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Alchemist
#26 Old 20th Jun 2018 at 8:16 PM
Quote: Originally posted by iCad
While your argument might make sense if the game was made in the 80s, it was made in the 2000s.

Yup, you're right; TS1 is much younger than I thought it was! Though developers coulda had a different time in mind when designing. And I know I shouldn't really keep trying to make sense of things, but really, isn't that what we do here, ?

"May the sunlight find you, thy days be long, thy winters kind, thy roots be strong." -Grand Oak Tree, DAO

XPTL Mod Archive | Change a Mod's Mesh into a CC Object | Increasing the Game Difficulty | Editing ACR 4 Your Age Mod
Bored? Read an unfinished legacy or sim story. | aka Kelyns | she/her
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Mad Poster
#27 Old 20th Jun 2018 at 9:13 PM
I read somewhere that it's all got to do with Sims' short lifespans. If you only live for 80 days then you simply don't have enough time in your life to take out and pay back a §300,000 mortgage. On the other hand, we, living 70 to 80 years, will eat thousands of meals in our lifetime, whereas a Sim from birth to death may only eat a couple of hundred. So averaged over a lifetime, the relative proportions of income spent on housing and food are not so very different to our own.

Of course this ceases to make any sense if, like me, you play with aging off, and a day on a Sim's life is just that -- a day. In that case I think it becomes more a matter of culture. If you ever speak to someone from a very different culture to your own, you are likely to find that what is logical to you is nonsensical to them, and vice versa. So I can't help thinking that, if I could sit down and talk to one of my Sims about house prices in our different societies, my Sim would conclude that it was the house prices in my world that are mad. And, when it comes to £300,000 for a semi-detached bungalow that cost £630 to build before the war, my Sim would be right! It's just silly money!

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#28 Old 20th Jun 2018 at 9:21 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Phantomknight
Yup, you're right; TS1 is much younger than I thought it was! Though developers coulda had a different time in mind when designing. And I know I shouldn't really keep trying to make sense of things, but really, isn't that what we do here, ?


Indeed it is. However, there's also the concept of picking your battles, and generally you want to pick ones that you can possibly win. Making the money/economy in the game jive with the real world is, I think, one of those things you just can't win. If you fix one aspect, you screw up another. Like, making house prices "realistic" drives up rents to incredibly unrealistic amounts. Probably the only way you could totally fix it would be to get at the source code and rework lots of things from the ground up, not only prices of things but also how the game does things like calculate rent.

That being said, the thing that I generally do, when I want to be a little more realistic about money in a neighborhood, is to consider house (and car) prices as down-payments only. I figure that for a house, the price of the house is a 10% down-payment (which is about in the middle of the spectrum as far as the typical amount that people put down on a mortgage) while for a car it's a 20% down-payment. I then use Monique's computer's banking functions to give Sims mortgages and car loans to pay off for the balance of the price of the house/car. The problem you tend to run into with that, though, is that the interest on those loans make for very large bills twice a week, even on very modest houses, and the wages of the game's careers aren't really up for the task. Soooo, I've also made a set of Maxis careers (because I don't like custom careers) where I've tweaked the wage structure accordingly, so that the bill payments are a more manageable percentage of a family's weekly income. I only use those tweaked careers when playing neighborhoods where I decide to be a bit more realistic about money.

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Top Secret Researcher
Original Poster
#29 Old 21st Jun 2018 at 7:23 PM
First it's important to know that I play my game with 1 simsday = 1 real month (I created this project http://modthesims.info/d/519753 )


Quote: Originally posted by Phantomknight
As an American, most of the game's pricing "feels right" to me, though some things are also wildly out of portion too. But I think that's because things are done to scale, in relation to what a sim earns, and that's how I approach things in my game.


I think the developers of the game (also Americans) have put a lot of typical American things in it (like going to college and the scholarships), but maybe the financial system isn't equivalent to RL because it's such an international game. If I read about the prices of bread and meat in the UK, then that's about the same in Belgium. If I read about the houses around the world, that's not really comparable to Belgium. Even Flanders, Brussels and Walloon (the three parts of Belgium) can be quite different.


Quote: Originally posted by Phantomknight
Any multiplier used would be very specific to an area and maybe even time period. Your multiplier of 7, for example, is waaaaaaaaaayyy too low for where I live (NYC), in terms of housing anyway. Sims get about 3-4 times the apartment for what we pay in real life.


It indeed depends on the area and city you live in. Even in Belgium it's really different to buy a house in Antwerp or Brugges or Geraardsbergen.
But I came up with the multiplier 7 when I build my own house in the game and saw how much it was and then compared to what I payed for it in RL. Then multiplier 7 is about right.
But that's about houses not apartments.
I also built the apartment where I lived, in game and then I'd say you should divide it by 14 or something like that (knowing how the timeframe is done in my game) regarding that 1 days wage is 1 months wage and the rent should be 1/3 of what you earn per month (at least that's what the bank told me).
The (1 bedroom) apartment I build costs about $1,400/7 days. So that's $200 per day, but my sim, living alone and being in level 1 of its career, doesn't earn that much a day! So $1,400 is actually quite a lot. It just doesn't feel that way because it's per week.


