Myths, Urban Legends, And Apocrypha Of TS2 Explored And Exploded

[J. M. Pescado]

MYTH: Something special happens when you reunite Bella from Strangetown with the Goth family, either by moving the Goths to Strangetown or Bella to Pleasantview.
STATUS: FALSE, unless you consider corrupting your neighborhood files something special. Bella will not regain memories. The Goth children will not recognize Bella. What WILL happen is that your neighborhood files will be corrupted by duplicate copies of the Goth relatives and/or anyone Bella happened to meet prior to moving. Don't do this. Absolutely nothing cool happens with Bella.

MYTH: Alien abduction is more likely if your sim has high interests in something, gazes from an elevated platform, or at certain specific hours at night.
STATUS: FALSE. Alien abduction occurs with a straight 0.05% (NOT 5%) chance per cycle of stargazing. For practical purposes, this is somewhat worse than your odds of becoming a road waffle if you dash across the street without looking. If you're still alive to read this, you're probably not gonna see an abduction anytime soon unless you cheat, install a hack, or play the Curious brothers.

MYTH: The Headmaster instantly rejecting a family on arrival is caused by poor-quality yards, furniture, family funds, or other family state. Improving your yard, making your family richer, making the members like each other more, or improving their grades even when they are already above a C will make him more tractable.
STATUS: FALSE. The headmaster's snooty 1700 departure is caused by a bug relating to the saving of your game after calling the headmaster. Do not save your game after calling the headmaster. It is advised that you do not call the headmaster hours in advance. Call only shortly before or during hour 17 (5pm), and he will arrive immediately. Do not save after calling the headmaster until he leaves. If you do experience a snooty instant-departure, the headmaster will perform his proper ritual if called back immediately.

MYTH: Children learn skills faster than adults. Alien children learn skills faster than other children.
STATUS: FALSE. The rates of sim skill learning are fixed and invariant with respect to age. Some sims learn some skills faster than other sims due to personality affinities. The wearing of a thinking cap or the effects of smart milk also increases the rate of learning.

MYTH: Feeding a toddler smart milk results in him learning faster when he becomes a child than a toddler who is not fed smart milk.
STATUS: PARTIALLY TRUE. A toddler who receives smart milk can, in some circumstances, have his skill-boost-rate attribute "stuck" similar to the fashion of a stuck emitter, or perhaps the snooty-headmaster-departure. A freshly nuked toddler may also carry over his effect briefly into childhood. However, this represents a bug and does not occur consistently. Some children may stick and become "smart" for their entire childhood, others may not. No pattern has yet been discerned.

MYTH: Lazy sims require less sleep.
STATUS: FALSE. Despite what is claimed in the blurb text for Lazy/Active, lazy sims have higher energy decay rates and therefore require more sleep than active sims, not less.

MYTH: Parents frequently produce identical children.
STATUS: PARTIALLY TRUE. This effect is actually a bug, the "firstborn effect", caused because the personality generation algorithm of TS2 runs on a deterministic sequence that is reset to the beginning everytime you start the game. This can be most clearly witnessed in CAS, where you will get the exact same series of sims every time you restart the game: Aries, Aquarius, Cancer, etc. The effect extends to babies of a couple, so that if you have a baby, then save, quit, come back later, and have another baby, the second baby will be exactly the same in personality as the first. To break this trend, at the start of every session, you should go to CAS and roll an arbitrary number of sims, then discard them. The number should be be different and arbitrary, or you will simply be advancing the sequence a fixed number of steps every time. The genetics of a sim is determined by various rules of inheritance and can result in similar-looking offspring if you do not understand how traits are inherited.

MYTH: Sims of certain astrological signs have better or worse compatibility with sims of other specific signs.
STATUS: FALSE, as of TS2U v1.0. Compatibility, romantic or otherwise, of two sims, is determined entirely by their present relationship state, personality, and conversational interests. Sims which have low interest in another sim's high-interest topics will have poor conversations and thus build relationship slowly. Sims which have personality types that make them less inclined towards certain social interactions will have slower relationship build. None of this is directly associated with astrological sign, as the sign is fixed, but both personality and interests are mutable. The actual sign itself has no effect. This may or may not change in a future expansion pack.
TRUE as of TS2NL.

