Game Play Questions, How do YOU play?
Emma:
Quote from: jolrei on 2008 July 31, 14:44:13
My two hard rules are 1) that Emma will not woohoo/marry/date Pescado, and 2) There is no Goopy!
See, this is why Jolrei is my BFF :D
I tend to just go with the flow of what my sims want and relationships/love is built on ACR and TJ's crystal ball. My sims get to date their 'one sim'. Whether they stay with them is another story!
J. M. Pescado:
But Emma and Goopy BELONG together!
Emma:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2008 August 01, 01:16:47
But Emma and Goopy BELONG together!
Only in Awesomeland :P
chintznibbles:
Warning: This post contains Way More About My Sims Than Anyone Wants To Know. You've been warned. There's also a Too Long; Didn't Read version at the bottom. ;D
Anyway, since I started getting nerdy in another thread, I'll finish here. I write stupid little vaguely sci-fi stories as I play the game, most likely as an offshoot of some D&D-related tendency. It's a sort of tattered patchwork, cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things, but it makes playing the game more fun. Here it is in a nutshell. (A giant, hellishly verbose nutshell. I'm bored at work and feel like typing a lot, apparently.)
The general consensus among researchers is that some twenty-odd years ago, a great event known as the Convergence occurred: three little-known astrological stars lined up in perfect occlusive harmony, and the world as Sims knew it ceased to be. The new world has been folded together with the Otherworld, a domain of strange fey Sims and mysterious beasts, the Elemental Planes, and a shadowy realm known as Nevermore, inhabited by all kinds of vampires, werewolves, and in fact pretty much anything that's ever been in a scary movie. To make matters worse, the Convergence flung an Antaran Hive Ship light-years across the galaxy into neat geosynchronous orbit with Sim-Earth. Unfortunately, the celestial forces were not kind to the ship, an ailing model of suspect provenance in the first place. Mere days after they arrived, the Warpspace Transubstantiator blew out, nearly causing a catastrophic hull breach. Antaran escape craft have been crashlanding into the surface like clockwork ever since, bringing the prolific greenskins and their robotic servants down planetside.
The modern world is a fair sight different than it was a mere 30 years ago. The Convergence completely rewrote the surface geography of the planet, completely upended almost every Earthling governmental structure and, perhaps most tellingly, stranded untold thousands of faeries, elves, beastlings, elementals, aliens and robots on the planet. To make matters worse, the years following - known as the Collapse - were scarred by mortal wars and marked by the emergence of a zombie-creating plague, shadowy incursions by vampires and spectral beings, and scattered but rising reports of werewolves stalking the countryside, savaging all they came across. Slowly, and in spite of the doomsayers' predictions, order has begun to take hold once again: Earthlings, long numbed to the strangeness in their daily lives, have begun to rebuild their shattered world with the aid of their new neighbors. Emeraldvale, a small town in what was once California, is the site of one such reconstruction effort; unhindered by such concerns as government and moral authorities, the shell-shocked citizens have begun building anew, slowly assembling a motley collection of houses for themselves that bear a sad similarity to their previous suburban dwellings. Their fertile soil - and a little elven knowhow - have enabled them to become a nearly self-sufficient town, lacking only in high-tech facilities and raw materials for manufacturing.
Another nearby town, Viper Canyon, found itself almost a ghost town before the Convergence, but in the years following the Collapse, the new inhabitants of the town decided to make the best of a bad situation and converted the now-deserted factory floors that once lined the canyon walls into living spaces and greenhouses. These days, Viper Canyon has become a thriving city, having reopened many of their discarded manufacturing facilities and boasting of an active civil defense unit, the Pit Vipers. Travel is still something of an impossibility for many, but the Pit Vipers have managed to root out enough of the bandits and monsters in the nearby area, creating enough security for the citizens of Emeraldvale lucky enough to own biofuel-burning cars - or repaired Antarian skimmer vehicles - to visit the Canyon, whether to seek employment or simply wander around, remembering what it was like to live in a real city.
No one knows what the future portends, not even Faerie royalty or the most astute Antarian scientists, but local prospects are looking up, for the first time in twenty years. Two brothers recently reopened the once-dead Rattlegulch Mine outside of Viper Canyon, taking out fresh veins of iron, copper and Adamantium, a metal long absent from the Earth. There's even been talk in the Viper Canyon assemblyhouse of forming a new government, a New California Republic, as it were, guarded by the Vipers' growing security force and fed by the lush fields in Emeraldvale and the surroundings. The few that remember the horror of waking up in the Convergence, finding the world an entirely different place, and those who listen to the far-off rumblings of war and plague still fret over the coming years, but for many life as normal has returned.
