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How do you actually play multiple Sims and multiple households in this game?
waterywatermelon
Posts: 473 Member
In The Sims 2, you may direct the Sim to the telephone and call for a taxi. The taxi will come and pick up the Sim. As your Sim leaves the lot, the residential lot will be saved. Even the exact time will be saved. Your Sim will then do stuff on the community lots, but the amount of time passing on the community lot does not matter at all. Then, when the Sim comes home, the Sim will come home at EXACTLY the same time as the last saved point. A very helpful and realistic mod would be the Community Time Project mod. Instead of coming home at the default time, your Sim's time on the community lot will be counted and recorded. Then, when the residential lot loads up, the player will receive a notification that the Sim will come home at a certain time. In the meantime, you can play with the other family members, or if there is no one there, you can allow the time to speed up until the Sim comes home.
In The Sims 3, time progresses forward for all Sims in the world. You can set commands for each Sim in the household, and the Sims will do them, step by step. If one Sim is in a rabbithole, studying in school, then you can switch to another Sim and check out what that Sim is doing - all in one open world.
From what I can tell in the Sims 4, the gameplay feels very similar to the Sims 3. However, in the Sims 4, it may feel much more limiting in scope. You can actually command your Sim to skill, but you are not really sure what exactly they are skilling or if they are skilling in something related for their own careers and school or something completely random.
As of now, I am not entirely sure how to play multiple Sims in the Sims 4. In my last save file, I just have 2 Sims in a household, and if they want to go to places, I have to make sure that both Sims have the energy to travel. Otherwise, I skip the traveling, and I let both Sims stay at home and do stuff at home.
So, on one side, the gameplay does feel like The Sims 3, and on the other side, it really doesn't.
In The Sims 3, time progresses forward for all Sims in the world. You can set commands for each Sim in the household, and the Sims will do them, step by step. If one Sim is in a rabbithole, studying in school, then you can switch to another Sim and check out what that Sim is doing - all in one open world.
From what I can tell in the Sims 4, the gameplay feels very similar to the Sims 3. However, in the Sims 4, it may feel much more limiting in scope. You can actually command your Sim to skill, but you are not really sure what exactly they are skilling or if they are skilling in something related for their own careers and school or something completely random.
As of now, I am not entirely sure how to play multiple Sims in the Sims 4. In my last save file, I just have 2 Sims in a household, and if they want to go to places, I have to make sure that both Sims have the energy to travel. Otherwise, I skip the traveling, and I let both Sims stay at home and do stuff at home.
So, on one side, the gameplay does feel like The Sims 3, and on the other side, it really doesn't.
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With Sims 3, you get open worlds, color wheel/textures plus Fairies/Genies/Werewolves, Lunar Moon & so forth.
With Sims 4, you can actually build like crazy, Gallery, better Aliens/Mermaids/Witches/Vampires, way more worlds, way more cheat codes & can muliplate the environment & weather of you worlds.
Plus, you can make your own Hybrids with the occults.
As for multiplay, it's not that hard to go from one household to play with & the other, just select manage world & you're back on the map to select another household or even another world.
You can even have multiple Game Saves. I have 6 on the go for my different timelines.
Basically, Sims 4 has alot of potential & with the new devs they are finally letting the game grow regardless of what's still missing. We will probably eventually see that.
You are smart for waiting this long to begin your Sims 4 experience. My daughter & I made the mistake of starting in year one back in 2014 when it was an empty game. Our reasons was because Sims 3 kept freezing up every 30 seconds & couldn't hold the 20 packs.
Plus the autonomy works fairly decently and there is not much danger in 4. Death is quite a rare occurrence for me, especially for Sims in my household. (I think I have encountered some bugged deaths of neighbor Sims lately, but that is a completely different thing.) I had to fight fire so much more in previous entries (though most times I have a fire in 4 it is bugged and therefore devastating). So just ignore who you want when you need to.
If anything, rather than hard, it is just annoying to have things like active careers to keep up with, too. If I remember correctly you still have to follow them to work to get your promotion, at least with the GTW ones, and I just consider it a hassle to be limited. Also, multiple households are rotational for me. I never liked story progression of any sort, so that has always been what I have done.
but basically I just jump to whatever household/sim i feel like playing and is important to my story at the moment
kind of like how if you were writing a book not every character in the book is present at all times they all have their own storylines and scenes and outside of those they just exist in silence on the background but time passes for all of them
when playing a scene with multiple households i must then decide whos perspective it is from and control that household or merge households to control more sims
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I have my sims travel to other lots often (almost every sim day) based on the goals I set for each one and their schedules/the calendar. Generally, though, when the children are at school, I travel with the older sims/their parents, so mom and dad can run errands, go on dates, etc. Other times, I'll simply leave some sims to chill at home. The game isn't so fast-paced that I feel the need to have every sim be productive at every second. But if I were feeling that way, I wouldn't hesitate to extend their lifespans to long.
