What are the differences between zombies and normal sims?

[gjam]

Memory and assumptions get you every time...  This is getting closer, but I'm still reaching on the window of opportunity...... what do you think?

"The odds of abduction are 0.05% in any stargazing cycle (1 in 2,000 every 5-6 mins).  That's from stargazing with the expensive telescope (the cheaper scope doesn't have the code for abduction on it).  Your sim can probably only manage about 9 hours of stargazing a night (7pm-6am) before collapsing from needs failure, so his chances of getting abducted are about 5% or 1 in 20 per night.  Even if your sim spends every night of his adult life stargazing until he collapses from exhaustion, he has only about a 3 in 4 chance of getting abducted, so if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life.  Remember near-elders can't get pregnant."

You're trying for a canned paragraph to use as an educational aid elsenet, right?  My $0.02 worth:

The first sentence is confusing. People won't understand what a "stargazing cycle" is.  I'd start out with the information about which telescope. (Also, I assume the information about how any sim, male or female, teen through elder, can get abducted, but only adult males get pregnant, will have already been covered.) Then I'd say something like:

<i>"There's a 1 in 2000 (0.05%) chance of getting abducted every 5-6 minutes while stargazing. If your sim stargazes continuously all night long, that adds up to about a 1 in 20 (5%) chance for the night."</i>*

Then your last two sentences about lifetime odds are fine.

* Yanno, on second thought, I'm not sure it's a good idea to go into the 5-6 minute thing at all, even without calling it a "stargazing cycle".  It might be more productive to say there's a 1 in 200 chance for one hour and a 1 in 20 chance for all night. It kinda depends on who your audience is. For typical BBSers, I'd keep things very, very short and very, very simple.  For people who comprehend sentences more than four words long, you can flesh it out a little more.

[seelindarun]

1. Yes it would be good to stick the exact length of the stargazing cycle into the math - you can't argue sensibly about the exact answer if you are doing the maths with approximate numbers. 

2. Incomplete cycles - it's probably correct to include incomplete cycles as the dice is rolled at the start of the cycle. That's not going to make a big difference to the overall answer though.

3. What's still bugging me is the window of opportunity for abduction because it makes a big difference to the answer and because it's a basic fact about abduction.  If a sim could do 11 hours of stargazing instead of 9 you'd be closer to 90% than 74% over the long term.

I came across posts about abductions from the electro dance sphere the other day.  Is that for real or was there some long fixed bug causing sims to disappear from the dance sphere?

I think exact percentages aren't so important.  It's now reasonably established that 5% odds of abduction per night is the correct figure, as advertised.  Even if you do precision math on numbers extracted from game code to get a more exact figure, you'll still have operator error and intrinsic randomness.  You can argue sensibly with inexact math because abductions are coded to be random.  In fact, it would be very unusual to get precisely 3 abductions for every 4 adult male sims who stargaze their whole lives.  You will have players who go 4 generations without an abduction and then get 3 in the space of a sim week, and some will get an abduction in the first sim week.  That's not borkage, that's the random number generator being suitably random.

I would argue that in practice a 90% chance of abduction over 29 days is indistinguishable from 75%.  Why?  Because human experience is simply not that sensitive to probabilistic outcomes.  The player who got an abduction in the first week will have the impression that 5% odds per night really isn't so low, the player who waited 4 generations will feel that 5% is intolerably low, and it will not matter whether the exact figure was 4% or 6%.  You may want to do the exact math to defend your credibility but there isn't much more practical utility to be gained by it.  In the end, it comes down to play style.  What purpose does the player want abductions for, and will it be reasonable to wait possibly a very long time for it?

The electrodance sphere results in abduction and pregnancy if the sim had been abducted by telescope before.  I use this often as a way to extend the fertility of stargazing males.  Teens can get abducted but not pregnant, however they are eligible for sphere abductions as adults.  If you prepare a CAS teen to stargaze through his full teen and adult life stages, the odds for abduction rise to about 90%, based on the same assumptions as above by Novotny.  I've not tried a sphere abduction since BV, but it worked as of Seasons.

