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Inventor
Original Poster
#101 Old 27th Jul 2021 at 10:33 PM
Capp mansion
No, all the Adult Capps remain moved out -- I was more wondering this for the number of bedrooms they used to have. Do you imagine that the other two families also live in some kind of a Herrenhaus next to the main Capp mansion, as they are a wealthy family? Or would they rather live in fancy homes in a Nachbardorf?

That balcony thingy was based on the balcony of the Herrenhaus in Berßel, but I can imagine such a balcony is an exception. The walls on the balcony was an experiment with the 4t2 tudor walls to check how that kind of timbering would work out, but thanks for pointing out anyway ^^. The original window colors were white wood, but meanwhile I've downloaded rounded castle doors that hopefully would suit better with the dark wood of the timber.

Would the parlor most likely be a room the closest to the entrance? Regarding the extension building, I can consider utilizing that as a library .
Do you mean that the hallway could be narrowed down to two tiles at the entrance, or that the outer two rooms could be connected with each other?

Monty Ranch
Any suggestions for the floorplan layout? If a hallway used to be open with pillars like around an atrium, would they have been enclosed with plastered walls during renovating to make the villa more climateproof? I'm aware I could move around the pillars with cheats so they are still visible between the walls.

Some questions for storytelling
Do you imagine that lazy teen Sims would join a sports club because they friends do it (even though it isn't their OTH), or only Sims that have at least 4 or 5 active points?

In the 00s, did the more outgoing rural teens also keep up with fashion trends, or did they rather wear basics because trendy shops weren't close enough and online shopping was limited? (I take into account which Sims have high interest in fashion )
What kind of Hausschuhe did teens and kids usually wear? And what kind of shoes do households usually have for guests? I assume that adults and elder are more likely to wear Birkenstocks (or Crocs for gardening?), but I doubt if mid-00s teens would wear that (I recall that Birkenstocks became trendy for women just in 2009).

Did teens usually switch to sweatpants at home right after school if they don't have visitors or have to go anywhere for the rest of the day, even though baggy jeans back then were probably more comfortable than skinny jeans? (this might be interesting to the game so I can look for loungewear-like PJs)
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Lab Assistant
#102 Old 31st Jul 2021 at 9:22 PM
Capp mansion - bedrooms:
As the house is older, it can have as many bedrooms as you like to have. I assume that it was built during a time when rich people still had lots of personnel at home and at least some of them also lived in the house. Therefore, the need for bedrooms was bigger in the past than it is today.

Capp mansion - inhabitants:
The other two Capp families definitely would have bigger houses, although not as big as the Capp mansion. The houses do not have to be directly next to the Capp mansion - I think any location except for the Monty side of the village would be okay. Regarding size, 80 Bard Boulevard, 95 Bard Boulevard, 7 Chorus Court and
54 Via Veronaville look sufficiently big to me - if you want them to live in Veronaville. I could imagine that Goneril and her family live in Veronaville. Goneril might hope that this increases her and her children's share of the Capp heritage. I also assume that she works in the family business (= in the economy career) and that she is or wants to be Consort's right hand.
I do not think that another village would be that attractive for Regan either. If she does not live in Veronaville, she at least would want to live in a town (or a city) where she could e.g. have after work drinks with her colleagues in a fancy bar.

Capp mansion - balcony:
I just had a closer look at pictures of that house and the balcony definitely looks unusual. Would it somehow work to imitate the upper part of the balcony by adding an (interior) foundation beneath the roof? It might not work if you add a regular roof, but if you use some CC object, it would be possible, if the CC has an adjustable height.

Capp mansion - parlor:
It would be relatively close to the entrance, although I do not know whether it has to be the closed one.
I think a room without diagonal walls might be better for a library and you should have sufficient rooms on the ground floor of the main building. If the Capps were really rich and important in the past as well, you might turn the extension into an orangery with some nice old-fashioned windows.
I was referring to the two ends of the hallway on the left and right sides of the building. And yes, you either could connect the outer two rooms or you could add a new wall to create a 4x2 bathroom at the end of the hallway.

Monty ranch:
I do not think that anybody would ever build a non-climateproof house in Germany. The temperature record for the lowest temperature ever is -37,8 °C and at the time when the house was built, temperatures were lower than they are today. I would keep the pillars in the traditional way and consider them part of the outdoor atrium. However, the layout should be done in a way that using the atrium is optional so that the inhabitants are not forced to go into the atrium in winter. Therefore, there also should be completely enclosed hallways inside the house. As the Monty's do a lot of cooking, I would place some herbs (decorative plants) somewhere in the atrium as they would be protected better from cold temperatures there so that the chances of surviving winter are bigger.

Sports club:
If lazy just means that the teen is too lazy to tidy up his room, too lazy to do his homework and other typical teen stuff, then yes, he could decide to join a sports club.
If "lazy" just refers to the lazy/active bar in the personality tab, then I do not think that a lazy sim would join a sports club. Or rather: Many children join the sports club at a pre-school age because their parents sign them up. Usually they can become members for free if one of their parents is a member of the sports club and many adults are members, although many of them are inactive and just want to support the club. The children can try different sports and see whether they like one or more sports. If they are not interested in any sport, they usually drop out somewhen during primary or secondary school. It is rather unusual to join a sports club as a teenager unless the teen is switching clubs (because the new club plays in a higher league or the like).
Maybe the lazy teen does not participate in trainings and matches, but hangs around a lot of time at the sideline of the pitch. I guess many small sports clubs would accept that, especially if the teen occasionally buys a beverage there. Sports clubs without restaurants usually have some crates with different beverages standing around somewhere and everyone who takes a bottle out of it, either immediately puts some money into a box or makes a tally on a tally sheet. Prices usually are significantly cheaper than in a restaurant, but a bit higher than the wholesale price and the club keeps the margin for the club's account.

Fashion:
Many teens kept up with fashion trends, not just the outgoing ones. I assume that there was less pressure than in cities, but teenagers themselves frequently are interested in fashion. Online shopping was not really that popular yet at that time, but there still were many catalogue companies where you could order via mail. However, most people that I know simply bought clothes in stores. The nearest town (with about 10 000 inhabitants) had several smaller clothing shops, some of them also from bigger brands. If you want to have such a shopping street, I would suggest either many separate lots with 10 tiles width as fake row houses or bigger lots with several row houses on the lot. On the ground floor, you have 2 tile wide staircase that leads to the upper floors and is separated from the rest of the ground floor. On the rest of the ground floor, there is some kind of business like a clothing shop, optician, drugstore, butchery, bakery with small café area, ice café, stationary shop, leather goods shop, pharmacy, bookshop, etc. and on the upper floor there often are doctors, lawyers, a cram school, offices for some other kind of business or even apartments (usually inhabited by people who do not own a car). The sidewalk would have to be much wider than the usual sidewalk so that cafés may have some tables and chairs outside and some other shops also put a few clothing racks or the like outside to catch the interest of people who walk by. On the sidewalk, there also are street lights, benches that do not belong to any shop, flower buckets, sometimes seasonal decorations, parkings parallel to the street with parking meters, a bicycle lane and the street is a one-way street (because the street goes through two towers of the former city wall and the gaps in the towers are too small for two cars at the same time) with a speed limit of 30 km/h so that pedestrians easily cann cross the street. Most of the houses in this street have one full upper floor and a bit usable space beneath the roof. About 10 % of the houses have two full upper floors. A bank and 2-3 other buildings are wider than the other buildings so that they should be on a lot with a width of 20 tiles. There also are a few bigger public buildings like festival hall and district office (Landratsamt), although most public buildings like the town hall are at the market square that is adjoined to this street. The festival hall and district office also have a smaller square on the lot that is connected to one or two more streets and a tiny garden with a few bushes and flowers. (Sorry for the derail, but maybe it can help you for your downtown and/or suburb.)
Every 2-3 months, my parents made a short trip to a city with my sister and me where we could go shopping in more shops than in our home town. When we were children, they would go to the shops with us. When we were older, we frequently split up so that each of us could go to their preferred shops. At lunch time, we would meet to have lunch together, maybe hand over some shopping bags to my father so that we had to carry less stuff. Somewhen in the afternoon, we met again to go home together.
At that time, both in the towns and the cities, there still were some local chain stores for clothing and shoes, but many of them slowly disappeared and got replaced with national or international chain stores.

Shoes:
For your teen, google "Adilette". As he plays soccer, I guess that is the most logical choice for slippers to wear at home. For Birkenstocks and Crocs, your impression is correct. If you want some inspiration for other sims in your neighborhood, you can have a look at the Deichmann website. They have a big variety of shoes and they have a store in pretty much every town and in cities often more than one store. As I grew up in a house with floor heating, I am used to walk around just with socks in the house and continued to do this even after moving out. I do not even own a pair of slippers.
Most households do not have any shoes for guests. I only know some old castles with parquet floor where visitors have to wear some shoes provided by the owners of the castle. When your shoes are not too dirty, it usually is okay to keep wearing them and when they are dirty or when you wear shoes that might damage the floor (like some high heels), you just take them off and walk around with socks. I would not want to wear shoes that many other visitors also have worn before. None of my friends and relatives have shoes for guests. I just have seen this on a few ocasions on TV and there the host usually had very cheap slippers so that they could offer new ones to every visitor.

Sweatpants:
I never did that and I do not know anybody who did that, but of course I only have sufficient knowledge about a few people who are really close to me. As a teen, I was quite spontaneous so that I never knew for sure that I would not meet anybody anymore for the rest of the day. I can imagine that the CAS teen wears sweatpants after school and that he also would not mind if his friends would see him dressed that way.
It might not be something for your teen, but if you also have some old-fashioned older people in your neighborhood: In the past, people only used to take a bath on Saturday afternoons and just washed themselves at the sink on the remaining days. After taking the bath, these people frequently already put on their PJs. Poor or parsimonious people even re-used the water for the whole family. At first, the children were bathed, then the mother was allowed to take a bath and the father usually was the last one. After taking a bath, the whole family had dinner and afterwards watched a family show on TV together. This was not really common anymore around 2000-2005, but I assume that a few people still did it this way.
Inventor
Original Poster
#103 Old 1st Aug 2021 at 10:30 AM
Wow thank you again for your detailed feedback!

I was thinking to recreate Windenburg as Downtown so that I can move the Regan Capp household there. Since I imagine that Titania works as a DJ in downtown, she's more likely to meet up with Kent over there.

Capp mansion
Good idea about the orangery! In that case, I can consider placing a greenhouse roof on top of it to make it functional. I assume that one of the deceased family members (Contessa or the parents of Juliette, Hermia, Tybalt) had Nature as OTH.

Since I've understood that prestigious private schools are not really a thing in Germany, what could be plausible reasons why Consort would send his grandkids to a Gymnasium in a town further away (let's say the school near the Downtown hood)? Is it solely to let them avoid getting in touch with the Montys during schooltime, or because he has good upper-class connections with the school staff over there?

Monty ranch
When I was trying to look at floorplans of villa rusticae in Germany, I couldn't see clearly whether or not they have indoor hallways beside the open atrium.

Would Antonio also stay living in Veronaville?

