Rotation, do you do it? If so, how?

Ayumap

So, I'll admit I've played Sims 2 more than my Sims 3 game so far even though I do enjoy the Sims 3. One thing that's been holding me back is the fact that I love to play rotationally but, I don't like the idea of my sims "progressing" without me. (at least to an extent) I've tried to play by rotation per save, but I want to expand on families and play different family members in different houses. Is this possible?

I've tried to look up Sims 3 rotation, but never really found anything relating to what I was looking for. I just kept seeing that turning off story-progression doesn't actually stop it. Is this true?

I guess what I really want to know is (what the title suggests); do you play rotationally? If so, what have you found to be the best way or most manageable way to do so. Any tips or helpful mods?

I use a few mods from the Nraas website, but I don't think I've come across any that help with disabling certain story progression aspects.

I guess my biggest gripes are: I don't want families moving out of the town or getting deleted. I don't want people divorcing or starting romances while in a relationship (cheating), and if possible I don't want sims to be progressing in work. (Though I guess I could settle not to have that one)

Karritz

I do all sorts of things. I move from household to household but more often I pick a household and move sims from other households through it.

Ayumap

Karritz wrote: »

I do all sorts of things. I move from household to household but more often I pick a household and move sims from other households through it.

Are there any notable issues that you think you face? If so, what are they? I know some players actually really like story progression and sims living their own lives without them (the player). I find myself a bit more controlling lol.

I like the idea of moving sims between worlds (saving them to the bin and transferring them) but I've been too scared that once I do my sims will start leading lives that don't fit with a particular story that I want to tell.

TreyNutz

Ayumap wrote: »

I guess my biggest gripes are: I don't want families moving out of the town or getting deleted. I don't want people divorcing or starting romances while in a relationship (cheating), and if possible I don't want sims to be progressing in work. (Though I guess I could settle not to have that one)

NRaas StoryProgression disables emigration by default. I think by putting your households in custom castes you can prevent relationship changes. I'm not sure about stopping career progression. Anyways, you might find this link useful:

http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+Progression+Rotational+Caste+Settings

Ayumap

TreyNutz wrote: »

Ayumap wrote: »

I guess my biggest gripes are: I don't want families moving out of the town or getting deleted. I don't want people divorcing or starting romances while in a relationship (cheating), and if possible I don't want sims to be progressing in work. (Though I guess I could settle not to have that one)

NRaas StoryProgression disables emigration by default. I think by putting your households in custom castes you can prevent relationship changes. I'm not sure about stopping career progression. Anyways, you might find this link useful:

http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+Progression+Rotational+Caste+Settings

Thank you! That'd be the biggest help. I'll take a look into it asap. This sounds like it would really help me move forward in my sims 3 saves.

Karritz

I find my sims don't do much. But that may be because I have so many of them that the computer can't cope with giving them too much to do. The few things that do annoy me could be stopped by making adjustments to NRAAS Story Progression but I don't tend to bother. They will move to a different house if their current house has too many Sims in it and not enough beds for everyone. I have about 300 Sims in my town and I'm trying to play all of them. Not very realistic but I find I like to get to know them all. With that many Sims I find I am less concerned about them doing their own thing than I was when I had only a single extended family that I was trying to control.

I have found that if you rotate Sims though a house then they drop in autonomously a lot after you've moved them back to their own homes. This happens even with EA's Story Progression. I find that fun to have friends and relatives of my currently active family drop in to visit. Sometimes they even curl up in a spare bed and stay the night.

Ayumap

Karritz wrote: »

I find my sims don't do much. But that may be because I have so many of them that the computer can't cope with giving them too much to do. The few things that do annoy me could be stopped by making adjustments to NRAAS Story Progression but I don't tend to bother. They will move to a different house if their current house has too many Sims in it and not enough beds for everyone. I have about 300 Sims in my town and I'm trying to play all of them. Not very realistic but I find I like to get to know them all. With that many Sims I find I am less concerned about them doing their own thing than I was when I had only a single extended family that I was trying to control.

I have found that if you rotate Sims though a house then they drop in autonomously a lot after you've moved them back to their own homes. This happens even with EA's Story Progression. I find that fun to have friends and relatives of my currently active family drop in to visit. Sometimes they even curl up in a spare bed and stay the night.

