Advice for a rotation

LolaLuvsSims · January 2018

I usually only let my sims I want try to keep playing only have one child. My current Sims have triplets who just aged to young adults. I want to try to play rotationally so I can keep up with the whole family. I usually just stick with the oldest child if there is more than one but I want to try something different. Any advice?

ElCaptain · January 2018

Rotate through the kids every day or couple days. If you wanna keep a structure there really isn't more to it.

LolaLuvsSims · January 2018

I see people making it a lot more complicated @ElCaptain Days of the week or certain times. I don't want my other households getting messed up while I rotate

PolluxSims · January 2018

I'm actually curious to hear what others say too, I'd like to start some rotational saves in the future.

I know some people tend to play each house for one Sim week before switching to another one, so you could try something like that? If one week seems too short, you could always go to two weeks or something?

MidnightAura · January 2018

I rotate every 3 days when I play. At a push 5 days max.

ArtsyBanana · January 2018

Usually when I rotate when there is no child in the family I usually look at the jobs of the sims to make sure that when I rotate back to playing them, it won't be in a time when they need to go to work (to avoid losing job performance just because you rotated households

)

Ex. Sim X's job has work on TUES-SAT. So I would keep in mind that when I rotate to Sim Y's household, I would rotate back to Sim X's household on a Sunday or Monday no matter how many sim weeks I spent with Sim Y, so that I would not rotate back when Sim X is losing job performance.

However, when there are children in a household (especially since I had triplets one time

) I usually want them to do really good in school so I usually give myself no choice and I have to rotate on weekends in the game to make sure that when I rotate back they won't lose school performance by missing school. However this means that it is possible that the sim's parents will be missing their jobs when you rotate back

.
But hay sometimes we have to sacrifice our time for our kids right?

Orchid13 · January 2018

I play with aging off so it doesn’t really matter how I do it. If you want to play with aging on I recommend downloading MC command center so you can manipulate your households better

RedDestiny92 · January 2018

Depends on what I'm doing I sometimes I have a main house and don't care to do much with other households except check in for make overs and birthdays. Sometimes it depends on the play session, I had a main house and threw in a couple more houses here and there then switched for the first gen of that house and only hopped over to make sure that family was visiting who I wanted them to. In another save I have my main house and bounce around to make sure people work on their skills and kids do homework then return after, on speed three it goes by decently fast for those days. I do play with aging on it's long for one save and short or normal for the other. Either way is fun for me

kwanzaabot · January 2018

Rotation play is hard with a large family.
My problem is that I struggle to actually find something interesting for each family to do. Parenthood gets a lot of mileage out of rotational play, but when you're essentially raising 6 or more kids across several families, it's very easy to just get bored by the whole process pretty quickly.

kemisz · January 2018

I rotate once a week for each household that I play. I usually switch over at 12am on Sunday. I use MC Command centre because I play with ageing on for my main household, but aging off (for the non played households) during my other rotations.

Switching on 12am Sunday will interfere with some careers like stages of the culinary career and the criminal career but it mostly works for me.

I cheat needs when I switch over to a new household because they only have a few hours until work/school and I don't want to be catching up on low needs.

Hope that helps and I hope you have a lot of fun trying rotational play! It takes some getting used to but it is super fun once you get the hang of it!

LolaLuvsSims · January 2018

Thanks everyone! I don use MC Command Center so I'll just look at the settings a little bit. I want all three triplets to live full lives.

rosemow · January 2018

Hello
This guide to roatational play on Carls sims 4 site may help you
http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/tutorials/rotational-play.php

ZilogMan · January 2018

A really simple system I use for households is to just switch to controlling the next Sim in the household at midnight.

I like playing full or near full households, if you try to control all it gets too micromanage-y anyway even if you're not controlling one at a time as a "challenge".

You can influence the uncontrolled Sims by Helping with Homework, Encouraging the Sim to Work out, using the Fire Up interaction etc.

If you only ever control one Sim, you never get to see that Sim acting autonomously so don't get a feel for their true personality.

PolluxSims · January 2018

ZilogMan wrote: »

A really simple system I use for households is to just switch to controlling the next Sim in the household at midnight.

I like playing full or near full households, if you try to control all it gets too micromanage-y anyway even if you're not controlling one at a time as a "challenge".

You can influence the uncontrolled Sims by Helping with Homework, Encouraging the Sim to Work out, using the Fire Up interaction etc.

If you only ever control one Sim, you never get to see that Sim acting autonomously so don't get a feel for their true personality.

Ooh this sounds like a really great idea! Do you do this for only one household or do you do it rotating between families in general?

SimsLovinLycan · January 2018

If you're not opposed to using mods, MC Command Center will definitely help. With it, you can slow the relationship decay rate and eliminate relationship culling so that your sims in inactive played households don't lose relationships you wanted to cultivate or lose relationship levels too quickly (or at all) while you're playing another household.

fadingaudio · January 2018

I used to rotate every week on Monday morning at like 5am, but I decided now to just play and enjoy the families for as many or as few days as I want. I don't care about the townies aging, dying, or their timeline at all. My active households don't age and that's perfectly fine for me. The townies are just background noise. So some households I play for 5 days and others for a week and some longer or shorter. It depends on what I have to do with them for that session or that storyline I have going with them.

ldmarko · January 2018

I play a huge rotation, 22 families, and the only recommendations I would make is to make sure the age setting is on active household only, and also keep an eye on your other sims as you see them out & about in the world. Nothing is supposed to change in the household while you're away, but sometimes at parties or the Romance Festival, they can get to flirting with other sims & that can mess up the relationships you set for them. Oh, and don't try to play rotational on long life, you'll never get through a generation & find yourself stuck with 6-toddler households & a boring repetitive game. I learned that one the hard way.

