How does one drug sceen their nanny... I must admit, I have no idea how to do so, but am convinced of the need to. Perhaps it's only me, but I find every time my SIM toddlers need a diaper change, attention, or anything else really, the nannys solution to the problem seems to be to feed the child a bottle. And while Im sure we all want healthy SIM children, my concern after four or five is that my toddler may well swell up like a bloted tic and pop!! And once they refuse bottles due to the natural swelling of their bellys, and subsequently their diapers, the bottles lay around on the floor turning green and waiting for some hapless child to come along and feed from one. Who in their right mind would hand a child a bottle while they have a loaded diaper and a three quarters full hunger bar? My conclusion is only a nanny on drugs or with a particularly nasty sadistic streak. My second rant is simply that I am confused about the seemingly high amount of twin births my unrelated SIMS have. For those of you who have not yet suffered the "joy" of twins, let me simply say, good luck. Perhaps Im not the best SIM parent, however I find that three SIMS with two nannys at once are hard pressed to keep their mood or asperations up. So, my questions are, are twin births as common for everyone as they are for me and are my nannys the only ones who seem to be deranged?
I don't know about the frequency of twins. Would you believe that I have never had twins in either TS1 or during the solid week I've had the new games. As for the nanny I agree with you. First time I saw her and how useless she is I laughed out loud and said: "Oi! Mister Wright! Not fair! I wanted a nanny and you sent me a demented granny!". However (useless or otherwise) she does stop the social services from hassling you if you absolutely have to go to work, like my Drake family had today .... Today I've been playing with my first family, the Drakes, again for the first time since last w/end. Their hood, Drakesfield, has grown in population and they now have several friends and daughter Blaine is getting real moody over young Jared Jelks who is possibly the coolest, if not the brightest, young man in town. Blaine also saved the family a fortune on nany bills by help out a lot in the successful raising to childhood of baby bro, Francisco while keeping her job as a gofer, keeping straight a A+ school report, learning to cook better, sneaking out one night with her friend Angela, and chilling by the swings downtown with Jared. She also blew the entire family's budget on a rackful of new clothes ... why? Because black is so last week, Mom! Mum and dad had to sell the carpets to pay for enough food to see them thru the week-end and there was only enough left on Monday to give the baby a bottle and Blaine a bowl of cornlakes to see her thru the day at school. LOL. I am not cheating my principle families. Whatever happens to them is kismet.
First let me say, I cant believe I mis-spelled screen in the title of this post. That's what I get for being in a hurry. So far I've had 2 out of 3 of my SIMS (Unrelated) have twins. Or rather two out of three of my pregnancies. Twins are much more work than I anticipated and due to the timing, trying to get the oldest into private school, working on two promotions at work, and trying to fullfill one SIMS aspirations before he hits elder status in two days, Im having serious problems even keeping my SIMS in the yellow, much less the green. I thought a nanny would help. So I even hired two. So far they have got in the way more than anything. Anyway, Im glad to hear that twins are rarer than they have been for me, as I was about to give up on having children at all!
So far I've only had two sims pregnancies in the game, the first was a single birth, the second was twins, each in a different family, so now I'm wondering if it's something like a 50-50 random frequency or those of us getting what seems to be an unusual number of twins are just "lucky" on the draw? Does anyone know what the odds for getting twins is SUPPOSED to be? And does anyone know if twins will run in familes over the generations, so a twin's child might be more likely to have twins themselves, or anything like that? -edit- Back to Nannies! I haven't tried one yet as at the last minute before carpool I realized my sim had 5 days off showing so I had her call in sick instead of hiring the nanny. I've had to have my sims each take a sip from the elixir of life, trying to make them survive as adults long enough for the babies to be kids at least!
Nannies are indeed a pain. But they fill basic needs long enough to get some rest or go to work. The nanny I had watched tv more than she took care of the baby.
You guys wont believe this...but my sim just had quadruplets. I hear you asking how did this happen....well, I am unsure as to whether it is a glitch but my dear little sim got knocked up (awwww) and then decided to stargaze...then she inevitably got abducted whilst heavily pregnant. The weird thing is, when the aliens chucked her out, she went into labour and had not one, not two, not three, but four babies! Two boys and two girls...none of which look like aliens. Has anyone else had this phenomena happen? My sims are going nuts trying to take care of four screaming babies and the nannies arent the best.
I can't wait for the lucky day I might get quads in TS2. But I have to fix it first since something got corrupted an now I can't even install it again lol. Just gotsta catch me dad.
About twins I've had a lot of pregnancies in my neighbourhood. A lot. We're talking like 12-15 pregnancies (I've had a week off from school after a surgery, and right after that, the yearly one-week-vacation in autumn, that's many hours of gameplay...). I have about 11 or so households in that neighbourhood. None of these pregnancies resulted in twins. NONE. And I have even reloaded the game a few times, (SIM)minutes before the baby was born, because they had the wrong sex... I like playing God. Maybe it's something in the groundwater?
