Private school - is it good? i'm wondering if anyone has done private school for their sims? can the kids come home at night/weekends? tks.
Joining the private school is a aspiration goal for both child and parent. It also show up in the memories. Beyond that, the private school kids have school uniforms instead of their everyday clothes, and that is the ENTIRE effect. At least for childhood and early teenhood. I have yet to see if there is any effect when turning adult, and if there are any random bonus effects. They have the same schedule, and even the same school bus.
Private school isn't a boarding school. Your kids still live with you, they just catch a bus to a different school. I haven't had any kids old enough to send to school yet, so my question on Private schools is: do you get kicked out if your grades drop? Once you are in, do you have to keep a high grade to stay in it?
One of my children went to Private School, but on the kicked out issue... i don't know, he has had an A+ average since his second day of primary school... On a related note, I got a rating of 95/90 for the headmaster's visit and I thought I did really badly... how high can this score go? Do you have to surpass 90 to be accepted? My second attempt failed as the mother was fired the same day and the rest of the family went to bed.... I don't think the headmaster was impressed by her sobbing, and whenever they spoke all i got was "XX--" above their heads! >_<
The headmaster rating I have a family of 3, and the girl had D grades. After the 2. day of elementry school, I called the headmaster. I made him turkey, which was burned, Showed him the house(score 24/90), then kissed his a** like 5 times. Then talked about the school 2 times, and then he ate. Final score: 63/90 and she got in! I tried it some other family who makes tons of money, live in a cool mansion. Eerything was clean, the family was well rested(invite him on a sunday, it pays off), and showed him 3 rooms(there are 6 bedrroms and 4 bathrooms), then he ate spaghetti and the final score was 93/90! So go figure.
On another thread someone posted more info on private schools. I've done both and I can't tell any difference. I've put Alexander Goth through school and he was already in private school. I've gotten one admitted from public to private and matriculated and another from childhood to adulthood in just public school. I couldn't see any differences. I got the one admitted in with a score that went to 92 but a last minute schmoozing done badly dropped it to a final 88 and I still got in. It may take some time to figure this one out. It may be nothing more than an aspiration choice concerning kids.
Never can figure it out I tried it again. this time with Hubert. Hes an old geezer living in a shed in the outskirts of the town. His grandson is living there too. there is one bedroom, where both Hubert and his grandson sleeps. Seperate beds, of course. Hes old not a *******. They have one toilet, one shower. Thats it. After Hubert came home from work, he was tired and dirty, so was the kid. They called the headmaster and made him salat. the kid got in
I found two other advantages to private school: 1) their needs (especially fun and comfort) don't decay as much so they have more energy to get their homework done, have some fun and perhaps even get an afterschool job (if they are a teen.) 2) if the teen gets a job, they start at level 2 instead of level 1.
If their fun level stays higher in private school that would be worth it. Trying to get the homework done each day AND get to school the next morning with a full fun and energy meter is hard! I have to have a routine or I can't do it. They come home and play on their console game until fun is maxed. They then do homework. I have to invest in a top of the line bed because they frequently have to get up early to either play a game, shower or eat or finish the last bit of homework. Something seems to get sacrificed to get that homework done daily. As a real parent I'd be in the school complaining about the quantity of busy work assigned.
You know, it occurs to me that both of the "schools", private and home, seem rather low on the usefulness, although the private school is occasionally useful: In theory, schools are supposed to give your sim the education he'd need to succeed as an adult. Unfortunately, it gives him absolutely no skills, except as random chance cards on rare occasions in private school. Furthermore, every so often, the kid will drag home some useless NPC, which will likely run amok in your home, since the "come home, cheer at report card, drop off homework" loop takes about a half hour to complete, and the visitor dragged home does not have any such things to deal with. Thus, you have to have somebody ready to get rid of this interloper lest he disrupt your carefully organized routine. I have come up with an alternative. You are definitely better off keeping your kid home, sending him to school only when he wants to go, or needs to go to avoid dropping into the D category. Instead, keep him home skilling, or helping out around the house. A largely home-schooled education is far more effective at allowing your kid to both grow up well, and prepare him for a career...especially since kids seem to actually pick up low to mid-level skills faster than adults do, which makes some amount of sense. Higher-level skills are still somewhat harder to learn, due to both the lack of ability to wear a thinking cap, and what seems like a generally slower rate of learning skills above level 5-7ish. Therefore, it's simple: If you keep your kid home often, he'll be able to get more skilling done, and be generally more productive later. Just send him only when he feels like going, as indicated by a desire to get an A+, or a fear of missing the bus. Given that you'll have plenty of time to achieve platinum mood, this should be very easy. Even with a poor family of 2 parents and 6 kids distributed between toddler and teens, generated and run on the starting 20K, it becomes much more doable when you're not trying to cram all the kids onto the bus every morning, especially when you don't have enough beds for everyone so people have to sleep in shifts.
Good call Thats some good advice. However, all the teens I have now, never had those problems. As children, they kept practicing their skills, so when they were old enough to go to school, they wouldnt have problems. Also my teens learn really fast. Usually it takes about 1 hour to get one skill(for my teens, that is) where it can take 3 or more hours for an adult.
