Yes, it's purely flavor text (no pun intended.)  Which, on the one hand, is fairly pointless as you say, but on the other hand makes it extremely simple to change.

And has anyone figured out how to switch the vast sea with fake land? They did it in Sunset Valley.

On a happier note, we do have certain content available that could make this system work. The "Give" interaction mod by treeag from MTS2 allows transactions so we could, for example, transfer items from our sims' inventories to the mayor's when paying taxes. Of course, that would take forever but it's all I can think of for now. A better alternative would be something similar to Monique's Automatic Payment Mod for the Sims 2. God, I miss those days...

I read the post you linked to. Lots of people have speculated that EA was attempting to thwart CC because it makes so much intuitive sense, but so far I don't think anyone has offered any real evidence of this. This guy at the forum talks about a "validation binary" but he doesn't state where he got his "facts" from. Yes, he mentions someone who work(ed?) for EA who he met at a party, but he doesn't specify what kinds of info he actually got from this person. And what exactly is the "big joke" at EA? The bugs? The challenge of "defeating" the modders? What??

He might be right, who knows, but it's a very unclear and unsubstantiated message, if you ask me. And I almost never run the sims while connected to the Internet and I use the no CD option to start the game, which others could do too, so surely if they try to make it mandatory to stay patched it won't affect the player unless they choose to let it. I was even able to install all the new store items by compressing the files and using the 3viewer, and the game runs (mostly) fine and the files show up in game.

Hm yeah, I could try that .. is there any way to reliably trigger an opportunity in-game (provided that it exists)? I wouldn't know how to test for it otherwise. I was thinking there must be a mod for that somewhere on mts, but apparently not.

And is there a way to really disable this kind of thing, seeing as my way of "disabling" it doesn't seem to work?

So after some more testing, it seems pretty clear that the values are min, midpoint (normal performance), max. I'm still baffled by the first question though .. why that sim got a level 2 job without being qualified for it.

I'm sorry for necroing this topic, but I just wanted to point out that there is a third pregnancy book. it's gotten from the medical career as a reading-material-opportunity and is called Gift of Life. The opportunity doesn't say anything about it being pregnancy book, but it has white covers. Noticed when mommy had taken both normal books with her and daddy wanted to prepare for sprog.

This stuff is perfectly accessible for scripting mods; there's really no need to pester Pescado with it. I just took the related code snippet from the BCM and made a stand-alone birth notifier. I'v made a marriage notifier as well, but it's difficult to test it, because marriages are difficult to initiate without involvement of the active sim. And to work with StoryProgression mods, it's necessary that said mods send the appropriate events so the notifiers have something to catch.

Newbie to arr'ing here. Can I someone recommend a good, freeware/shareware virtual drive creator? Yeah, I know, Daemon Tools (Google is my abusive butoccasionally helpful friend), but I can't afford it. Don't get me wrong; I've figured out how to find them. I just want to know which ones are actually good and won't cause my drive to stop working after the 30-day trials ends or something.

I told myself after Spore that I wasn't giving EA one more cent, and this time, I mean it.

Wait a second, what does the link here have to do with the people who can't live without AM? It's not as if this patch is any more compatible.

I also wish they had left the names of the countries out of it, because I feel like it ruins the suspension of disbelief. The only two countries we had ever heard of were Sim Nation and their enemy, the Red State or something like that.

Al Simhara, Champs Les Sims and Shang Simla would have been plenty. I don't mind the cultural similarities, the symbols etc. but calling them Egypt, China and France really kind of irritates me. I look at that text and go "NOOO! This is the Sims! It shouldn't say that!" Those destination names they came up with for both Bon Voyage and those I mentioned above are fine. We didn't need to bring religious sexism and real world grief into this game!

So far, it seems possible to save without having Error 12s or 13s with WA. But it's hard to tell as of now since there are now 10 files instead of 1 save file for each save.

My first attempt did not result in errors but it crashed to desktop during a save and no save game folder was made.

Saving is now 4x longer since each town has it's own save file.

The game does not save during loading from hood to hood but so far saving from the foreign country accesses the cache of that country during save which somehow bypasses some error 12/13 occurrence. So far this is still in theory and still needs verification.

A suggestion: instead of going to the trouble of making these odd ill-designed EA/Maxis careers so that only one person can reach the top, why not just tweak the language of the scripts so that they're not illogical if multiple sims reach the top?  For example, if we assume that Sunset Valley and Riverview and any other future Sim Cities are diplomatic hubs, such as New York, Washington, London, Geneva, etc., it would make sense to have high level politicians in these cities from multiple countries.  Every patriot thinks his/her country is at the top of the "free world", so "leader of the free world" could be consistent with president or diplomat of one's own country, etc.  With some creativity, one could rewrite the descriptions for the political career track so that it wouldn't be illogical to have multiple sims in the same city with the same job description at high level jobs.  Same goes for the criminal track if one assumes that there are multiple crime families and one gets promoted to head of the family.

What do you think?

And, barring that, for those of us willing to play "let's pretend" we're in such a diplomatic city, how about making the "There can be only one" mode optional?  :-)

If you don't buy from the store don't buy from the store, but don't spoil the fun for everybody. For many simmers, the Sim Store is an invaluable service.