Changes for Sullivan

For a while now, I've been a bit bummed about how long it takes me to get through a round. I have a lot of families! If I didn't, I could get through a round a lot faster...but I'm also very attached to most of them.

I can find the time to play but when I have to blog about each family, playing requires a bit more planning and thought. So I've come up with a solution that I hope will work for me. I really want to see my sims progress in their relationships, careers and families and it's not looking incredibly likely for my youngest sims, if I keep going the way I'm going.

This is my plan. Generally, I have two families scheduled per game month. From now on, I will write a full update for one of the families and update on the other in the birthdays updates. Depending on what happens in that family, the birthdays update may be longer or shorter. I will also attempt to make sure the families who aren't getting a full update that round feature in other families' updates, so their own stories can be touched on there too.

My one exception to this new rule of mine will probably be the uni updates. I really love the uni updates and I think so many of my sims really come into their own during that time that I'd miss doing those, if I decided not to.

I was going to just mention this in the next birthdays update but I thought I'd make a dedicated post, just for anyone who is interested in my ramblings on the matter. I'll add a note in birthdays too, just for anyone who normally skips these sorts of posts. :)

Assigning hobbies to sims

Ever since I found out how sims get their One True Hobby, I've hated it. The way it's done basically means that all of your sims of one particular hobby will have similar personalities. That makes sense for some hobbies - sims who are into Fitness or Sports should probably also be active, for instance. But why, for example, do Arts & Crafts sims have to be nice? Why do Nature sims have to be playful? A lot of the criteria EA came up with just seems really arbitrary to me.

So I started randomising my sims' OTHs at birth. I was satisfied with that for a while, but after I had been using Starr's careers criteria for a while (which is partly based on interests), I thought I might try tying interests and hobbies together. This was a good while ago now but it's only recently that I decided to fine tune my system.

I'm going to start by showing which interests I assign to which hobbies. Then I'll show you a couple of examples of exactly what I do with that information to decide on hobbies for my sims, using a couple of Sullivan babies as guinea pigs. Babies are sort of blank slates anyway and I'm not yet wedded to the idea of any one particular hobby for them.

Anyway, so on with the interests!

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The Liebster Award - Maisie's questions

Please read Tuesday's post for a brief explanation of the Liebster award to see my list of nominees and questions and my responses to Shannon's questions and Wednesday's post for my response to Emma's questions.

1. What is your favorite part of your sims & your neighborhood?

Well, my goal with Sullivan was to create a cohesive hood, where the families were close like a lot of real families (I can't tell you how often family relationships would drop to zero in my old hoods - cannot imagine playing that way now!). So I think that's my favourite thing about my hood. Looking at my sims and being able to think "oh, that's so-and-so's cousin and that's what's-his-face's grandmother" and have those relationships actually mean something. That is really fun to me.

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The Liebster Award - Emma's questions

Please read Tuesday's post for a brief explanation of the Liebster award to see my list of nominees and questions.

Emma's questions:

1. What do you find most gratifying about sharing your Sims’ stories?

Knowing that other people are interested in what I'm doing my little hood really encourages me to improve it. The biggest example is decorating - blogging is why I learnt to decorate properly. I was so embarrassed to post pictures of my terribly decorated lots before, so I started making an effort with it, so no one would be looking down their nose at it (hopefully)!

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The Liebster Award

Wow, so over the past week or so, I have been nominated for a Liebster Award by three other fantastic bloggers - Shannon at Simdale Valley Post, Emma at Around Aleaton and Maisie at Millwood. Thank you so much to all of you!

It's a pay-it-forward sort of thing, so nominees are supposed to nominate others in turn. These are the rules.

1. Put the award on your blog
2. Thank the blogger who nominated you
3. Nominate 5 to 11 other blogs
4. Answer the 11 questions that were asked
5. Then ask the people you nominate, 11 questions.

Let's get started!

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Expanded genetics

In the notes for my last update, I talked about the new genetic system I'm using and said I would chase up the link to the thread, if anyone was interested. Tanja was and on the chance she wasn't the only one, I'm adding it here too.

So...Simmerville at The Sims Daily started this fantastic thread quite a while ago, talking about his/her (most simmers seem to be female but Simmerville has always used male avatars, so I think they might be a guy?) genetic system in TS3, used to decide whether a sim will have freckles, glasses and their level of hairiness. It's an interesting read.

If you're a member of N99, you can also read this thread, where I talk a bit about how I'm planning to adapt it to my own game. I'd never really thought about an actual system for this kind of thing before but I was immediately excited when I read Simmerville's thread!

It's almost a year later now (wow!) and I've been thinking about this a bit and deciding how I will implement it into my own game. I'm going to write this as if you've read Simmerville's original post in the thread I linked to, so go read that!

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Sim personalities and birth control

I haven't played out my next update yet, so instead you're getting another nerdy gameplay post from me.

Anyone who uses ACR in their games will be aware of the havoc it can wreak on your hood's population. Fortunately, ACR also includes a birth control option, which tempers that quite a bit!

For a long time in my game, I've allowed any sim with five or more neat points to use birth control. I snagged that idea from Laura, though I think her sims needed seven neat points. The thinking is that if a sim is neat, they would be organised enough to keep track of their birth control and remember to use it. However, ever since reading this post at Riverdale, I've been pondering how I could use the other personality traits to help me decide who would and wouldn't use birth control.

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Maxis scholarships, expanded some more

I've been sick and not feeling much like playing over the weekend, so I'm putting this up in lieu of the Lane post! Hopefully, you'll enjoy some nerdery in its place. ;)

Some of you have probably seen Starr's awesome post over at Apple Valley; if you haven't, go over and check it out! In it, she details the different ways she's made the Maxis scholarships more meaningful for her game, along with a few of her own scholarships which she's added. When she posted about it at N99 a few weeks ago, I decided to share my own ideas for some of the scholarships she hadn't expanded.

