Show us your... Gameplay: Legacy Edition

[Jelenedra]

Gameplay question:

How do you play your Legacy Challenges? They take a lot of prep and record keeping. So...how do you do it? Please to enjoy links to current Legacy stories. Pimp yo' stuff here.

[Zazazu]

Not current, but here are a couple generations of a legacy: Gen 1    Gen 2

I've been thinking of starting up another one in a more traditional 'hood setup with a downtown and supes, etc. for when I need a break from my BACC. I have an Excel scorecard at home that I have setup for scoring purposes. It is decent. I'll attach it when I get off work.

[Jelenedra]

Do you play with the old rules or the new?

The handicaps sound fun; they also seem like they'd help new Legacy players write their stories if they choose some of the more eccentric handicaps.

[J. M. Pescado]

I don't play legacies: It's too much like a checklist of things-to-do, and the characters all die before they you can really do anything interesting with them. Plus, the Legacy itself punishes you for trying to do anything at all, since you'll never finish if you don't basically bull through it.

[Jelenedra]

Checklists are good for people with short attention spans. 

[Zazazu]

Do you play with the old rules or the new?

The handicaps sound fun; they also seem like they'd help new Legacy players write their stories if they choose some of the more eccentric handicaps.

New. Well, whatever is at legacychallenge.com. The last time I played was right before FreeTime, so I'll need to update for that.

I like the handicaps, except I have lukewarm feelings regarding those that require me to have X amount of interest in Y subject. I do not like the pet goals as skilling up a pet once is enough (kind of like playing Uni all the way through). There are other sections I'll get bonus points for, but I never attempt extra pet points. I'll just breed them, rarely skill them.

I don't play legacies: It's too much like a checklist of things-to-do, and the characters all die before they you can really do anything interesting with them. Plus, the Legacy itself punishes you for trying to do anything at all, since you'll never finish if you don't basically bull through it.

I want my characters to die. I like my house building and genetics play, and you just don't get that with sims that don't age fast. I'm only going to care about a small percentage of my sims regardless. Right now, I have 15 playables in my main 'hood and I focus completely on 2, though technically I'm playing them all.

EDIT: Spreadsheet added. Excel 97/2003 version for maximum compatibility. It does the math for you. Obviously, you'd want to edit the handicaps section for whatever you choose. My snarky rule abbreviations are provided for free.

[J. M. Pescado]

I want my characters to die. I like my house building and genetics play, and you just don't get that with sims that don't age fast. I'm only going to care about a small percentage of my sims regardless. Right now, I have 15 playables in my main 'hood and I focus completely on 2, though technically I'm playing them all.

Yeah, but unfortunately, with Legacy, that's ALL there is. It's basically a crash course in how quickly you can turn over 10 generations of sims, and as you can't really leave the lot as a result without making it drag on interminably, you end up playing most of it out on 3.

[DrNerd]

I play with the old-new rules, for whatever that's worth, and the Well-Dressed Sims, Legacy Tree, Storyteller, One-Way Street, and, uh, I think I got another handicap or two in there somewhere.  I'm playing for points as well.

I have a spreadsheet where I keep track of all the point stuff, the family trees, personalities, LTWs, Permaplat status, and lot designations for uploads, so that I don't overwrite old chapters with new, since I had to rebuild my 'hood between Gens 4 and 5.  The family tree is also up on tribalpages, plus I keep a notebook handy with everyone's personalities and Aspirations, as a reference for when I'm playing.  I also have a fair amount of plottiness going, so I have a Word file with all of that written out for when I need it, and I'll just pop open the game in Windowed mode and C/P from Word.  I find that having a plot in there really prevents me from cranking out the generations.  I have to pace what I'm doing, and build up to the big moments.

Have I mentioned that I'm playing a concurrent Uglacy/Prettacy with identical twin founders?  Because I'm playing a concurrent Uglacy/Prettacy with identical twin founders.  Which means I get TWICE the information to keep track of!  But I made the decision not to age the spares pretty early on, so they're still floating around.  I don't mind the heirs/spouses aging and dying.  I like getting fresh blood in there.  Sometimes, their personalities are strong early on, and I regret having to give up the fun ones, but in other cases, it's been more like, "Gah, WHY are you still alive?  WHYYYYY?  DIE already!  You've set yourself on fire three times, JUST DIE!"

Oh, link to Legacy is in signature: Vetinari Dualegacy.