Thanks for sharing your experience with me. That's a lot of sims you play! Can't say I blame you though, there have to be a lot of interesting stories with so many different sims.

I'd love to see sims come by and visit and stay over. Feels very life like. I'm glad to hear that you don't find yourself facing too many issues with rotational play in the Sims 3. You and @Treynutz have really got me excited for my Sims 3 future.

I wanted to ask people sooner, but I felt a bit.. idk, dumb? I'm glad to see that I had nothing to worry about in asking for help/opinions here.

Thanks for your replies, both of you. I really appreciate it.

jonas3333

I never understood how people complained about rotation issues and begged for Sims2 type of gameplay. Since we eventually got the option to set the lives of the sims to longer and personalized amount of days, rotation is easy as not a lot happens if your teens have, like, 45 days before they become young adults, etc. and you have plenty of time to play multiple households. I give my sims longer periods during teen and young adult/adult times and increase child some and toddler just a little bit. Babies don't get bonus time cuz boring for me and I usually cut the elder's days as I'm done with them by that time and don't need them stickin' around and taking up lot space.

I also use mods and would never consider EA story progression for even a generation. That emigration rule is ridiculous and infuriating.

If, while you're playing a family, a different household gives birth or something, it's easy enough to change the name of the child and focus on them for a day or two if necessary. The little things that happen while you're away can be appealing rather than frustrating.

Rukola_Schaaf

i play both depending on the game, rotationally through the whole town or
only one family or even one sim with the rest of the town moving forward on their own without my big intereference, marying, geting children, geting divorced, moving out & in, dying ...
i played also often rotationally with story progression on, i play that way, if i have nothing specific in mind, just enjoying the scenery & what the game throws at me, tweaking here & there something & seeing then the sims appearing somewhere with new kids, it's quite fun but of course not the playstyle if you have specific town interactions in mind

i play with several NRaas mods & tweak the town as far i only can to my liking

i am currently playing a very controlled rotational town, with aging & story progression off, also with heavy tweaks in NRaas mods to prevent the sims in the game from progressing, especially preventing them from moving out & in, falling in love, getting children, dying

i am at the moment setting the entire population of Monte Vista completely anew
there are currently around 70 sims living in ca 35 households, all sims made from scratch along my ideas & stories for them, i played them all in Bridgeport already, but it didn't work like i intended so i moved them all with their skills & job progress & job position to Monte Vista, which suits it better
they have to meet each other again, since they lost all their relationships between the households while moving to the new town, but since it takes a lot of time to set the town to my liking & aging is off so they have now plenty of time to progress in their friendship & enemy building which are still on as sims interactions enabled, enabled as story progression is also the job progress

i was never a big builder in any of the sims games, so if i can only manage it somehow so i prefer to play with the original houses, changing them & expanding on them only

after i removed all residing Maxis' sims out of the original Monte Vista houses & moved all of my sims in, then i've activated at first one sim & did create then his entire family through two generations backwards
i played him as the main sim for several sessions, setting his life to my liking with an own buttler residing with his townhouse
after his life was already on the right track i moved then to his parents to make his upbringing believable
& then corrected the lives of both sides of the grandparents
the first sim with the buttler is living separate, the parents are living their own life in an own house & both sides of the grandparents are living also separate in own houses, those are 4 households already with one aunt living together with one of the grandparents' households

meantime i am moving through the other households in the town doing next along my mood, setting their lives anew & correcting everything to how it has to run, correcting their character if it's not working as it should on its own, changing the clothing, extending the clothing since i installed now for the first time the Seasons expansion, so they all need winter clothing additionally, furnishing their houses to how they are intended to live, tweaking the jobs, even tweaking the skill level & job position if needed by hand (i did that with the grandparents of the first sim to speed up their life & move the entire family of those 8 sims to what i intended for them)

my current game is very strict in what i have in mind, it's important for me to have those sims living a very specific life & i am trying especially to get the sims' traits matching how they have to behave & omitting as far as possible how they shouldn't live
& since families with children are rather strenous & elaborate to play, so i won't have many of them, currently there are no children or teens in town, there are also no babies or toddlers, those sims at the moment are starting their lives first, the families building forwards will come after i tweaked the families of the main sims backwards as i described with the first sim