MYTH: Thinking caps improve a sim's ability to teach skills to other sims.
STATUS: MOSTLY FALSE. The thinking cap can only affects the teaching of Toddler Walk/Talk/Housebreak skills. It has no effect when used to teach other sims on career objects and will simply waste charge.

MYTH: Brandi Broke's (Pleasantview) third child (at start of scenario) is always male.
STATUS: TRUE, assuming the game is not tampered with in any unusual way. It has been confirmed that the gender of the resulting child is nonrandom and is caused by artifacts relating to the way the Make Character primitive generates babies and the unusual status of the father's character file. Actions like resurrecting Skip in SimPE would alter the outcome.

MYTH: Tipping the service NPCs improves their work.
STATUS: FALSE. Tipping the service NPCs will improve their relationship towards the tipping sim, but relationship has no effect on the actual quality of work performed by NPCs. Sufficiently high-relationship will cause them to ask if you want them to hang out after work. This dialog box can interrupt the flow of gameplay and may be seen as a detriment. However, no effect occurs on quality of work.

[Alvaron]

Myth or the real deal, J. M.: the pregnancy modifier token adjusts the percentage chance for a couple to have twins. You are, Oh Fishing Fiend of Farspeaking, more awesome than me! 

[J. M. Pescado]

There is a pregnancy modifier token that does affect twin chances, but it is not a factor that you can influence: Food does NOT affect the pregnancy modifier token, it simply appears on your sim for unknown reasons, possibly randomly, or in connection with being a twin. In any case, it is not an effect that you can influence through any specific known action.

[Oddysey]

I suspect that Prima writes their guide while the game is still in Alpha, as a lot of the random crapola in those books is stuff that is often a more complicated version of the actual system. Also, the guide for TS1 included some business about "chance cards" (not what they actually called them, I think) where you made a decision. This wasn't in the actual game, but it was in the sequel. I have a hard time believing that Prima invented this out of whole cloth and then Maxis implemented it.

[Hook]

I suspect that Prima writes their guide while the game is still in Alpha

Prima obviously writes their strategy guides from the Design Document for the game.  Many things change between the time Prima gets their version of the Design Document and the time the game is actually shipped.  Sometimes there's even an updated Design Document when the game ships, but don't count on it.   And by then it's too late to modify the Prima guide.

Hook

[SJActress]

All's I can say about Brandi Broke is that the woman will NEVER have girls!  I can't get her married, so she's adopted FOUR different sons: two babies, a toddler, and a child.  I am trying like hell for her to adopt a girl--then neglect all the boys.

[vecki]

All's I can say about Brandi Broke is that the woman will NEVER have girls!  I can't get her married, so she's adopted FOUR different sons: two babies, a toddler, and a child.  I am trying like hell for her to adopt a girl--then neglect all the boys.

Not true.  My Brandi Broke married a fellow by the name of Matt Riffraff (who had 2 daughters himself, Kayla and Layla), and they had a daughter, Bridget, followed by twins Bart and Beatrice.  Beatrice is nearly a clone of Brandi, but with green eyes.

(Layla became a romance sim when she aged into a teen and I'd had hopes she would break her stepbrothers Dustin or Beau's heart, but while they lived in the same house they only ever had family interactions.  She now has wants to flirt etc with Dustin now they're living in separate houses in university though )

[J. M. Pescado]

Brandi Broke *CAN* have girls, but there are a few factors which promote boys. Brandi's third child, the one she starts pregnant with, is always a boy as an artifact of the way baby genders are determined: Because Skip Broke is "unlinked", the child is always a self-pollination of Brandi. In such a case, the game is programmed to always produce a baby that is the opposite gender of the mother, so you're going to get another boy. This gives Brandi 3 guaranteed boys to start with, completely nonrandomly. If, for some reason, you want to give her *MORE* children, you have a 50/50 shot of getting yet another boy. What's more, Brandi is pollinated at game-startup. It is possible, by sheer random chance, for this pollination to result in twins, which, by the rules above, will always yield twin boys if this happens. You can easily get 4-5 boys out of Brandi with very little "random" involved yet.

