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Fellow rotational players, what are your rotation habits?
BabySquare
Posts: 7,869 Member
Just out of curiosity, how do you rotate your play?
- How often do you rotate?
- Between how many households?
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
I rotate once a week, between 5 households on Sunday mornings, though the day might need to be changed to streamline the university experience.
How about you?
- How often do you rotate?
- Between how many households?
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
I rotate once a week, between 5 households on Sunday mornings, though the day might need to be changed to streamline the university experience.
How about you?
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I don't have any certain day but I almost always end at 5 in the morning. That means I start the next household in time to get ready for school or work.
I have many households because I play all the premades plus some of my own Sims. I tend to play each neighborhood in order and have the families interact.
the households i switch between are typically family members of my main household, though sometimes it can be friends of the main household. so the number always changes depending on the type of life aforementioned main household leads.
i don't have a particular day or length of time which i'll play in certain households which i guess is chaotic but alas.
Once a week per household in an order (started of from the founder household to the extended families). I have a spreadsheet to keep the notes on the families.
2. Between how many households?
6 households so far. All of them are relatives. I haven’t played with any premades yet.
3. Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
Sunday - Sunday (if this make sense 😅). To make the kids life easier. I know for sure that I’m not going to get them do homework once they returned from school on Friday.
-Season length can be 7, 14 or 28
-Multiply that by 5
-Divide by the # of households you want to play
-The result is how many days you should play each household (round down if it’s not an even number)
Example:
14 x 5 = 70
70 / 8 Households = 8.75 days
Therefore I play them for 8 days each.
When I leave Household #1 it is Day 8 of spring. By the time I get back to them, it’s Day 8 of spring again.
I always change households at 5am as that seems to work well.
While I have a preferred order of families in the rotation, sometimes I skip around and play a family I particularly feel like playing.
I'm probably very much an outlier in the frequency of switching between households.
Depends how focused i am on each household, if i play Sandra Matthews one sitting and feel like she is far from a good place, i keep playing her until she is in a good place, it goes for any other household. Naturally with MC i have to make sure to set flags so she or any single sim in the household can't marry and won't have offspring while away on another household, in order to keep up with having some control to keep that meddling MC away!
Best time to switch between households? quite honestly there is no real ideal perfect time for it, but considering the needs are automatically regenerated when the game gets a hold of that sim (and it can take some time for the autonomy to assert itself in some cases), they always have full energy so it would be best around early morning some time (5-8am), also depends on jobs), but i also got sims who like to party, so in those events i would be getting there in the late evening (8pm-10pm) and have them dance and chat the night away with other sims in a nightclub or lounge.
I usually do 3 or 4, as more than that can be tricky and also i might forget where the others are when i do switch over and play around the flags in mc before and after. it all depends on how large the households are, if they are Manderbrooks, Mannings or Hiroshimoto's with 8 sims in play, it makes it more difficult to keep control and remember, but if they are Alderra's, Teswick's or Cassavetes with 4 sims, it is easier to deal with and more so with less. it might be possible to have 4 single sims across four households, even though it is unlikely, it can simplify things a lot more.
-Maybe a favorite townie is going out dating to find a partner.
-Maybe a townie elder with several kids needs a flower arrangement scented with the death flower so that the NPC-kids stay related.
-Maybe I would like to see a new club on a specific lot.
-Maybe a townie I like gets two kids, there are always many toddlers, kids and teens in my saves
-Maybe it is vampire time and I turn of risky vampirism and go clubbing with one of them
Anything goes during the NPC-holidays! Then when the holidays are over I go back to my main family and let their lives continue.
I rotate weekly.
- Between how many households?
I want to say six families. There has been one I've been avoid right now. lol They are my farming sims, and just haven't felt like playing them. They their two oldest children have moved out and I have them in the rotation too.
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
Sundays ant 3 am.
One week per family/household.
- Between how many households?
Minimum: 4
Max: 8/10
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
I always start on Sunday.
Extra:
When I play the premades, I try to play all the 4 seasons with 8 families in a world (I add the Maxis gallery ones when there's less than 4/8 families/households), then I move to the next world, and the next, and the next, until I played 4 seasons in each family from each world.