Eh, may as well show off my boys:
Gen 6 Prettacy heir Eratosthenes (Rizzo) and his oldest son Carver, who will in no way be heir, given his lack of recessives and the twins' havingness of recessives.


Rizzo's cousin Simon, who is just purty to look at.


Oddly Hot Badass Archimedes (Archie), Gen 6 Uglacy spare.


Anyone want to guess what three Sims/face templates figure most strongly into his genetics?

Gen 6 Uglacy heir Anaximander (Xander), aka Monkeyboy, after a rough night.

[Ravenwings]

I've given up on both Legacy and Prosperity as too boring. I don't like to do the exact same thing over and over, one sim after another. Maxing everything out for each sim is dull as hell.

I kind of combined the two into a new style of playing. I don't keep track of points, but I do keep copious records. I started a new neighborhood (devoid of all life) and created ten founders, five male and five female. It was part Prosperity because I used the randomization from that and also because apart from these ten there will never be any more CAS sims, and part Legacy because they are all adult founders. I also took the Prosperity method of playing on rotation, but I do it by season because that makes more sense to me. That way the neighborhood stays in season synch as well as aging synch.

If this sounds a bit like playing ten Legacies in one neighborhood, well, I admit the first days of each founder felt exactly like that. That also happens to be the only thing I ever liked about Legacy, so it worked out fine.

I try to give the sims personalities by defining what they like and don't like, will do and won't do. I use dice a lot to determine those things, but some I let the sims choose themselves. No one maxes everything, or even close to everything. They're assigned one or two things and that becomes what they're known for. For example I have one sim whose "thing" it is to use his influence for evil. Every time I take him to a community lot I'll wreck havoc by having him influence fights, pranks, and other evil deeds. Sims have favorite places they go, and places they won't set foot in. They have clubs they join, like pregnancy circles and regular meetings of paranoid abductees.

Each sim has their own way of making money. They can't just do a little bit of everything, like make flowers one day and robots the next and then start a farm the next. They get one thing that they're good at. One sim farms money trees. Only one sim is allowed to own a business of each kind. If someone's already selling toys, no one else is allowed to go into toy-making.

They're not allowed to make friends with the whole freakin' neighborhood, either. That's the sort of thing that annoys me more than anything else in some of these challenges!

[Jelenedra]

Has anyone tried to do a Legacy in an apartment yet? That'd be interesting. Of course, it would involve very careful planning in the building beforehand. Otherwise you'd constantly be moving your sims about.

[purplebunny]

I play/document a legacy that has been ongoing for 2 years now and is currently on Generation 7. There are approximately 40 households at this point. Generation 7 has a population of 75 sims right now and at least three sims are still pregnant. My 'hood has only exploded once (due to my own stupidity and simPE) but I had a back-up.

Prior to generation 6, I recorded only some of the family lines--basically the immediate legacy family and the first circle of cousins. Each generation got a page in a notebook with some minimal statistics jotted down. Now, I use an index card system because I dislike tabbing in and out of the game to record everything electronically. Sims are filed alphabetically by first name and sorted by generation.

Line 1: First Name Last Name-Married Name (if applicable), Gender
Line 2: Personality, Sign / Aspiration-Secondary
Line 3: LTW / LTW 2 / LTW 3 / etc.
Line 4: Parents (or origin, if not born in game, i.e. bin sims from the various EPs)
Line 5: Spouse / Gender Preference
Line 6: Offspring
Line 7: Skintone DNA & Range
Line 8: Dominant eye color / Recessive
Line 9: Dominant hair color / Recessive

On the back of the card I record anything about them I especially need to remember. When they transition to Elder I enter their lifespan (check with SimPE).

I play with the "New" legacy rules but I do not score, although I follow a couple of the handicaps: the one about using no Elixir unless it's moo juice and the storytelling one. The handicaps only apply to the legacy household, however.

I document my legacy on the Exchange. The story does not follow the more distant relatives except when they make the odd cameo, and the writing style changes drastically around the middle of generation 3.

Link to Chapter 1; Warning: contains poor photography (which improved as I went on) and Pirate scum.

I've also written several pulp/noir/satire detective stories and posted them on my sim page. /shameless plug

[Zazazu]

I've given up on both Legacy and Prosperity as too boring. I don't like to do the exact same thing over and over, one sim after another. Maxing everything out for each sim is dull as hell.

