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Questions about Rotational Play
Alorxico
Posts: 360 Member
Greetings fellow Simmers,
I am currently playing only one family, but they have two children. Once they grow up, I plan on moving one of the children out of the house and switching between the two households. HOWEVER, while browsing the forums last night I came across some horror stories of "abandoned" families being completely reworked when the player returns to continue their side of the story; Parents having secret lovers, adults and teens having new jobs or no jobs, everyone aging up, new kids with different parents, and one poor player had an entirely different family living in the home upon his return.
Needless to say, after reading these complaints, I am hesitant to play the game the way I want to play it. I am one of those players who loves creating my Sims' life-stories and feel cheated when the game decides the actors are going to improvise. Still, if experience has taught me anything it is Simmers will always find ways around these problems. So, here are my questions;
1.) How do you prevent your "abandoned" family from aging while you play another family?
2.) How likely is it that the dynamic of my "abandoned" family will completely change while I am gone? i.e. new lovers, broken marriages, lost jobs, etc.
3.) How likely or unlikely is it that the game will cull my "abandoned" family while I am playing another family?
4.) What are some of your best practices for rotational play?
5.) What mods are available to reduce Sim culling, secret lover acquisitions, and sudden job changes?
Thanks for the help!
~~ Alorxico
I am currently playing only one family, but they have two children. Once they grow up, I plan on moving one of the children out of the house and switching between the two households. HOWEVER, while browsing the forums last night I came across some horror stories of "abandoned" families being completely reworked when the player returns to continue their side of the story; Parents having secret lovers, adults and teens having new jobs or no jobs, everyone aging up, new kids with different parents, and one poor player had an entirely different family living in the home upon his return.
Needless to say, after reading these complaints, I am hesitant to play the game the way I want to play it. I am one of those players who loves creating my Sims' life-stories and feel cheated when the game decides the actors are going to improvise. Still, if experience has taught me anything it is Simmers will always find ways around these problems. So, here are my questions;
1.) How do you prevent your "abandoned" family from aging while you play another family?
2.) How likely is it that the dynamic of my "abandoned" family will completely change while I am gone? i.e. new lovers, broken marriages, lost jobs, etc.
3.) How likely or unlikely is it that the game will cull my "abandoned" family while I am playing another family?
4.) What are some of your best practices for rotational play?
5.) What mods are available to reduce Sim culling, secret lover acquisitions, and sudden job changes?
Thanks for the help!
~~ Alorxico
0
Comments
2. Unless you use the MC Command Center mod, they won't change within the family. They will often lose lower-level relationships (you can stop that with a mod - MCCC or Neia's No Relationship Culling) and they will often gain new relationships: lovebirds, friends, and dislikes (you can nuke those with MCCC or UI Cheats Extension)
3. Played Sims don't get culled. (Unless you have a bug of some kind, but the culling of played Sims has been extremely rarely reported.)
4. Some people rotate on a schedule - once a week, etc. I try to rotate when no Sims in the family I'm going to should be in school or at work: they end up with poor work/school otherwise.
5. For Sim culling, MCCC. It also covers relationship culling. For the acquisitions, you can remove them with MCCC or reduce the relationships with UI Cheats Extension. You won't get sudden job changes.
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When I rotate between houses Its because I want to play from different perspectives. because all my households interact with my other households, so I can still make sure relationships and jobs remain intact.
the only thing that could happen is, new relationships friendly/possibly romantic. if your sim is pregnant they will have the baby without you, and the game will randomize it's name, and gender.
but they'll maintain where they're are during/job and school they won't make progress or lose progress.
Only households you've never played get random jobs.
As far as I'm aware, the game only culls, unplayed households and townies. sims you don't interact with too much or at all.
Like I said, Interacting with my other families
Son in Family A is Best Friends with Son in Family B
Son in Family A is Boyfriend to Daughter in family C
Daughter in Family C is Best friends with Daughter in family D
Son in Family E if enemies with son in family A
Son in family E is Boyfriend to Daughter in Family D
and with Get Together, I can relax a little more with the Club system.
I love being able ask them to change into a certain outfit when i want, and Now they actually stay together and because of group likes, they sort of act how I want them to, and how I would control them. which is kind of scary sometimes.
My Mood:
I love rotational play. I probably play about 2 or 3 different homes a night. I turn aging off. And try to have fun soap opera stories for them. Also, I try to recreate my favorite sims from past games.
Did you have both aging settings right? There are two: one aging setting for overall, one for played Sims who aren't your active household.
The relationships are culled 100% whenever I switch families it seems, they forget all their friends, even best friends or ones in the same club. But they are not culled as in removed from game they just forget everyone. I really like building up families for interaction - kid A best friends with kid B who is dating kid C who is twins with kid D and stuff. That can get a little difficult when relationships are forgotten but it doesn't take that long to build back up I suppose so not a huge deal breaker.
The careers and all that have remained the same even when switching with no progress gained/lost while I'm playing elsewhere.
Like previously said though a pregnant sim will give birth and then be auto-named.