TS3 has two major limitations for me though,
the one is the absence of any consistent self employed store or restaurant owner (TS2 OFB)
the other is the limitations to apartments (TS2 AL)
i miss both feature really badly from how they worked in TS2, in TS3 i have to workaround those limitations to get at least the core parts of my stories to work like they should

in TS3's apartment buildings is only one of my own sims allowed to live, the other households have to be pure NPCs
i have to tweak my stories to match that limitation, currently i remade one of Monte Vistas bigger houses with 5 apartments but only that one with my own active sim is occupied the other 4 are at the moment still empty

Scrapdash

I rotate households a LOT, have always played this way. But I don't use Story Progression either. You always have the option to turn that off.
I used to play with ageing off too, but now have my ages set to really long, so it will take a teen 50 days to age up for example. If someone has aged up a bit too much for your liking, you can always have them eat life fruits or create the elixir to make them young again.

My town still moves forward, but I'm such a control freak I use Master Controller to marry people, have them get pregnant etc.
Nothing really dreadful will happen to the families you rotate out of, my sims always have several death flowers, but death is so rare anyway I'm sure they'd be fine. I only once had a couple split up when they weren't the active family, but that was actually quite entertaining as they played out their very bitter breakup in public.

TadOlson

I'm one of the biggest rotational players with my legacies and I've had to load up 90 NRaas Mod files and heavily customize the settings in story progression with custom castes for each household to make sure I can regain control of them without finding they've made unwanted changed in my absense.I've got a few legacies where I've been rotating between families in a single game.I have to do most of the story progression manually like in TS2 and I really don't mind that at all.I've been using the same story progression settings for almost two years now and it's caused no issues with rotational play unless I set something wrong by mistake.

Mrknowitall526

Rukola_Schaaf wrote: »

i play both depending on the game, rotationally through the whole town or
only one family or even one sim with the rest of the town moving forward on their own without my big intereference, marying, geting children, geting divorced, moving out & in, dying ...
i played also often rotationally with story progression on, i play that way, if i have nothing specific in mind, just enjoying the scenery & what the game throws at me, tweaking here & there something & seeing then the sims appearing somewhere with new kids, it's quite fun but of course not the playstyle if you have specific town interactions in mind

i play with several NRaas mods & tweak the town as far i only can to my liking

i am currently playing a very controlled rotational town, with aging & story progression off, also with heavy tweaks in NRaas mods to prevent the sims in the game from progressing, especially preventing them from moving out & in, falling in love, getting children, dying

i am at the moment setting the entire population of Monte Vista completely anew
there are currently around 70 sims living in ca 35 households, all sims made from scratch along my ideas & stories for them, i played them all in Bridgeport already, but it didn't work like i intended so i moved them all with their skills & job progress & job position to Monte Vista, which suits it better
they have to meet each other again, since they lost all their relationships between the households while moving to the new town, but since it takes a lot of time to set the town to my liking & aging is off so they have now plenty of time to progress in their friendship & enemy building which are still on as sims interactions enabled, enabled as story progression is also the job progress

i was never a big builder in any of the sims games, so if i can only manage it somehow so i prefer to play with the original houses, changing them & expanding on them only

after i removed all residing Maxis' sims out of the original Monte Vista houses & moved all of my sims in, then i've activated at first one sim & did create then his entire family through two generations backwards
i played him as the main sim for several sessions, setting his life to my liking with an own buttler residing with his townhouse
after his life was already on the right track i moved then to his parents to make his upbringing believable
& then corrected the lives of both sides of the grandparents
the first sim with the buttler is living separate, the parents are living their own life in an own house & both sides of the grandparents are living also separate in own houses, those are 4 households already with one aunt living together with one of the grandparents' households

meantime i am moving through the other households in the town doing next along my mood, setting their lives anew & correcting everything to how it has to run, correcting their character if it's not working as it should on its own, changing the clothing, extending the clothing since i installed now for the first time the Seasons expansion, so they all need winter clothing additionally, furnishing their houses to how they are intended to live, tweaking the jobs, even tweaking the skill level & job position if needed by hand (i did that with the grandparents of the first sim to speed up their life & move the entire family of those 8 sims to what i intended for them)

my current game is very strict in what i have in mind, it's important for me to have those sims living a very specific life & i am trying especially to get the sims' traits matching how they have to behave & omitting as far as possible how they shouldn't live
& since families with children are rather strenous & elaborate to play, so i won't have many of them, currently there are no children or teens in town, there are also no babies or toddlers, those sims at the moment are starting their lives first, the families building forwards will come after i tweaked the families of the main sims backwards as i described with the first sim