Quote: Originally posted by Phantomknight
But I digress. The way I would approach it is to just use the game pricing, and add up how much I think a sim in a certain tier would have (house, furniture, clothes, cars, vacations, and all that), then build my system around that. I might factor in the cost of kids, too--like how much their furniture would be, assuming a new renovation each life stage, and how much a new full set of clothes would be for each life stage. Once I have all that info, I could see how long it would take sims to earn things and figure out how to set up my financial system (which in my case is mostly just overhauling salaries).

I hope that helps a bit?


That actually helps a lot. I am going to look into that. Thanks!


Quote: Originally posted by iCad
All in all, since there's no internal consistency in the game's pricing of objects and real estate at all, there's no way that you can come up with a multiplier that will make sense across the board. What you'd need to do to really make it work is to restructure all the prices in the game -- including all the build-mode stuff, down to walls and making roofs actually cost something -- so that houses you build have more realistic end-prices, and so that your prices will be consistent across the board. Which you CAN do. (Well, maybe not making roofs cost something, but the other things you can do.) I've thought about doing it, even, but in the end it just gave me a raging headache and I decided to suspend belief instead. But just as a "for example?" One of the problems of that kind of restructuring would be that you'd drive up rents to ridiculous amounts in order to make house prices more believable. So why would anyone rent an apartment when they could just buy a house for far less money?


It's not my point to restructure all prices. Just finding a multiplier, one for each category that I think is the most important in my game to make my sims life a bit harder financially and to make a bit more sense to me. The way my sims can save money, I'll never can in RL just because of those prices. If I have to choose a region then of course I would choose my own as I know the prices where I live.
And about the houses, I was thinking (with mods, some workarounds and OFB) to sell the house a bit more expensive than the game would sell it.


Quote: Originally posted by terula8
I kind of built my own financial system since - as other players have pointed out - it's not realistic or consistent. Basically, if a sim is earning x simoleons (or Sim Dollars per day, then I multiply it by 12 (since in my game 1 day = 1 month, and I have both ages and pregnancy lengths modded to that end) to get their yearly salary. From there, I can calculate taxes and how much things should cost, and also how much sims in owned businesses should be paid. No it doesn't add up perfectly, but I don't mind that as long as the taxes/loan system works.


That's exactly what I want to do. I feel the same way about it. It doesn't have to add up perfectly, but I want a taxes/loan system that works. I wrote this thread to get some inspiration on how I should build it.


Quote: Originally posted by terula8
Not to be a pedant, but I think the reason simoleons don't add up properly is because each item has a scale - so beds range from 100s to 700s, and TVs range from 100s to 1000s (for example), each individual item has a scale that is unrelated to any of the others, so it's hard to quantify value.


You're totally right. I can take a good deep look at those scales and find the multiplier I need.


Quote: Originally posted by Isa-WP
To be fair, their clothes last forever. If your shorts could survive you, your children, your grandchildren and your grand-grand-children while being worn for days on end they would probably go for a few hundred pound as well.
It's a bit of a shame that clothing doesn't have some kind of cheap/moderate/expensive system in the game, but a lot of CC makers would forget about it anyway or make everything cheap. I guess making everything pricey evens it out.

Actually, lientebollemeis, what are you planning to use those comparisons for anyway? A tax system?


I totally agree. It's to bad there's no cheap/moderate/expensive system for clothing, but indeed they last forever so I have to put some thought into that as well. I would never spend 200 euros for clothing (1 euro = ~0.75 pound), but if it would last forever,...
I already have some sort of tax system based on the Belgian one, but I want to evaluate a bit and there's also VAT that I can maybe put into account (to make houses more expensive or something). And maybe rent can be brought in to calculate the tax so it's very interesting to rent an apartment. I still have to think it all through really. Excel will be my friend again!


Quote: Originally posted by iCad
That being said, the thing that I generally do, when I want to be a little more realistic about money in a neighborhood, is to consider house (and car) prices as down-payments only. I figure that for a house, the price of the house is a 10% down-payment (which is about in the middle of the spectrum as far as the typical amount that people put down on a mortgage) while for a car it's a 20% down-payment. I then use Monique's computer's banking functions to give Sims mortgages and car loans to pay off for the balance of the price of the house/car. The problem you tend to run into with that, though, is that the interest on those loans make for very large bills twice a week, even on very modest houses, and the wages of the game's careers aren't really up for the task. Soooo, I've also made a set of Maxis careers (because I don't like custom careers) where I've tweaked the wage structure accordingly, so that the bill payments are a more manageable percentage of a family's weekly income. I only use those tweaked careers when playing neighborhoods where I decide to be a bit more realistic about money.


That's a very interesting idea. I already changed the bills so they come 5 times/week (every month in my game except for the weekend) and adjusted the amount to pay accordingly. In Belgium you can put the intrests of the loan of your house into your taxes application (or at least my accountant knows how it works) so you get money back from the government.
Also now I think of it. I pay government taxes for Belgium, Flanders, East-Flanders and the city I live + taxes for having a property. I just can't do that to my poor sims. Well then at least the issue of them having it quite easy to save money compared to RL (which I mentioned above) is solved.



It would be way easier if we could put a price on everything instead of the game. But with reading all these comments and thinking this all through, I think I might be able to find a workaround for that (even without any cheats or mods).
I don't know it all yet. I have to think it through a bit more, but thanks a lot you guys. Never thought I would have gotten so much response on this. I can really put my mindstream on now to figure something out before having 3 weeks of (only 22 days to go )

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