Other than the relationship issue (which gets pretty annoying) I'm able to play multiple families.
Also the cakes are "reusable" as long as no one's taken a slice. So if you're aging up multiple sims you can use the same cake by just adding candles.
-The changing jobs was a bug that was fixed, so I wouldn't worry about that (MC can fix that for you too, if it reappears).
-I use MC to stop both types of culling.
-I used to ignore the extra romantic relationships that are formed, but have been using MC to fix relationships, that are caused by sauna woohoo being a friendly interaction in club settings. Since that one causes sims to form romantic relationships that ignores age, gender preference and family relationship, that one is too messed up for me to accept. That bug, has an easier fix, but MC is a workaround until I remember to change settings when playing the club leaders.
I rotate between three households and have aging set to long. Sometimes I turn aging off to avoid missing a birthday or a death (if a sim dies when you're not on the lot, there won't be a gravestone/urn). The game will sometimes make new romantic interests, friends or enemies for my sims while I'm away, and I either ignore them or play along. The most annoying thing about it for me is that a new romantic interest will sometimes call to ask for a date, but it's not a problem to just ignore the call. I like an element of randomness in the game, but I understand that others want to avoid it.
Friendship level keeps relationships from culling? I must keep this in mind because I honestly don't want to use mods. I play in rotation among many households. I will give this a try.
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Watch out for the relationship decay though ! If you have too much households in your rotation, some may have decayed into the no-longer friends level before you go back to them. They have reduced (halved to be precise) the relationship decay when they introduced the relationship culling, perhaps to diminish that. It depends on how you play too, if your households are keeping in touch, and there's a lot of club meetings while you're away, those would probably counterbalance the decay too.
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by playing with aging turned completely off
the rotational game works then similiar to TS2
every important part of life of sims is made by me
you have to play them at least once
& you will have to correct their life
there are several cheats which you can use to do so, like eg correcting the lovebirds relationships to zero again, if you wish so, assigning them jobs you want them to do, also correcting by cheats skill levels the sims may experience spawned by the game randomly
usually the game doesn't change much of a played sim, but unplayed sims experience often radical changes
depends on the lenght of time you play
the longer you play the more sims will the game accumulate & it can happen that the game will remove your sims, even the played ones at some point
you should remove unwanted unplayed sims by hand out of the manage households screen regularly to keep at least that number of sims down
but i think there is a problem with ghosts also, ghosts where their graves are nowhere to be found
i have currently no ghosts in my game, it's probably because i play it with aging off
my sims die, when i say it's their time to die, currently no sim is dead in my game
do it all by your own hand
don't count on the help of progression by the game, there is none
the game will play its own game, while you are trying to play yours
i simply REFUSE to repeat again, after i am doing it still with TS3, to be compelled to direct the game heavily in its basic gameplay by "mods"
& therefore i refuse to use the MCCC
& that's probably the reason why i am way more discriminating why TS4 is lacking as a game in whole
i don't excuse TS4's devs in their sloppiness by correcting it with a mod ... again
a mod is for me a modification, a change of the actually included content not a fix to everything broken
i fix all the broken stuff by hand with the help of cheats to remind me how broken this game actually is
the birthday cake works only starting from child
you have to age babies without any birthday, unfortunately
you can pretend to give a birthday party though
@Tomatplante
you're not the only one
though i am not playing completely mod free, because some mods are actual mods, which just expand the gameplay to where the devs thought it's not necessary like the Part Time Jobs For All by plasticbox
I keep track of the ages for all my sims, and I manually age them up at the appropriate times. I don't turn aging off because I do want my elders to grow older and eventually die. I also turn aging on for the neighborhood once each rotation, so my "townies" all age at the same rate as my played households.
To prevent culling of townies I don't want to lose, I put them in a "safe house" -- just adding them to a vacant lot in the town. Even though I don't play them, the culling mechanism always skips over them.
Like others have said, you usually don't lose strong friendships; acquaintances do disappear, though. If you're only playing two or three families and you play them regularly (once a week for each, for example), the friendships shouldn't decay to the point where they disappear.
There was a problem with jobs about a year ago. They tried to fix it so that unplayed sims would get jobs, and it worked, but so many rotational players complained that they took the fix out.
Occasionally my married sims will have a romantic interest with some other sim when I come back to them. I look upon it as a flirtation and don't worry about it. It's never been as much as half of the pink bar.
I've noticed that if I don't send my sims to community lots much, the other sims in rotation tend to have fewer new relationships. If you really don't want unexpected friends, enemies, and romances, you can try keeping all your sims at home.
Unplayed Sims still get jobs assigned, but played Sims don't. Even if you don't actively play them. (I have loads of households marked played in my rotational save just because I wanted to pick their jobs.)
For the unexpected friends, enemies, and romances, I use UI Cheats Extension and MC Command Centre. With the first, I can reduce the level to one I prefer; with the second I can make them forget each other entirely. Often I'm okay with the new relationships the game makes in the background, but sometimes they're just wrong.