TS3 has two major limitations for me though,
the one is the absence of any consistent self employed store or restaurant owner (TS2 OFB)
the other is the limitations to apartments (TS2 AL)
i miss both feature really badly from how they worked in TS2, in TS3 i have to workaround those limitations to get at least the core parts of my stories to work like they should

in TS3's apartment buildings is only one of my own sims allowed to live, the other households have to be pure NPCs
i have to tweak my stories to match that limitation, currently i remade one of Monte Vistas bigger houses with 5 apartments but only that one with my own active sim is occupied the other 4 are at the moment still empty

Wow! I have yet to try to rotate through a whole town but I like the way you're playing!

And yes I too miss OFB. I never had AL but wish I did! If you're really into playing apartments, I made a mod over on MTS that stops the random controllable Sims from appearing around 2 AM on Apartment lots. I also have expanded the roommates system so it works on multiple lots, not just one, and also tweaked the way rent is paid when roommates is enabled. Also, you can now enable roommates by phone on Apartment lots. I mainly created it so I could rent houses from the beginning for poorer Sims instead of purchasing a lousy house. Look for "Apartments & Roommates Fix" on MTS if you're interested!

Jessa_Dakkar

I definitely do rotational play. I sometimes jump between families every few minutes. What helps me with this is the NRaas Master Controller mod. I can click on any sim, household or even icon in my currently played sim's friends list and in a few quick clicks be playing another family without having to jump to map view and edit town.

What else helps me are the self-employed careers. I have a house with three elderly ladies and the game kept wanting to put them in the science career and hospital career, so I made them self-employed writers and gardeners. Even though they don't do any of that, it keeps them from being placed elsewhere. Otherwise I have had no issues with sims being moved from one job to another while I am playing a different family. I have also been lucky that my sims keep their relationships. If they don't, I will be fine with that. I don't create the sims to control every moment but set things up so that they can live their lives without much input from me.

Ayumap

I'm a bit surprised I've gotten so many replies! (pleasantly) I read through all of your post and it's interesting to see where everyone differs in what they allow and don't allow for their sims. Thanks for sharing with me.

@jonas3333 - I'll be honest, I listened a lot to just what I read. I seen a lot of people saying it's not possible to play rotationally in the Sims 3 unless you wanted to do it by save and that that I wouldn't have the same amount of "control" over what was allowed and what wasn't. I guess there are just a lot of misconceptions.

As for aging; that's one thing I dislike about the sims 2. Having to use the no aging cheat to feel like I'm getting enough time in my sims lives. I don't tend to play with aging on as I prefer to age sims up at my own pace, but it feels a lot better being able to have certain life stages age up "naturally" when I do want to use aging on.

@Rukola_Schaaf - You sound really busy! lol. I'm not great at building either, but I do alright. Monte Vista is my favorite world, I don't think I could even begin to be able to replace all those homes and I wouldn't want to! Reading your post made me start adding "goals" that I want to meet for my own towns some day. I love how vast and connected your world seems to be.

As for business running in the Sims 3... I heard there were a few things in the Sims 3 store that never really got any where near OFB and were buggy. I take it they really aren't worth the money to buy? It's a bit sad to see that's not really an aspect you're able to enjoy in the Sims 3. It's really fun in the Sims 2 (as I'm sure you're aware)

@Scrapdash Thanks for mentioning the death flower, I'll have to look into them because it sounds like you have a good idea there. I'm always scared to have Murphy beds, vending machines, and jelly bean trees around because I'm scared a sim is going to die lol. I'm a bit of a control freak myself.