Backstory crap out of the way, my actual playstyle is pretty random. I hate loading screens, so Emeraldvale sims are basically stuck in their lot unless I feel especially frisky or am allowing them their one ceremonial pilgrimage to the Town Square (my one community lot :p ), where they hang out (and have their needs cheatingly refilled) until they've met a suitable number of their neighbors that I suspect they'll find at least one two- or three-bolt sim in another house to get their romance on with (and sufficient friends if they get a city-slicker career, of course). All sims are bisexual until they settle down preferring one gender via repeated romantic actions, so I do have quite a bit higher precedence of gay sims than would be realistic. My sims are also largely female, mostly for convenience purposes; I like boobies, I guess. ::) A standard household is usually two girl-sims with a token male thrown in*. Generally speaking, sims do not breed, because children are icky and bothersome; the youngest sims that exist are Teens and I am generally loath to let my actual sims age into elders. Created elders are not allowed to die, generally speaking, unless I've decided I hate them or feel like trying for a ghost. There are currently three pets in the entire neighborhood. EV sims generally make shit with the various hobby items and stations (no robots, though; those are solely the domain of the Antarans.) and farm the hell out of their backyards, because I rarely bother buying them food. Four sims own cars, all fortune sims of varying degrees of richness - which explains a bit of why all the carpool cars look the same, neh? Several tinker sims have recently converted pre-Collapse junk vehicles to the new biofuel standard, though, so the mobile, city-job-having population is on the rise.
Viper Canyon is the Downtown, the sole sub-hood I have set up. I tend to divide my playing time between the two 'hoods fairly regularly. It's named after the preset map, fairly obviously, and populated with factory-looking lots I downloaded off of MTS2 a long time ago. (Emeraldvale is populated with my abortive efforts at house design. I blame my sims, of course. They're a lazy bunch, with nary an Architect among them.) They're played in much the same way, though they mostly have ordinary sim jobs (with a lot of Military and Police careers) and have the option of buying stuff. They also have their choice of several comm-lots for their pilgrimage, from an exciting work-study trip to the Rattlegulch Mines to an equally informative visit to the City Hall... or even a shopping trip to the Bazaar, where sims can get their largely barter-based economy on.
In general, all the townies are Earthlings (and indeed they are most of the actual Earthlings in my game... who wants to play a boring human?), though I added a few prototypes of the major races when I nuked Goopy and his ilk.
*(I actually have backstory reasons for this, too, but like the rest they're pretty wacky. Elementals are genderless but adopt a favorite shape for convenience purposes; it'd be pretty pointless to attempt to breed with a being that is pretty much made up of fire/air/water/etc. Sounds painful. They can breed amongst themselves, but given that they are immortal, they rarely feel the need to do so.
Antarians have a gender system similar to honeybees: the vast majority of them are neuter female workers, followed by occasional male drones (who do most of the research and childrearing, having no other purpose in life than sitting around looking pretty for the Queen) and one or two Queens per colony shard. Drones occasionally harvest DNA from workers who have caught their eye, largely for excelling in a particular skill or trade, but don't worry about the poor workers; most of them find the harvesting procedure to be quite enjoyable. Queens, who are activated females, take recombinant genetic material from the drones (which they in turn enjoy quite a bit), merge it with the colony's reference pattern (the Queen's own genes), and produce eggs that they can either incubate and birth themselves or implant in practically any sim, from a willing Antarian worker to a human male. Hence, pollination. (The egg induces a special nutritive cyst to form if it isn't somewhere it can implant neatly, such as a worker's uterus, so the process is eminently survivable for males... but wholly unpleasant, from most accounts. They are Ceasarian births by necessity, though lately the elves have shown some promise with their largely painless aetheric translocation techniques. One or two babies and/or parents lost to the aether per year is still a fair sight better than the current success ratios on medically-assisted birth procedures.))
Anyway, I'll quit rambling now. At this point, I'll be surprised if anyone actually reads this. :)
TL;DR version: In order to retcon in all my crazy faerie/alien/beast/robot sims, I have constructed an over-elaborate backstory for my neighborhoods. I play in a very lazy fashion that aims to minimize time spent at load screens while maximizing my enjoyment in making sims reach their little minuscule goals over and over again. ;D
Clutzy:
Usually with the first generation born they tend to be het, after that it snowballs for deciding sex. I'm just stuck on sims carrying on their genes right off. After awhile though (could be the generation after, could be four down) I find myself actively deciding "Nope, not for you!" But then again, that's been not really happening ever since I discovered the "same-sex pregancy" hack and not gone cold turkey from it. However, I do notice my Romance sims have a tendency to be Bi. I think its because I just want to get that LTW of 20 Lovers over and done with, I swear I get too often. This time around though I'm just going to toss a die for the future generations to come once the current ones are done with college, and onwards. Het, Bi, and Homo will each get two numbers and whichever number it lands on will, thus, be that sim's sexuality.
In the case of pairing off, I must admit I try starting them off young in highschool for finding a good match. If there's a double bolt right off, its safe to say that will be the mate, 'less there's some competition. Or that LTW of 20Lovers, 501st Dates, 20 Woohoos. If that's the case, then its after that sim has completed his/her LTW (with the exceptions of the sims that have the personality of "Nevermind! I could get away with it!") and pick which one bolts highest. Otherwise the picking occurs in college, either by messing around with the one bolts that came along to see about upgrading their bolt or being on the look out for another Sim that s/he has better chemistry with. Some though do just find themselves hitched to a single bolt, but lord help that couple if someone higher came around.
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