Relativity mod and Skill gain

OriginalMara

So since my life span is so epic-ly long, it seems my Sims, and Sims in my town, are gaining all their skills crazy faster in relation to that. I mean, I don't want them to be masters of all the skills by the time they turn into adults! lol

That's where relativity comes into play. However, I do not want to actually alter how time moves, just slow down the skill gain.

I imagine the settings are in default mode so that if I only change the skill-related ones, I'll be fine, and time will stay on EA default.
But anyway, my main question is, I see there is a setting for Life Span Skill Factor, which I would probably use, because of my crazy long life spans... however, is that all I need to do to slow things down? I am looking at the mod's Interactions page... I mean, I shouldn't need to change all the skill gain factors individually to say, .5 or .25 if I already set the life span factor on?

HappySimmer3

I wish I understood how those skill and motive factors worked! Hopefully @igazor will be able to explain it because I've read the documentation but it doesn't really explain it, at least not in a way that I understand! My ages are crazy long too, so I wouldn't mind slowing down the skill factor more than the default speed (which I believe is suppose to take your age lengths into account), but I also slow down time to about 50% and my sims get tired too early in the day so I'd really like to extend their energy factor, too.

ChelleJo

I don't know about skill gain, I usually just play on default 90 but @HappySimmer3 as for energy, I've found that having the decay factor for energy at 1.35 and the delta at .68 my sims are good throughout the day and only need about 7-8 hours of sleep (provided I don't keep them up too long into the yellow/orange) on a 19 speed (which is 50%).

igazor

The Life Span Skill Factor set to True (it's False by default) will work well for many life spans. For these players, the individual Skill Gain Factors would best be used to fine tune individual skills on top of that where the player finds them still too easy (or difficult) to gain. Charisma is one I always make more difficult, for example, and sometimes Logic, with settings of around 0.85 or maybe 0.75 for those.

For players with extremely long life spans, as in the many thousands or tens of thousands of sim days, they may find that the Life Span Skill Factor will backfire on them and make it almost impossible to skill up at all. Or they may find that their sim has to read a skill book for 100 sim days in order to gain one level (or something like that). In those cases, I would definitely suggest keeping the Life Span setting off and setting all individual skills back by a factor of maybe 0.5 to start and then adjust in either direction after getting a sense of how things feel.

I don't know where the tipping point is on life spans where the overall Life Span Skill Factor becomes unusable, but I do know that individual Skill Gain factors like 0.001 are unworkable unless your intent is to drive yourself and your sims crazy.

OriginalMara

Hmm... well my lifespan is 4200 Sim days right now. I will certainly try the Life Span Skill Factor... but yeah it if seems to take too long, haha, I will go skill by skill.

Thanks for the clarification!

I just didn't want to end up with a bunch of people in my town with mastered skills before they even make it to the adult stage.

Off to install Relativity... and then use MC to reduce skill points for everybody who already has a lot! lol

OriginalMara

@igazor - Just a curiosity question... I was going through and down-leveling the skills of the Sims in my town to a more realistic level, now that I have the mod going... and I noticed that some skills had an 'H' by them... and was wondering what that referred to.

igazor

H means that the skill is Hidden. As in, it won't appear on the skill-tab for the sim in the game.

OriginalMara

Ahh, got it! Thanks.