Most Profitable Family Build What do you guys think is the most profitable Sim family-type? What sort of things would you choose for a family to earn their way to success, assuming that you never use money/mood cheats or trainers, and assuming you don't engage in any deviant behaviors like the black widow/axe murderer shenanigans. Just regular play: What would you choose for your path to success? Currently, I lean towards the active knowledge sim. What about you peoples?
I don't usually have the committment to doing hardcore moneymaking... but if I were, this is how i see it: Fortune Asp: Sounds like it should be the best, and has good bonuses for promotions etc, but you lose money on the constant "buy a fridge worth over 2K" aspirations. Knowledge Asp: The best so far as I know. While they don't get aspiration points for promotions, they have a constant pursuit of knowledge giving them easy platinum and skill increases. Family Asp: Don't care too much for work other than "get a job in X career" and "earn money", they would rather procreate and live at home than focus on making lots of money. Romance Asp: Really require far too much micro-management to succeed in making money in any job. If you try to make money here they'd better have a house full of lovers because otherwise it's going to be a hard road being plat. for promotions. Popularity Asp: Actually pretty decent for making money, as their aspirations dont cost much more than time and a phone. You won't have to worry about not having the friends for promotions here. ( oh but u will be making lots of dummy families just to be plat. ) ------- So far as clean/messy lazy/active etc... high active is recommended for all Asps. but here's the rest IMHO Fortune -> doesnt really matter... Knowledge -> Low-Playful and Low-Outgoing, they won't get so annoyed by reading books all the time Family -> Mid-Outgoing, Mid-Neat, Hi-Playful Romance -> Hi-Outgoing, Mid-Nice Popularity -> Hi-Outgoing, Mid-Playful, Hi-Nice ----------- For a family unit it really depends on what kind of term you're looking at. For a couple with no dreams of procreation then Knowledge/Knowledge or Knowledge/popularity. Knowledge/knowledge will go well in pretty much any career, popularity is a definate in the sports career. For a 1-2 generation family I use knowledge/family or knowledge/popularity to ensure the promotions come quickly and the next generation comes through strong. For multiple generation families, if you want to make money consistently as each generation ages, I'd start with a family/family couple to ensure that the second generation can grow up and be the breadwinners. ------- So all in all, I'm hardly a power player that cares about how much net worth I can accumulate, from casual observation I believe: BEST - Knowledge GOOD - Popularity MEH - Family BAD - Fortune AVOID - Romance
Shy, active Knowledge Sim for me. With mine (started as a teen, now adult) I was able to have her max out all skills very quickly, and she also makes friends very easily. She's virtually never out of platinum and gets promoted every time she goes off to work.
Knowledge sim here as well, as long as I only have one or two sims in the family. If I have more then two post childhood sims, I might make one of them (preferably the teen if not all sims are adults) a popularity sim. That sim would focus on making all those connections that the others need for their careers.
Mmm. So it seems everyone is reaching more or less the same conclusions I have. Although I argue that for raising a family, Knowledge/Knowledge is a pretty solid combination as well. If you're carrying through multiple generations in the same house, anyone who isn't a knowledge sim isn't likely to survive too long, because your house will inevitably become haunted! Knowledge Sims, on the other hand, are not terribly concerned over a house which has a slight ghost problem: In fact, they prefer it that way. That was basically my take on them as well. Yeah, the constant buying, especially when your Sim is not yet rich and is living in a shack as a result, is not a combination that makes for easy success: While the promotion Aspirations are not bad, there's only one problem: They're basically useless for getting you to platinum aspiration BEFORE work. I'm thinking that Fortune sims may actually do best if they're totally lazy. Lazy sims tire easily. Sleeping freezes your aspiration decay. Very little that a Fortune sim actually does for Asp requires that he be concious to achieve it. Also, they're deathly afraid of being demoted or fired, when, in fact, as far as "success" goes in terms of "net worth achieved", being fired or demoted is really irrelevant, since you'll just quickly be promoted again at triple pay if you stay platinum. This, of course, won't happen because a Fortune Sim will likely go into depression when this happens, and given that the only thing which tends to satisfy them is buying tons of crap, something that doesn't tend to happen without constant cashflow....well, you see the problem. On the other hand, an interesting Fortune Sim quirk I've found: While everyone complaints about Tree/Shrub/Flowerbed, these appear to actually be *GOOD* wants, since they can basically be satisfied for free: Since trees, shrubs, and flowerbeds are "Build mode" objects, when you sell them off again immediately, you don't lose the Asp gained, since they won't "miss this object". So I find that whenever I roll "Buy fireplace worth $3000", I immediately lock it, then the morning before work, buy the fireplace, get the Asp, and then sell it back, getting all of my money back, but keeping the boost. Otherwise this would have been a real waste of a want....because come on, where the hell do you put a randomly demanded fireplace? Those things are structural. You can't just tack them onto an