Regarding your baby boom in Happy Valley,I just remembered an old family in Forest Lake.The son had the romance aspiration and at that time so did everybody else!Richard fufilled his WooHoo wants easy enough but ended up with about 20 children.His wife wasn't happy when 20 toddlers appeared on her doorstep!
When you play the Devoteds house do you turn free will off?I found with romance sims its the only way to stop them messing their lives up.

When I was playing the household with the Family Sim/Romance Sim pair, I managed to keep them in line just with careful observation and much WooHoo. If you're getting heavy cream at home, you're less likely to step out for skim milk!

Wren wrote:

Regarding your baby boom in Happy Valley,I just remembered an old family in Forest Lake.The son had the romance aspiration and at that time so did everybody else!Richard fufilled his WooHoo wants easy enough but ended up with about 20 children.His wife wasn't happy when 20 toddlers appeared on her doorstep! When you play the Devoteds house do you turn free will off?I found with romance sims its the only way to stop them messing their lives up.

I don't turn autonomy off (mostly because I don't know how ) but I do watch them like a mother hen watching her chicks. That goes double if they appear on another lot as nonselectable sims. Any time they show up in another household, I wait for the residents to greet them and then make them selectable. On a community lot, I don't even wait that long.

This can get complicated on a large lot, and worse if it has any naughty objects that the sims can use autonomously. One fellow who was supposed to be campaigning for a monogamous relationship (in Anja's story*) showed up at the frat house on campus. I didn't even notice when he arrived; I was watching the big room at the back and he headed upstairs. I happened to go upstairs and caught him in a compromising situation with one of the local sexpots. Later I checked his memories and discovered that he had become involved with two young ladies, one of them his college professor!



----------
*That's a link to Anja Vanderspeigle's story on Insimadult. Warning: Very adult material.

miros1 wrote:

When I was playing the household with the Family Sim/Romance Sim pair, I managed to keep them in line just with careful observation and much WooHoo. If you're getting heavy cream at home, you're less likely to step out for skim milk!

Yeah, that's the trick. Once in a while the Romance sims will roll up a collection of no-no's with no opportunities for boosting their aspiration levels with acceptable behavior, but if you just play them for a while, they'll get it over it.

I think that once they've had a taste of the forbidden fruit, they are more likely to crave it. That makes it all the more important to keep an eye on them. That happened to me right after the game first came out, in the infamous episode where a monogamous family sim (Carl Franks) autonomously had an affir with a Knowledge sim (Giselle Testbed) and got her pregnant. It was very difficult to play Carl after that.

(The original version of both Carl and Giselle were lost in The Bomb.)

autonomously? completely autonomous affair? Can they really do that? I don't believe they can try for baby autonomously at least!

I've played a few famillies like this. I ahve come to rather enjoy the Romance Sims. They take more controlling I spose. Fambly Sims - well you can just leave them to it if they are reasonably well off.

Sita wrote:

autonomously? completely autonomous affair? Can they really do that? I don't believe they can try for baby autonomously at least! I've played a few famillies like this. I ahve come to rather enjoy the Romance Sims. They take more controlling I spose. Fambly Sims - well you can just leave them to it if they are reasonably well off.

Yes, completely autonomously. This was with the original, unpatched base game right out of the box. I documented it in The Autonomous Adventures of Giselle.

Since then, as far as I know, the only unintended pregnancies in my game happened because I was too hasty when clicking on the woohoo command.

Man, am I glad I never played with the unpatched game! It's hard enough to keep an eye on the little buggers as it is!

Interesting (to me, anyway) side note: as I was setting up the Oldie couple in their new house (yes, I'm still dinking around with the Maxis familys) I found myself unhappy/annoyed by 2 things:

- Mr. Oldie was pre-set to be a (yet another) Romance Sim. (This is seriously the most over used Aspiration when it comes to the "pre-set" Sims! ) Of corse his LTW was to WooHoo 20 Sims. (Gee, what a shocker....NOT! )

-Mrs. Oldie was set to be a Family Sim, and for some strange reason had no LTW. (It was etheir a glitch or she was really supposed to be that shallow. She didn't look blonde...... )

Not being even remotely interested in playing Horny Old Coot Bangs The Neighborhood While His Clueless Wife Sits Home & Knits, I broke out MATY's Lot Debugger (love that thing) along with SimSlice's Aspiration Grilled Cheese Sandwich, & got busy.

Long story short, they both ended up being (of all things) Pleasure Sims, with the mutal LTW of having 50 Dream Dates!! As you are allowed to "date" your spouse, this works out great (well, for my game purposes) but I just thought it was pretty funny (strange) that an Aspiration as seemily shallow as Pleasure would contain such a.....well.... romantic kind of LTW, while the Romance LTW's are geared for.....well....pleasure of a sort.

(My LTW is to see some more Aspirations in gerearal added to this game! That's a subject for a different thread however..... )

Getting back on subject, it's interesting to see that there is hope for playing a truely romantic Romance Sim! Makes that Aspiration a lot less creepy! Well, to me anyway.....

-ZW

Yup! For me, the great learning was that I don't have to give them everything they want.

That's sort of like real life. People want things all the time, including things that they know won't be good for them in the long run. (It's an old axiom that dates back at least to Adam Smith: Man has unlimited wants.) Wisdom lies in knowing which wants to satisfy.

Often as not, I'll just use JM's lot fixer to toggle the Lifetime Want bit so that I don't have to worry about their aspiration levels. Once in a while I'll play with the rules as Maxis wrote them, but that's usually only on a capricious whim and only with a solo sim.


How the heck do you turn autonomy off?

I never toggle the LTW bit, just reroll it until I get one that I know I can satisfy before they die!

I believe autonomy gets turned off from the Game Options dialog, the one you get when you click on the Gears.

I'll have to look the next time I get my game going!

For me, a great deal of the fun of playing the game is seeing what the nutty little simmies will do, so I probably won't use the Autonomy Off option much. Still, it might come in handy when I want to corral a bunch of sims to do screen shots for a story.

Turning autonomy off usally makes me forget it's off so my sims starve and die...

Lol, that's why I'm afraid to turn it off! I kill the poor Sims often enough that I make sure I've got the Paranormal career reward so I can get them back!

bump