Alice and Kev Challenge?
Chain_Reaction:
I really need to get around to doing something like this. As surprising as it may sound, I haven't ever worked a sim up from nothing in any of the 3 versions. I always cheat up the funds to an insane amount, build them a huge house and play. They only get jobs if I think about it. I know I've sucked most of the fun out of the game by doing this all these years but I have this obsessive urge to have all the options available at start.
Blech:
Quote from: J. M. Pescado on 2009 June 22, 05:24:18
Alice and Kev isn't a challenge, it's how I usually play the game. The fact I voluntarily CHOOSE to do so as a PREFERRED starter option should tell you that this is, in fact, BETTER.
After playing like this with just one family, I think I'm starting to agree. It makes it a lot more interesting and fun when they have to work for every little thing. Like McCrea, I've learned that the "Any way they can" rule for money making sucks when collectibles come into play. To get around this, since IRL it's highly unlikely but still plausible to just find gold lying around, they are allowed to find and sell one collectible for their entire lives. The gardening and fishing is also out, now, for me. They are only allowed to harvest from community plants just enough to live off of, and the same goes for fishing. No more profiting from food. With these new rules, my sims have exactly $79 after one week, and the only thing they've added to their shack is the easel for the child.
J. M. Pescado:
It's not so much the entire "moving up from nothing" thing that motivates me to do it. It's the fact that the amount you start with is insufficient to buy a house with good, non-harmful things. Since there is no point in buying HARMFUL things which depreciate and make you lose money, it stands to reason that there is no point in having a house at all, since you won't actually be using it while it has nothing of use. Plus, the game penalizes you for not partaking of its open-world structure.
Take, for instance, the Body Skill. Going to a "gym" community lot grants a 50% boost to the gain rate. As any gamer knows, failure to use a bonus is equivalent to a penalty. Therefore, from a gamer's perspective, all Body skill gains OUTSIDE of a gym operate at a -33% penalty. Therefore, it would be utterly daft to pay from your limited pool of funds to buy a piece of exercise equipment that is 33% less effective than something that is free. A similar bonus is applied to the "work at home" interaction at Libraries, making it the biggest misnomer in the game, as you would always be working from a library, where the computer for doing so is free and outperforms any computer you could thus buy. The same applies to book skilling at libraries: Sims get a read-speed bonus at a library, increasing the rate at which they gain skills from a book. If this wasn't enough, the game will stick you with the "Stir Crazy" penalty moodlet if you continue to defy the numbers and stay home. In fact, the only thing that you can install at home that you cannot get out of a community lot is high-quality cooking (stoves are verboten on commlots)...and it's not as if you cannot get food on community lots also for free, or quality food, if you grill/restaurant it.
In short, unless you can afford to furnish a house to sickening levels of opulence and your sims have nothing better to do with their time and money but wallow in decadent luxury, there is little reason you need a house at all! There's no weather, and in any case you would be unaffected by it while inside a community lot, you don't have to PAY for anything you use on a community lot, when your lot is empty you receive no bills, and nearly everything you can buy is inferior to what you can use in the field.
Is this is a bad thing? Well, as I found in TS2, watching sims at home? Totally and utterly boring. Watching them behave like assholes to each other on community lots and in the open world is where all the action is, anyway. Readers of Awesomeland wil note how scenes of home-life are utterly absent, because there is nothing interesting to see there.
Blech:
I HAVE to try that out now, for real. The next sim I make is going to be all the way "homeless". Right now, I prefer to have them skill at home whenever possible, because it's easier to keep track of them that way, but with all the bonuses at comm lots, it does seem pretty stupid now. I think I'll try it out with just one sim to get accustomed to the new playstyle, but the logic of this style sounds infinitely better.
J. M. Pescado:
Quote from: smellyarmando on 2009 June 22, 09:42:43
I HAVE to try that out now, for real. The next sim I make is going to be all the way "homeless". Right now, I prefer to have them skill at home whenever possible, because it's easier to keep track of them that way, but with all the bonuses at comm lots, it does seem pretty stupid now.
The argument of "harder to keep track of" has some amount of merit if the family consists of multiple people...but it is becoming increasingly less of an issue with AwesomeMod's developing "Supreme Commander" feature, which allows you to boss sims around merely by clicking on their headbobs in the map screen, without ever having to even LOOK at them. :P
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