existing house if there's no place designed to even hold one. For some reason, public polls all seem to HEAVILY favor Family sims. Yet over here, we lean towards Knowledge. This mystifies me. While it's true that Family sims do tend to easily achieve platinum state through a flurry of their mini-wants (since their power wants are all long term and generally cannot be achieved at reasonable time and cost unless you already planned to do so), the moment you actually *DO* give them a family and satisfy their power wants, they tend to become harder to appease by far: While their wants are easy to satisfy, the low-paying ones, the ones you're actually going to rely on, don't "lock on": If you start satisfying their wants towards one family member, they'll quickly lose interest and want to interact with someone else. This, of course, means that they flitter across the house disrupting everyone else's activities in an attempt to reach platinum. While it's easy for THEM to achieve this, everyone else suffers! Even two family sims do not necessarily achieve perfect lock-on to each other, and if they start doing the wandering disruption thing, nobody in the house will get anything done without being constantly hassled. I actually argue that the Romantic Slacker handles better than the Fortune sim. While a Romance Sim *DOES* tend to require a certain amount of micromanagement, they don't necessarily need a house full of lovers. If you keep them away from too many members of the opposite sex, and restrict them to, say, a wife and maybe an external mistress, they're less likely to clog with undisplaceable power wants, and will tend to instead want "Woohoo", and "Public Woohoo" a lot. These are great 3500 and 5000 pt Asps that will invariably put your Sim into platinum. If the sim in question is also very lazy, this will also knock him out, putting him in Asp freeze. The drawbacks to this being that they have no real desire to succeed in any job. Then again, you didn't REALLY expect a Romance Sim to CARE, did you? Another nice property of Romance sims is their "free" platinum ability. You can plat a Romance sim using zero time and zero money, since they can easily achieve aspirations while not being played. So if your Romance sim has about 5 Sim minutes to go from low green to Platinum, this is nigh-impossible for anyone else, but a Romance sim can pull this off using "external" play: Switch over to another house, and arrange some Woohoo. (Hence the "external" mistresses). Anyone else, except maybe a Fortune sim who has a "Buy Something" want is spooned. Even a family sim can't pull this off easily, because family members tend to dwell on-lot, and therefore, can only be interacted with at cost in time. If your carpool leaves in 5 minutes, you don't have that. Even a Fortune sim can likely only "borrow Asp" here, since you COULD buy some junk, but if you can't really store or use it anywhere, you'd have to sell it back and take a loss again. But at least you'd manage to plat for work. Romance sim won't have this loss: He'll keep his Asp. Popularity is ALMOST as good as Knowledge, and can pair very well with them, because while Knowledge sims tend to attack work from the "skills required" angle, Popularity Sims attack work from the "friends" angle. They also share the Romance sim's property of being able to achieve zero-time, zero-cost plat on occasion, but since popularity sims have weak quickie-wants that don't tend to lock-on to any specific Sim, or invariably annoy you by locking onto the WRONG Sim, perhaps one that is not present and cannot be otherwise accessed, this is not quite as direct as a quick +3500 Woohoo. Also, if using another family to manipulate Asp, you have to keep checking back to see what he wants now, unlike a Romance sim, where you know he wants Woohoo, and giving him that has already platted him anyway. I'm still thinking that "Lazy" is actually a good thing in a Fortune Sim: Lazy sims spend most of their time asleep, and Fortune Sims need to have their ASP frozen for an extended duration of time if they expect to make it to work the next day using mostly the high they gained from promotion - that requires you knock them out and put them to sleep ASAP. "Cat-napping" doesn't hurt, either: ASP decays on the hour, and if your Sim is asleep at the top of the hour, the meter doesn't decay. So if you spend like half the hour awake, and are sound asleep before the end of the hour....you don't decay. So....obviously, it seems the big breadwinners tend to be either Knowledge, followed by Popularity. What do you think makes a better combination for a pair: Knowledge/Knowledge, or Knowledge/Popularity? Two knowledge sims can easily strongly hold down a job, but neither of them has any real desire to make friends: In fact, two knowledge sims may actually impede this, since they can satisfy each other's social needs and therefore reduce their desire to phone out. On the other hand, Popularity Sims don't really skill very well, since they only sporadically pop "gain a skillpoint", and it's the low-paying +1K version rather than the incremental one. As it becomes harder to gain the necessary skillpoints, they're harder to satisfy. On the other hand, they can career-hop reasonably well.
Friendships are easy to gain by playing them externally. I say go knowledge sims all the way, or maybe ONE popularity sim among the knowledge sims if the family is large.
Has anyone else come to the discovery that, in the end, Sims are ultimately simple-minded and easily amused, and that all of the toys you can buy them cannot compare to the cheap-as-free hand game they play? 4x Hand Game can fill the Fun meters full of two sims at once, costs nothing, is faster than most toys a Sim can buy, and gives Social and Relationship at the same time. Does anyone else do this also?