I’ll check in on other households to play matchmaker, woo hoo to continue the legacy, change randomly generated names, and edit out the hideous sunglasses and bangles and sleeping sneakers the game doles out to kids.
To stick to the question, it varies in terms of when I rotate. I try to keep everyone on roughly the same schedule and I make sure to stop in for different holidays with different families so that it isn't too repetitive. Recently, I had been rotating through households that I hadn't played in a while. I've largely finished that up and so I'm finally getting back to the Strangerville pre-mades. Really though, I have households spread all over the different worlds. I tend to think of who hasn't been played in a while and therefore needs to be aged along. I also get drawn into plot development.
I might play a dramatic house and then switch to a mellow one or move from one world to a dramatically different one. It is interesting to see things play out. For example, Gunther Munch recently died so his ex-wife whom he divorced a long time ago moved in with Wolfgang Munch because they always had an interest in each other. Gunther's death caused a chain of events such as his daughter needing to move in with her evil mother. His daughter cannot wait until she can escape to university. I went from that drama to a prince that lives in a palace with his loving and beautiful wife and his son who will inherit the kingdom. They are lovely but a little bit boring since they don't work or have anything to work through. I think I'll be sending them on some luxury vacations, such is the life of the super rich. Those are just examples.
- Between how many households? Many households, I lifted the 200 sim limit and started doing my own townie culling (deleting elders and weirdos that I didn't recognize). I might turn off new townie generation for a while. Nothing wrong with townies, I've just got enough who are edited and known by my sims.
I currently have many sims in one save. I have ideas for a few different saves but if I get too drawn into other saves, I might not go back. I like having sims run into each other. The game will send some households I haven't played in a while as townies walking past the households I play or in the community spaces.
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day? There's no rule about this. I try to avoid times when they would miss work or not be able to do homework. I do like giving them full weekends. With holidays, sometimes I'll switch households to play a different one during the holiday. I actually tend to switch in the evening so they can fill up on needs and get a fresh start the next day. I then sometimes turn aging off for a day or two to make up for any time lost due to rotating.
I do not have the formulas or spreadsheets, though I'm very impressed by those. I tend to quickly look the household over and see where I left off. I don't switch during pregnancies and I don't leave in a way that is hard to pick up where I left off. There's either some obvious milestone or I'm just ready to come back fresh later.
"The plot" kind of changes as I rotate.
I play each family for one sim year on the calendar with seasons set at 14 days.
- Between how many households?
Most of the premade families plus a few of my own made families.
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
I always start a different family on the first day of spring.
I have three rotational saves. The first and the oldest one has over 100 households, the second one has about under 50, and the third and the newest one is nearing or is already over 100. In short, a lot of sims.
Not on any particular day. However, if there's an important day or holiday on that day, I won't rotate until about 6:00 PM the next day.
Every sunday at 2 am, so if there is holiday at Saturday, the household can experience it fully
- Between how many households?
9 and counting... I make new household everytime the offsprings are suitable to live on their own.
Between 2-7 days per household. I play with a point system. As soon as a household has accumulated 10 points, I go to the next. Usually that takes about 3 or 4 days, but with a larger household, they might lose points for passing out, setting fire, etc. I play sort of an ISBI, so I can't always control everyone.
Between how many households?
Ten, at the moment.
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- How often do you rotate?
- Between how many households?
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day?
I rotate once a week, between 7 households (Knights, Landgraabs, McDermotts, Gregorys and three Veleta families (all of which are directly descended from Malcolm Landgraab)) starting and ending on Sundays at 7am..
- Between how many households? I currently have 52 households on strict rotation. (They are all played in order).
- Is it on a particular day? If so, which day? Households change at 5:30am Monday morning.
Hopefully I can fit in University play in a similar way that I did with TS2. I would play 5 households, then university, then another 5 households and so on. I did it this way so the sims wouldn't be at uni forever (I was playing 88 households in TS2).
But because of the way I have my settings in TS4 it may be better to play more households in between each university time. Will have to find out how it all works once I get it and see what will need to be tweaked.