Hood planning/architecture
Does this map generator create somewhat realistic layouts for German villages? http://fantasycities.watabou.ru/
If one of the household Sims is a plant farmer (but no livestock), would they live in a regular house since the arable land is usually not attached to their lot, or would their lot contain agricultural facilities, like a barn?

Sports club
With laziness, I meant low Active points indeed. But good idea that the lazy-but-sports-interested-Sims would just have drinks with their football-playing friends. However, how likely would shy-yet-active Sims with high interest in Sports join a football/soccer club? The only non-team sports that TS2 offers which increase enthusiasm in Sports, are boxing and log rolling (swimming increases Fitness enthusiasm instead).

Fashion
Do you know websites or magazine archives where I can look for impressions of 00s everyday wear, especially for late-twenty-somethings/thirty-somethings and middle-aged persons? I still have old Dutch magazines at home for teen girl fashion inspiration, but not so much for adult wear and teen boys. But if you know where one can find Bravo archives from the 00s, that would also be great!
In the meantime, I'm browsing for ancient CC in T$R

The clothing shop tips you gave me are useful if I get to building a Downtown!

In my next post, I will post my WIP pics of Capps & Summerdream mansions
Inventor
Original Poster
#104 Old 4th Aug 2021 at 10:06 AM
Here are the WIP build pics

Capp mansion


Summerdreams mansion
Lab Assistant
#105 Old 8th Aug 2021 at 3:59 PM
Capp/Summerdream:
So you plan Titania and Kent to have an affair?
I do not think that Kent is the one who decides where this Capp household lives. The Capps are a matriarchal family so that Regan should be the one who makes decisions. In addition to that, Kent is predestined for the science career and has a good relationship to Bianca Monty. I do not think that his family is too happy with his decisions. Apart from the matriarchal aspect of the family, however, in my opinion there is no reason for him to continue living with Regan and her husband. Therefore, I usually let him move out as soon as he finds a job in the science carrer and makes sufficient money.

Capp mansion:
I would try to hide the greenhouse roof because at the time when people built orangeries, they used other roofs.

School:
I am sorry, but I cannot think of a plausible reason why Consort would do this. There are special Gymnasien with music and/or arts as main subjects, but the Capps are all about business. As far as I know, there are no Gymnasien that have business as main subject, just Fachoberschulen and Consort definitely does not want his grandchildren to graduate school with "just" Fachabitur because that way they would have limited options for studying. I know some people who changed schools because they wanted to have certain subjects as Leistungskurs during their last two years of Gymnasium and their school did not offer these subjects as Leistungskurs. This either can happen volutarily after finishing 11th grade or unvoluntarily if a pupil has to repeat 13th grade (because the pupils of a grade have some influence on which Leistungskurse are offered by a school so that different grades can have different Leistungskurse). I also know a person who went to school in another town, but this person attended evening school because they were no longer allowed to attend Gymnasium after already repeating two years. If someone lives close to the boarder to another state, this also might be a reason, especially if the school system in the neighboring state has a lower level of difficulty. But this would not be an acceptable reason for Consort either.
Each school has a school district and pupils who live in that district are supposed to attend the local school. Schools from other districts or even other states are allowed to reject pupils and many schools do reject such pupils.
Regarding influence on the school: I am not sure whether Consort really would have too many connections with any teachers from that school (maybe not even with the director). I think that Consort is very traditional and in the past there was a distinction between Besitzbürgertum and Bildungsbürgertum (roughly translated: bourgeoisie of property and bourgeoisie of intellectuals). Therefore, I think that Consort rather would try to become part of the school board and maybe his company would sponsor a few school events (sponsorships are tax-detuctable, it would improve the reputation and they might attract good students for a Duales Studium after graduating from school - a combination of studying and already working at a company) - but usually, you become part of the school board of your school district and sponsoring also would make more sense close to their home because people there know the company owned by the Capp family while in a town/city further away fewer people would know the company and the company would just be one of many in the region.
I do not think that avoiding the Montys is a sufficient reason either. I am quite sure that the Monty teens spend the breaks with their friends from Realschule and it would make no sense to send just three of the Capp grandchildren to another school while Goneril's children attend the schools closest to Veronaville. I could imagine that Consort would somehow influence the school (by sponsoring and being part of the school board) that his grandchildren assume important roles at school (like pupils' representative - although that person is elected by the other pupils). These additional tasks could keep them busy during some of the breaks and they could learn some skills that could help them for their future careers.

Monty ranch:
I did not find any appropriate floor plans, but I do not think that anybody in Germany would consider building a house where you really have to go outside if you want to go from one room to another. If you want the house to be seasons-proof, but still want to keep the atrium as the only equivalent to a hallway, you could have invisible floor tiles above the atrium so that the game considers it as indoors.

Antonio:
I think that Antonio lives in Veronaville. If I remember correctly, you plan to have the family restaurant in Veronaville. Therefore, Antonio would have a short travel to work. And as a widower with two young children, he definitely would want to live close to his parents so that they can take care of the children sometimes. As they recently lost their mother, I assume that the family does not want them to stay at home alone while their father is working, running errands, etc. And if you consider one ingame day one real life year, Antonio could start dating again before his children age to teenagers and I do not think that he wants his children to know something about this until he is sure that his new relationship is really serious.

Hood planning:
The road layout of the generated maps looks realistic and naturally grown. In the village center, along the main street and - depending on the size of the village - maybe a few more streets, you could build houses as densely as on the generated maps. In the outskirts of the villages, lots can be a bit further apart from each other (like on the generated maps without town wall). Not every village has a river, but as Veronaville has one, that aspect is not a problem. Villages usually do not have town walls and hardly any other defence. A village might have a fortified house (Festes Haus) as one of the administrative buildings or a fortified church (Wehrkirche) with a wall around the church and maybe the graveyard. The number of houses is too high for a village. Villages do not have marketplaces so that squares should not be too big. Farms outside of the village are less common than in the generated maps and if there are any, they are rather new. Most villages also are less round than the towns and villages in the generated map. I think that this is due to the fact that the generator mostly generates towns with town walls and generated villages frequently have a similar layout. In reality, the less inhabitants a village has, the less round its shape usually is. A settlement usually was started by building houses along an existing road. Some villages still just consist of one road today. When a new street was needed, it usually was built close to/in parallel to the main street so that many villages have an elongated shape.
The generated maps do not differentiate between residential buildings and subsidiary buildings. Thus, especially for lots with older houses, you have to ensure that there also are some subsidiary buildings. Not all of the subsidiary buildings are next to a street which is an aspect that is missing in the map generator.

Farmer:
There definitely would be some subsidiary buildings on the lot where the farmer can store tools, machines etc. I am not sure whether a barn is needed because one of the most important features of a barn is the hayloft and hay is mainly used for farm animals. Of course, it is also possible to sell the hay, but growing fruit or vegetables should definitely be more profitable.
However, Sims 2 only has harvestables that you also could grow in a garden so that horticulture might be the more fitting term. Typical plants for fields would be different sorts of grain which should be difficult to implement ingame. For horticulture, a garden on the residential lot is not sufficient to produce sufficient income in real life, but in the Sims 2, it should be sufficient. Thus, for convenience, you might have the farmer work on their residential lot as long as said lot is not in a too central location within the village.

Sports club:
As mentioned in my previous posting, children usually are signed up by their parents at preschool age. Many of the other team members are children that the shy child already knows from daycare so that there are many known faces. Thus, it is realistic that a shy sim also continues to play soccer as a teenager and adult.

Fashion:
I do not know any fashion magazines that were popular for young and middle-aged adults at that time.
Here is a link to a mail-order catalogue from 2000: https://archive.org/details/ottofruehjahrsommer2000
I hope that the catalogue contains sufficient inspiration for you.

Capp mansion - most recent posting:
I would enlarge the room on the upper right by shortening the hallway. It makes no sense to have a dead end in the hallway.
What type of heating does the Capp family have? If they have a central heating that requires oil or gas, there would be one room for the heating system. And for oil, there would be a room with tanks in which the oil is stored. This room usually is a bit protected, e.g. with a heavy metal door and a half-wall directly behind the door. The room with tanks usually is also only connected to the room with the heating system, but not to the hallway. The room with tanks should have an outer wall that can be reached without too many problems from the street so that a tank truck can fill up the tanks with a hose.
I could imagine that Consort has a wine cellar and maybe a room with a humidor where he stores cigars. There also should be a laundry room with washing machine and dryer. Maybe you also could have an ironing room next to the laundry room. The Capp's definitely would have some house staff who would do that work and I do not think that the Capp family wants to watch the staff doing the work. Somewhere there also could be a cleaning cupboard. For the pantry room: It is common to have a freezer in the cellar. If there are any rooms for which you do not have a purpose, you always can turn them into a storage by placing different cabinets and boxes. Maybe some of Contessa, Cordelia and Caliban's stuff is also stored in the cellar if the family does not want to throw it away, but considers it too painful to keep the stuff upstairs where they would see it more often.

Cellar:
The Fachwerkhäuser that I know either have a smaller vaulted cellar or no cellar at all. However, as your version of the Capp mansion does not have Fachwerk on the ground floor, it might be more common to have a normal cellar.

Second floor:
I do not think that the hallway would have a dormer. In real life, the hallway would have some daylight from the floor beneath and maybe also from the floor above. You also could make the hallway a bit longer on one side so that the hallway has one of the regular windows.

Front view:
I would place the columns beneath the balcony closer to the stairs so that the columns really support the column. Right now, the columns are very close to supporting walls of the building so that there is no real need for the columns in their current location.
Shed roofs on the dormers are common, although I cannot think of a house that has both shed roofs and gabled roofs (from the floor beneath) next to each other.
I think that stairs and walls look sufficiently similar. It does not have to be the same stone anyway. In my home region, there are some old houses with walls of sandstone, but floors and stairs from sandstone were too worn-out and had been replaced decades ago.

Front yard:
I think that the graves are the biggest problem. It is not allowed to bury somebody on a private lot in a built-up area. Therefore, all the graves should be moved to a graveyard lot. Mausoleums also are not that common in Germany, but if you want the graves to stick out, you maybe can build a chapel on the graveyard that was founded by the Capp family and that therefore has a small area with the graves of the Capp family.
For a garage, I would suggest the same as for the Monty ranch: Build a subsidiary building in the same style as the main building with round gates instead of a garage door. If you can find an alternative to stairs for the way leading to the house, you could place the garage where the graves are right now so that it faces towards the way.

Back view:
I do not think that the EA greenhouse roof would be fitting for this. Most historic orangeries have regular roofs and if the roof is (partially) from glass, it frequently is an architectonical highlight with a dome or another special design.

Summerdream mansion - cellar:
I honestly do not imagine them having lots of parties in their cellar. Their garden is suited perfectly for parties with the whirlpool, bar, stereo etc. I also assume that they can do sufficient magic that it is not raining when they want to have a party. If you want to be able to have parties in the cellar nevertheless, maybe have a big room in the middle for this without a hallway. You can have two small rooms on each the left and the right side of the building: a room for the heating system (if they have a central heating), a laundry room on one side, a kitchen so that they can serve food and cold drinks without having to go upstairs all the time and one or two half-baths so that the guests can use the toilet without having to go upstairs.