*Also of note, I suspect that YA sims cannot be abducted.

[cwykes]

Thanks for your input Giam - I do find that summarising helps me get it exactly straight in my head, but yes I'm looking for a canned paragraph to trot out when the subject comes up elsewhere.  I'll add in another sentence on the EDS thanks to Seelindarum.

I think the length of the cycle needs to be mentioned because I've seen posts saying stop/starting stargazing increases the chances of getting abducted.  I guess that's because the odds are calculated at the start of every stargazing cycle, so breaking into the cycle would give you more chances of getting an abduction.   I'd have thought 5-6 sim minutes was too short to bother myself, but if you keep queuing up and cancelling stargazing, maybe you could double or treble(?) the number of dice rolls in a night.  All that is assuming you can break into the cycle.

[seelindarun]

I think the length of the cycle needs to be mentioned because I've seen posts saying stop/starting stargazing increases the chances of getting abducted.  I guess that's because the odds are calculated at the start of every stargazing cycle, so breaking into the cycle would give you more chances of getting an abduction.   I'd have thought 5-6 sim minutes was too short to bother myself, but if you keep queuing up and cancelling stargazing, maybe you could double or treble(?) the number of dice rolls in a night.  All that is assuming you can break into the cycle.

I don't think it has been established whether the odds are calculated at the start or at the end of a cycle.  Back on that BBS thread, I think Treynutz did do a preliminary investigation as to whether the odds really are greater if you stop/start the stargazing, but I think it was too little to be conclusive.  Given how long it takes sims to dock and un-dock from any task, I'm not sure you really can increase the odds much, however that's pure speculation on my part.  It looks like an experiment for you, cwykes! 

[cwykes]

No way!  I'm an analyst not a scientist and I suck at experiments.  The attempts I made in game to see if counters actually did make a difference to food quality and skill gain, put me right off!  Looked to me like you earned skill quicker on cheap counters, but Prima guide says expensive counters are better.  Turns out it's to do with animations not time.  I gave up at that point!

Here's a new version of the canned para.  You're right - there was an "if" in front of bit about the cycle...

"The odds of abduction are 0.05% in any stargazing cycle; that's 1 in 2,000 calculated once every 5-6 mins.   Your sim can probably only manage about 9 hours of stargazing a night before collapsing from needs failure, so his chances of getting abducted are about 5% or 1 in 20 per night.  Even if your sim spends every night of his adult life stargazing until he collapses from exhaustion, he has only about a 3 in 4 chance of getting abducted, so if you want him to get alien pregnant you'll probably have to resort to elixir of life.  Remember near-elders can't get pregnant.

Your sim must use the expensive telescope.  The cheaper scope doesn't have the code for abduction on it.
The height of the telescope makes no difference (Pescado)
A sim who has been abducted once already can get abducted again while using the Electro Dance Sphere."



Unknowns -
1. can sims be abducted at the tail end of the stargazing period  c4.15 - 6am?
2. how much stargazing can a sim do in a night?  preferably a range for 0-10 active points
3. does stop/starting help? When in the cycle are the odds calculated?  & can you restart quickly or does backing out take so long that the cycle would have finished anyway.

I might look and see how long a really active sim can stargaze of if he has snapdragons to hand.

[seelindarun]

Unknowns -
1. can sims be abducted at the tail end of the stargazing period  c4.15 - 6am?
2. how much stargazing can a sim do in a night?  preferably a range for 0-10 active points
3. does stop/starting help? When in the cycle are the odds calculated?  & can you restart quickly or does backing out take so long that the cycle would have finished anyway.

I might look and see how long a really active sim can stargaze of if he has snapdragons to hand.

I've had two abductions after 5am, unfortunately I can't say definitively whether those two stargazing cycles began before or after 5am.  I usually just park a sim on the telescope and triple speed as the rest of the family sleeps...

[cwykes]

So I was right to suspect that the 7-4 thing isn't actually the window of opportunity for abduction.  That means I really do need to check out the stamina issue.  Stargazing 7-6 would up the longterm odds of abduction by 22%.