5 of those houses are my main House Holds, the families that my story revolves around, the rest are more or less either extended family members or supporting characters that my sims interact with… more or less on a daily basis.
To help with family play, I actually make family Clubs, like House Hoggarth is my Large family of 8 sims, the mom and dad and six kids, so I had the mom establish the House as a Club, and added her children and the family activities include eating bathing and sleeping and then the last two club activities are tailored to the type of family they are.
For social I said be friendly toward certain Houses
And don’t be mean towards certain houses. And then the last is participating in summer activities.
They like to farm, garden, Cook, Bake, and they’re also a Family of knights, Trying to develop Knighthood more, right now it's just looking like a medieval College Fraternity.
While the other Family like House Charmont their club consists of a family of 4 sims. And Same thing Eat, bathe, sleep, I wanted Magic to be their club activity, but it’s chaos. So books telling stories and music is their favorite way to spend family and leisure time.
If I’m taking one sim out, I really just want them to live so I leave it on “Care for Self” while I’m away with a sim.
My Mood:
If you leave a household member behind, that member will still care for themselves at home.
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Sims 4's and 3's time shenanigans are part of the reason why I play with aging off. That way I can take my Sims 4 sims to community lots without paying for the trip with the lifetime of the sims that stayed at home.
My Sims 2 neighborhood feels very organized, with at the moment 8 households. One rotation equals one season.
In contrast my Sims 4 main save consists of ~played 170 sims, but only five main households. There is no system behind when I switch between households other than that sometimes I need to catch the Starlight Accolades on a sunday.
In Sims 3 I've given up on rotational play. The few times I play it, I keep to a single household.
The idea is that one sim is your priority at the moment, the one you're actively playing, and you're right that you can't be very specific about what you ask the other sims back at home to do. But you can switch back and forth. Like if you want a sim to go to the park with their friend Miki and bond, but you don't need to direct their whole conversation, you can take that sim to the park with Miki and then switch back to a sim who is at home. Then click on the icon by the sim who's at the park and click "Socialize with... Miki" and they will build their friendship without you while you play the sims at home. You can bring the sim at the park back home anytime.
I keep my active households pretty small. Even when I've had as many as 3 sims in them I've found it a burden to get to one before they ran off and lit the house on fire...
My townie households end up becoming large communes thanks to MCCC and having autonomous move in and marriage all on, and when I household ends up getting put together I look it over and either edit the fashions of the townies or delete that one and let MCCC put another in there. I've flipped on nearly every autonomous setting I could find, and gave it settings to build the kinds of 'world activity' I want.
- This gives me some minor control over the 'background cast' without micro-managing them.
As for Rotation style, the only time I've really employed that is in my Ancestral game save. Then it was to go back and forth, when I realized a child was to be born to make sure the family isn't missing anyone. I've also found that I prefer to play John and Sarah Jane more than any of the others. With Cottage Living, just trying to keep both households' crops and animals up, I've had to resort to a daily back and forth routine. Making sure they all get up very, very early to care for the animals and others in the household see to the upkeep of the crops. Then, I switch to the second household to do the same. It's crazy, but will stop, except for those needed babies once John and Sarah Jane get married. Mostly, I'll stick to their household. Since I use MCCC, I can pre-determine the gender of each child, I can click on a Sim and make her pregnant, then force her into labor so as to not spend too much time over there. It is what it is, but I have fun.
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In TS4, I like being able to customize aging in the settings and to manage my own story progression. Generally applying story progression to all but one household would not work for me. I do have my own concept for the passage of time which is that the calendar shifts continually but I am seeing snapshots of each household. Time is passing but it is a bit gradually. At some point I'll be likely to switch on aging for a bunch of unplayables. Not all of my sims will reproduce especially any more awkward born-in-game sims.
As for what I do on different lots, I actually tend to send a household together to a given lot to do activities together. If they go bowling, they all go bowling or they all go to the gym, park or pool. Sometimes I might leave one at home which isn't a big deal for me. I am more likely to turn off aging in that case so that the sim I am not playing is not "penalized" but it just depends. I don't actually think that much about it.
I tend to play a whole group of sims. If a sim lives alone then obviously I just focus on that sim. Most of them end up in families. I usually like them to do whatever the activity is together or to be on the same lot. Most of my lots do have different things to do and I edit community lots to have more features or meet more needs. If I have toddlers then I need to take them into account but sometimes the parents just send them to daycare and have a day out.