Summerdream mansion - ground floor:
If your Summerdream family likes to party a lot, I think they would like an open layout for the ground floor. That way, kitchen, dining room and living room would be one big party area.

Summerdream mansion - first floor:
The room on the upper right has no access to the hallway so far.
I like the sizes of the two rooms on the right side better than the sizes of the two rooms on the left side. For a bathroom, 3x4 should be sufficient as size. Thus, you could make two of the smaller rooms a bit smaller than they are right now and you could enlarge the other two small rooms so that they are 5x4.

Summerdream mansion - second floor:
No suggestions at this point. I think you should fill the space on ground floor and first floor first to see what kind of rooms you still need - if you need any additional rooms at all.

Summerdream mansion - front view and back view:
I think that you use too many different window types and that the first floor has too many windows compared with the ground floor.

Summerdream mansion - garden:
If you think that the DJ set in the Gartenhaus could be a problem, it most likely will also be a problem in the cellar. I know several people who already get annoyed when neighbors talk in the garden at night even without music.
I do not think that it is realistic to have columns and fence as separate items. Most Gartenhäuser just have columns without a fence, but the few that have both, have the columns integrated into the fence.
You could have a look at Michelle's recolors of the Vector Column Fence:
https://modthesims.info/d/500513/st...od-colours.html
https://modthesims.info/d/585037/lo...in-al-wood.html
(There might be more sets with additional recolors.)
With that fence, you could have just one column in each of the corners. It makes no sense to have a third and forth column directly next to the wall of the Gartenhaus.
Even in a village not every house has a garage. For newly built houses, it is obligatory in many towns and cities that you have to have at least one parking on the lot, but this was only introduced a few decades ago. Thus, there still are many houses without garage, parking or the like on the lot and the inhabitants of the house simply park their car(s) on the street.
If Puck really is a grease monkey, however, it might be good to build a garage or workshop somewhere on the lot so that he has a place for his hobby. Otherwise, it might be very uncomfortable during winter and when there is rain, wind etc. and if he also will do illegal stuff, it might be better if the neighbors cannot watch him directly.
Inventor
Original Poster
#106 Old 8th Aug 2021 at 9:57 PM
Thank you again for the detailed feedback! I hope you're doing okay.

Capp & Summerdream
I haven't decided yet whether or not I want to let Kent and Titania get into an affair -- I only saw that they have a mutual crush on each other. But I have to check in the game how their chemistry is like.

School
In this case, I consider adjusting the school types to public school for the Capps. Too bad there's no school mod that introduces school tiers, but I guess that separate secondary school tiers are most likely only a thing in Benelux and the German-speaking countries.

Farmer life
I have a career mod for agriculture, so I can let the Sim go to work with a tractor CC and pretend his land is somewhere further in the village. In this case, would it still make sense to have a horticulture area in their residential lot as well? Does a farmer's family usually live in an old house, or is a post-war house also plausible?

Capp mansion
What heating would be the most plausible for a mansion, you think? I have no clue about usual types of heatings in old houses and mansions. Is the subsidiary building with a garage usually detached or attached to the main old house, or is it highly variable?
Regarding gravestones, I have to look up myself how to move graveyards to a community lot without hood corruption, like putting them into a Sim's inventory.

Summerdream
Ha, I can imagine that they own a Weather Machine, or I can turn them into Good Witches
The windows are heavily inspired by Herrenhaus Aue, but maybe that mansion is another exception regarding window arrangement.
During cold weather, I imagine they would use the cellar or the Gartenhaus for indoor parties. Thanks for the room layout tips!
I'm surprised how strict Germans can be regarding noise annoyance :O. That is something hard to imagine amongst Dutch people.

Household thingies
How common is it for a rural household to own a pet? Do they usually own dogs or cats, and how many? How strict are landlords with pet ownership regarding non-apartment rental homes? For the Sims, I usually check whether or not they roll wants to get a pet, but for some families, I've created a dog or cat as well.

If a teen has a large bedroom (like my CAS teen), how likely would they own a double-person bed?

Back then, did the mother usually get a job again once all her kids attend secondary school?

Hood infrastructure
I've been trying out the HoodPlanner software, so soon I want to share a draft layout for Windenburg and want to create a layout for a "Nachbardorf" OFB subhood with the help of that medieval village tool. I also want to figure out how to adjust the road layout of an existing hood.
Inventor
Original Poster
#107 Old 10th Aug 2021 at 10:54 AM
Update: some WIP pics again

Capp
I have to look up ideas for old-fashioned interior. Hence I haven't started yet with adjusting walls, floors and furniture. I suspect that dark wood is more suited for old-fashioned furniture.


Summerdream
Lab Assistant
#108 Old 17th Aug 2021 at 9:25 PM
School:
I really think that this is the most realistic option. In my grade at school, there were children of longterm unemployed parents as well as children of company owners and even one child of nobles.
As attending the private school ingame does not cost any fee, maybe you can use that as equivalent for Gymnasium and public school as equivalent for all the other school tiers. There are mods that change how pupils can get into private school so that you can avoid having the director scenario so often.

Farming:
In the past, pretty much everybody had a garden behind the house - if the lot was big enough. Therefore, there still are many families who still grow lots of fruits and vegetables themselves - regardless of whether they are farmers or have other jobs. However, the fruits and vegetables from your residential lot usually are just food for the farmer and their family and not a source of income.
There are many newer farm houses. As long as the family can afford building a new house and as long as the old house is not protected by monument protection, people can demolish their houses and build new houses whenever they like (in accordance with the respective approval procedure). I even know a few cases when farmers built a new house although the old house was protected - they were not allowed to demolish the old house, but they bought or already owned another lot in the same village and built the new house on another lot. Most of the newer farm houses that I know were built somewhen in the 60ies and 70ies. There was no need to build a new house directly after the war because villages were less destroyed than the cities, but some years later, many people had some saved money due to the economic recovery and people could avoid spending money on modernizing electricity, heating and plumbings in their old houses.
As mentioned in one of my previous postings, there also was something called "Flurbereinigung" when fields and meadows were reorganized so that farmers have fewer but bigger parcels of land - big enough to use machines. In some villages, as a consequence of this Flurbereinigung, a few isolated farms were founded outside of the village with lots of parcels directly around the farm. As the Flurbereinigung took place in the 70ies, many of the isolated farms were build around the same time.

Capp mansion - heating:
At the time when the house was built, it most likely was heated with tiled stoves. In manor houses, the tiled stoves usually were build that way that the biggest part of the tiled stove with its decorative facade was in the room that was supposed to be heated by it. The back of the tiled stove faced a hallway just for the house personnel so that they could add more firewood without disturbing the inhabitants and their guests. In more simple houses, there were no extra hallways and the tiled stoves could be accessed from the front to add more firewood.
The easiest option to replace the tiled stoves are night-storage heaters because you just need a bit of space for them (they are the more bulky heaters) and a socket outlet. At the time when these heaters were most popular, people had to change the settings for each room individually and also use separate water boilers for each bathroom and for many years, asbestos was used to build the night-storage heaters. Nowadays, these kind of heaters have a rather bad reputation because there still are a few in use that contain asbestos and heating with electricity usually is more expensive than the common alternatives.
Oil and gas are the most common alternatives to night-storage heaters. When you use oil or gas for heating, you usually have a room (usually in the cellar) with the central heating unit that heats water and the water then is transported to all rooms through tubes and within the rooms you have heaters (the smaller ones) or floor heating. In most houses, these tubes are hidden within the walls because the walls are wider than the ingame walls. Installing such a heating system is a lot more work than just placing some night-storage heaters, but the result is much more convenient because the central heating system also has some controls that affect the heating in every room and you also do not have to worry about turning on and off water boilers in bathrooms. For an oil heating, you would need an additional room with some tanks to store it. People usually order new oil once every one or two years and it then is delivered by a truck. For a gas heating, you will only need a gas connection somewhere in the room with the central heating unit.
There also are heating systems that only cover one floor, but these heating systems frequently are used for houses with several apartments so that I do not think that the Capp family would have chosen this option.
Usually, for old houses, my suggestion would be night-storage heaters, but for the Capp family, I can imagine that they spent a lot of money on renovating and modernizing the house. Therefore, both night-storage heaters and central heating sounds plausible to me.

Capp mansion - garage:
For an old mansion with rich inhabitants, I assume that detached is more realistic. The mansion and subsidiary building were built at a time when horses and carriages were the usual means of transport and the inhabitants had personnel to take care of the horses and a coachman to drive the carriage. Thus, it was better for them if the subsidiary buildings were not attached to the mansion so that noise and bad smells were further away from them.
For smaller houses with poorer inhabitants, attached subsidiary buildings should be more common because the inhabitants had to do the work themselves and preferred shorter ways. In certain German regions, it even was common that farm houses combined a residential area and the stable in the very same building (Wohnstallhaus, sometimes even with included barn - Pfarrer-Mayer-Haus and Ernhaus should be the most interesting types for you region-wise). The animals helped to keep the building warm (with the downside of having the smell in the residential area) which reduced the costs for heating.

Capp mansion - gravestones:
When you send the gravestones to a community lot, the type of death might be lost. There is a mod that prevents this. Apart from that, I always create a backup before moving graves and I use the No unlink on delete mod.

Summerdream:
Herrenhaus Aue has an article on German Wikipedia that lists several modifications and extensions - including the change of the window arrangement on the upper floors at some point. The building mixes architectural elements from more than 200 years. It is quite common that old buildings were modified after a while to suit the needs of the then inhabitants although it is rather uncommon to exclude the ground floor from the modifications (probably because the combination of brick-built ground floor and Fachwerk upper floors is not that common for mansions).

Noise annoyance:
It depends on the circumstances. The police and regulatory authorities do no just walk around trying to find people who are too loud. They only will come when one of your neighbors complains. If you have a bad relationship with your neighbors or if you do not know each other, they might be more likely to complain. And if you make noise too often, they also might be more likely to complain. In some places where it is loud very often, people might be annoyed very easily. If the police or regulatory authority is called, they will first check whether there really is too much noise (in general more than 40 db during daytime or more than 30 db during nighttime, i.e. 22:00-6:00, in the house/apartment of the complaining person - even regular road traffic usually is louder than this). If you are too loud, the police will ask you politely to be less loud, but they will not end a party or fine you. Depending on their patience, you even will get a second or third warning for free. If you still are loud after the last warning, they may end the party and fine you. If you have a longer history of noise annoyance, they might even temporarily confiscate the stereo to avoid additional disturbances.
I got the impression that there is more noise in cities and that for that reason people complain more often. If you occasionally have a party in a rural area, usually nobody will complain - especially when the hosts of the party inform the neighbors beforehand. However, if the parties take place very regularly, you might get into trouble.
As your Summerdream family seems to party a lot, it will depend on the relationships with their neighbors. If they attend all the parties, there will be no problem at all. If they have a grouchy neighbor who is not invited to the parties or neighbors with babies or toddlers who cannot sleep because of the noise, trouble is more or less guaranteed. However, most likely you do not have such an easy black and white situation ingame, but lots of grey. The friends might have to stand up early on the next day because of work, new babies are born, toddlers age up etc. A party in the house only will affect the closest neighbors while a party in the garden could also affect neighbors two or three houses away. If a friend is annoyed by the noise, they might call you and ask you to be a bit quieter instead of calling the police while a grouchy unfriendly neighbor would prefer calling the police. There are lots of possibilities for drama or peaceful coexistence - depending on your preferences.