Here's my ranking, from easiest difficulty to hardest difficulty: Family Fortune Popularity Knowledge Romance Family you can earn instant money just by marrying two single Sims together, then pooling their earnings into one account. Woohoo, money! Mainly I just find Sims w/ Family aspirations to be easier to control, and easier to keep happy. Fortune---you strive to earn money, you strive to move up the career ladder, you're bound to get money this way. But yeah, you can argue that they lose money easily b/c of their wants, but hey---flower beds and shrubs are el cheapo. Again, easier to control, and easier to keep happy. Popularity---make friends, influence people. More friends you get, more likely you're gonna get promoted sooner or later. I had a family whose Popularity Sim kept making more and more friends until they ended up w/ a total of 10 friends at a time. Which is really helpful. Sims w/ the popularity aspiration are a little harder to control b/c they keep craving people to talk to, but then again, they're still pretty easy to keep happy. Knowledge---even though these Sims desire to know all and see all, for some reason I have a hard time keeping these Sims happy. They're always depressed. :| But the skill earning aspect is helpful in promotions...so that's no biggie. Romance---these stupid Sims don't even WANT to work. -_-' So they're gonna be hard to control and but easy to keep happy if you have the "materials" on hand to do so. :\
Another interesting and related question would be: Which Sim/Family can make the most money without a job. I'm prone to think that the knowledge sim would excel here as well... writing books, creating paintings and even chocolate factories etc My question is twofold. Is it possible to make profit via this 'career'...? and if so Which Asp is the best for doing this? Romance Sims don't like going to go to work, so can this play to their advantage? Obviously half the issue is that you need a high creativity ranking to make much money, which doesn't really help a romance sim, but once you're there?
Yes it is. Darren Dreamer, obviously, has demonstrated that it's possible to make a living as a painter. However, normally, knowledge sims don't roll aspirations to paint: It seems more likely to occur in Fortune and Popularity sims. It's part of the power want branch in a Popularity sim, and I had it appear on a teen gen-1 fortune sim also, which may be unusual, since I've never seen "sell masterpiece" appear in any gen-0(CAS) fortune sims. Maybe it happens after all reasonable fortune wants are sated and you keep knocking out masterpiece after masterpiece. Romance sims are indifferent to work, but actually WANT to succeed in the Slacker track. However, the main reason they don't really want to work is because they'd rather spend their time getting laid. Well, the Romance sim will still be unhappy and unfulfilled. Even a Knowledge sim won't really be happy about this, because once he maxes out his creativity, he won't really aspire to paint very much anymore. To a knowledge sim, this was all just a means to an end, and not an actual end in itself. So I'd say Popularity is best for this, because they actually natively WANT to "Sell a Masterpiece" or "Sell a Novel" for a reasonably fat chunk of ASP, a want which will seem to keep recurring as long as they do it, and you lock it every time it happens. On the flipside, it seems Family or Knowledge sim makes a good Tree Farmer: Family sims primarily want to interact with their family members, which, as everyone knows, is a ton of mini-wants that churn out Asp. Knowledge Sims want to skill a lot, and after they max out, if they're married, they'll fixate on that, having nothing else to really want, so they stay platinumed out pretty easily also. Perhaps even more so than Family sims, since Family sims mostly hover at 500-point wants like talk/play, whereas Knowledge sims with all skills maxed will regularly roll the flirt/kiss/makeout/woohoo chain.
wrong family-i find i like family the best cause it's sooo easy to make them happy like you can get +500 for hugging someone! Romance- as far as im concerned romance is a waste of time especially that if you pick family for a teenager they have (at first) the same disiers as a family sims first kiss, make out etc. Knowledge- soso i find i prefer a more people person sim and not somone who prefers to read all day which is quite boring if your playing that sim. fortune- i dont really prefer because as stated above it really wastes your money as your starting out so it's very dificult unless u use the money cheat or start out rich. popularity- soso for jobs popularity's good cause you always need a certain amount of friend (extremley annoying)
Yeah, they're pretty easy to make happy, but it can take awhile, and they don't tend to mesh too well with anyone other than another family sim: While it's easy to make the family sim happy, doing this disrupts the activities of all of the other sims in the family, since family sims rarely achieve a "lock on" with a single person, and invariably, that other person does not tend to share the desire to be hugged, so doesn't gain any Asp for it. Also, none of their wants are career-oriented, so fulfilling them does not really further your advancement, unlike with Knowledge sims and Popularity sims. They also like to churn out sprogs, which can be extremely demanding as well. Great, of course, if you're marrying them off to an existing well-off family and then populating the neighborhood with their sprogs, so-so when they demand more broodlings without having the resources necessary to really raise one well. Romance really cannot be considered an aspiration intended for a successful career, since that's not really the goal. That's the beauty of Knowledge sims: You can park 'em and leave 'em, confident they won't decide to go on a fridge raid after spontaneously abandoning their current task, since skilling tasks tend to be blocking and will occupy the attention of a sim until a need goes critical or mood fails. Yeah, the endless demands for junk are hard to satisfy unless you already *HAVE* fortune. Once they have the best everythings, they tend to settle down and want to paint, though. They have the same kind of advancement ability as knowledge sims, but they also advance the entire family as well, which is pretty handy: Still, more than one is probably unnecessary.