But rotational play in ts4 is fenomenal. I like to bond with my families so I only rotate between 3 households. I'm not entirely sure what your question is but you can easily use the household manager to swap sims in and out of households. All of the ones I mark as my favorite do not progress (as far as I know. Maybe minor things?) so I don't worry about what they are doing when I'm not playing them. I prefer to have total control. So for example if I want sims from two different house holds of mine to go out, I swap sim 1 into sims 2 household and have them go out that way. When the outing is over and it's time to go home I swap them back.
All of my familes are max households. It's easy to manage but only because I use mccomand mod to slow down time and sims needs to my liking. It gives me freedom and time to do things I enjoy instead of fighting against the clock
But if it's just one sim not having energy, you can still leave them at home and set them to take care of their needs. I believe (though I'm not sure, because again I use a mod) that you can tell your sim at home to sleep. I know you can tell them to take care of their needs. Not being able to do anything more with the away sim is the issue I have.
But, yes, it is frustrating to visit another lot with part of your household and not be able to leave the ones at home completing whatever you queue up for them.
I have learned to adapt my play to take this into account.
I tend to take the whole household on trips, unless I'm not too fussed about the ones left behind. Occasionally I leave some, but being careful not to do this at night/late evening as it messes up their sleep patterns and energy levels. It's not good to return from a nightclub at 3 am and find your kids still up and about!
I will usually make sure to arrange things for them to do on the trip. So, for instance, if I have a family where the dad wants to go to the gym, I might have a pool there for the others to enjoy. Or mum might take along her guitar or easel to occupy herself and the kids could take toys/a book or do their homework.
This was an easy way to play several at a time since yes, you wanted one or two to go with your Sim but not necessarily return home at the same time for whatever privacy reason your Sim wants to do things somewhere else and or at home. It was an easy way to get them out of the house and stay gone for awhile. And we could always click the panel to make them come back home or switch to them easily. The only thing is TS4 isn't as detailed as TS3 or even TS2 and so the Sims we could 'drop off' somewhere else may not continue to do whatever you left doing (if on a community lot) and therefore on their own to do or meet anyone without your control. This is true in Ts3, too, however if you left one somewhere to switch to another they usually were still doing whatever you commanded them to do when you went back to them. Or grabbed them to send them home..or in TS3 they may run back home without your consent. In TS4, they don't but would return home eventually.
In TS4, it was easy to play multiple households but I never stuck to a week or a season or a time line of when to rotate, like others, it was like a book or movie in my head. I jumped around to see what was happening or what a Sim was thinking in a different household like scenes in a play or movie and or whatever tickled my fancy to go do with other Sims. I did not like the time continuing though, because I didn't like that in TS3, either. SP is not my thing, I like to witness what happens to my Sims like babies born in game and not getting named before I have a chance to get back to them. Things like that really bothered me in TS4 with it's type of story progression. Or giving my Sims a romantic partner I had actually never seen in the game....no.
Gardening is one of my favorite things to do in Sims 4, so it's a huge annoyance. It's one of the reasons I'm not the biggest fan of Seasons. I have few saves in which I do play rotationally but mostly I have just one played household per save and I rotate between them, it saves me from losing my nerves.
There are also other annoyances for playing rotationally in the same save. If I want to keep the age of my Sims and their friends in sync I have to keep aging off and do it manually because the Sims that I don't currently play will age too fast. I hate it because I want to play, not fiddle with every Sims birthdays. I know I can have only active household age but then I have to always play every household the same amount of time and I don't like it, too much stress and "rules".
Also what to do with unplayed households then? My households can have mutual premade or randomly generated Sims as friends and if I keep the aging off or on with them they will either age up too fast or don't age up at all.
It's too much of a hassle and stress for me, so I only keep these kind of saves very limited and usually only play with families that have children who have moved out (only 2-3 different households per save) and I keep the aging on long lifespan for all Sims. I only play with Maxis Sims in the same save with a lot of Sims rotationally because none of them are actually my Sims and the gameplay is more chaos like anyway.
In other saves, the story is more complex and involves different families that I play rotationally. In one such stories I have a large community of spellcasters with an intricate family tree due to intermarriage between the different families across generations. Eventually I succeeded in having two children who can boast direct descent from all the ancient founding families.
I've also just started a new save with different families in HoB. These families all all somewhat connected because they are relatives, inlaws or friends. They all live in HoB and occupy all the residential lots (I evicted all the pre-made Sims). The idea was to create a close-knitted village community. There isn't a single main character or main family, but I play all of them equally.