Pets:
There are roughly 80 million people in Germany living in roughly 40 million households and with about 16 million cats and 15 million dogs. I got the impression that cats and dogs are more common in rural areas than in urban areas because in rural areas more people have sufficient space for a pet. Most people that I know only have one dog. It is difficult to say how many cats people usually have because in rural areas most cats are allowed to leave the house and lot and when you see a cat, you cannot really tell to whom they belong. The only exceptions that I know are some farmers who have two or three dogs and/or several cats - but not every farmer owns dogs at all. However, these cats and dogs usually are not kept in the house. Dogs are more like watch dogs and cats are supposed to hunt vermin like mice and rats in subsidiary buildings.
For rental houses and apartments, I do not think that it is such a big problem. There should be sufficient landlords who do not mind if their tenants own a pet. Until 2013, landlords were allowed to add a paragraph to the contract so that tenants immediately knew whether they would be allowed to have animals - and animal owners could look for another apartment/house, if animals were banned. Since 2013, general bans are not allowed anymore. General permissions still are allowed (I have one in my contract as well). If nothing is stated in the contract, tenants have to ask the landlord for permission before buying a pet. If the landlord says no, they have to give a reason for this and they also have to take into consideration whether they gave other tenants the permission.
Small pets (like wormrats, fish and small birds) always are allowed and tenants do not have to ask for permission. Other pets like dogs, cats, bigger birds require the landlord's permission (either in the contract or by asking them). Potentially dangerous animals like snakes or spiders always require the landlord's explicit permission even if the contract contains a general permit for having animals.
The landlord make revoke the permission if the pets are dangerous to other people (e.g. aggressive dog), annoying to other people (e.g. noise or smell) or if the number of animals is too big for the rented space.

Bed for teens:
That depends on the parents, I guess. 1 m wide beds should be the most common version and usually are supposed to be for one person (although it is possible to share it). A few very strict parents might even buy 80 cm or 90 cm wide beds to dicourage that someone else sleeps there even for a single night. More relaxed parents might buy a 1,2 m or 1,4 m wide bed in which two people can sleep with sufficient comfort. 1,6 m, 1,8 m and 2 m should be quite uncommon because for these sizes, you usually have two mattresses instead of a single big mattress which would be rather uncomfortable for sleeping alone most of the time.

Parental leave/return to working life:
There is no fixed point in time when mothers return to work after having a child. The mother of a child has to stay at home from work (paid time off) at least for six weeks before and eight weeks after the due date. If the child is disabled or if she has multiples, she has to stay at home for at least twelve weeks after the birth. After the birth, the mother has a special protection from being fired for three years and she also may stay at home for up to three years without losing her job (the company is obliged to give her a job equivalent to her previous job upon her return). There also are several laws that help mothers to reduce their working hours from fulltime to parttime, if they want to. Some of these laws still apply when the child is older than three years. In 2007, a parental allowance was introduced. One parent can get the parental allowance for up to twelve month if they stay at home and up to two additional months are possible of the second parent also stays at home for at least two months. If the parents work parttime and do not exceed a certain amount of working hours, they also can get half of the monthly allowance for the double number of months. In 2013, a law was passed that all parents are entitled to a place in childcare for their children as soon as the child turns one year. They still cannot guarantee that every child is offered a childcare place until that age, but the number of childcare places has increased significantly since then.

Childcare for children younger than one year is extremely difficult to find. For children younger than three years, it was rather difficult, but not impossible around 2000-2005 (today much better), but the prices are rather high. Therefore, for some families it might be the cheaper option if one parent looks after the children instead of having a job. Kindergarten (3-6 years) has affordable prices and is widely available. Thus, there are no financial reasons to care for the child at home anymore. The last year of Kindergarten is for free in many communities because it is supposed to prepare children for school.

The three years protection from being fired and guarantee to return to your old job apply per child btw. Thus, if a women gives birth to several children within a couple of years, she will be protected until the youngest child turns three. The job guarantee also applies until that point. If the mother did not take off the full three years per child (because the children were born with less than three years apart), it is possible to take off the unused time (or parts of it) until the 8th birthday of the respective child.

I assume that only workaholics would return to work after eight or twelve weeks. Many women (especially the ones with good job qualifications) got back into worklife around the time when the child turned three (today the most common age it is between 1 and 3 due to the better availability of childcare) because at that age it is relatively easy to get a childcare place and to resume work at your previous company instead of having to look for a new job. The majority of these women worked parttime after having children although they had fulltime jobs before. Most women that I know who did not resume work within three years had serious problems finding a job similar to their old one and either did not start working again at all or started working in other careers in jobs that require low or no qualifications at all (assisting in caring for elders, assembly-line work, being cashiers in supermarkets etc).

If you are referring to the CAS mother: She gave birth to her first child probably somewhen around 1985-1990. I am not sure when exactly the three years job guarantee was introduced, but I think it was at a later point. If it was not yet introduced at that time, she would have had to resume working three months after the birth or quit the job. As you mentioned that she will be in the culinary career. That is a career in which it is relatively easy to find a job again. Although there is no real need to wait until the youngest child starts secondary school. The mother could work parttime in a restaurant because her husband would be at home during her working hours to watch the child. Alternatively, she also could work in the cafeteria of a school or company. There it should be possible to get a parttime job with working hours from 8 or 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. so that she could be at home at the time when the child returns from school.
If you want the mother to resume working about the time when the child starts secondary school, nevertheless, then it might be better to wait half a "year" longer so that she can help the child with homework and make sure that the child has a good start at the new school.

If your question was more general, there is another group that I would like to mention: Women with office jobs. I do not know exactly when computers were introduced in everyday office work in Germany, but I know that even in the 80ies many office workers still used type writers. Thus, a woman that had a child somewhen during the 80ies or 90ies and stayed at home for several years, missed the point when computers became common in all offices. Their job had changed so much during their time off that they needed extensive training before being able to apply. The job center might have helped some of them, but many had to change the career or were so discouraged that they never started working again.

Pictures from the last posting:
Piano: There are recolors for the piano available as download.
Urns/graves:It does not matter whether you place the graves/urns inside or outside. Neither option is legal in Germany.
First floor: For bedrooms, an open look is not the priority. As long as they are big enough, a big family like the Capp family would prefer having separate rooms (maybe adding a door somewhere to use one of the rooms as walk-in-closet). At some point, Consort and Contessa lived there with their four children and Caliban and the first grandchildren and they needed many bedrooms at that time. For bathrooms, you could make room 5 a bit smaller (e.g. 3x3 or 3x4). If you want a second bathroom, you could split up room 8.
Summerdream house: The many different floor designs are a bit of a strain for my eyes, but as the Summerdream family is everything but normal, I guess it will suit them.
Summerdream kitchen: Germans like to have all the kitchen appliances (including stove and fridge) integrated into the kitchen counters and cabinets. Therefore, you might need counters for the "outside curve". There is CC here on MTS that has this option for the EA kitchens.
Summerdream TV: I think the current placement is okay. I would use a cheat to center the sofa.
Summerdeam first floor: I somehow like the floors. Most of them have similar colors so that they do not look restless (although the sims will never have the same view on all rooms of a floor at once that we have).
Winding stairs: The hallway/staircase looks very unusual to me, but I guess in the Sims we have limited options for stairs.
Summer dream second floor: If you want to change the room layout anyway, you maybe could add a gap between rooms 3 and 4 ad replace the winding stairs with regular or modular stairs. Regarding rooms 2 and 6: I think it would be good to decide what you want to do with these rooms before deciding how the layout should look like. The vast majority of houses in Germany has much fewer rooms than your mansions so that it is difficult to come up with ideas for the room use.
Inventor
Original Poster
#109 Old 18th Aug 2021 at 5:37 PM
Currently I'm decorating the mansions, but I wonder, what would be a plausible maximum tile size range for bedrooms in old houses? 20 to 25 tiles? I feel that 15 tiles would be too small for upper (middle) class Teen Sims' bedroom.

New families

At some point, I want to recreate the premade families from Windenburg, of which a few Sims are from Italian descent. How likely would other Italian families (not related to Monty) live in the subhood village, or would they rather live in a Downtown hood due to more proximity to e.g. industrial sites?

Storytelling questions
Is it common that two villages share a football club, especially if one of the village is really small?
If someone in a friend group is the only one with a motor vehicle, who would they most likely give a ride while the remaining friends have to travel the long way by bus?
What could be some plausible reasons from Romeo's POV why he and Juliette aren't going steady with each other, while they already kissed like months ago and mutually like each other? I understood that kissing someone usually means going exclusive with each other and that having "the talk" isn't always needed. However, I don't know to what extent also applied to younger European teens (can't speak of experience as I haven't dated yet during 8th/9th grade lol).
Do you have any (slightly) off-game story ideas how my outgoing CAS Teen would become friends with a shy, science-geeky girl from 8th grade Gym he vaguely knows from their football club? (I pretend they are in the same age class teams) I was thinking that they could get to know each other in the Secret Hobby Lot.
Lab Assistant
#110 Old 22nd Aug 2021 at 10:04 PM
Bedroom size:
I had a look at some layouts of Herrenhäuser and except for one or two master bedrooms, the other rooms usually had 12-20 m². Other old houses have smaller rooms as they have less living space in total. (Although back at the time when such houses were built, nobody cared about the needs of a teenager. Adults, teenagers and children slept in the same type of bedrooms with the only exception that married couples had double beds while everybody else had a single beds. Even in upper class families it was common that two or more children shared a room while in poorer families sometimes all children shared one room. If the family was rich enough to afford desks for their children, they were placed in a study and not in the bedroom. Playing also took place in other parts of the house or outside.)
Todays average size for bedrooms for children and teenagers is about 12 m². Therefore, I would have a maximum size of 16 m² unless the family is really rich and has a very big house (or had to rededicate a room because they had more children than planned).

Windenburg families:
People in Germany are free to live wherever they want to live (if they can afford it, of course). Therefore, I would look at each family, their biographies, characters etc. to decide where to place them.
Industrial parks usually are in the outskirts of a town, while the downtown most likely would be located in the town center. Moreover, unqualified jobs in industry and agriculture were common for Italians at the time when Germany tried to attract many immigrant workers (1955-1974), but due to the industrialization many of these jobs got lost and therefore also the incentive to live close to factories. The children and grandchildren of these families usually are well integraded with all kinds of professional qualifications and jobs. Of course, running an Italian restaurant or ice café is overproportionally common (because we like Italian food and frequently eat at such places), but I know many Italians with university degres and corresponding jobs as well.