[SJActress]

Brandi Broke *CAN* have girls

Sorry, I meant my Brandi Broke.  She's got seven kids now (four adopted) and they're ALL boys!  It's driving me nuts!

[J. M. Pescado]

Well, the odds of 4 independent children (your first 3 are fixed to be boys and not random) being boys is 6.25%. This is slightly better than the odds of rolling a 1, which, as any D&D player can tell you, happens constantly. 'sides, you can hardly claim Brandi is having those children at all if you're adopting them from the Ugly Baby Generator.

[Oddysey]

Yep, especially if I've touched your dice recently, or if I'm rolling and I'm the DM. Never fails. Anything with random generation in this game is kinda screwy, and ALL GAMING DICE HATE ME.

[J. M. Pescado]

Heh, you're probably just not very good at at. Anything with 6 or fewer sides is my bitch.

[Oddysey]

My friends won't even let me *touch* their dice anymore. I consistently get not-quite-critical misses and generally low rolls. Except if I've accidentally made some encounter slightly too tough for the PCs to handle. Then all the NPCs start rolling crits constantly and the PCs start dropping like flies. Which would be okay, if this didn't happen only when I *wasn't* trying to kill the characters off. If I try to kill them, then my rolls start sucking again.

[Kristalrose]

Hey, JMP, I'm currently working on a Newbie's guide to TS2 for Worldsims.  Can I include a link to this thread in it?  Because this is good stuff and answers a lot of the questions we get asked over and over?

[J. M. Pescado]

Sure, go for it.

[KLGFCG]

Quick question... does the number of a particular gender in the neighborhood have any influence on the genders of new babies? In other words, if you have more females in the neighborhood, does that increase the chances of new babies being male or vice versa? I seem to get a LOT of boy babies but I'm not sure if there's anything more than odd randomness involved. Thanks for any answers, oh awesome one. ~KG

[J. M. Pescado]

There's a possibility that it's sadorandom in such a manner, but I've never managed to get enough of an imbalance and had enough time to actually statistically rule out the possibility that any such runs are simply random chance. Also, there's "stickiness" in the random number generator which can potentially bias results as well.

[SimsHost]

There's a possibility that it's sadorandom in such a manner...

Did you mean pseudorandom, or was that pun intentional?


Anyhow, what JM said.  I'm leaning toward a theory that an individual player will develop certain habits in starting up the game, entering households, and doing things that would pulse the random number generator.  The random number generator seems to start with the same seed each time the game is started so there is a distinct possibility that you are seeing repeatable phenomena in the sex of the children.

[J. M. Pescado]

Did you mean pseudorandom, or was that pun intentional?

Intentional. Sadorandom, as in "pretends to be random but is actually sadistic".

[SimsHost]

Did you mean pseudorandom, or was that pun intentional?

Intentional. Sadorandom, as in "pretends to be random but is actually sadistic".

Awesomely put.  I'll have to add that one to my list of Bon Mots Worthy of Stealing as soon as I file the serial numbers off.

[cwhitney]

MYTH: Eating specific foods before, during, or after pregnancy increases or decreases the odds of having twins in this or subsequent pregnancies.
STATUS: FALSE. The odds of having twins is modified only by the individual sim: Certain sims are more or less likely to have twins based on the presence or lack thereof of an invisible inventory token. No food you eat will influence the outcome one way or another.

Is it only if the mother has the token that this can happen, or can two sims have twins if the father is the only sim to have said token?

[KookieDoe]

Well, i have to say that....

The ability to learn skills faster than other is caused by ageing in platinum mood

[Hook]

Well, i have to say that....

The ability to learn skills faster than other is caused by ageing in platinum mood

Please post your test conditions and the results of your tests so that we may study them and try to duplicate them.

Hook

[KookieDoe]

What do ypu mean...test? I didnt make a test i just noticed that twins with the same personalities have  learned skills differently cuz one grew uo in platinum

[Oddysey]

It's not true if other people can't duplicate it.