Encouragement - how does it work? Older relatives of below-adult sims gets a "encourage" option for the traits the older sim possess. However, I have never seen a sim change traits by getting encouraged. Dies it not work, does it take a awful lot of encouragement, or am I doing it wrong somehow? I have simply "spammed" the younger sim as part of long lists och selected chat options.
It's kind of weak and can take like 8 or 9 attempts to get a single point. And it requires a lot of micromanagement, as "spam queueing" won't work. Only the first encouragement attempt goes through, the rest drop from the queue without effect. You have to wait until the encourager starts doing his clapping thing before you queue another one, or it'll just be ignored. The best time to try this is probably on a community lot, where time in-game is frozen so you don't waste half the day doing it...just all of your energy. But eh, for adults, there's the energizer, for kids, they have nothing better to do anyway.
8 or 9 times? That hasn't been my experience at all! lol At the first I had no idea it was doing anything..I thought it was like patting them on the back. I encouraged everything! lol I finally noticed little serious sims were obnoxious, active sims turned into slugs, etc. If mine are encouraged to be serious and they nod and read a book or write in diary, I have a point removed from playfulness. If I encourage activity and they nod and do a few jumping jacks, I have a new point for active, etc. I check carefully before encouraging so I don't end up with neat freaks or obnoxiously playful hellions now. If mine go through the whole time consuming routine I get a point added or removed each time. Could something else be factored into this?
It is allegedly the case that the age difference between the Sims affects the effectiveness of encouragements. There could also be other hidden factors, but I have no idea what they are, and closer examination of how effective encouragement really is would necessitate having to exit TS2 and load the thing up in an editor to examine the stats for their internal storage, which isn't actually 0-10, but is actually 0-1000, where a stat actually has 100 sub-points for a single "point" as seen in the game. The fact that you can't queue encouragements is also somewhat annoying.
I'm not sure I've tried queueing encouragement..I use it sparingly for minor personality adjustments now. I do get tickled watching elderly parents encourage their adult children. They take the advice sooo seriously..and dash off to clean or exercise and dash back to have parent praise them! lol My adult sims get immediate personality adjustments as well, though. All of my children and the vast majority of my adults are knowledge sims. Perhaps certain types are more receptive to encouragement.
I sometimes wonder if the age difference thing, like, apparently, the skill involved in winning a game, is reversed, so that the opposite is actually true: The smaller the age difference, the greater the effect, and the higher the skill pertinent to winning the game, the less likely you actually win. You'd think a logic-10 sim would consistently defeat everyone else at chess, but in practice, he generally loses over and over to the biggest idiot on the lot. Even if he cheats.
Cheating during chess.... You can cheat during chess? Does your sim just cheat or does the option show up? BTW When it says say Encourge Laziness is your sim going to get really lazy, or or active how does it work. I've encourged cleansliness a few times ( I find enviorment really effects their mood) but i find it doesnt change unless it's a closer age difference. Can teenagers encourage kids?
It's a suboption if you click on the chess board while playing chess that Grouchy sims receive. If your Sim has 0 niceness, he will autonomously cheat as well. When you have him cheat, he yells "Aooda! Aooda plaka!" and points at something, and when the other Sim looks, he moves the pieces. If the other Sim turns back too soon, he gets caught and the relationship goes down slightly. If you encourage something, the encouraged attribute shifts slightly towards the direction encouraged. If you encourage laziness, your Sim becomes less active, etc. Why you'd want to encourage a Sim to be *LAZY* is beyond me, though, since Active is a good thing, and too much of a good thing...is an awesome thing! This is in contrast to attributes like Neatness, where too little of it results in a guy who desecrates his surroundings, and too much of it results in obsessive-compulsive disorder; Outgoing, where too much of it results in your Sim becoming a deranged stalker who harasses people all the time, and too little of it results in somebody who has no appreciation of a good fight; and Niceness, where too little of it makes your Sim a trash-can kicker, and too much of it makes your Sim a spineless wuss. In contrast, Active is entirely good, as the more active a sim is, the less he whines about his Comfort meter (A max active Sim practically never has to sit down), and increases his Energy, which is basically always a good thing. With every attribute but "Active", moderation is the best choice, but Active is simply "more is good".
I think that the options on what a parent wants to encourage is controlled by the highs/lows of their personality points. If you have a sim who has low activity points and so is lazy, but the rest are about middle ground, then the adult sim will want to encourage their child to be lazy, too. I have had good luck with encouraging children. Both adult and child have to be in good moods and have to have high relationship points for it to work. I see a little face icon with double plus signs come up over their heads when it works. I haven't had to keep repeating the order for it to work, either. If it doesn't work, then I try to work on their moods and relationships first.
Discouraged about encouragement Hello all, I apologize if this question has been answered already, as a (somewhat careful) search revealed nothing previous. I do carry my own bucket of tar and feathers should I have missed it. Anyway, I recall first becoming turned off with regards to encouragement when my two-days-from-hula-girls grandpa would incessantly "encourage" his four grandkids in the house. Of course, being guilty of at least 5 deadly sins most of the time, his advice was of questionable value, and his hypocritical ways resulted in his untimely demise as the "tomato" of a drywall sandwich. My point/question: I never used encouragement because of a) non-spam-ness b) AND fear that increasing one trait would, character-generation style, lower another. Does this happen? Thanks in advance.
Autonomous encouragement is Bad, especially since Sims do not have any sense of what is a GOOD thing to be encouraging. Especially since I am convinced that a personality not unlike my own is essentially the perfect sim, or at least does not tend to react in ways that irritate me, the first and foremost of all virtues being activity. There is nothing I detest more than people whining about sleep all the time. Look at me: I practically never sleep, even when it requires nearly lethal doses of caffeine to ward it off! The sacrifices one must make to avoid the evil demons of sleep. TS2 needs a jar of caffeine that is snorted off a table. And gives a major energy boost. Enough to make sure your Sim can ward off sleep for the entire month that he will live. BECAUSE IT WORKS FOR ME! No. Encouraging a trait affects that trait entirely in isolation. Lowering a trait is not necessarily a bad thing, either. All traits have potentially undesirable effects, with the exception of Active, that occur at high levels. Outgoing and Playfulness, for instance, are disruptive and potentially destructive behaviors, as a highly outgoing sim insists on harassing others constantly, and a highly playful sim has the attention span of a hyperactive child. And is complete hell as one. The obvious drawbacks of sub-2 Neatness should be readily apparent, but at extremely HIGH levels of neatness, you get obsessive-compulsive behavior. And excessive niceness, while not immediately harmful in any particularly overt way, interacts badly with outgoingness and playfulness: They harass others with unwanted gestures of affection, and cry about it when rejected. Actually, overly nice sims cry too much. I encourage all of the Sim-kids of Sim me to be grouchy, like me. I want them to be spiteful, mean-spirited *******s. I then marry them off to spiteful, mean-spirited individuals, so that my family line will continue to be spiteful and mean, so that I may be proud of them.
