I have a concept that sounds like a decent challenge to me; but I've never played a challenge, I'd have to stick a playtest of this into my ongoing storyline and it would take forever to see how it worked (I have made a family, though), and I have no idea how to score it. So if anyone wishes to assist me with these issues, that would be nice.

So.

Your family has escaped from war-torn Simlakistan, or Simlantis, or Simalia, or been exiled from the planet Simurn, or whatever. Thanks to the International Simitarian Society, you've been settled in an apartment in Simerica - where everyone talks gibberish, the grocery stores contain only bizarre ingredients like 'lunch meat' (what the heck kind of animal is a lunch? Is it clean or unclean?), and the skills of your lifetime are suddenly inappropriate. Your mission: to assimilate into this strange new world and raise your children to be upstanding, successful Simerican citizens.

Your starting family should consist of 6-8 people containing at least one representative of each age category makeable in CAS or Body Shop. Ideally they should be created in such a way as to make them look "foreign" compared to your existing Sim denizens, but that's cosmetic; also ideally a baby should be added as soon as possible.

They must move into an apartment, and no one can move out of the apartment except to go to University or to marry (or the autonomous 'run away' departure of a miserable teen). Teens can only go to University on scholarship (no moving them in from the University screen with a $500 handout), and should have at least a full week of high school before doing so. Children cannot get homework help unless they have a 'learned to talk' memory - 'learning to talk' = 'learned Simglish from a family member' and trust me, if the adults don't speak enough Simglish to teach it to their children, they won't understand the homework well enough to be any help with it.

Now, the hard part: scoring. Since the goal is assimilation, this has to be represented by some in-game event or some arbitrary point total, say 100 points. I have no idea how to scale the points, but it would probably be something like:

Each teen to University - 5 pts
Each teen graduated from University - 10 pts
Each teen graduated with honors - 20 pts
Overachieving teen - 5 pts
Each connection to another household (friendship with or marriage to a native Simerican)- 5 or 10 points
Each A+ report card - 5 pts
Each toddler skill taught - 1 pt
Each promotion - 1 pt? 5 pts? Sliding scale based on number of adults in the household?
Each death from anything but old age - negative 50 points
Each runaway teen - negative 20 points
Other stuff as appropriate

I have no idea how people track points in a game like this (I'm math-challenged myself); and I don't have all the expansions, so I can't even guess how to assign points based on things like business start-ups or joining a hobby society. It's also possible that there is a basic disconnect between Maxis-generated apartments in the game that can be forced to hold six to eight sims and those that are suitably downmarket for the International Simitarian Society to have them available for the families they're helping, so you might have to build your own apartment from scratch, and there ought to be rules governing that. Also, I don't know enough about the available hacks and mods to determine which ones are and are not allowed. I think aspiration reward use should be limited, but I haven't used most of them and don't know which ones would break the challenge.

So it's a rough draft, and those are always terrible. Feel free to tear it down and show me my basic structural errors so I can do better next time, instruct me on points, explain that this has already been done, etc.

That sounds like a good story to play.
I never play challenges for points so I can't help you with this, but I'm missing one thing: What is the final goal? When will the family be assimilated enough to declare the challenge as finished and to count the points?

I was thinking you'd just play to 100 points, either tracking as you went or counting up any time you got a major milestone like a graduation or a wedding. So the goal would be "100 points" and everybody who didn't kill all their sims would win if they played long enough. After all, some families assimilate to their new countries in a few years, while others take generations.

I would welcome a milestone that suited the challenge format better, particularly if it were kinder to people like me who get lost when counting. Maybe you have a defined "head of household" and when that person died it would be time to count up and see if s/he died a winner?

Almost as soon as I started making a Simmigrant family it occurred to me that it'd be fun to have an "ethnic neighborhood" where sims from the same culture tended to congregate, say a couple of apartment blocks in Downtown populated entirely with such families (they wouldn't all have to be extended), and in that case marriages within the neighborhood would subtract from the assimilation score; but that's just me complicating things before they're finished.

I really like this idea! I'm not sure about the scoring though, I've been having a think about it and can't really see how to score it differently. One thing though - I don't think that deaths by anything other than old age should be -50 points, or even minus points at all! I mean, what does acidentally dying from electrocution or fire or whatever have to do with assimilation? Maybe people who are part of the culture they're trying to assimilate into always fix their own stuff, and occasionally dies doing so, so dying of electrocution should gain you positive points! :-P Joking aside though, I don't think that how people die is really relevant to how well they are adapting to life in a new society. Also, I'd say that with a household of 6-8 it would only take a week or two to get to 100 points! A couple of overachieving teens, some friends, a few promotion for a couple of people with jobs, and maybe the maiden aunt marries a local, and you're there. As I said though, I'm struggling to think of a better way to do it!