I kind of combined the two into a new style of playing. I don't keep track of points, but I do keep copious records. I started a new neighborhood (devoid of all life) and created ten founders, five male and five female. It was part Prosperity because I used the randomization from that and also because apart from these ten there will never be any more CAS sims, and part Legacy because they are all adult founders. I also took the Prosperity method of playing on rotation, but I do it by season because that makes more sense to me. That way the neighborhood stays in season synch as well as aging synch.

If this sounds a bit like playing ten Legacies in one neighborhood, well, I admit the first days of each founder felt exactly like that. That also happens to be the only thing I ever liked about Legacy, so it worked out fine.

I try to give the sims personalities by defining what they like and don't like, will do and won't do. I use dice a lot to determine those things, but some I let the sims choose themselves. No one maxes everything, or even close to everything. They're assigned one or two things and that becomes what they're known for. For example I have one sim whose "thing" it is to use his influence for evil. Every time I take him to a community lot I'll wreck havoc by having him influence fights, pranks, and other evil deeds. Sims have favorite places they go, and places they won't set foot in. They have clubs they join, like pregnancy circles and regular meetings of paranoid abductees.

Each sim has their own way of making money. They can't just do a little bit of everything, like make flowers one day and robots the next and then start a farm the next. They get one thing that they're good at. One sim farms money trees. Only one sim is allowed to own a business of each kind. If someone's already selling toys, no one else is allowed to go into toy-making.

They're not allowed to make friends with the whole freakin' neighborhood, either. That's the sort of thing that annoys me more than anything else in some of these challenges!

You might be interested in BACC (Build a City Challenge). I have two, one which is on ice where I'm going after the goal population in a manner that still seems like normal 'hood grow - that's Highland County. The second, I'm not focusing on virtual population, only trying to up my multiplier when I need a certain level to unlock a career for a sim's LTW - that's Camstaff. Oh, and Camstaffians are filthy rich.

You do start out with a single sim, but can add sims when you earn CAS points. Highland County adds CAS (first through a couple that moved in, then through adoption). Camstaff doesn't.

I do seasonal rotation. For legacies...the first three I did, I didn't play spares. I dropped the first two of those and the third went to gen 11/12. My fourth I dropped at gen 4, after I killed 2/3 of the 'hood in a plague. I randomized who would die, and some of my faves were killed off. Sims don't get maxed skills unless they need them for LTW. They don't get maxed careers unless they need them for LTW. They don't get LTW unless I roll that or if the 'hood is aimed at fulfillment.

[Jelenedra]

Is that kinda like the method of no directed skilling unless there is a want? That was you that mentioned that in the last gameplay thread, right? It makes gameplay a lot more interesting. Even if everyone just spends all their time on instruments now. Freewill, yay.

[LadyArgonna]

The Duncan Legacy, which has survived a move to another computer and a complete reinstall (yay for backups, right Purplebunny?) is getting ready to go to Gen 2 at the helm. Meg Duncan, my founder, is the only sim, Legacy or otherwise, that I allowed to have more than four children. She has 12, and her hubby has twin aliens by the only in game abduction I have ever had. I wanted to get the legacy point for the 10 children/30 grandchildren impossible wants, and I wanted to get it out of the way ASAP. I plan to put the spares in houses, marry them off, and have them have a few kids apiece. The extraneous family lines will peter out by generation 4 or 5, as I wanted this Legacy to have a strong "We are Family" theme, to underscore the dirty rotten scoundrel who's trying to ruin everything...
Link to the first chapter is here.
Please be advised that I'm still finding the voice for the Legacy, but I think I've improved greatly over previous attempts.

[Zazazu]

Is that kinda like the method of no directed skilling unless there is a want? That was you that mentioned that in the last gameplay thread, right? It makes gameplay a lot more interesting. Even if everyone just spends all their time on instruments now. Freewill, yay.

Basically. Of course, in a legacy for points, you'll need to skill up a few sims for impossible want points, plus your Ivy Leaguer.

I wanted to get the legacy point for the 10 children/30 grandchildren impossible wants, and I wanted to get it out of the way ASAP. I plan to put the spares in houses, marry them off, and have them have a few kids apiece. The extraneous family lines will peter out by generation 4 or 5, as I wanted this Legacy to have a strong "We are Family" theme, to underscore the dirty rotten scoundrel who's trying to ruin everything...

Doing 10 kids (well, 14) in the first generation who you are going to play for a few generations is drastically going to slow your legacy progress down. I'd have saved that  for the last two generations, myself. For my dropped legacy that I'd linked to, that's the same sort of issue I had. First gen only had four children, but the second gen had thirteen total. It was way too much, way too soon. Enter the plague and the death of poor, gay, fat Theodore Heuss, and cutie Story Ridge.