Soccer club:
In such a situation, each village would have its own soccer club, but two villages and clubs may form a Spielvereinigung so that they can have one team consisting of players from both clubs. For children's teams and youth teams, this happens quite frequently because there all children born within two years form one age group and have their own leagues and many villages do not have enough children in each age group. Nevertheless, each club still would have an adult team of their own. In lower leagues, it can happen that senior players have to help out or sometimes teams play with less than 11 players, but if a club does not have enough players for an adult team, they should quit playing in a league.

Motor vehicle:
If the person with the motor vehicle really is friends with the others, they would also go by bus instead of driving themselves. Otherwise, the whole group has to spend time on meeting again at their destination because bus stops rarely are located close to parking lots.

Romeo and Juliette:
Kissing each other does not necessarily mean being exclusive. If the kiss takes place e.g. at a party, at a bar, under the influence of alcohol I would not assume that there are any promises/obligations linked to it. And I am sure a romance sim could find justifications for pretty much any other ocasion as well. Thus, there could be a situation where Juliette assumes that they are exclusive while Romeo on purpose avoids talking about that topic and making any promises. I am sure that he does not mind that Juliette is faithful to him, he just does not want to have to be faithful to her.

Girl from soccer club:
In my opinion, it is not possible that they just know each other "vaguely". A soccer club in a small village usually does not attract players from other villages/towns which means that she also has to live in Veronaville. And if she lives there, this means that the attended Kindergarten, primary school and the first couple of years of secondary school together. I am not sure whether your CAS teen is 14 or 15 years old, but even if they are one year apart, you know each other in a small village because there are only 5-10 children per year.
Apart from that, a soccer club in a small village does not have a girls team. Girls who want to play soccer play in the boys team. As each age group in soccer consists of two years, your CAS teen and the girl most likely would be part of the same team so that closer contact would be completely logical.
Although I am not really sure whether a science-geeky girl really would play soccer ...
Inventor
Original Poster
#111 Old 22nd Aug 2021 at 10:52 PM
Football clubs & education between two villages
In that case, I understood it would makes more sense if the 14-15 year old Teens would be mixed-gender clubs in a Spielvereinigung of Veronaville and the "Nachbardorf". At the beginning of my plot, the CAS Teen is 14 years old (Leo) and the shy girl (I recreated Kendra McCarthy the Townie) is 14 (Virgo). She has Knowledge aspiration and has Science as OTH, but she is fairly active and has a high interest in Sports, hence I wanted to give her sporty traits/hobbys.
Would a small village like Veronaville have an own elementary school, or would the school building be located in the Nachbardorf?

Romeo's love life
He has a balanced and nice personality, but he hasn't got lightning bolts with other Teen Girls I've recreated so far, except one lightning bolt with the tomboy (Renee Andrews the newspaper delivery girl). So I don't have any shipping plans with him yet . When in Crush status, they are neutral Chemistry towards each other. However, Juliette has two lightning bolts for multiple boys, including that dudebro CAS Sim .

Building new houses
So I've been googling for a 3-bedroom Einfamilienhäuser/Bauernhof in RLP as example for building a house for the farmer's family (the parents + sibling of Renee Andrews), but this time I had a hard time finding one with a floorplan (otherwise the lack of windows on some walls confuses me when building rooms). It doesn't have to be Fachwerk because I want to fill in the hood with regular white stucco houses (can be either pre or post-war style). Can you help me out a bit with finding such an Einfamilienhaus with a floorplan included?
Lab Assistant
#112 Old 23rd Aug 2021 at 9:35 PM
Soccer:
Sports clubs usually are open to everybody regardless of gender. Soccer usually is just one of several disciplines for which the club offers training and competitions. However, it is not correct to call the soccer team mixed-gender because the team belongs to a league system that only allows male players from the age of 16 and older. Girls are tolerated until that age, but if they want to continue at an older age, they have to join a club that has a team with just female players that is part of a women's league. I do not remember how many girls tried soccer at pre-school or primary school age, but at the beginning of secondary school, only two girls of my grade were playing soccer (we were about 160 pupils at that time) and by the age of 14-15 only one girl still was playing. I also assume that any really talented or passionate female soccer player would already try to join a club with a women's team before the age of 16 although that usually means that the girl's parents have to spend a lot of time driving her to training sessions and matches further away.

School:
Primary schools usually are in a nearby town, not in a village. Primary schools are financed by the communities and the vast majority of communities has at least one small town and these towns usually also are located relatively centrally so that it rarely makes sense to have a primary school in a village and bring all the children there by bus. Currently, there are a bit more than 15 000 primary schools in Germany which equals one primary school per approx. 5400 inhabitants. You would need many small villages to reach that number.

Romeo:
Maybe he needs the massive attraction aspiration benefit? Or you could change his turn ons and offs or give him a love potion ocasionally.
But it is a nice variety that even a romance sim can have problems to find one or more significant others. I usually play megahoods and in such big hoods, there are three-bolters for pretty much every sim.

New houses:
If the houses also may be new ones, you can have a look at that website: https://www.musterhaus.net/grundris...haus-grundrisse
They collected floorplans from several companies that offer houses ready for occupancy. In the menu on the left, you can choose floorplans by house size or by room number (Please be aware that "room" includes everything except for kitchens, bathrooms and hallways. Three bedrooms plus living room means that you have to have a look at the houses with four or more rooms). If a house has more than one floor, there is a separate floor plan for each floor, but the pictures usually are next to each other so that it should not be too hard to find all pictures. The floorplans show you where the windows are located. Unfortunately, not all floorplans include helpful dimensions, but it should be relatively easy to calculate them yourself by comparing with the size of the beds (2x2 for double beds, 2x1 for single beds).
For older houses, I would suggest looking on websites that offer houses for sale/rent. https://www.immobilienscout24.de shows the word "Grundriss" beneath the picture of a house if a floorplan is available. That way you hopefully will not waste too much time finding relevant houses. By clicking on "Weitere Filter" next to the basic search options, you e.g. can search for a house from a certain period of time.
Inventor
Original Poster
#113 Old 24th Aug 2021 at 6:29 PM
Sports
I haven't expected that so few girls did football! What other sports were more popular amongst girls at your school?
The reason why I picked football for multiple female Sim characters was because of the limited amount of sports that increase the Sports enthusiasm, and I understood/assumed that a village as small as Veronaville or the Nachbardorf won't likely have a basketball club as well. Unless I pretend there's a log-rolling club as well, although I understood that sport is only a thing in the US. Swimming increases the Fitness enthusiasm instead. Unfortunately, I haven't found any functional gymnastics props. It must be noted that I haven't sent any of my Sims to the Secret Sports lot yet.

School locations, setting up a love story
In that case, would it be more sensible if the elementary schools are nearby the secondary schools in my story concepts? I recall you suggested that in an earlier reply.
In that case, then I think I will pretend that the CAS teen knows Kendra the Townie a bit from elementary school (she's a grade lower than him as her birthday is too late to be a Kannkind). I understood that the "Cool"-Guy-Falls-For-Shy-Girl is an overdone trope in YA novels, but I wonder how that would roll out in the German culture featuring Sims logic . My first thought would be that she is the one that gives Nachhilfe to him (I assume it's unusual/not allowed to get tutored by someone a grade lower + different school tier, but I want to design her as a very ambitious and smart student). Alternatively, they could get to know each other through a common friend, in the Secret Sports lot, or at a big party at the Summerdreams (even though she isn't a party girl).

House building
Thanks for the tip! This will be more helpful for me. Hopefully, I can find some nice oldish detached houses with floorplans that located in RLP (otherwise I can also look around at southern NRW areas).
Lab Assistant
#114 Old 24th Aug 2021 at 9:31 PM
Sports:
First of all: Most villages have one sports club that offers more than one type of sport. Thus, there is no need to have a separate soccer club and a separate basketball club and a separate club for whatever other sport you want to introduce. Sports clubs that are just specialized on soccer are something that you rather find in cities and towns and hardly in villages. Most village sports clubs have just one training session per week and team because they are not that competitive. Therefore, gym and pitches only are used for a few hours per week by all the soccer teams and available for other sports for the remaining time.
I think track and field and swimming were the most popular sports, but that took place in school voluntarily and in the afternoons. Many schools also offer some more exotic sports (like luging at my school although we had to drive several hours by car to the next bob/luge run), but often there are just a few training sessions and one or two competitions per year.
Horse riding also was popular and riding clubs frequently were in villages, not in towns because the land was cheaper there. However, I do not think that horse riding is the right sport for a nerdy girl and a riding club and a sports club are two different organizations so that the girl and the CAS teen would not have contact with each other.
Ballet was popular during pre-school and primary school age, but by the age of 14, the vast majority of girls had stopped doing the sport. And ballet does not take place in sports clubs; it usually takes place in a dancing club in a nearby town.
I looked up some sports clubs of villages close to where I grew up and the most popular sports in these clubs except for soccer are table tennis (mainly older men), handball (mainly younger men) and gymnastics (mainly older women). For sports like table tennis, some clubs offer extra training sessions for teenagers even if they do not have enough teens for a team. These teens at least can take part in individual championships. For handball, of course, you need a certain amount of players to form a team. As not every village has a handball team, teenagers interested in playing handball will join a club of a nearby village or town. Gymnastics in small village sports clubs is just for fun.
I think your best try is to look for some more exotic disciplines that are very popular in a certain region. There are some regions in Germany where e.g. fencing (both genders) or netball (mainly girls - could maybe work with the basketball basket ingame) is very popular so that in these regions even villages might have an own team while in other regions of Germany only bigger towns and cities have a team. If you want to check whether a certain sport is popular in a certain region, you can google "Hochburg" and the German word for the type of sport that you want to look up. Maybe you even can find a sport that has a nerdy image? However, I am not sure whether your CAS teen and the girl would have a lot of contact in the sports club. Training sessions usually take place one after the other and not in parallel.
As you mentioned before that you would like to have some carnival events close to the village, the girl also could be part of a Gardetanz group or Tanzmariechen. There are some groups from small towns or villages that are quite good. Once a group has a good reputation, girls and women from other villages and towns might like to join so that it does not matter that much whether the village is small. I think that this sport also could be suited for a nerdy girl. However, a Gardetanz group would be part of a local carnival club and not part of the sports club so that the girl and the CAS teen also would not meet by chance.
If you want to continue with the soccer idea, the girl does not necessarily have to play in a team. She also could already be a referee (the minimum age in most states is 12, in some states 14). Most likely, she would be responsible for matches of younger age groups, but she still could watch his matches and he could watch matches officiated by her.

Schools:
It would be a logical choice if all schools are relatively close to each other. In the mornings, there were separate buses for primary and secondary school pupils, but after school, there was just one bus for everybody. (The number of lessons per day can vary so that there were buses back home at five different times.)
I think that it is more likely that they already know each other from Kindergarten. There, different ages do not really matter - you simply play with whomever you like. But of course, they still had some contact during primary school, e.g. during breaks or when waiting at the bus stop.
It is not forbidden to give Nachhilfe to somebody a grade higher than you, but usually it simply will not work. The material that is taught usually is not the kind of information that you look up in your free time just for fun. Attending different school tiers, however, is quite common as long as the person who offers Nachhilfe attends a "higher" school tier than the person who receives Nachhilfe. The vast majority of pupils who offer Nachhilfe attend Gymnasium.
As Kendra McCarthy is not exactly a German name, she might be a native speaker of English. That way she could offer English Nachhilfe to him and the age gap/different school grades would not be a problem. I cannot imagine her, however, being able to provide Nachhilfe in all subjects.
Inventor
Original Poster
#115 Old 25th Aug 2021 at 10:36 AM
Ah I forgot that a sports club in a village has mixed sports! Does such a sport club also include a small swimming pool? I didn't know that refrees could already be that young!
Then for the exotic sports, I will pick log rolling because that's available in the game. I guess that sport might be more suitable for geeky yet active Sims. And I can let some sport-enthuastic girls play basketball.