I definitely intend to try your idea of making cultural "areas" within a neighbourhood, so that you could do the within/between areas marriage thing. I'd probably do it using skin colour, hair colour and maybe clothing style to designate the different "cultural groups", and I guess the aim would be to eventually have a neighbourhood full of multicultural extended families. It sounds really interesting! And I'm curious to see how this challenge will develop further! :-)

It could be 1000 points; all numbers are arbitrary. I was thinking 100 was too low, too, but I just threw it out there. Originally I was thinking "well, the math is simpler if most things are worth 1 or 2 points," and then I forgot that rationale as I was typing.

I think any time someone dies an unnatural death it's a major setback for whatever your goals are (Death Sucks :P), but it's true it's not assimilation relevant. We can all die unnaturally.

Obviously if the "goal" is going to be a set number of points, the single hardest thing about this challenge might be working out a fair and comprehensive scoring system. A lot of people here have mods I can't even imagine, so maybe everybody would have to devise their own! Which wouldn't teach me a damn thing.

I want more ethnic hairstyles and things. My core group are all black and I had to give up on most of them having nappy hair as there's only a handful of suitable hairstyles in the CAS. As it is, I've got three guys with 'fros.

I am thinking that I may play this a bit differently - taking the key points and running with it, so to speak :-)

I am starting up a new neighbourhood, and intend to have 4 groups of sims - based on skin/hair colour to distinguish them, as that's probably the easiest way to do it! Each group will start with, say, 4 married couples. I'll move all 16 of the couples into the neighbourhood, into apartments, I think. With one apartment block for each group.

Then the aim will be to integrate all four groups - by befriending sims from other groups, marrying them, moving into their neighbourhoods (which would be allowed only if you had XX number of BFF's from that neighbourhood) and so on. Things that allow sims to move up in the world would also be aspired to; I would have certain careers that can only be held if the sim is a graduate, for example, and sims will only be able to move into houses/bigger apartments if they earn enough money. The ultimate aim would be to have a completely integrated neighbouhood within X (probably 5) generations - with no distinct areas or cultural groups. Will take a long time, but I think it'd be fun! And it does away with the need for a set scoring system, too...

I'll probably give your challenge a go too, it does sounds interesting. Shall wait and see what further ideas you and other people come up with first though!

**EDIT** And names, too. I'll make the groups have names from specific real-world regions/cultures to distinguish them by. I've decided to base the groups (very broad groups!) on Spanish, Scandinavian, African and Scottish cultures/stereotypical looks/names/etc, so that I can distinguish them to start with. Then, when the mixed generations start to be born, it will also be challenging to merge the naming traditions of the cultures that the parents come from.

To start with, each couple will be moved into a 3 bedroom apartment, and will start off with $15,000. When they have sufficient cash they will be able to move to bigger apartments/cottages/houses/mansions.

Oh, cool! I'm glad I had an idea someone could use.

It wouldn't surprise me if my first challenge (never having played one) turned out to be impractical - that's so often the case when you're learning the ropes - but it's good to know the base concept has value, even if the details never work out or the finished challenge doesn't resemble the original idea to any significant degree.

Since most apartments are two-bedroom at most, maybe I should limit the size of apartments in the Assimilation scenario? You can always put a murphy bed in the living room. I've known families that lived like that; even one that had a son sleeping in the kitchen.

Oh, I'm sure it's practical, with some adjustment to the scoring etc; I just like to leap into things rather than starting small! :-D I've started making the couple, next I will design the neighbourhood (I want to have it fully built/laid out before I start playing the couples) and then write myself some rules before I start! :-)

That would make sense - otherwise people could have the family living in a 6 bedroom one that they built, or something, and that would make it much easier. I intend to start my couples in small(ish) 3-bedroom ones - that way families that stay poor will have space for a few kids, but there will be definite incentive for families to earn as much money as possible so that they can get a bigger apartment/house! Maybe you could say a 3 bedroom apartment? Or 3 bedroom with two doubles and a single? That's still pretty small for 6-8 people, so would be challenging, and require things like Murphy beds etc. I've never met anyone who slept in the kitchen, but I know a family who converted their dining room into a bedroom for two of their kids. They did have 7 kids, mind.....

I really like this idea, too! You might want to put a limit on how much money the family can spend/possess at the start, and what kind of objects they are allowed to buy. (Or maybe a limit on how comfortable the furnishings can be, etc.) I can see it being a bit like the Asylum challenge at the start, where there aren't enough beds or seats at the kitchen table for everyone in the house.