[Faizah]

I play a very loose legacy style game. I start with a single sim, plop them on a large empty lot, and go.

My latest was started on the largest beach lot, for something different. The founder is an elder, has over $130k, and is on her second spouse (who was an elder at marriage, like the first was) and has four kids. (One at uni, one teen, twin children.) I'm breeding for noses, I really like interesting noses, but I'm not overly controlling of breeding partners. (Uni student found hers when I let her have autonomy for too long on the SS lot. Usually they just get their highest bolt match.) My uni student and her brother have cute little ski slope noses, not quite the nose I was hoping for. The half-sibling twins might fare better.

I plan to buy the neighbouring beach comm lot when I decide who will be carrying on the second generation. (Probably the eldest.) The founder and the uni student are both infallibly good witches, capable of crafting thrones. I've been littering witchy items throughout, on the first owned comm lot, in the dorm, in the SS lot. I'm thinking that the teen needs to be an evil witch, to balance things out.

I don't cheat, ie, 'motherlode', or obviously cheaty objects, but I do use macrotastics (it does nothing I can not already do in a more tedious manner) and TwoJeffs' ACR (hello uni student's future breeding partner) among other things. Pescado's directors cut is in there, for sure. Expensive NPCs + Nanny + Maid... Thinking of hiring a gardener too. Not that they need service NPCs, there's an unemployed elder and a retired elder on the lot, they've got nothing better to do! (Hmm, the nanny probably won't come now, the Sim whose schedule she was following is retired. I'll rehire her when the eldest gets back, and gets a job.)

From here on out, I'm planning to only spawn once per offspring, picking the random option on TwoJeffs' Trips and Quads mod. (That's how the twins became twins.) Though, I may make the less interesting spares into townies, just to get them out of my way.

Also, I'm a huge geek. The home lot is called 'piece of our leg' ... a reference to a translation from a Stargate episode that was either that, or 'place of our legacy'. (Though it make no sense that piece/place and leg/legacy would be so similar in another language...)

[LadyArgonna]

Doing 10 kids (well, 14) in the first generation who you are going to play for a few generations is drastically going to slow your legacy progress down. I'd have saved that  for the last two generations, myself. For my dropped legacy that I'd linked to, that's the same sort of issue I had. First gen only had four children, but the second gen had thirteen total. It was way too much, way too soon. Enter the plague and the death of poor, gay, fat Theodore Heuss, and cutie Story Ridge.

I do a lot of thinking about my legacy when it's slow at work, and I decided to go ahead and let Meg pop out all the spawn now, because I can go ahead and use the spawn and grandspawn as great plot fodder. I also wanted to break myself of the habit of ignoring anything and anyone not currently on the Legacy lot, something that plauged Jared Simmons, my first Legacy attempt. When the last two younguns are out of college, I'll put up an heir poll on boolprop or something and go from there. But I'm adamant that I play all the sibs. I look at it not from a time standpoint (it's taken me two months to crank out a chapter; I'm not going for speed here) but from a "what do I want to write" angle. Besides, I'm afraid that if I wait until Gen 8 or 9 to pop out all the younguns, I'll forget about it completely and miss out on the points altogether!
I know, I know, I stated in a previous post that I hate heir polls. I should have been a bit more clear. I hate heir polls written by 12's.

@ Faziah - I wish I'd thought of a beach lot. Yoinked for possible later Legacy ideas.

[J. M. Pescado]

The Legacy thing just doesn't work for me, and possibly anyone else, too. For starters, I'm a male, which means I have this goal-oriented one-track mind. Therefore, if I treat the Legacy thing as the goal, I will plow through it with the singleminded determination that is typical of the male mind, which quickly reduces it to a repetitive 10-generation exercise played at maximum speed to farm milestones and points. If I don't treat the Legacy thing as the goal, on the other hand, it really just ceases to be distinct from regular gameplay, and instead becomes a distant afterthought you know you will never finish because the neighborhood quickly balloons out of control without targeted play. Plus, being stuck on one lot all the time is dull. As such, my present style of play is a sort of "play the world" method, with supporting Undiscovered Shinies to enable this. Which makes it sort of like how TS3 SHOULD be, but won't be, because EAxis sucks.

[Zazazu]

Plus, being stuck on one lot all the time is dull.

