Keeping Sims ages in sync Hi All Was wondering how OC (obsessive compulsive) everyone is about keeping Sims ages in sync. For example its not really realistic for your sim's college crush to still be in college when your sim becomes an elder ... well unless the college crush is really dim... I tend to play all my families equally, so that if they are friends, they age approximately at the same time. If a teenager goes away to college, I play the sims that stayed at home for a few days, so that they get a bit older as well. Any thoughts?
My neighborhoods are all totally out of sync. I was playing with the Broke family (Brandi's on her third husband) and by the time Dustin was almost an elder, Angela was still a teen. Had to speed her up with a little Elixir.
Well when I started over I decided to have just 3 main family lines that I have striven to keep in some sort of sync ... though where families have grown (and I'm in the 3rd gen. I do tend to pick only one or two children from each family to keep the sync going for ... the others I tend to move out and play for a while to develop sub plots and then just leave them be as decoration for the neighborhood view, as well as to populate community lots and be available for weddings, parties and bar mitzvahs ...
i dont tend to keep my families perfectly in sync. right now my big concern is getting all the children grown up and out to college from my "main" families. im planning on moving them all into the same dorm to make things a bit easier and they can also stay friends.
My families are completely out of sync. I've had several sims' children, and grandchildren, die before the grand/parents have. It leads to one weird family tree - but I don't like some of my sims well enough to play them for 10 minute intervals.
I try to play my families equally, but it doesn't always happen. I seem to have a few favorite families that I play much more than those I find "boring." and so they are stuck in limbo. Before my "Simsville" neighborhod was shot, I had tried to play it by generation. I would think of all the babies in the neighborhood and try to raise them into children. When I got these kids as children, I would raise them to YA. Then they would all go off about the same time. So, that way I tried to keep my generations together. For example, one group was: The Jerry Twins Leia Hicks, and her sister Scarlett Mae Bonypart Dodge Spencer Margaret Clonch Taylor Spock All these Sims were in college The next group were teens: Ian Prince Josephine Bonypart Tyler Hicks Milia Davis Luke Hicks The Spencer boys (Dakota and Cougar) Well, I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Can you tell I miss these kids! :(
I try to play my neighborhood evenly. But I have some Sims that I've essentially left alone to be Townies. I made the mistake of taking 32 kids, 2 from each of 16 families, to University at the same time. I learned that that way lies madness and have since then decided to just have a few core families that I play regularly.
Tried for awhile to keep neighbors and their kids in sync. But I seem to have gotten away from that. I now have elders whose brothers and sisters are still living it up in a dorm at college even though they all started life only a few days apart. Interesting, to get phone calls from relatives and friends who haven't aged a single day. Sure glad that doesn't happen in real life . There are just entirely too many people in my neighborhoods and getting the kids through college just takes a long LONG time. I've decided to accept it as part of the weird world where Sims live -- where time is seriously warped.
Oh LOL (to a buttock losing extent ) Kat! I remember your posts in the build-up to the release of Uni and thinking to myself: "man that girl is dedicated!" when you told of the numerous teens you had prepared for college ... in some ways I feel disappointed though. I feel like I did when I found out who Santa was
I have second generation college kids mingled in with the third generation. For example, Sora Lockhart and his niece, Leia, live in the same rental property. I'm not sure how Pepe Curious and Portulaca Lockhart are related (they're in love), since Pepe is the cousin of Boba Fett and Starboy, who are married to Kairi and Lulu Lockhart, who are the cousins of Tidus Lockhart, whose daughter is Portulaca. Crazy stuff. My brother keeps saying that his Sim son shouldn't marry his cousin, so I'm having Sora try to snare a Barker kid (four kids in college, poor Lora Yuna and Garrett...not to mention that my Sim persona dropped her kids off with them....lol). So I'm probably going to have a messed up family tree down the road, lol.
I just never ever ever concentrate on ages. I create a family, develop it for a week or so, get bored and create new sims. However, I am going to do my very very best to create a town started by a few families. It's going to be hard - but my new pet project.
32 sims at university? It boggles my mind! LOL! On my first spin through university, I thought I had to fill the dorm. I took 8 and I thought it was going to take my lifetime to matriculate all of them. If I send more than one at a time now, I put each of them in a separate dorm. You can whip one student through university in an evening of play with pescado's university clock. I find the university does help me keep my sims in some type of sync. It forces me to graduate them before younger siblings need to attend. I finally found a look I can live with for the elders and I do let them grow old and die now. I make a point of making each home a group I enjoy playing. If I don't enjoy spending time with them they seem to age quickly and die peacefully (thanks to Merola's Painting).