Love story
Then I will keep "Kendra" her role as tutor because that makes to most sense to me to get them to know each other despite not being in the same school tier. She might help him with physics for sure, but also with some other subjects. What could be some sensible reasons why the teen boy's dad couldn't always help him with chemistry and biology homework? If I understood correctly, I can picture him as a teacher apprentice since it's his first year working as a teacher.

Names & family
In my game, I gave all the Sims except the Italians German names (even some of the Capps), but for the English-playing readers here, I refer to premades and certain Townies with their English names to minimize confusion.

I picture the Capps as a mixed UK-German family, of which Consort is of UK descent and Contessa is German. I haven't made up yet whether Caliban (father of Juliette, Hermia, Tybalt) would be from Germany or from UK. But I modified the names of the teens as well because my story isn't inspired by Shakespeare.

If a Sim from Veronaville has relatives (aunt/uncle/elder parents), would they most likely live in the same small village or would living in the Nachbardorf subhood also make sense, provided they have a job not too far away?
Lab Assistant
#116 Old 27th Aug 2021 at 12:35 PM
Sports:
No, swimming pools usually are operated by (public sector) companies and even many small towns have problems to operate pools in a profitable way.
I guess that twelve year old referees are an extreme exception, but there definitely are older teenagers who officiate games.

Love story:
Nachhilfe in physics will not work because of the different grades. The level of difficulty in Gymnasium is higher than in Realschule, but not that much higher that the Gymnasium pupils are one whole year ahead (so that Kendra would have the same level as the CAS teen) after 3-4 years of secondary school.
If you do not like English Nachhilfe, the most plausible alternatives would be French and Spanish as these are common as second foreign language and lessons for the second foreign language usually start in 7th grade. It is not necessary that her whole family is from another country. Maybe just the mother immigrated so that they all have a German-sounding family name.
Apart from languages, informatics (programming) was the only field where the nerds and geeks at my school really were ahead of the curriculum. However, back then only few schools offered informatics as subject at all and if they offered it, it usually was optional. Thus, if the CAS teen had problems with informatics, he simply could have chosen other subjects instead. At my school, informatics was not a subject itself. The grades were included in the math grades for those 1-2 years when we had informatics lessons. No one had serious problems with informatics and many used it to improve their maths grades a bit.

Names:
In the Sims Wiki, you can find the international versions of sim names for many of the premades at the bottom of each page. For the basegame hoods, the German names should be complete.
Regarding the German names: Did you have a look at some websites with charts for popular names in certain years or decades? Having just German and Italian names would be rather unusual. The websites could help you to know which international names were more popular at which times. Some names also are associated with certain prejudices. It is up to you whether you want to integrate such stuff into your game (it might be fitting for the Tussi's children e.g.) or whether you want to ignore it.

Family:
Both options make sense and a nearby town also would be possible. It is a combination of several factors: Can and do you want to live in the house of another relative and inherit/take over that house at some point? Are any suitable houses or empty lots available for sale for an acceptable price when you want to buy one? Where does the partner of a sim come from? From the same village (less likely) or from somewhere else (more likely)? Would the household like to have certain services or localities close to their home? Young adults might want to be close to some bars or clubs so that they do not have to drive car afterwards or parents with certain jobs or single parents might need a Kindergarten with longer opening hours etc. Even if the job is not too far away, the exact distance can make a difference because you can save a lot of money if you walk to work or go by bike. And not every adult has a car so that some also depend on public transport and therefore have to live somewhere where public transport is available. Some companies (especially in the town center) will not have parkings available for their employees so that commuting can be quite inconvenient. How well are the sims integrated into the village? Are they active members of some clubs there (more likely to stay) or is the family the only connection with the village while they have hobbies not related to the village and friends who live somewhere else (less likely to stay)? People with university degrees are more likely to take up a job further away because bigger companies usually pay significantly better (due to collective salary agreements) than smaller companies and bigger companies frequently also are located in cities/bigger towns. For these people it would be important to live relatively close to a motorway access. For people with other jobs, the salary difference between city and village usually is much smaller so that it does not make sense to commute such a long distance.
I am sure that there are many more factors that influence the decision. Therefore, most likely a few relatives would live in the same village while other relatives live in other villages or towns. Some people also move further away, mostly because of a relationship or a job. This is more common for university graduates than for people with other professional education because students usually move to the city/town where they study and meet new people and potential partners there and also can get into contact with potential employers through dual courses of study, internships, writing your diploma thesis on a topic related to a company etc.
Inventor
Original Poster
#117 Old 27th Aug 2021 at 2:53 PM Last edited by Softlism : 29th Aug 2021 at 8:44 AM.
Family names
Yes, I used Beliebte Vornamen to check which given names were most common for each generation. I also checked the distribution of surnames throughout the states. I already understood that certain English names like Kevin, Cindy or Mandy are/were associated with lower-class or Tussis in Germany, though I suspect that English names were more widespread in NL and less associated with socioeconomic classes. For Kendra, I use her name of the Dutch game (I found it more fitting than Pandora). But since she has the Galway girl look (dark hair, light blue eyes), I can imagine she could have English roots. For Renee the newspaper girl, I also picked her Dutch name. Other recreated Townies either have the name of the German game, or I picked a different German name based on their generation.

House building
Are Einfamilienhäuser/detached houses the most common type of housings in small villages? (whether rentals or properties)
When I was looking around at property houses in RLP at immobilienscout24, I mostly found floorplans of maisonettes or only one floor, like Dachgeschosswohnung, or very new houses. However, I cannot refine my search without registering first. I can always build the exterior based on pictures like I did before, but the lack of windows at some parts of the walls doesn't feel logical to me from a "Simlish" point of view, so I still need a bit of help with room arrangement once I start building new houses again.
When exploring interior pics through real-estate websites, I noticed that trail lamp fixtures with 2 - 3 lamps are very common in German interior. Luckily I have found at least the IKEA lost-n-found trail lamp.
Inventor
Original Poster
#118 Old 28th Aug 2021 at 9:55 AM
Some WIP pictures of the Capp mansion: https://imgur.com/a/0eiEhSy
I've put the descriptions underneath the images on Imgur this time because it started to get cumbersome for me to add standalone Imgur images here. Regarding the furniture theme, I was thinking of a mix of antique and old-English style (Tudor or Victorian) since the Capps have English roots.
If you have any interior or deco suggestions, can you share with me some example images?

Here are some pictures of a Fachwerkhaus I've downloaded from a German forum: https://imgur.com/a/TTKaliS
The front yard is very big, so I imagine that this lot would have been built at the outskirts of the village
The cellar could use some room division (2 rooms + hallway)
What are your thoughts about the layout?
Lab Assistant
#119 Old 29th Aug 2021 at 3:30 PM
Names:
Yes, English names definitely are more common in the Netherlands than in Germany. Although not all English names cause prejudices in Germany (I know at least two half-English children and one half-American child from my school who had names that are unproblematic). And there also are some French names that cause the same prejudices than the English names.
Names like Kevin, Chantal and Jacqueline were the ones that started the phenomenon and prejudices. The peak for these names was somewhen between 1980 and 2000. Since the 2000s, most people are aware of it and the names became less frequent. When you google Kevinismus or Chantalismus, you will find many articles with some background information.
Names like Mandy, Peggy and Ronny were common in Eastern Germany. For some names, the Eastern German authorities insisted on new spellings (e.g. Madeleine -> Madlen or Madleen, Jeannette -> Janett). These names are not necessarily associated to lower-class. They were more a sign that the parents also wanted to be part of the free Western world. These names have a bad image, but in contrast to e.g. Kevin these names apparently do not have a bad effect on school and university grades. The frequency of these names also declined between 1990 and 2000.
While the frequency of the original cliché names declined, people started looking for other "special" names. Names of TV/film characters and names of children of international actors now are more common. Some people also chose "regular" names and exchange some letters (e.g. "y" instead of "i") and/or add diacritics to make the spelling "individual".
There also is a contrary trend called Emilismus that started in the 2000s. People choose some previously old-fashioned names like Emil, Anton, Oskar, Charlotte and Mathilda. These names are associated with a good educational background so that the parents assume and hope that their child will have better chances at school due to this name. This trend mainly focuses on names with non-German origin (Latin, Greek, French, English etc.) as well.

Pandora definitely is not common as a name in Germany. If the registrar knows the origin of this name, they even might refuse to register it if they think that the child could have problems in their life due to a certain name. The German version of her Dutch name is btw Corinna. Kirschfink as family name also should be very uncommon or maybe even not existent so that it should not matter that you changed her name.
Renee Andrews' Dutch Name sounds like it could be German. Although I think that her German name also is acceptable.
In general, I think that the German names used in the Sims 2 are rather bad. The translators used many old-fashioned names for children and teens. They "translated" names by using German words (regardless of whether they are common as names) with similar spelling or sound instead of by meaning. They translated inconsistently (English name A sometimes was kept in German, sometimes was translated as B and sometimes as C). They mixed up who should have which family name (German name of sim A resembles English name of sim B while sim B has a completely different German name). Umlaute and "ß" were frequently avoided and "ae", "oe", "ue" and "ss" were used instead. In Veronaville, some ancestors have different family names than their spouses although they have identical English family names.
Therefore, I definitely understand that you modify some of the names. You might look for a German name mod although I do not know whether one exists. And even if there is one, the mod would affect all neighborhoods that you play which might be inconvenient if you play more than one neighborhood actively at the same time.

House building:
For new buildings and in the outskirts of the village, detached Einfamilienhäuser are most common in small villages. For older buildings and in the village center and along the main street, it is quite common that there are subsidiary buildings and/or that the houses share walls with neighboring houses.
The website only can show you the houses that currently are for sale. Old houses like the ones that you are interested in are not that common anymore and I guess that it is emotionally more difficult to sell an old house where many generations of your ancestors have lived than selling a relatively new house. For very new houses, it also is possible that a company built them just to sell them afterwards. Houses in general are quite expensive in Germany at the moment. However, old houses are not that expensive because of the legal restrictions that often exist and because there will always be something that needs to be repaired or modernized in an old house. Therefore, it currently is not advisable to sell an old house and buy a new house instead unless you have a lot of money to spend. Of course, some sales cannot be avoided after deaths or divorces, but that should be more frequent with newer houses as well (divorces in average take place after 14 years of marriage).
Trail lamps are common in dining rooms and living rooms when you want to illuminate bigger areas (like a big table).
Immobilienscout24: Did you find a few offers with the word "Grundriss"? I searched for a few cities on the website and for some cities almost no offer had a Grundriss available while for other cities most houses had a Grundriss available.