Yeah, I don't do that. Even playing in rotation, looking at the same house periodically for 10 generations  stinks. I move them around. They lose money that way, which theoretically makes it harder (theoretically...in reality it's so easy to make money that any setback is very temporary).

Decided to start another one last night in a simulated sprawled city, since I needed to play with making terrains again. Even reducing her to the $5000 liquid you get after buying a 5x5 (she's on a 3-wide beach lot), no digging, no OFB action, she had an enclosed 5x6 home at the end of day two. On day three she was in her LTW career. On day four, she was already screwing two possible mates.

[DrNerd]

I guess I'm a rarity in that I don't move the family around a lot.  They're both living in the houses they've had since the Founder got a good Chance Card to the tune of $50K in one case, and since the Gen 2 heir moved back from college in the other case.  The houses are functional, they suit my style of play, and although I wish I'd built them on 4x4 lots instead of 5x5, and the Uglacy lags pretty heinously no matter what I do, I have no burning desire to move them.

The flipside is that, since I'm running two Legacies at once, I'm bouncing back and forth between a minimum of two houses at any given time, and generally have to pop into my villain's house and shoot a scene or two there for many chapters, or play through the spare-types who have kiddies to keep them synched up age-wise with the main-house kids.

If I'm in the mood to play without plottiness, I'll play the spares, or my SimSelf, and if I'm in the mood to build, I'll go into my custom 'hood, which is built on the Alpinloch terrain, which means that I can't use any premade houses, since any premade lots will totally mutilate the neighborhood terrain.  So I have another 8 houses to build from scratch, into hills or down cliffs.  And then sort out the placeholder-types and build THEM houses.

[rufio]

Even reducing her to the $5000 liquid you get after buying a 5x5 (she's on a 3-wide beach lot), no digging, no OFB action, she had an enclosed 5x6 home at the end of day two. On day three she was in her LTW career. On day four, she was already screwing two possible mates.

I have a hack from MTS2 that halves all job income, which helps with the too much money issue a lot, when combined with no20Khandouts, apthack, and making my sims pay for college.  In my hood, it's effectively divided my sims into social classes - the families that were created before I installed those hacks and rolling in cash, while the newer sims and the unlucky offspring of the older ones are pretty poor and living in tiny apartments that they could just barely afford after graduating from college.  I did have one of my rich entrepreneur sims gift her home business to a poor college student on condition that he graduate with honors, and occasionally one of the rich sims who is good friends with a poor sim will transfer some money, but generally not.  Once sims get enough money to start a business, though they're generally golden.  But with the reduced income from regular jobs, and graduating from college nearly broke from paying tuition, that's a lot harder to achieve.

[Faizah]

I just remembered another thing I do. The founder gets a job on day one. (But can change career at any time, via the newspaper, if the LTW career pops up.) Everyone else only gets a job if they are a teen, or their LTW career shows up in the paper. Even so, by the time my founder hit elder, the family had around $100,000, cash. At this point I'm thinking of razing their (poorly designed) home and rebuilding. If nothing else, it'll blow through a chunk of money. Also, I've since realised that I actually like building!

[witch]

Also, I've since realised that I actually like building!

Heh heh heh, welcome to the darkside.

[J. M. Pescado]

Is that kinda like the method of no directed skilling unless there is a want?

That's not even a meaningful restriction, since if you look at the want trees, you'll find out exactly how to manipulate a sim into rolling a specific want.

[Lion]

Zaza, your file does not download well. Thanks for the build a city challenge. It looks very interesting. If not playing it, I'll definitely incorporate elements into my current apocalypse mutate. For the first time, I'm playing the Veronaville. I use all its seven families, but move them each into empty 8x8 bunkers since it's nuclear winter. They loose everything but $1k to $5k randomly rolled.

Anyone want to guess what three Sims/face templates figure most strongly into his genetics?

Cornwall?

They're assigned one or two things and that becomes what they're known for. For example I have one sim whose "thing" it is to use his influence for evil. Every time I take him to a community lot I'll wreck havoc by having him influence fights, pranks, and other evil deeds. Sims have favorite places they go, and places they won't set foot in. They have clubs they join, like pregnancy circles and regular meetings of paranoid abductees.

I like this very much. Kindly share your list of all the "things"?

my present style of play is a sort of "play the world" method, with supporting Undiscovered Shinies to enable this. Which makes it sort of like how TS3 SHOULD be, but won't be, because EAxis sucks.

Please elaborate. You play a family, teleport in the visitor, and make all the residents unselected?