As for when to rotate, there's no right or wrong answer to that, you'll just have to try things out & decide what works best for you. I'm one of the "weeklies" who likes an even rotation, but there are pros & cons to that. The pro being that you get equal time with all of your sims, the cons being that something good often happens, like an alien birth, right at rotation time or you find yourself slogging through a week with an uninteresting family, because you need their children to grow up to marry your other sims. The great thing about it though is that it's your game & your rules & you can change your rotation patterns anytime you want or not even keep a pattern at all, just change your household whenever you feel the time is right.

Pegasus143 · January 2018

I play each household I want to age for a week (putting the "want to age" in there because I have some sims marked as played in my game just so they won't age when I turn on aging for non-played sims). I rotate early (meaning before 3 am) on Wednesday mornings and have a text file on my desktop to keep track of who's been played each rotation. I keep aging on normal, active household only for played sims. Non-played sims get aging turned on 1 week for each full rotation of households, otherwise they'd be aging at over 10x the rate of played sims since I have so many households I play. One thing I'd caution about with using MC is if you're using the story progression stuff and have a setup similar to mine, you'll end up with A TON of sims in each age span... I like it, some may not.

Simpatsyann · January 2018

Pegasus143 wrote: »

I play each household I want to age for a week (putting the "want to age" in there because I have some sims marked as played in my game just so they won't age when I turn on aging for non-played sims). I rotate early (meaning before 3 am) on Wednesday mornings and have a text file on my desktop to keep track of who's been played each rotation. I keep aging on normal, active household only for played sims. Non-played sims get aging turned on 1 week for each full rotation of households, otherwise they'd be aging at over 10x the rate of played sims since I have so many households I play. One thing I'd caution about with using MC is if you're using the story progression stuff and have a setup similar to mine, you'll end up with A TON of sims in each age span... I like it, some may not.

I do essentially the same thing. When I started my rotation I had four households and didn't really think about the fact that MC was producing 4x the marriages and births that it should have been, but when I realized it I figured what the hell. By the time I got to around a dozen households it was pretty overwhelming so I set the chance of pregnancy pretty low and also limited the number of children per family. Still, thanks to that and the fact that I've never had "no affairs" flagged, that first generation of townies left just TONS of offspring all over my towns. I think Eric Lewis alone fathered 16 kids.

GalacticGal · January 2018

Set your game play, to aging only active lot. Then switch to whichever household you desire at the pace you desire. For a time I kept bobbing back and forth even during the same Sim day. This got to be too much. So, I decided to play a household for a full Sim week. Sunday -Saturday. I could get much more accomplished this way, and if a child was to be born, I was right there to see it unfold and name the kid what I wanted to name it. But having aging on only for the active lot, makes it closer to how rotation was played in Sims2, inasmuch nothing of note really happens to the non-active households while you're away.

Pegasus143 · January 2018

@Simpatsyann Yeah, I've also got a situation similar to your Eric Lewis, though mine is a randomly-generated townie.

PolluxSims · January 2018

I was wondering if maybe someone could give me some advice about my new save. I made a family of eight Sims: two adults, five teens, and one child. I want to play with the teens for a bit and have them work on skills before I age them up, because I want to give them all different types of careers. Once they turn into adults, I'm gonna have some of them move out and start a rotational save for them all.

My problem is, I'm not sure how to go about aging them. Normal lifespan seems too short for what I want to do, but Long seems too long. I thought about just keeping aging off for both my household and townies, but I want some of the kids to find sweethearts before they age up, so I guess the smart thing to do would be force their sweethearts to age up as well? I hope this makes sense lol.

Edit: I should mention I'm playing on console so can't use mods lol.

3KNPen · January 2018

If you're not opposed to mods I suggest MCCommand Center. You can tweak each age group individually as much or as little as you want to to give yourself whatever amount of time you want. It's also got other options that are helpful when managing a rotational save.

PolluxSims · January 2018

3KNPen wrote: »

If you're not opposed to mods I suggest MCCommand Center. You can tweak each age group individually as much or as little as you want to to give yourself whatever amount of time you want. It's also got other options that are helpful when managing a rotational save.

Sorry I should've mentioned that I'm on console, I edited it into my post. If I could use MCCC I totally would lol.

orkhid22 · January 2018

kemisz wrote: »

I rotate once a week for each household that I play. I usually switch over at 12am on Sunday. I use MC Command centre because I play with ageing on for my main household, but aging off (for the non played households) during my other rotations.

Switching on 12am Sunday will interfere with some careers like stages of the culinary career and the criminal career but it mostly works for me.

I cheat needs when I switch over to a new household because they only have a few hours until work/school and I don't want to be catching up on low needs.

Hope that helps and I hope you have a lot of fun trying rotational play! It takes some getting used to but it is super fun once you get the hang of it!

I need to figure out how this MCC works. I'd love aging on while I'm playing one family and aging off for the other families

PinkPaws66 · January 2018

I believe you can age current family only in the regular Sims controls.

The Sims Forums

Advice for a rotation

Comments