Capp mansion:
I do not think that the Capp family would have a garden shed. If you want to build something there, you could build a gazebo.
The orangery looks really nice.
The front door looks like a castle gate. I guess for a mansion you would have something more decorative and less solid.
I am not sure whether the Capp family would leave their stuff visible to all visitors. The entrance area looks less representative because of this.
On this picture, the chandelier looks more like a modern interpretation than an ancient object.
Deco behind the staircase: Some kind of valuable antique.
Parlor: I would add a big expensive rug or something like a tiger skin.
Remaining space: If you do not have a purpose, you always can put some cabinets, closets and vitrines there.
Bathroom: I think that it is trange to have a wall closet without anything beneath. It would be more common to have a closet or cabinet beneath the sink or combined wih the mirror.

Downloaded house:
I think that the layout of the house was created for the Sims and does not have a real example.
The garage door looks nice. Maybe you can use it for a few other houses.
Inventor
Original Poster
#120 Old 29th Aug 2021 at 5:04 PM
Naming of the Sims
In my game, I renamed those Sims to Iris and Korinne (the Dutch spelling was Korine, although I'm aware that "Corinne" is a more common spelling in Germany).

Premade mansions makeovers
I haven't found many other types of 2-tiled rounded doors so far, but I will keep your thoughts in consideration. What kind of antique aesthetics/eras would you find fitting for the Capps besides Tudor? Any thoughts about the wall colors? What kind of fences would suit best around their lot, besides tall shrubs?
Regarding the hallway, I can swap the coat rack for an antique-looking wardrobe dresser.
Also, what kind of (antique) furniture style would you find fitting for the Monty Ranch, besides Ancient Roman?

Downloaded Fachwerkhaus
I'm glad someone suggested that garage door in my WCIF thread! I think that most Sims houses CCs are built from imagination. What would you suggest to adjust in the room layout , or is it too complicated to do that?

Architecture
I've looked at Immobilienscout24 and searched on RLP in general, but most Grundriss offers were from apartment buidling or newer houses.
Can you specify more what you mean with "subsidiary buildings"? Do you mean community lots/public buildings, or (detached) buildings with only the upper floors as living area?
I guess I have to keep on interpreting room layouts for older houses.

Hood layouts
I managed to install SC4 and created various maps using that Fantasy Town generator. Here are some concepts I generated for Veronaville and the future subhood/Nachbardorf (have to make up a name for that yet): https://imgur.com/a/wRMV0Qy .
Which ones do you like the most for each hood?

School life
I was thinking about what interactions the Sims could have when they sit together in the bus for like one hour and that the older teens tag along with their friends instead of driving with a motor vehicle (also because of free public). Did non-classmate teens have the most interactions with each other in the bus, since the school days for lower grades used to be short? And maybe I overlooked it in your earlier replies, but does a bus only pick pupils from a certain town, or also from other towns along the road?
I don't see Mercutio and Tybalt fitting in one bus because they will fight like chickens every moment . Or does each grade/class/tier usually start school at a different period?
I also downloaded a bus default replacement and for now I picked red (did a quick Google search). Do you know which color the (school) buses acutally had in RLP?
Inventor
Original Poster
#121 Old 30th Aug 2021 at 10:56 PM
Monty Ranch WIP
https://imgur.com/a/XIVT2Sa
Some questions:
* Which rooms on the ground and first floor could have open walls, and which rooms are best to be utilized as bedrooms? Do you have ideas for some of the spare rooms?
* What furniture type/era would suit best for the Montys?
* What kind of ground/stone suits best for the driveway?
* Would it work better if the garage building is rotated with the doors facing towards the mansions? At this moment, I have placed three cars, but the upper right car is behind a part of the main building.

Summerdream WIP
https://imgur.com/a/1ZlzUIo
* On the ground floor, how could room 6 be utilized, such as adding cabinets and/or a chess table?
* Even though one can assume that uspernaturals have different lifestyles and interior aesthetics, would it be sensible that the kid's rooms are extended with open walls?

Other suggestions are welcome too
Lab Assistant
#122 Old 4th Sep 2021 at 8:23 PM
Names:
In fact, the common spelling in Germany is Corinna. Corinne sounds rather French to me.

Capp mansion:
As the Capp mansion is quite big now and symmetrical (apart from the orangery), I think that Barock with bigger or even floor-length windows might fit. Regarding palaces, the Würzburger Resizdenz should be the most famous one in Germany for that period. In Kurfürstentum Pfalz, a lot of buildings were build like the Mannheimer Schloss and most of the historic center of Heidelberg (because there was a big fire that destroyed almost all older houses).
Maybe the pictures of some of these buildings will help you with the wall colors. As a fence, I would choose a higher metal one or maybe even a white or gray wall.

Monty ranch:
For antiques, you could look for some Romanik-inspired furniture. However, I also would use some furniture that was popular in the 70ies and 80ies because that most likely was the time when Patrizio moved to Germany and his wife (and children if they already were born) moved to Germany a few years later. They had to buy some furniture for their first apartment here and I am quite sure that they got emotionally attached to some of the furniture items and decided to keep them even when they could afford newer or more expensive stuff later in their lives.

Downloaded Fachwerkhaus:
The garage should not be included in the house and the "cellar" is the ground floor and should be the floor where the most important rooms (kitchen and living room) are.
The first floor definitely needs a hallway and more rooms. The walls are necessary for the stability of the house. I do not know any Fachwerkhaus that has such a fireplace. The walls of a Fachwerkhaus consist of materials that burn quite well so that you would try to keep the fire away from the structure of the building. For a renovated Fachwerkhaus, a Schwedenofen would be a good choice, I think. The walls also are relatively thin so that you would not have that area behind the fireplace.
The second floor also has too big rooms and big dormers like this are not that common. It is okay to have a few houses in the neighborhood that have big dormers, but so far all the houses that you have shown have big dormers.

Architecture:
By subsidiary buildings I mean all kinds of buildings that are on the residential lot, but do not contain any living space - garages, barns, stables, simple halls were tools, machines, trailers and other stuff are stored. These buildings usually have no heating, electricity for lighting, but no or almost no power outlets, usually no water supply. Some buildings like halls may be open on one side so that the access is easier. Some of these buildings also have a second floor where lots of old stuff from previous generations of the inhabitants is stored (mostly junk with a few antiques inbetween). It is possible to turn (some of) these buildings into living space, if needed, but it would require a lot of work because you have to open slits in so many walls for water tubes and cables. There were a few projects when subsidiary buildings of posh estates were turned into expensive apartments, but in a small village usually no one is interested in moving into such a place so that these buildings remain in the same state as they were for many decades and often there is thick dust.

Hood layouts:
I like the third layout and the second last layout.
In the first layout, the bridges are at the far ends of the village which makes no sense because people would have to make a big detour when they want to go o the village center. I also think that it contains too many curved and diagonal lines which would be difficult to transform for Sims 2.
The second layout has just two districts which is not sufficient for the three big families of Veronaville. Apart from that, the layout looks okay.
The third layout has three dristricts, a relatively central bridge (although you definitely could add more bridges - a second one big enough for cars and maybe also one or two smaller ones just for pedestrians), a clearly defined center and the houses are closely built in thee center with a bit more space in the outskirts. The big building in the village center can be smaller or you could build a few separate buildings instead.
The fourth layout lacks a village center. The fifth and seventh layout look okay, but I do not think that it makes sense to have a Nachbardorf story-wise. The Nachbardorf would have a similar number of inhabitants as Veronaville so tht you would be euqally limited regarding community lots.
Therefore, I would prefer the sixth layout. It is bigger than the other ones so that you could at least have a small town with a cinema, public pool, the schools that all your children and teens attend, the companies where some of your sims work etc.

School life:
Bus rides do not take an hour. For Grundschule and Hauptschule a distance of up to 10 km is realistic and for Realschule and Gymnasium 30 km at maximum, but for most pupils, the distance is much shorter. In my region, pupils usually chatted on the bus and maybe showed a new object to somebody else.
The bus ride from my village to school only took about 5 minutes. There was more exchange at the bus stop and at the school before the first lesson started than on the bus.
Towns usually are the place where schools are located. As long as the distance to the school is less than 3 km, no schoolbus will be offered. Pupils are expected to walk to school or to go by bike.
For villages it depends on whether they are located in a community that offers all school tiers (so that all pupils have the same destination) or whether Gymnasium and Realschule are further away (so that the pupils have at least two different locations). It also depends on the time when you take the bus and of course on the number of inhabitants of a particular village. In the morning and after the 6th lesson the number of pupils is high, after the 4th or 5th lesson, it is medium and after the 8th and 10th lesson it is low. My home village has 700 inhabitants and we had two buses in the morning and one after the 6th lesson. After 4th and 5th lesson, we had one bus that was shared with one other village. After 8th and 10th lesson, there only was one bus for all villages from that community. The villages are spread around the town so that no other village is on the way. In the morning, the buses started picking up pupils around 7 a.m. so that the same bus could do 3-4 tours until school started at 8 a.m. (all schools start at the same time - otherwise it would be more complicated and expensive to have buses). Therefore, the first pupils were at school around 7:10 and had to wait there for almost an hour until lessons started.
If a community does not have a Gymnasium and Realschule, this means that one part of the pupils (Grund- and Hauptschüler) remains within the community while the other pupils (Realschüler and Gymnasiasten) have a longer schoolway. There, the number of pupils could be so low that one bus picks up pupils from more than one village. However, this always is a detour so that communities will ensure that there are not too many stops. It might also be possible that buses bring pupils from all school tiers from their respective villages to the place where Grundschule and Hauptschule are located and from there one or several buses bring the Gymnasiasten and Realschüler to their schools.

Mercutio/Tybalt:
As you mentioned in one of your previous postings, I can imagine that Consort does not want the teens to take the bus and prefers/preferred to bring them by car. How does aging work in your game? If Tybalt already is 18 in your game, he could drive to school himself and take his two sisters along with him. As he is in a higher grade than the two girls, there might be one day per week when he has more lessons than them. Maybe, the two girls sometimes take the bus on these days because they do not want to wait for Tybalt and that is how Juliette and Hermia met Romeo, Mercutio and Puck?!
You also have to decide how long Mercutio should go to school. Realschüler usually graduate from school at age 16, Hauptschüler at age 15. If you want to integrate the different school tiers in a more realistic way into your game, you could set Hauptschüler and Realschüler to independent teens (with SimBlender) at some point of their life stage to show that they graduated from school and started working. For Realschule, you also can decide that a sim now attends a Fachoberschule and let them continue to attend school like the Gymnasiasten. For the ones without Abitur and university degree, it also would be realistic to limit how far they can progress in certain careers and to reduce the chance of promotions so that they make progress more slowly. This, of course, only applies to the kind of jobs that require some kind of education (like science, medicine, business) and not the ones that do not require education or that typically require an Ausbildung instead of a university degree (like culinary, athletic, slacker).