It would be cool if there were more rules/scoring related to how the immigrant family is supposed to earn money. The jobs in-game require very different sets of skills in real life, so maybe first-gen adult sims would have to roll to see if they can take a job that an immigrant would normally have a hard time getting (teaching, for example, is hard to do if you don't speak the language... medicine requires a lot of education... etc) or maybe they might have a cap on how many levels they can be promoted. Also maybe there could be points for sims that run a home business, or farm, or become an artist/writer if they exceed certain goals. (Like selling X number of masterpieces or something.)

I've written out a list of sim careers and the requirements that they'll have in my game for the purposes of (my heavily adapted version of) this challenge. I've attached it to this post now that the first draft is done, it's a Word 2003 file, if you can read them on your computers I'd love to hear suggestions, comments etc! It's in a RAR, because I could find out how to attach it if it wasn't....

As you'll see if you read it, a lot of the careers aren't available for the "first generation" - either because they need a degree or because they're not available for other reasons; for example, first generation sims can't serve in the military or as policemen. Some of the careers mention needing friends from more than one "community" - I have set my neighbourhood up so that there are four different communities, identified by hair/skin/eye colour, names, and the area where they live, and for some careers I reckoned that sims would need lots of friends from any community, or from communities outside their own, and so on.

I have also added some custom careers to my list, these are all ones that I plan to use in my game to give my sims more options, especially during the first generation.

Katalina522, it would be cool to see points for the things you mentioned, but I think the OP doesn't have all EP's so won't know how to assign them. I have had a few ideas about them, how about you? And I agree about the set amount of money to start with thing, that kind of fits with the apartment size restriction ideas too.

Oh, it's so great when I can inspire other people to do my work for me, I mean get creative! I can't unzip that .rar file, but I've PM'd you with my e-mail so if you don't mind, Laura, you can send it as a straight attachment.

Limiting career choices is a great idea. Plenty of immigrants from places like war-torn Simlakistan are working below what would have been their capacity in their home country, because of language, education, and legal differences. That's part of the assimilation process. So for story purposes if you want some variety in your ethnic neighborhood family backgrounds, you can decide that certain sims came down in the world when they moved and are now trying to claw their way up again, while others were dirt-poor and what looks to their professional-background neighbors like squalor feels like luxury to them. In one apartment the teen-age girl is looking around in dismay, crying: "Where's the dishwasher? Why is there no bidet? Am I supposed to share a toilet with my brother? Gross!" and above her head another teen-age girl is gushing: "Look, ma, our own bathroom! And we don't have to heat the water on the stove! And we can have one room for boys, one room for girls, and one room for grownups! It's heaven!"

I've been experimenting with making a fourplex this afternoon and am finding that my instincts for how big the lot should be have been way off. I can fit a fourplex with three-bedroom units and a playground on a six-square lot, and get bedding for eight, dining for six, a two-counter kitchen; a bathroom with shower/tub, sink, and commode; desk, couch, and TV into the rooms with a little space to spare to move around and add a stereo or a hobby item. I think this is small enough, since even one toddler can really crowd the space. I'm thinking that limiting the size of the starting lot may be a better way to go than limiting the number of bedrooms, since a three-bedroom unit on an eight- or ten-square lot could be huge.

As for making rules about what they can have - I'd like to be flexible to accommodate different playstyles, EPs, available mods, and family configurations. Personally I always have to have a shower/tub and I want room for potty chairs in all the bathrooms, even when I'm not expecting a toddler ('cause the little buggers always happen eventually), but other people may like smaller bathrooms and use the space for closets. So perhaps what I need to do is generate a list of options, like: phone, fire alarm, and any one other electronic device (so you can have a stereo or a TV or a computer) to start, and you earn the right to more electronic devices as you meet certain in-game goals. Like, um, I dunno, first kid to go to college? Fifth promotion?

I'm thinking of disallowing aspiration rewards, as raising the toddlers gets so much easier with the smart milk; or maybe if you use an aspiration reward you have to pay for it by giving up something else.

I have emailed it you you :-) The requirements are perhaps a little random, and do require all EP's, which I know you and other people don't have. So if you/people wanted to use my list you'd have to adapt some of it - especially the bits about needing friends from different communities.

I have been considering this, and I think I may give a few sims degrees right from the start (using a mod) - after all, they could've gone to uni in their home countries, right? I'll roll a die to see who gets them, I expect. I'm starting off with couples rather than a family, so I will have four groups of 5 couples, but I will write them all background stories to give (myself!) an idea of what their life would've been like before they moved.