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Getting into university in Sullivan

For the whole time I've been playing Sullivan, I've been using the same system to decide which Sims will and won't be admitted into university. It's a fairly simple system. If a Sim earns 4 scholarships and has the want to go, they go and pay full tuition. If they earn 6 scholarships and have the want, they go and they pay half tuition. If they earn 8 and have the want, they go and tuition is completely waived.

I've been dissatisfied with that for quite a while though. It's not really realistic. In real life, I somehow gained entrance into university without earning any scholarships at all and I'd wager that's true of many of you as well. I wanted a new system but hadn't been motivated enough to develop anything. 

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Personality points that make sense

At N99 recently, I was talking about my method of assigning personality points to my Sims. Some found it very helpful for their own games, so I decided to take Starr's suggestion and make a dedicated post about it here. Maybe it's something you can use in your own games or maybe you just want to sit back and marvel about just how nerdy I can get!

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Changes

Round 27: Winter 2025

last update/next update

Adam Gottlieb is 70, Athena is 65, Amelia is 36, Wade is 35, Sophie is 12, Noah is 7 and Emma is 5.

Narrated by Sophie Gottlieb

Ever since Grandpa Filippo died, Emma has been driving everybody up the wall.

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You say it's your birthday, Spring 2021

It's spring and it's time for us to wish a happy 1st birthday to Timothy Lane!

Let's take a look at his parents when they were toddlers, for comparison purposes!

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Sullivan's Top 20 - a Valentine's Day interlude

I'd been thinking of doing something like this for Valentine's Day for a couple of months now and Laura's post with Lakeside Heights' hottest couples made me actually get my butt in gear and do it, rather than forgetting about it until February 15th.

I have not kept truly consistent records of my chemistry scores in the past, so all of these couples, bar one, are currently together. I'm much more meticulous about noting chemistry scores now but my former slackitude means I don't have the scores for a lot of my former couples. All these couples are three-bolters - I didn't realise I had so many!

With no further ado, the Top 20 couples in Sullivan!

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Taxman, 2017

Athena Gottlieb is the new (and first) governor of Sullivan. One of the bedrooms in the Gottlieb house has been converted to a home office for Athena. 2017 is a tax year and one of Athena's new duties is tax collection.

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Round 21 Summary + tax rundown

This round, I started doing taxes again. I'd stopped doing them for a while because I was using Bigger Bills and many of my Sims were way too poor to pay! So I got discouraged and pretended the taxes were part of the bills.

I've taken that hack out now though and am doing taxes manually again. I've decided my Sims will pay taxes every 4 years - they paid in 2013 this round, so the next taxes won't be until 2017.

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The golden path

Round 21: Autumn 2014

last update/next update

Tate Benton is 44, Zelda is 39, Josie is 12 and Jack and Charlie are both 2.
(Leontine is 72 and Finn, Claudia and Victoria are all 13)

Narrated by Tate Benton

Our family has changed so much over the last two years. Our daughter Josie is now 12 and has already decided she wants to be a doctor. Of course, we don't want to pressure her but I think all of our chess games helped her earn the genius grant scholarship she was recently awarded.

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Space boy

Round 21: Autumn 2013

last update/next update

Galen Clarke is 75, Georgette is 73, Kendal is 37 and Calvin and Troy are both 10.
(Lake Draper is 56 and Patience is 11)

Narrated by Kendal Clarke

Georgette recently managed to claw her way back up to the top at the law firm. Her superiors were really impressed with her dedication to mentoring the younger employees. They tend to get overloaded with the extra work no one else wants to do and Georgette is always willing to help them in her own time at home. It's nice to see her going off to work happy again.

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The future freaks me out

Round 21: Autumn 2013

Rose's last update/Joanna's last update/everyone else's last update

next update/Eliot's next update

Eliot Novak is 27, Luc and Cordy Lane are both 20 and Rose Draper and Joanna Gottlieb are both 18.
(Asha is 16.)

Narrated by Cordy Lane

Luc and I are in our junior year now and we've been joined at Novak Hall by Joanna Gottlieb and Rose Draper. Joanna is also our cousin and she's super-studious. She finished her term paper within days of arriving and it was so obvious she was going to ace the whole semester. And probably every semester.

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A note about aging and the Sullivan calendar

Seeing I have finally fine-tuned the aging system in Sullivan to be exactly as I like it (heavily based on the aging system at Lakeside Heights), I thought I would revise my shamefully outdated aging post. If you still want to read that one, it's here. I think most long-term readers will have already picked up what I'm doing as we've gone along. With my StatCounter though, I noticed I'm getting a lot of page views on that old aging post and I think some readers out there might be confused! 

My rounds represent two years of real-life time, so Sims get two years older each round. I track time by months. Each month features 1 or 2 regular family updates. Some months will also feature a birthday update (which occur exactly one year after birth for babies aging to toddler but only in January for all other age stages). University updates for students living on campus are always in March. Occasionally, I might have a special mini-update for a wedding or another special event I might want to cover outside of the confines of a regular update. Those could occur in any month.

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Changes to Sullivan's calendar

As I mentioned in my last post, Round 19 in Sullivan will mark the debut of the new calendar system. It is based largely on the system used over at Lakeside Heights and at Riverdale but I've modified it a tiny bit to suit my own purposes.

One "round" will now be 2 years Sim-time (Rounds 1-18 were 5 years Sim-time), so Sims will now age 2 years each round. I will be tracking my hood by seasons, rather than by months. I've got my order of play all mapped out and as I have fewer than 24 households, it made more sense to me to track it by seasons.

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