Heh, I think the gifts more than make up for the amount spent on them. It's funny in one of my families the male slob has dropped of a Telescope, Hot tub and DJ Booth. Not a rich sim, The Slob! And that's just for cuddes with a urine drenched hobo who hasn't spent a cent on him. (I suspect the gifts are stolen)

Does it lower the chances of being promoted?

In the perfect world (for me) the sim would EITHER get a bonus OR get promoted for good performance, not both on the same day. Less optimal but still acceptable would be reducing the chance of promotion and/or the promotion bonus. Starting at lower levels is good too, altough I do want my sims to be more impoverished at the start too. Oh, it'd be nice if bills were large enough to cause cardiac arrest as well (maybe not literally, altough it'd be funny!).

The game is so financially trivial it's not funny. In a single days work a sim can afford the most non-car expensive item in the game. I'd like working to be relatively on par with painting and raising old people for insurance, after all working gives free mood boosts and chance card chances.

It IS possible to get rid of money with a number of hacks such as JM's money order, but I'd rather they didn't get the surplus money in the first place.

Besides it's make more sense if instead of getting promoted they just get a new title and (worthless) stock options  .

Does a hack exist, or would it be possible to make one, where the promotion bonus is eliminated or greatly reduced?

I'm playing a hobo-variant.


Unofficial Hobo Variant:
A phone-booth is the only structure on the lot, a 1x1 room with a phone, archway, windows on two sides and a decoration on the back.
No plumbing.
No food or drink.
No bed.
No electronics (other than battery powered).
No bookcases, telescopes or chess sets.
No stealing food (at least not when eating garbage is a reasonable alternative).
No working or going to school. Think unemployed and illiterate.
No dates.
Anything goes on community lots as per ethiopian rules, altough skilling, earning money and paying for stuff is forbidden.
   
It's basically Ethiopian + email + other nasty restrictions . Except with a concession allowing the phone booth and street light (walls are illegal for email, phone & light are illegal in Ethiopian, but they are intended to be "lot fixtures" rather than property of the hobos, modifying them in any way would be a breach of hobo-variant rules).

How about if they have a shotgun in their inventory the bite cannot be done on them? The rejection animation could be great.

I expect it should start badgering you to go home to the kids after 5-8 hours, altough not actually force the issue. Also Nannies should stay indefinitely in case you do want the parents to have a long holiday from the kids. Also if the only adult at home dies while all other adults are out, a Nanny should turn up instead of the social worker.

Tedium.

You should have seen my sim-selfs wedding. He had befriended a bunch of zombies and invited them to his wedding party. Being zombies, they spent the whole time moaning and groaning. Suffice to say the wedding was a bust. Instead of a honeymoon the bride and groom got to have a bawl-fest. I was sad, my sim-self is so kind that he befriends those unloved zombies, and they ruined his wedding  .

Four zombies and a wedding?

*looks puzzled* what's this "ordering food?" thing, is it like stealing food only without the stealing?
(too much Ethiopian means all my sims now obsessively snarf food rather than pay for it ).

Lack of time sync is something that has vexed me since it's been possible to go to community lots, especially because the solution is so obvious and not difficult in a technical sense. The most annoying thing is that the lack of time sync effectively destroys any and all semblance of game balance, and I mean meta-balance, the entire flow of the game. Sims do at least age in sync in the main hoods' (when sending a fraction of the family out) but at university sync is lost! the obvious solution makes all sync work correctly. bah! bleh!

And something else that annoys me is every expansion pack makes the game easier, by giving your sims more activities to boost moods and skills while also allowing them to pull the requisite time to perform the activities out of their ass. In any game there should be meaningful choices, doing everything shouldn't be an option. The Sims 2 has become a game where the success of your sims depends ENTIRELY on the amount of real time you devote to them, this should only be the case with aging off.

I'm almost surprised a modding solution hasn't ever been found, like putting returning sims in some kind of statis for the off-world hours or something. There is probably an obvious reason why it's impossible.

hahahah, plastic and duct tape mummies.

I use the Surgery Station to make zombies even more hideously deformed, sometimes I get lucky and it malfunctions 

Here you see a horrific freak of nature playing poker with a zombie.

heheh, this hack is funny in ISBI challenge after ripping out Bathroom Uses You. I have like 6 sims in the house with really low neat, they wander around stinky all the time. The only neat sim is a female elder who habitually wanders around in nasty underwear wetting herself. It rules.

I've invented the Sim Perpetual Motion Machine for the purpose of this challenge but it works well in normal play too.