I keep all of my families pretty much in sync by playing 2 sim days in each household on a rotating basis. When I get to a family I find boring or tedious and I really don't feel like playing them, rather than skip over them I just take a break from the game for a day or two (blasphemy, I know!) until I feel I have the energy to deal with them. Of course, I usually spend that break downloading, downloading, and downloading some more.
My sim families are TOTALLY out of sync. I just have those 'favourites' that I only play. For example, I find the Caliente sisters very boring, while Don Lothario is extremely interesting!
The first time I thought about this was when my first legacy challenge family hired a nanny to look after the first born. That same nanny then became friends with the sim when she became an adult and actually came to the sim's anniversary party when she was an elder! I subsequently had issues with her getting stuck on the lot as she was still on the lot when I installed Uni ... so she died there. I trashed that neighbourhood and started over with my new neighbourhood a while back, and with 5 families there, I'm now on second generation for all of them and almost ready to send the second gen to uni. I do pretty much what Hellokit does, and play each family in turn for a while. If there is a really boring family I don't like, I generally try to cause some chaos there for excitement, or leave TS2 for a few days.
Yes, out of synch bugs me!!!! Trying to keep all of them in synch, however, leads to madness. I had 20 sims in college at once in my old neighborhood, and they're still there. I gave up on that. I had a sim who is an elder even though her parents are not. That was a bit weird. In my new neighborhood I play in rounds. I've got a handful of families with kids and I play them in turns until the kids age to the next stage, then I move to the next family. The secret is to not have too many families, and to give yourself permission to not play everyone. I am considering having my "cow plant sim" make "friends" with some of the sims I can't be bothered to play until old age ... but her lot might get a bit crowded with all those green ghosts on it. I have some greek house sims that will graduate if I ever play them again, and I was thinking of having them become NPCs ... marry them off, have a couple of kids, and then just not play them again unless I had a specific use for them. Built in friends for my playable sims other than that annoying Marsha ... And, to age or not to age, that is the question ... I have some sims that are allowed the elixir and some that are not. Every family has a different plan. For example, I have the Triplets of Belleville, and they're adults now. I plan for them to reach their lifetime aspirations and become elders, and then drink the elixir until the end of time. They're going to be great old ladies and I want to keep them around. They've been a lot of fun to play.
I'm incredibly OC about my sims . My first post here was a question about how anal everyone else was about socially engineering their neighbourhoods. As far as I can remember, noone was as anal as me . They were quite out of sync recently, until I decided to draw up a list of generations, to work out how many I had and who was in them. I was horrified to find that some gen1 sims were still babies while the majority of gen2 recently graduated en masse from uni (finally - yeesh uni is dull! After a while I speeded it up with Pescado's Clock so when they weren't studying enough to pass their exams they were taking them. I'm not going to make the mistake of sending an entire generation of teens to uni again!) and are therefore mainly adults (with the exception of a few children and recently-grown-up teens). So my current project is to synch my generations, so as not to have anyone in any earlier generation younger than anyone in a later generation.
Thats pretty much my view as well zooty ... except I don't go to the point of writing down stuff... Well I have one family I need to play now, who are the founders of my Mountain View neighbourhood, and one generation ahead of the rest. Unfortunately the current heir's wife died from the choking death while pregnant, so I need to find him a new wife and make sure his parents pass on gracefully.
My problem is, not all sims are created equally interesting. That's part of why I quit the previous neighborhood. I was like Zooty, trying to get everyone to synch up and I had too freaking many kids in college and it was soooo dull. I'm being pretty good with my current 'hood, partly because I'm keeping it so small. I think I will create my own NPC families out of the pre-made college kids when they graduate, but I won't bother to age them past a certain point. They'll just be more interesting alternatives to Marsha and Meadow and Ivy. I'm having a problem with my "main" families, however, in that some of the oldest gen are getting so boring to play and their kids are catching them up. I've been trying to get one of them hit by a satellite but it's not that easy. I don't play with any cheats or hacks, although I've been tempted. I think I may play them anyway and find a way to make them interesting ... or have them get eaten by a cow plant, one or the other. I could kill them by taking away their food source, but that's just too mean. I think with a little imagination I can find a way to make them interesting again.
I find elders good to play, I mean isn't retirement the time to relax and enjoy what you have worked for? So I have them paint portraits of each other, and the portraits become valuable as well after death, throw parties and invite as many people as possible, get them to play with their grandchildren and generally potter around doing whatever. Because there's only two things unavoidable in a Sim's life, death and broken plumbing.
