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Rotational gameplay: What's your flavor?
MsPhy
Posts: 5,055 Member
I have come to realize that when people say "rotational gameplay," they often mean quite different things. My question is: if you're a rotational player, what's your system? I imagine there are as many different answers as there are people who identify as rotational players; I'd love to hear about what other folks are doing.
My own style originated while playing Sims 2. I was always very concerned about Sims ageing at the same rate, so I tended to play each lot in a given rotation for a certain number of Sim-days before switching. This went particularly well with doing the Prosperity Challenge. I initially did this with paper and pencil, but eventually I found a mod that let me set the "day" on each lot and that would remind me when I'd played 5 or 7 or however many days I'd set up as my rotation. Before I left a family and moved to the next, I always made sure everyone was home and in bed. (This was actually a carryover from a habit picked up in Sims 1).
My style in Sims 4 is much like this. I have ageing set for active household only, and ageing off for unplayed Sims (replicating Sims 2 in this respect). I like to play each family for 7 days and will switch at 6 a.m. each Sim-Monday. This way everyone I play ages at the same rate, and everyone is at home and usually in bed at the time of the switch.
So how do y'all rotate? What's your rotational gameplay style?
My own style originated while playing Sims 2. I was always very concerned about Sims ageing at the same rate, so I tended to play each lot in a given rotation for a certain number of Sim-days before switching. This went particularly well with doing the Prosperity Challenge. I initially did this with paper and pencil, but eventually I found a mod that let me set the "day" on each lot and that would remind me when I'd played 5 or 7 or however many days I'd set up as my rotation. Before I left a family and moved to the next, I always made sure everyone was home and in bed. (This was actually a carryover from a habit picked up in Sims 1).
My style in Sims 4 is much like this. I have ageing set for active household only, and ageing off for unplayed Sims (replicating Sims 2 in this respect). I like to play each family for 7 days and will switch at 6 a.m. each Sim-Monday. This way everyone I play ages at the same rate, and everyone is at home and usually in bed at the time of the switch.
So how do y'all rotate? What's your rotational gameplay style?
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I don't really have a set rotation, I just kind of play one family until something says...Oh, you know what? Pitte McCaide should marry Annalisa Gleason. And, then I run over to Annalisa Gleason to build her skills and such up, and change the aging.
However, with the Forumite project I'm doing, I plan to rotate to a new household every hour or two just to keep the craziness going and see how that works. Though I suspect I may want to grab that mod - are you folks still seeing people disappear/age out of existence when playing rotational?
Now I play one family per town and when they are teens I move a boy or girl in and build the relationship from there. So only the ones that will inherit the home gets to get married. I move the others out and they usually end up in the Roomies household.
Saying "not to be rude", then blatently being rude does not excuse rude behavior.
I haven't had anyone go missing since installing the mod, and I check every Sim-day at 2 a.m. I DO have more townies spawning, though, and I don't like that, because if it gets above 180 it will cull townies regardless of the mod. There's another mod that stops spawning of townies; I need to pick that up this evening.
I do have a question for you for I haven't gotten far past my existing household as of yet. Are you getting the same gender births in the other played households or a 50/50 mix? As in my sims so far have only girls and I wondered if I let my played houses have the birth while I am playing another house if I will have some boys for my hood. Hope you understood that for I confused myself while typing it! LOL
Thank you!
Excellent - I wasn't aware of the townie generation one. I'll look into that too since I'm gonna want to keep the world relatively static and open for growth via stuff I control, not more homeless sims popping up in the 🐸🐸🐸🐸 park again >.>
The patch fixed culling of housed Sims, but townies still get culled if you don't have it.
That 180 includes dead Sims, from what I've heard? I've started deleting townie elders now and then so they won't start counting to my 180 when they die off, but I suppose all the dead Sims might count to it. Or is it only Sims I knew? (That still sucks. I might have to start putting elderly acquaintance down if it does.)
I'm playing a rather large rotation right now and only get about 1.5 hours on the game every day (life is so busy!), so I've only had 2 births in-game so far and they are both boys.
One of the SimGurus said that it's a 50-50 chance whether you get a boy or girl, so each time your Sim has a baby it's like tossing a coin. You might toss heads 6 times in a row before you get tails, because each flip is individual and doesn't affect future flips.
There's a mod you can use to change a Sim's name and gender. If you get desperate, you could always try that?
All the townie children in my game are boys and all the teens are girls, which I find odd. I'm not sure what controls generation of townies. I'm thinking about dumping a bunch of the elder townies and replacing with a few self-created families, but it's not a huge deal to me because I don't tend to let my Sims get romantic until they are young adults, and there are plenty of young adults/adults floating around.
Had to start over fresh because my video card was struggling so bad. That said in my first game I had 6 straight girls, EA/game is using a 2 headed coin for the toss I swear!
Game is playing so different with the new video card and I am too! I do think I will try and see if letting the game handle the births will balance it out some. Maybe it was just my video card and all will be fine now. Computer specs do matter as to how your game will play. (personally the GT 520 1GB is not cut out for this game or TS3 just wore it out)
I also wonder if what you start out with makes a difference. As in I started out with a single female and had allot of males for her to choose from as townies. Maybe that made the engine produce more a more male gene pool?
So far I haven't needed or wanted to use CC, mods or cheats. But I will sure keep it in mind for future use if I have to.
Off to start some experiments!
I'm not sure on the last part. There's some mod that tells you what your population is (I've seen the mod referenced in MasterDinadan's thread but have not been able to find it), but it's apparently giving some unexpectedly high numbers. Dinadan was taking a look at it.
Someone in another thread was speculating that birth gender was tied to balancing the overall number of males and females in your population, but I haven't looked very closely at it.
If we delete their urns, do they stop counting?
Unknown. It was a surprise to learn that they were being counted in the first place.
With that said, this is the first time I've played this way. I usually do like @Crackseed and focus on one hh, sometimes even one sim within a hh. But the way TS4 is set up, it's easier, in my opinion, to set up several hh and bring people together when and how you want.
I'm not a psychopath. I'm a high-functioning psychopath. Reaper
I always use Save As. The game will give the saves names like "SavedGame32" with the family name on the line beneath. Next one would be SavedGame33. Then if I switched families and did a Save As, it would be SavedGame34, with the new family's name beneath. I never overwrite my saves. After a time I'll go back and delete the very oldest ones.
I haven't been really rotating in TS4. Not sure why. I have several different saves, but I haven't been hopping around in the same save.
Cool - thanks for that info!
I just rotate as I please - if I'm working on one character getting married or promoted I'll stay with him/her until that happens. Then I switch. If I stay too long with one household, I turn ageing off for a while. But I like to have it on because I lose interest in some households and then I like the game to raise the kids. Although after babyhood you can always send the family back to CAS to update the ages. Excellent concept there.
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