The first thing you should do upon the nanny's arrival is to barricade it into immobility with your furniture. This will prevent your nanny from terrorizing your household and forcefeeding your children until they explode. This is particularly important when your children are actually at the child stage, and the nanny is simply a nuisance Maxis tacked on that wasn't present in TS1: Since children are perfectly capable of satisfying nearly all of their basic needs on their own, the nanny is actually entirely superfluous. About the only thing they CAN'T do is cook meals, but honestly, Sims AI is the *LAST* thing I want managing my meals, since they constantly raid the fridge even when they are not really hungry! Besides, you can always use snacks. Therefore, particularly in such cases, the nanny can only visit chaos and destruction upon your household. She should be locked up in the basement or someplace, walled off by a stack of couches or something, to prevent her from tampering. As a side benefit, the quality of child care provided by the nanny will likely improve.
I usually have a small, unused room in the basement used for whatever storage, execution, etc. needs which might ever arise, and I keep the nanny in there using moveobjects whenever the baby/kid doesn't need anything. Helps... in some situations. The AI scripters at Maxis must have been smoking summat mighty strong when they wrote the nanny AI...
While I doubt that they were actually "smoking summat" when they wrote the code, I do hope that they fix the nanny. I have this feeling that a lot of the "bugs" that people report having may be tied to the nanny. I can now say that I have played TS2 for over 200 hours and the only real bug I've found is the inability to plan outfits for my toddlers. But I don't use the move_objects cheat regularly (only once because it looked stupid to have a strip of grass next to the fence where I had my pool) and I haven't yet used the nanny (except for once when my Sim wanted to go the the Community lot and his wife was still at work.) So, somehow my machine or my playing style is different enough from the people who say that "everyone will get the bugs if they play for more than 170 hours."
A cursory examination of the nanny's behavior reveals that the people who programmed the nanny AI should be taken out and shot. Let's look at how other service NPCs function. The maid's behavioral algorithm can basically be defined as follows: 1. Arrive. 2. Find a(nother) mess. 3. If a mess cannot be found, goto 9. 4. If mess is inaccessible, goto 2. 5. Goto mess. 6. Clean mess. 7. If time is up, goto 9. 8. Else, goto 2. 9. If good friends with house resident and resident is present, ask if they want to hang out. 10. Else, Leave. Seems pretty simple, eh? The gardener is pretty much exactly the same, only he concerns himself with unwatered plants, untrimmed bushes, and weeds. Delivery NPCs are even simpler: Arrive, ring doorbell, wait to be greeted or until timeout, give/drop goods, leave. Now let's look at the nanny. The nanny's behavior matches none of these. This is surprising, since taking care of a baby is formulaic. Assuming a baby is present, the following behaviors should be performed: 1. If baby cries and is stinky, change diaper, wash baby, put baby back. 2. Else if baby is still crying, feed baby, put it back. 3. Else LEAVE THE **** BABY ALONE. As a nanny is a service worker and babies cannot resolve their own needs, this should be considered priority 1. For toddlers, the procedure is similar: 1. If its food bar is red, feed it. 2. If its energy bar goes critical, put it away in its crib if one is present, otherwise do nothing. 3. If its bladder meter gets low, and it has sufficient energy, attempt to take it to the potty/potty train it if one is present. 4. If a toddler is stinky, change it if necessary, wash it. 5. If it has unlearned skills, and it has energy, attempt to train it. 6. If it is awake and in its still crib, let it out. Simple, yes? I follow these rules basically to the letter, and every single simkid I've raised in this manner ends up just fine and peachy. Now, children are much simpler by far still, since they're more or less independent, with only the inability to prepare food. 1. If child will starve prior to the arrival of a schoolbus, and hunger bar has gone red, serve the food. That's basically ALL you have to do to take care of child sims, since they can independently satisfy every other need. NOW WHY IS THIS SO **** DIFFICULT?
It's true that children can't cook what you would call a meal. But i have this family, both parents have love aspirations, so they're pretty busy wohooing, and cheating on each other,and don't have the time to take care of their little Ben. That's why they bought Ben a mini oven, now Ben is perfectly independent , every day he has a delicious burnt cake for breakfast, lunch and dinner. that's the beauty of autonomy.
Well, I never said they couldn't eat. They can subsist entirely on snack food, too. Thing is, the game doesn't appear to recognize that a child sim *IS* mostly self-sufficient, and still requires the nanny, who you promptly have to find a way to barricade somewhere so she doesn't trash your house.
Yes, I totally get what you said. I also find having a nanny very annoying. For some reason I never thought about barricading her, I wonder why... Well, I guess it would make an interesting story if her ghost stays and haunts my terrified children at night:devious:. " Mommy there's a nanny under my bed!!"
Sim Children I have to agree with J.M. Pescado in his earlier reply. If you follow the things that he wrote. It not difficult at all to raise a child, and have them grow up to be fine upstanding adults.
No, I think you misunderstood: I didn't mean "trap and kill", I meant simply "barricade to keep her from terrorizing the house". Let her go after you're no longer forced to have her around by the game. Otherwise the game will just generate another nanny to replace the dead nanny, and your gamefiles will then be clogged with dead nannies. Many of my children grow up to be neither fine nor upstanding: They're right cranky *******s, like their parents, and tend to become evil overlords trying to take over the world. An entire section of my neighborhood is owned by a growing crime family now.