Indeed it's more efficient that way. However, personally I consider it to be abuse of game mechanics. What school teaches your teen sims is not ingame skills, but all that other stuff that isn't covered by the skill system. All that stuff that all adult sims have, the stuff that let them and not teens progress at all in career paths beyond the first three steps. Yes, you can skip it. When a sim turns adult, it automatically know all the basic adult skills even if it never learned them. Just as all children can walk, talk and use the toilet even if you neglected to teach them any of these basic skills. On the other hand, I don't consider it abuse to use the "Move a sim out and then in again to collect 20k" cheat once if you start with two adult sims, because you ought to get 20k per adult sim as starting cash. This is all about personal opinion, of course. Just stating mine.
There's another reason to do this: Whenever your sim gets an A+, every single sim in his family gets a memory of this. Now, I want you to picture exactly what's going to happen if each of his 5 brothers gets an A+ as well. Every day. Cuz school nowadays is easy, and apparently doesn't teach people anything that being homeschooled doesn't, hence why it's increasingly common. Every day these kids come home from school, they and their parents receive a deluge of 6 memories on the spot. That's 48 memories. It gets worse. Let's say their grandparents were equally prolific. Those grandparents receive another 6 memories apiece. Their aunts and uncles receive 6 memories apiece. Each and every one of their cousins, of which there could be up to 30-40, get them too. Now each of the cousins returns home with their report cards..... This is a nightmare! Especially in light of the "memory corruption" bug that will render a sim unable to engage in any "chat" type actions, such as eating at the dinner table, watching TV with the family, hot-tubbing, or talking on the phone. I actually started doing this *BECAUSE* I wanted to avoid being hit by this bug before the patch comes out, and discovered it works better! Well, hell, in real life, what you learn from school now is basically nothing you can't learn from homeschooling and the Internet, except for the social skills of interacting with the people at school. Trouble is, in TS2, school absolutely crushes the kid's social life. He returns from school dogtired, and with a pile of busywork to get out of the way. By the time he finishes his homework, he's ready to pass out, or is starving, or needs to piss, or filthy, or some combination of all of the above. Not a single child I've raised prior to "homeschooling" has managed to have a extra-familial friend list greater than 3. With homeschooling, the child studies during regular school hours, then can go and meet his friends when they return from school. Well, it's not as if you can simply never go, and when he DOES go, he invariably returns with a solid score. And you still do get free food, so I often send him anyway if he's the only one hungry, so it's not worth trying to prepare a meal. Mmmm. Free food. And I always train them to walk, talk, and use the toilet, 'cuz it's worth a major aspiration boost, often on both sides. There's plenty of incentive built into the game to do this. The flipside being that, in contrast, there's a partial discentive built into the game for school that encourages homeschooling: It's not absolute - some kids really do enjoy this, and get major aspiration boosts for attending. Others do better in homeschool. Meh. Considering that TS2 isn't really about competing, and there is no "my sims are better than your sims" competition, you're ultimately free to consider whatever you want to consider as "legitimate", and draw the line at cheating or exploiting anywhere. The only people who fail TS2 are those who can't make their sims do what they want....whether we want to make our Sims succeed, or make them into miserable failures, we all win as long as we make them accomplish what we want. Admittedly, much is lost if your vision of success involves "motherlode", but even there, we have a difference between "be successful", and "become successful".
:disappointed: That was so sick I had to verify it myself to believe it. And yes. EACH day a kid get top grades, it's spammed into the memories of all relatives. That totally sucks. And I havn't even encountreed that bug yet. Don't want to. Anyway, of course there is no right or wrong way to play this game. if someone want to use motherlode or move sims in and out to gain huge amounts of cash, I don't think he should be ashamed or anything. However, if he comes here to the board and reccomend the rest of us to play the game in that same way because it's more efficient, then I will calmly say taht I disagree with him, and why. There's nothing more to it. "Agree to disagree" is a godo principle. And it goes both ways.
Well, the current reason I'm recommending this goes a little beyond playing style: Stability. As I pointed out, THE SPAM! IT BURNS! As you know, the memory bug seems to strike most frequently when the sim's memory is filled with spam: It doesn't seem to be directly related to age or playing time, since my oldest, most-played sim, a relative hermit, is not yet afflicted, but his wife *HAS* become affected, due to a deluge of "family reunion" memories incurred from attending her brother's wedding party in which everyone was invited. Said brother is starting to exhibit slight symptoms as well. And he has relatively low playing time, but a LOT of spam from his two straight A+ nephews and one niece. Needless to say, homeschooling both improves your sim's skills, which you may not necessarily care for, but reduces the amount of memory spam.
There's no way to delete the memories? grr... And, why, in some of my sims memories does it say "met mystery sim" "kissed mystery sim"
Not yet. People are making progress with deciphering the format of storage files, but the Flashy Thingy has yet to come. That'd make a pretty nice career award for an alien-oriented career track, though: Flashy thingy people, erase their memories. Those are "filler" memories for Sims who were created in CAS, not born. It's basically just a filler experience so your Sim isn't still looking for his first friend, first kiss, etc. If you created the Sim with a spouse, those "kissed" experiences will be replaced by that sim instead of the unspecified mystery sim.