Outings. The boosts from a rockin' outing are large enough to easily cover any decay during the outing itself, in fact it's possible to build up to a rockin' outing in about half a sim hour, using the Baby - Rub Belly interaction, handy for keeping the Pregnant sims needs up. So when making friends, the sim can just chain outings. In fact it basically makes sense to always be in an outing when socializing, free, unlimited mood boosts for doing what you'd be doing anyway. In fact outing abuse should make a "Bare patch of dirt" challenge doable.

This story is hilarity incarnate.

And i love ISBI, it's one of those Art mimics Life things. It's like the one normal person in the world where everyone else is crazy.

I was thinking of ISBI landlord edition, always having atleast 6 sims on the lot and the torch-bearer doesn't go to work, he just mooches off the idiots with their pathetic jobs.

Maybe it could be the Inbreeding challenge. All sims trace back to the founding father *snicker*.

Nah, vamparism means no more hunger/bladder decay meaning no more heading to community lots. Then have ALL the sims meditate and set it to 3x speed. The vampire does fine meditating in full sunlight (that melting thing, all in the mind ). And since sims who are alive at the end aren't penalized as severely any "surplus" sims can (and I think should) always be vamped so they don't need to be micromanaged...
I'm pretty sure vamping massively speeds up going for the bonus points anyway (but isn't that just player-torture?)

My other idea for rapid aging: getting red aspiration then chugging elixir. But I can't remember if that slaps motives around.

Well Bleh!
First child is a girl with 6 neatpoints.
Okay by my calculations there is no way to get perfect email score because the toddler will be too busy moaning hunger and getting molested by the nanny-collective to possibly train any toddler-skills. I think I have to put this family on hold until I can figure out a way to get perfect scores on both ethiopian and email.

I believe the key to (stress-free) Ethiopian is Vampires, especially for females. Sims that need to (eventually) die can simply be cured and then meditate until death do part thee.

I'm going to do Ethiopian, Email and Bohemian Challenge (non-awesome challenge, no going to work allowed) all at once.

Is it permissable to have babys/toddlers taken away? Like in case of twins or something... I hate to think of having to raise an unwanted ugly little misfit.

Hey I have a question about logic used to autonomously find a bathroom, it SEEMS that Sims use "as the etheral crow flies" to find the nearest bathroom, so they might decide the bathroom below their feet is closer than the one on the same floor but a few steps away. For this reason I usually build "bathroom stacks" where the toilet is on the same tile on each floor, since doing so I've never had problems with Sims traipsing up and down stairs to use bathrooms.

So uh, the question. Am I being superstitious? (altough I'm sure the plumbers appreciate the toilet stacks :p)

Oh, I like this idea, altough I don't have a crowded hood.

I've taken to using the Lie Detector as a pseudo electric-chair, altough to do the actual killing I boot them through a APO door set to deathfield.

 

He was a welcomewagonizer and I needed zombies  .

I need to invent more sim-crimes. Stealing gnomes is already punished by death. Something has to be done about kickybagging. I could probably classify Hanging Out as loitering, and I'm certain there is no wholesome reason to swing on a fridge door. Ah, phonestalking, that must be punished, in fact I think I'll make a suicide-hotline, when a townie wants to die, they call it!

She's charming .


Double zombified live-in nanny, cleans, cooks, babysits, eats grilled cheese, never complains. Best $6000 my sims ever spent  .

I'm currently populating my (bastardized) prosperity neighborhood with undead, one of the families I started with 2 Uni grads, who I vamped after graduation (being my first vampires, I couldn't quite figure out how to get the countess to bite, in the end I used influence). They had fun braving the sun to reach the top of their careers, and raising a baby. I had a living elder caretaker but he kicked the bucket, forcing daddy vamp to meditate in the baby room. I think I'll make a zombie-nanny for child rearing (can I zombify a nanny then restore her nanny status? otherwise I'll just have a "live"-in zombie-nanny).

In their house, I'm using APO set to Deathfield to guard my gnomes, if an actual friend tries to steal one I can always beg for their ungrateful life . And those thieving townies just get zombified, but I wish there was a more torturous death than deathfield, like maybe zapping them into a pit of despair to starve to death? I fully intend to convert nearly every townie into zombies and/or vampires. Downtime shall be night of the living dead.

I also had the foresight to create a cranky old elder as Sim #1 for telescope shoving. I've since vamped him because having a vampire getting angry at daytime spying and running over in full sunlight is comedy! I might zombify him and see if he becomes too slow to survive his shoving escapades.