School bus color:
There is no fixed color. Each community does a tendering for the school bus services for the pupils of their community and the bus company with the best offer will transport the pupils from that community. Therefore, at Realschulen and Gymnasien you will have buses from several different companies. Schoolbus services alone are not that profitable so that the companies also offer trips and vacations. For that reason they have buses with really comfortable buses with cushions, seat groups with tables etc. (google "Reisebus"). Plain buses with plastic seats etc. are more a thing for bigger towns and cities where these buses can operate all day long and not just for a few hours per day.

Monty Ranch WIP:
As this house is not a Fachwerkhaus, you can make the rooms bigger so that there is no need for open walls. I can imagine that the grandparents prefer to have a bedroom on the ground floor, but all other inhabitants should have their bedrooms on the first floor because it makes more sense to have offices, hobby rooms etc. on the ground floor. I do not have any special ideas for the spare rooms, but if you reduce the number of rooms by making them bigger and maybe having bigger hallways on the first floor, you will need less ideas.
As mentioned at the beginning of this posting, I could imagine that the Monty family still has some furniture from the time when they moved to Germany.
Driveway: Inside the building, something like Estrich is most common, I think. If you leave it the way it is, it usually looks gray, but it also could be painted in a certain color or you could have some tiles on top of it. For the outside, some kind of stone is quite common, alternatively concrete (as one big area, not single tiles) or gravel or the same floor that you used for the way leading to the house.
It seems strange to me that the garage is that far at the back of the lot. I would move it further forward (if necessary, you can move the house a bit backwards with the lot adjuster) and look then whether it looks better if it faces towards the street or if it is rotated by 90°.

Summerdream WIP:
For placing cabinets, you need some walls. Room 6 has open walls on two sides of the room and windows and an inwards corner on the other two sides of the room. Therefore, I do not think that the room is suited that well for cabinets. Maybe move the desk and bookshelf from room 5 to room 6. Then you could place some cabinets in room 5 instead. If you want to have a chesstable, I would put it in room 6 and maybe place some living room chairs or some other seats for sims who want to read books.
Extended bedrooms: For rooms 5 and 6 it does not make that much sense because the gap in the wall is so small that you will not have an open feeling. For rooms 7 and 8, the open walls definitely will change the atmosphere of the room. As the Summerdream family is everything but normal, I could imagine them having such big rooms for their children, but it is not necessary. As Titania is a family sim, I do not think that one more child will be sufficient for her and as Oberon is a knowledge sim, he might spend too much time at the telescope one day... Therefore, you might need room 8 as additional bedroom one day. Room 5 seems to be too small to be another bedroom - compared with the other bedrooms. If you want to close the room again, you maybe could give it some hidden entrance (like that one bookshelf - although the style does not fit for this house imho) so that the family can store some stuff in this room that they do not want to show to the humans.
Cellar: I am sure that you wanted to do this anyway sooner or later, but please add some floors for the four small rooms. Of course, a Fachwerkhaus does not have a concrete foundation like modern houses, but you would at least compact the earth before you build the house and due to the lack of sunlight, there would be no grass.
Balcony: I guess other chairs would fit better. These chairs look like you could get them in every discount furniture store and like chairs that you would buy to take them along on a camping trip, not ones that you would have permanently at home. The tables look fine.


I have to admit that I only had time to look briefly at the pictures from the last two links. And I am also aware that my additional commons frequently are related to stuff that, in my opinion, could be improved and rarely related to stuff that turned out well although many things turn out well. Writing these postings can take quite some time and sometimes I reach the point where I just want to finish the text and that you do not have to wait too long for my answer and therefore leave off the positive things. I am really sorry for that.
I also want to let you know that I really admire your passion and motivation for this project. I tried to build a subhood to solve housing shortage several times (just uninhabited residential buildings without CC), but always changed my plans and therefore never finished any hood. Your project already lasts much longer than any of my projects. I will keep my fingers crossed that you will be able to complete the neighborhood and that it will turn out the way you wanted to.
Inventor
Original Poster
#123 Old 11th Sep 2021 at 1:20 PM
Thank you for clarifying your critique and the kind words! I really appreciate that you are willing to help me so much with building a foreign-themed Sims hood. I've started this hood/story project 16 years ago and discontinued it after a couple of months due to school and a slow computer. But now with a better computer for TS2, expanded CCs, mods, and general knowledge, I want to try to pursue this personal Sims project as long as I have enough time for it.

Subhoods planning:
Thanks for the suggestions! For a real town where I pretend the village Sims go to secondary school, I want to try to recreate TS4's Windenburg as a Downtown Hood, but that's something for a separate thread in the future.
I want to build a village in the OFB subhood, but a less small one, i.e. one where the Veronaville inhabitants can get groceries at the Edeka or bring their kids to the Kindergarten/elementary school.

Character designs:
in my story, I picture Tybalt as being 17 years old and attending 11th-grade Gym, so he may or may not has started with driving lessons (was the minimum age for driving lessons already 17 back then?). I imagine Mercutio also as being 17 years, but either repeating 10th grade Real, working in culinary fully, or attending Fachoberschule -- in the game, he has a part-time job but I can always figure out how to make him work full time, as suggested.
Despite the premade Memories order, I imagine that the Capp and Monty kids already know each other (vaguely) since elementary school/Kindergarten since they live in the same very small village. Romeo and Juliette have been friends before, but indeed kissed each other when they got tipsy at someone's birthday party during the period he was comforting her during her grief. Actually, I renamed Juliette to Julia, but did that name also have a Chantalism reputation, or not?

Did Realschule kids also have a 2nd foreign language class by default, like French?
Lab Assistant
#124 Old 14th Sep 2021 at 6:46 AM
Thanks for your kind words as well!
I do not think that the first attempt 16 years ago still counts. I rather was referring to your current attempt that already lasts several months and you made quite some progress in that time. As you already moved in some families: Do you currently play with aging off?

Subhood planning:
I assume that we have different conceptions of towns and villages. How many inhabitants is your village supposed to have?
In rural areas, 1000-2000 inhabitants can be sufficient to be a town. However, some of these towns only have a Tante-Emma-Laden and not a supermarket. That is why I imagine the Nachbarort as town and not as a village. Windenburg could be the district seat and biggest town (10 000-15 000 inhabitants are sufficient for that) and the OFB subhood is another, smaller town. In rural areas, it is common to have several towns in one administrative district. In my home region, there are about ten towns in the administrative district.
Kindergärten usually also exist in villages. Therefore, Veronaville most likely would have a Kindergarten of its own. If the Capp and Monty children all attended Kindergarten, they most likely knew each other already from that time. However, if you think that Consort does not want the teens to take the school bus because of the Monty teens, I assume that he also was not open to them being in the same Kindergarten. At that age, children do not yet have prejudices and form friendships easily. As the number of children per year varies, it can happen that there are not sufficient capacities to care for all toddlers in their home villages. As long as you are offered a place in another Kindergarten of the community, you do not have a right to complain. Therefore, I can imagine that Consort (or maybe even Contessa as she still was alive then) used their influence to ensure that the children did not attend the same Kindergarten. If there was a Kindergarten with a really good reputation or more convenient opening hours, they would have ensured that their grandchildren attend that Kindergarten. Otherwise, they could have ensured that the Monty children have to attend a Kindergarten further away (maybe even two different Kindergärten so that the parents have to spend a lot of time bringing their children there and picking them up afterwards) and with unconvenient opening hours. I also could imagine that the Capp family has nannies or au-pair girls to care for the children at home.

Tybalt:
As far as I know, there is no minimun age for driving lessons. However, you may only do the theoretical exam three months or less before your birthday and the practical exam one month or less before your birthday. Thus, it makes no sense to start too early. If you pass, you can pick up your driving licence on your birthday. If you do not pass, you have to wait at least two weeks before trying again (and if you fail several times, you have to wait three months).

Mercutio:
Maybe the part-time jobs are a good way to simulate an Ausbildung and you do not have to mod them out. Ausbildung consists of a theoretical part in a Berufsschule with lessons in typical subjects like German, English and maths, but also lessons related to the profession and it consists of a practical part where the Azubis work in a company. For common professions, the Berufsschule is somewhere close and you go to Berufsschule one week and work the next week. For less common professions, the Berufsschule is further away and frequently you can stay there like in a boarding school.
Repeating 10th grade of Realschule does not sound realistic to me as starting an Ausbildung in the culinary career only requires a Hauptschulabschluss and in many German states, Realschüler automatically receive a Hauptschulabschluss when they pass 9th grade of Realschule.

Juliette:
The name Julia does not have a Chantalism reputation. However, the name was quite common back at that time. If you think that her parents would have minded whether the name is common, Juliane or Juliana might be alternatives.

Realschule:
As far as I know, you can choose between a natural scientific branch (-> no second foreign language) and a linguistic branch (-> second foreign language). However, I do not know whether it is like this in all states. And even if a state has different branches, it can happen that one school just offers one branch because they do not have sufficient pupils to offer all branches.



Gymnasium:
I have to correct what I wrote in one of my previous postings. Apparently, there still are Gymnasien that offer the "classical" languages Latin and Ancient Greek and wanting to attend such a Gymnasium would be a reason to go to a school further away (because you definitely will not find such a school in a rural area). Apparently, some doctors still like their children to attend such a Gymnasium although Ancient Greek is not needed anymore at all to become a doctor and you can learn Latin in a much shorter time (because you only learn some words and basics) at university.
However, I do not think that the Capp teens would attend such a school. As their family is business-oriented, they would focus on foreign languages that help them to make deals with companies from abroad. Therefore, English would be the most important language. French is the most common second foreign language, but if they have a choice, they might prefer Spanish.
They also might consider learning Chinese, although that language usually is not offered at school. Maybe, Goneril, Regan or somebody from the younger generation will have a Chinese live-in nanny or au-pair girl so that their children learn Chinese already at toddler age.
Inventor
Original Poster
#125 Old 14th Sep 2021 at 4:19 PM
When I play families, I apply Aging Off so I can create more scenes that would take place in a real year. I also use a Season Controller so I can let the story start in February/March.

In NL, we don't have official classifications for places, so the definitions of towns vs villages are ambiguous. In the Dutch law, the term "city" isn't used but instead they use the terms "municipalities" and "built-up ares" or (Geschlossene Ortschäfter). Before the 19th century, cities were distinguished from villages by having town privileges, although some big cities never gained town privileges while some small villages (~150 or even ~90) do have them.
In practice, towns below 25K are considered as "small towns" or "villages" (source: local newspaper article). The perception whether a place is a town or a village also depends on the population density, and how the inhabitants and the municipality perceive it. I percieve >100K towns as cities and I live in a >70K town. But when I was on holiday somewhere in Southern Europe, a 10K capital town already felt like a town/city to me. It must be noted that NL and Belgium are way more densely populated than Germany.

Summerdream Mansion - decorating the garden and party rooms
Link: https://imgur.com/a/4lNMigJ
Decorating the interior went fine, but now I want to pay more attention to the party areas, since the gameplay in this lot started with a party and I want to make some pretty snapshots.
* What types of tiles would suit better for the backyard and swimming pool?
* What walls and floors would be fitting for the massage room in the cellar?
* What type of fence would suit this lot?
* Any flower/plant suggestions for an Elven family? I want to give them a lush garden.
* Any more deco suggestions for both party rooms?
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