Hi there! You are currently browsing as a guest. Why not create an account? Then you get less ads, can thank creators, post feedback, keep a list of your favourites, and more!
Scholar
Original Poster
#1 Old 22nd Dec 2020 at 11:18 PM
Default Traits compared to Family Aspiration in TS2
The topic is about sims having kids based on their traits, not how many kids your sim has which already have several discussions, but I'm not sure about a better title. Also I'm aware of other ways to determine it, like their jobs and lifestyle, but traits are rather a big thing in TS3, so I wanted to focus on that.

When I was playing TS2, I mostly focused on the aspiration rather than wants and letting them "choose" for themself, so after playing TS3 for about half a year, this has become a bit challenge because I used to play the "insiminator" route with ideal kids based on their aspiration or personality. But now, I always end up overpopulating the world by giving them 4+ kids each, even sims like Thornton Wolff who dislike kids, but I've never like it to be exact same number for each sim,
like the Chinese 1-2 kids rule.

So the topic: IF you were to assign each sim preference for kids based their traits - how would you choose?

The other TS2 aspiration are easier to figure whether they prefer a social, wealthy, knowledgeable etc lifestyles (which is how I saw aspirations in previous sims game, what kind of life they wanted combined with secondary on) and Of course, Family oriented, Nurturing and Dislike children seems pretty straightforward but I'm not sure about the rest. In real life, I've never been a "kid" person, so I find it tricky to figure out. Like for example, a sim who likes to party, wouldn't they like have kids in the future? (which I can relate to, where I had a childhood friend whose sister was a model and party girl, but still had kids. But she ended up having the kid being raised by her parents).

and in example Wolff family from Sunset Valley - One want 5 children, while another hate kids all together - how do you play out this sort of situations where couples have conflicting traits?

Advertisement
Alchemist
#2 Old 22nd Dec 2020 at 11:50 PM
Family-Oriented
Nurtuing
Good (not necessarily)
Hopeless Romantic (because it conflicts with Commitment Issues)

what does his name even mean?
Scholar
#3 Old 23rd Dec 2020 at 1:35 AM
Quite a few traits could go either way depending on what they're stacked with.

Bookworm might want kids to read to, though if it went with more demanding traits & LTWs it could mean they are too busy for kids.

Neat might mean they keep house well, or it might mean they are repelled by the mess of children's play.

other household-maintenance traits like Handy, Green Thumb, Collector, Gatherer, Natural Cook, Animal Lover and all its variations, also cut both ways depending on what they're stacked with.

The Showtime traits, which I can't remember their names, will tend to stack badly with parenting, I think.
Scholar
#4 Old 23rd Dec 2020 at 4:07 AM
I got NRAAS' suite of mods and used Woohooer to set all woohoo to 5% chance of babies and Try for Baby to 80%. What I'd like to do is set it up so that woohoo would mean trying to prevent pregnancy and carrying a 5% chance, Risky to mean not using protection and carry a 20% chance, and Try for Baby to be 80%. You can kinda do that in TS4 with mods like Wonderful Whims or Wicked Whims, but it's more complicated as they've also added a menstrual cycle. I like that all woohoo carries some risk, and that there's some chaos to the game. This also means that I have variation of family size. Some big families, some small families. Some people die without having any kids at all. Setting a 5% risk to all woohoo means that there's always a group of toddlers, kids, and teens for my sims to be friends with. If I don't do that, then Story Progression is a bit too good at making sure that only the nurturing, family oriented, good sims or the completely careless have kids. This way Thorton and Morgana might have 1 kid, but not 5.

I'm thinking once I finish with the Calientes in Sunset Valley, I'll do a run in Riverview with All Woohoo set to 20% Risky and see what happens.

The Mayflies Legacy- a Random Legacy Story
Scholar
#5 Old 23rd Dec 2020 at 6:34 PM
Wait, are you saying that Story Progression automatically by default assigns babies to those who would be suitable for it? Nraas or EA Story Progression? that's interesting...my Lucky Palms is currently small enough I could make manual castes for allowed pregnancy, though by the time I'm done arranging the starting population and characteristics the way I want them, I may be done with micro-managing.

addressing the original question again: if you're using Master Controller, you could in fact collect the traits you like for family aspiration and make a caste where sims having that trait can be pregnant or participate in pregnancy. I think you ought to be able to design the caste with multiple traits, but I'm pretty sure you can't build in nuance like "any 2 of the following traits" or "percentage of pregnancy increased by 5%"
Scholar
Original Poster
#6 Old 23rd Dec 2020 at 6:53 PM
Personally, I go through ALL residents in a world (with MC Make Active) and then manually determine their pregnancy, traits, LTW, Career etc. Currently, a custom world with many of the reoccurring families from different worlds plus the ones from Sunset Valley and MC said I had 187 sims.

Which is why I try to micro-manage pregnancies and death - or otherwise the game will become bloated/laggy rather quickly if I constantly let them sims have 3-5 kids each. Trying now to maintain the population to 250 sims max.

After I started the thread, I got an idea. Randomize each sims desired amount of kids and divide it for the couple, but using traits to adjust it. Because it doesn't make sense for sims who dislike kids to have 5+.
E.g.: Morgana 5 + Thornton -1 = 4/2 = 2 kids MAX.

I'm still rather new to Nraas Story progression and hasn't fiddle with the Castes yet. Currently I've SP disable and playing sort of rotation but letting sims age normally.

But what I was wondering was about the other traits, because some sims do not have family oriented, dislike kids, nurturing or good.
Scholar
#7 Old 23rd Dec 2020 at 8:08 PM
I think the traits that would tend to make a sim a homebody, like the green thumb or neat or animal lover or natural cook, would tend to be good with having children.
All the showtime traits and the traveling-oriented ones would be ones that would make a sim less likely to decide on having children.

snob could go either way depending on whether it's a celebrity snob or a houseproud snob (i.e., paired with showtime traits or paired with neat/natural cook/green thumb)
Scholar
#8 Old 26th Dec 2020 at 6:44 PM
Quote: Originally posted by lucy kemnitzer
Wait, are you saying that Story Progression automatically by default assigns babies to those who would be suitable for it? Nraas or EA Story Progression? that's interesting...my Lucky Palms is currently small enough I could make manual castes for allowed pregnancy, though by the time I'm done arranging the starting population and characteristics the way I want them, I may be done with micro-managing.

addressing the original question again: if you're using Master Controller, you could in fact collect the traits you like for family aspiration and make a caste where sims having that trait can be pregnant or participate in pregnancy. I think you ought to be able to design the caste with multiple traits, but I'm pretty sure you can't build in nuance like "any 2 of the following traits" or "percentage of pregnancy increased by 5%"


I use NRAAS story progression. My longest running town started from scratch and ran 3 generations. The town initially had 2 kids, 2 teens, and no pregnant women. There were some established couples and families and about 15 single sims. I think the total was somewhere around 40 sims I made by hand. I noticed pretty quickly that the sims having babies were either the barflies or the loving families. I was getting a lot of romance notifications but not very many baby or surprise baby notifications. I also had to seed the pool at intervals to make sure my sims had peers a few times through MC.

The Mayflies Legacy- a Random Legacy Story
Scholar
#9 Old 27th Dec 2020 at 1:14 AM
I do have trouble having enough sims in each flirting cohort without having too many sims overall.
Scholar
#10 Old 27th Dec 2020 at 5:36 AM
You could create a hard population cap and then make a caste of sims you would be cool with yeeting and a caste of sims you don't want to move out and put immigration pressure on the yeeters.

The Mayflies Legacy- a Random Legacy Story
Back to top