@TadOlson That sounds... well just pretty awesome. You obviously put a lot of work into making those Nraas mod files. I'm still very much a noob when it comes to using and customizing Nraas. I just barely found out the other day how to save settings, not 100% sure I did it right though. I think I'm slowly understanding how to use the mod more and more. Seems it's a lot more detailed in what a user can do with it than I originally thought.

@Jessa_Dakkar - I had no idea you could change households that way with Nraas. That sounds like it'll come in handy when playing children or siblings who have moved out from the home. There's so much info here I'm trying to note to myself lol. Feel like I should write these things down for sure. Thanks for the tip on making people "self-employed" so that the game doesn't attempt to assign them a career!

igazor

If the self-employed trick seems too artificial for some, there is a custom "Unemployed" career add-on available with the NRaas Careers mod. No hours, pay, or retirement plan, it's just a placeholder non-career that helps stop the game from dragging inactive sims into other jobs when you don't want it to as it sees them as already employed.

If you speak to ten players at NRaas about how they play rotationally, you will likely get ten very different strategies they use to make this work. Some are not as interested and only want to concentrate on one household per game. Some do want to rotate through and micro-manage the entire world they are playing in, others want to concentrate on maybe 2-3 households or (as in my case) maybe a few more than that but allow the rest of the town around them to progress more "naturally" on their own though under certain guidelines.

The page that @TreyNutz links to above and I'll repeat here was actually just put up a few days ago in response to so many requests for such ideas. It may look intimidating for those just getting started with NRaas StoryProgression. But once you get into it, it's also not a bad way to learn about how the various settings and castes work. The Option One you will see there (that one's mine) is just one approach, the one that kind of evolved for me as I played alongside Twallan's earlier development of the StoryProgression mod -- we didn't even have castes back then, but they made it so much easier to manage similar batches of settings. It's still the way I play today. Option Two is that of another NRaas Organizer who takes a slightly different approach but still only plays around 10 households herself. We will hopefully have other options spelled out in time as players get around to documenting what has worked for them.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+Progression+Rotational+Caste+Settings

If anyone has any questions about how this all works or has suggestions to add, we would be happy to hear them.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/page/messages/Chatterbox
(free registration required to post)

Ayumap

igazor wrote: »

If the self-employed trick seems too artificial for some, there is a custom "Unemployed" career add-on available with the NRaas Careers mod. No hours, pay, or retirement plan, it's just a placeholder non-career that helps stop the game from dragging inactive sims into other jobs when you don't want it to as it sees them as already employed.

If you speak to ten players at NRaas about how they play rotationally, you will likely get ten very different strategies they use to make this work. Some are not as interested and only want to concentrate on one household per game. Some do want to rotate through and micro-manage the entire world they are playing in, others want to concentrate on maybe 2-3 households or (as in my case) maybe a few more than that but allow the rest of the town around them to progress more "naturally" on their own though under certain guidelines.

The page that @TreyNutz links to above and I'll repeat here was actually just put up a few days ago in response to so many requests for such ideas. It may look intimidating for those just getting started with NRaas StoryProgression. But once you get into it, it's also not a bad way to learn about how the various settings and castes work. The Option One you will see there (that one's mine) is just one approach, the one that kind of evolved for me as I played alongside Twallan's earlier development of the StoryProgression mod -- we didn't even have castes back then, but they made it so much easier to manage similar batches of settings. It's still the way I play today. Option Two is that of another NRaas Organizer who takes a slightly different approach but still only plays around 10 households herself. We will hopefully have other options spelled out in time as players get around to documenting what has worked for them.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Story+Progression+Rotational+Caste+Settings

If anyone has any questions about how this all works or has suggestions to add, we would be happy to hear them.
http://nraas.wikispaces.com/page/messages/Chatterbox
(free registration required to post)

Thank you for sharing the details with us. I'll have to go look around the chatterbox.

TadOlson

I started using NRaas Mods when I found out that I couldn't play how I wanted to play without Mods though I had issues at first with Norton and had to change to AVG before I could get the Mods into my game.I've got a system of using households castes for each family I'm playing that works for anything from playing just a few families to playing an entire town and it's a lot easier to use this for rotational play.The other options listed on the NRaas site are all good though they had too many limitations for me.I didn't find out about them until after I created my own method for rotational play and found it working.