Now that I have almost completed the first round of Sunset Valley, I have learned a couple of things about Story Progression's inner workings and the game itself that I wish I had known when first started out.
1) I wish I had known about the Face One Virus. When I first started playing, I didn't know all of the townies were generated with the same face. I thought The Sims 3 behaved more like The Sims 2 which generated the townies from a set of templates. For more details about the Face One Virus, see my legacy blog entry where I explain it in more detail. Since I initially allowed the homeless to move in, I have a lot of townies running around with the same face. I am seriously considering annihilating them with Master Controller so that their genetics don't overrun the town.
You can prevent this situation by installing Twallan's Register Mod and configuring Story Progression to generate townies from your Sim bin. See Twallan's FAQ for more details about managing immigration.
2) I wish I had known I could limit the number of romantic interests a Sim can have. This didn't really become a problem until Generations. With the introduction of the Romantic Reputation system, Sims with multiple love interests have a difficult time maintaining a steady relationship. This is a big part of the reason why you see my Sims break up so often. Twallan's Story Progression Mod has a setting under the "Flirt" menu that specifies the number of romantic interests a Sim can have at a time. By default, it is set to zero, which means there is no limit to the number of romantic interests a Sim can have. I have now changed this setting to 1. I am hoping that will reduce the volatility in the Sims' relationships. I don't think it will help the current young adult/adult generation much, but I am hoping it will help the future generations.
3) I wish I had known the EA team was going to release so many darned neighborhoods. Ok, I put this one in for the lols, but seriously they have already released eleven neighborhoods and there is at least one more on the way (Moonlight Falls). Sheesh! It's going to be 2050 before I finish this thing. Hopefully, I live that long.
Awesomemod by JM Pescado also annihilates face one virus by mixing bin sim genetics and just randomizing faces, too. It's what I use. :D I had no idea you could do it with story progression and register!
ReplyDeleteUgh, I agree about the worlds. I wish they'd let us have subworlds. It's getting ridiculous!
How do you like AwesomeMod? I am curious about some of its features. I saw your post on Twitter about being able to pause pregnancies with it, but I am worried about being "married" to the mod.
DeleteThe biggest issue is the same one everyone else has with it, it can take Pescado awhile to update it. But when he does, it's usually flawless. I will sometimes even just download the beta to play. That's the biggest drawback, it takes about a week after an expansion to update!
DeleteOtherwise, it is amazing. I love being able to type in 'fixall' and have most common errors remedied. (think batbox from TS2) I love the small tweaks, like no face one virus, the ability to turn on TS2 style aging, and the small tweaks to the game like moodlets/etc. Plus, it's so darn customizable!
For me, I play enough other games that I can usually wait that long to install an EP. I am also a week or two weeks ahead in my Prosperity playing, too. So, it works for me!
Instead of annihilating them, you could try completely replacing some of them with sims from your bin with Edit in CAS. I've done this in my new TS3 world and I like that it gives me more control over who looks what way than randomly generating does.
ReplyDeleteAnd OMG, TS3 so needs subworlds! I am constantly afraid I'm going to run out of room and my sims haven't even had any babies yet!
Carla, I do use the feature of replacing service Sims with immigrant Sims in my legacy save, so I guess I will also do it here too.
DeleteI agree with you about the subworlds! I haven't played with Twallan's Traveler mod that much, but I know it lets you travel to the other worlds. I think it even allows you to move to them, but I am not sure.