Saturday, January 08, 2011

 

Time marches on.... Sims 3 Prosperity?

I really loved playing this prosperity challenge, and this long afterwards, I amazingly still miss these families... Especially the Gemini brothers, and my Grilled Cheese Elders...
However, shortly after my last post, my balky computer crashed again, and for the last time...
By the time I finally had a new computer, I had lost my place on the challenge, and wasn't sure I could regain it... Around my daughter I no longer had a lot of time to play anyway, so I didn't reinstall the old 'hood, or try the challenge again...
I'm STILL tempted too.. As I said, I LOVED it...

Right now, however, I'm playing Sims 3.

I have up until now only played one family at a time on Sims 3, due to the 'hood progression feature... but I'd actually like to try a true neibhorhood...
Considering this, I wanted a structured way to plan and control which Sims I played and for how long.... The best fit I could think of for this was the Prosperity Challenge. I cannot find Prosperity Challenge Rules for Sims 3... Well, I found one person's attempted rules... but they didn't look very usable.
( http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=353221 )
Unless I can find better rules, I'm thinking of making my own.

For this, I'm thinking of trying two versions of Prosperity myself, and seeing if either are workable around the challenges of the Sims 3 format.

Sims 3 Prosperity - Basic.
- For this you uncheck the enable story progression option...
Sims 3 Prosperity Alive!!
- Keep the progression option, and just deal with household changes that occur without your control.

I haven't completely figured out all the problems that will be encountered, but I will use this post and comments to it to brainstorm, and maybe have a few people chime in with their feedback and ideas. :)

One problem, maybe only with "Alive!", maybe with both... As I said, I haven't actually tried playing multiple households yet... I'll do that in a testing phase once I have more of an idea what I'm trying to achieve...

ANYWAY..
---one problem will be scoring Elders, and other Sims too; as they may die while you are not playing them...
I think the best option for this, is every time you play a family, the last thing you do before moving to the next is jot down their scorable stats. If they die during another part of the round, their score as of the end of their last playing session is their score. (stats, LTW achieved, amount of Reward points... [Should only the Unspent Total be scored? or also scores for rewards bought?] etc.)

---In the old post I linked with proposed rules, the author began with removal of all non-challenge Sims from the 'hood...
This actually seems to have CAUSED problems... - Even with story progression off, When your active Sim needed Co-Workers, the game would grab a random other Sim (one of your Challenge Sims, because they were the only ones in the neighborhood) remove them from their current career, and make them co-workers with your Sim.
I propose leaving the "Townies" for Job Fodder, as well as marital Fodder, etc... And just either choose a world with an empty street to colonize with your challenge Sims, (there IS one, I forget which one it is though.. I have 3 hoods in my game) OR use the move houses feature to rearrange your 'hood so that you have a nice empty area for your Challenge Sims. - you can also evict Townies from small households and merge them in with other households.
AFTER your neiborhood is prepared, you would place lots and houses for your challenge Sims, and roll and place them. (OR you could use small prebuilt homes... I tend to build since you can work within your sim's budgets...)
Even WITH townies for an employee pool, one of your Challenge Sims may occasionally get tapped for a job change, but that's just one of the obstacles they face towards reaching their goals. - Likely with this issue, Top Of Career LTWs should be scored with an extra (5?) points due to the added difficulty.


--- The post I linked above also had a convoluted Rolling system for traits, declaring them 'Bad-Good-or Neutral' and you could choose out of the 3 types of trait depending on your roll... Even though it gives you NO control, I think a simple in-game "Randomize" will work better.... If others like the ability to have a little choice in the matter, we could go with his rules instead... or let you choose one of the 2 methods.

--- One problem I anticipate IF you allow Story Progression, is you may find one or some of your challenge Sims marrying and moving out while you are not playing their households... When this happens, from the edit town screen you CAN move them, their spouse, and their children if they have any, out of wherever they moved TO, and either into their original home, or their family home. - We'd either need to make exceptions for the only one move per life-phase rule, or totally revamp it... Lets say Only one move per life phase EXCEPT for corrective moves.. AND no moving into a Non-Challenge inhabitted house. (I think moving your family in with your Rich boyfriend, and moving his townie family into YOUR old house [House-Trading] would be a challenge-breaker...)


I had more ideas, but am temporarily drawing a blank... took me too long to get to the computer, I've been thinking about it all last night and this morning. :)

I do not want to actually start this challenge until I get and install "late night"... maybe someone will give me my birthday present early. :) But I hope to have some good roughed out rules to test before then.

Anyone want to chime in?

Comments:
Hey, it's Robin. I'm a mod for the sims 2 challenges group and helped develop some of the offical sims 2 prosperity rules. Sherri did work on originally making a sims 3 propserity rules, but never really came up with anything formal. There is a sims 3 prosperity group here http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/prosperity_challenge_3/?yguid=79292109 It's pretty dead now, but if you read the early posts you can read about everyone discussing potential rule ideas and pitfalls from when the game first came out. I think the group kind of died and no official decision was made because at the time it was just too frustrating to try to play prosperity style.

However, I think it is mostly possible to do now. I use awesomemod to keep my families the same as I change houses. I know prosperity is mostly anti-cheats in its ideals, but Sherri agreed that using mods like this are an option if the only point is to keep your families frozen while you change houses. I'm currently playing five houses this way and am quite happy with the results. If you want you can check out my blog at http://sirenprincessblogspot.com The sims 3 is at the bottom. I started it off as a legacy but realized I couldn't just play one house. I've been playing it prosperity style rotating between houses each week since my gen 2 sims became adults. And I'm really satisfied with this play. If you're interested in thinking out some rules using this system, let me know.

I have tried to play multiple houses without mods and just got too frustrated with my families constantly moving without my permission, losing the house I'd spent the whole previous round building them, for example. And the job changes. I found it not satisfying for my sim to reach the top of her career without me there to control her and 'earn it' if that makes any sense.

A few other thoughts. One thing I would suggest emphasizing in your rules is obtaining the lifetime wish for all your sims as that's a key goal in prosperity. Also I'm really enjoying trying to accomplish all of something during the course of my challenge, and prosperity had bonus points for completion of large things like that. So I've set for myself goals (I'd make them worth major bonus points) for getting a sim to the top of all of the different careers, achieving all the possible lifetime wants, accomplishing all the skill challenges, for example. Also I'd suggest using a rule against changing traits after their selected and changing lifetime wants. Just a few ideas for you.

I'd love to answer any questions you have or listen to your ideas and help you develop rules for your play that make it fun for you. And I'd love to read your blog of how it goes for you.

Robin
 
Forgot to add you might also want to join this group. It's the sims 3 challenges group. It's more active and still has people posting blogs. You might talk to people there about different rule ideas.

http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/Sims3Challenges/?yguid=79292109
 
Thanks Robin, Around juggling the one-year-old who did not want me reading online today, I went through and read the manual on awesomemod...
I really wanted to try house rotation 'live' and without hacks to see what happened and how it worked... but based on that manual, there's NO way it would work without it... having kids go from straight a's while played to f's because the game didn't let them do their homework, etc.. (sigh)
I'll check out the challenges list you sent the link to later, but wanted to go ahead and let you know I appreciate your comments very much. :)
 
Bah... I was going to install AwesomeMod, and try it out.. but that Framework thing isn't available, and I finally found a post via google saying it's no longer needed, and that the instructions for how to not use it are on MTS... So I looked around there until my head exploded.... Now I have to clean off my monitor, before I give up and just play the sims for a bit!! :)
 
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