common. Sounds like what you're talking about is a more specific (and interesting, honestly) subset of that. I'll look into it, but it sounds rather more unusual than the stuff I was specifically thinking about. Quite intriguing, too.


Sara, that's a little hostile. I can see your point, but I'm just not comfortable with using that kind of tone towards someone who could even potentially be actually suicidal. I've been there, it's not fun, and being told that your feelings are stupid isn't much fun either.

Humour, on the other hand--I can't tell if JMP is being actually serious, or whether he has the opposite meaning, since I would guess that his approach'd be more effective at discouraging suicide than the "oh, it's not really so bad" tack. Ah, irony.

Life may suck, but it sure is damn funny.

I think it may have something to do with deleteallcharacters. I did something similiar because I didn't want townies in my game seeing as I was going to create enough families to make them irrelevant, and the paper deliverers can't go to college. No great loss, seeing as I don't exactly want for marriage material in that neighborhood, but seeing as other people have had the same thing happen, it'd be interesting to know why.

This prestige based last name business sounds most interesting. Would be useful for when I go on one of my tribal organization kicks.

If a family name that I like (stupid townie names are exempt from this) is in danger of dying out due to having no married couples with it that are having more kids and no unmarried males, I usually have one female sim with the name have a kid before she gets married. (With her future husband, of course, to avoid weirdness in the family tree. I can deal with alien necessitated weirdness, but I avoid any other case of sims having kids with more than one sim.) I got into that habit after it happened accidentally and fortuitously, because I had a couple being weird and not rolling up get engaged wants, so I was putting it off, but the woman (family sim) did want to have a baby.

I've got to start keeping my own records of my sims genealogies. I've got a program for it, and it can output all sorts of different nifty things, not just the Sims 2 tree.

Do you have University? Sounds like the portrait you're getting is a zombie portrait, but that would be rather weird.

I'm not southern, but I've had grits. My dad used to eat them for breakfast a lot. Still likes them. He was an army brat, and I'm a coast guard brat, so neither of us really have a region of origin, but I guess his liking them might be because his parents are from the midwest.

They're not bad. One of the few breakfast foods I'll eat.

On the Coast Guard brat thing: moving every four years, you get to learn a whole new set of regional slang and cultural stuffs every time. Fun. Although the Coast Guard mostly stations its people on the coasts (gee, I never would have guessed) and coastal areas in general usually aren't as different as the midwest is from the northwest is from the southeast. Although people who have never lived in Northern California confuse it with Southern Californian culture, which is rather humorous, since they're different in a lot of ways.

I wish there were more configurable options in the game . . . like maybe two seperate power want trees for Rromance sims: one that was all about promiscuity, and one that was about romance but not kids. The "Have a child" fears would come up more for the second one; the first wouldn't really care. And multiple power want trees for Family sims would be nice: one that was about having tons of kids, and one that was more about having a larger extended family, so they would get more "relative gets married" and "relative has child" (I don't know why that's not a want that ships with the game . . . seems kind of obvious.) and wants like "Have/Be Friends With X family members". Heck, while I'm on the subject, having seperate "paranormal" and "science fiction" want trees for knowledge sims, and some more non-personal power wants (relative saved from death, self/relative saved from death X times, relative abducted by aliens X times, self abducted by aliens some obscene number of times, etc.) would be nice.

Also, it'd be nice to be able to pre-configure a CAS sim's gender preference. I guess they didn't put that in because they don't want to be accused of shoving the whole idea of having "gay sims" in peoples faces. They could have at least made a cheat code, though.

Is it even possible to hand-edit sexuality in game?

I think the WooHoo not affecting it thing is probably a combination of technical stuff associated with it being an object-based interaction and the thought that if a sim is at WooHoo level with another sim, they've done enough romantic interactions to define their sexuality anyway.

At least it's not binary. Maxis does seem to grok the idea that sexuality is a range rather than a "gay/straight/bi" choice.

If all else fails, use the teleporter bush. It's one of those handy objects that is good for fixing weird screw ups in the game code.

This is just getting demented. In a few years, I'd be able to give definitive advice, because then I'll know whether the strategy of "unilateral disengagement" works. (I'm a middle-east watcher. I will never, ever understand exactly why they're fighting, but it's a useful excersize for a game master and writer.) However, that might be something to try: tell Rentech that if she can drop it or continue, whatever she wants, but that you don't really care. And then make an effort to be civil to her.

Mind you, that last bit is a good idea no matter what. It's a tried and true method of driving people crazy: being friendly and helpful nomatter what they do. It even works in high school, the world's greatest stage for pointless politics.