I've decided to use the Maxis-made mobile home "apartments" as starter housing for my sims. It has 5 apartments on it, so each group of 5 will share a mobile home park. They're not remotely luxurious, as I recall, and should work quite well as starters. I am doing things differently to your idea, though, as my sims will be able to move to nicer apartments/housing as they earn money (I haven't worked the details out yet, though....).

I'm not going to have rules about what they can buy. They'll start off with the basic funishings in their mobile homes, but as and when they earn money I'll allow them to buy anything they can afford - I think that if an immigrant family moved to a new country and were able to find jobs etc they wouldn't be limited to certain items just because they were immigrants, they could buy anything available in the country. So that's how I'm going to do it for my version :-)

For your challenge I think that disallowing aspiration rewards makes sense, as it is points-based (probably!), but for my version I will allow the use of aspiration rewards because I like to play that way! :-D I don't use many of them, mind, but I do like Smart Milk!

For my version, I intend to make community-specifc community lots that only sims from that community can visit, by using Twojeff's visitor controller and Inge's coloured keys and doors. This is to mimic the idea that, in some cities and so on, there are entire areas which house mainly people from one cutural or racial background, and people may spend most of their time there and not meet many people from outside their communities. There will also be some more general community lots, including a job centre (using MogHughson's job boards), a graveyard and a few shops. And I have Nightlife, so there'll be a Downtown too, where all sims can hang out.

Okay, here's another draft. All flavor text the same. The apartment building is limited in the size of its footprint, should not be built on a lot containing more than six squares in any configuration, and should not contain more than three bedrooms or 1.5 baths. Once bought, an item must stay in the game taking up space until used up or sold - no putting things in and out of inventory as needed. This plus the limitation on moving out should restrict available items without having to be arbitrary about what they can and can't buy or use out of aspiration rewards, since you won't be able to add space. Date rewards must be used or sold. You can't carry the Electro-Dance-Sphere in your pocket.

Job availability is restricted in the following manner; jobs available in your game and not specifically described should be put into one of these classifications as seems best to you (after all, you're the one playing the game and we may not agree into which category Journalism or your custom Tooth Fairy job falls - for the record, I'd say Professional and Menial):
Professional jobs (Education, Law, Business, Medicine, etc.) are not available to simmigrants without a degree from a Simerican University OR 6 points in the key skill for that career.
All menial (culinary, animal care, construction), entertainment (show business, sports), and creative (art, music) jobs are open to all simmigrants. However, these jobs have no benefits; the sim cannot use any accumulated "vacation" days - no calling in sick, no trips to the Simhamas, just the basic staying home during pregnancy and days off.
Public service jobs (military, law enforcement, politics) are not open to sims not born in Simerica.
I'm thinking of modifying this for the sake of sims who have some arbitrary number of friends in that career track.
Opening one's own business should be possible for players with the Open for Business EP, but I have no idea how that works and can't begin to limit or reward it.

Play to X number of points. The following point scores are typical; users with mods and EPs that offer logical additions to this list should have their required total adjusted to suit.
Each connection to a native household - 1 pt. (I'm considering limiting this to households that can be connected to yours by the little lines when you're looking at the household in neighborhood view; so no townies, no one currently at university, no one in Pleasantview if you live Downtown, and no one in your apartment building. This arrangement has its faults, but so does allowing townies and university connections. Alternatively, the connection may have to be BFF; so an estranged married child wouldn't count.)
Each A+ - 1 point
Each toddler skill acquired without smart milk - 1 pt
Each overachieving child - 2 pts
Each child graduated from University - 2 pts
Each child graduated with honors - 3 pts
Runaway teen - negative 2 pts
Child taken by social worker - negative 3 pts
F report card - negative 1 pt
College drop-out - negative 2 pts (Possibility, but maybe too complicated: child must move back home! If the game won't allow the child to return, he must move into the same apartment building. Either way, he is restricted in his career choice to one also held by an adult in his family until he is promoted past that family member; at which point he is worth 4 pts, bringing him up to the same value as a graduate.)
Promotion in a menial job - 1 pt
Promotion in a creative job - 2 pts
Child (living at home or not) gaining a professional job - 3 pts
demotion - negative value of promotion x 2
Fired - negative value of promotion x 3

Yeah, not complete, but better?

All right, sorry for the delay in feedback, but after I updated some software on my computer last week TS2 got corrupted and it took a while to get everything back in order.

lauratje86, I really liked how you did your divisions and restrictions for the careers. I do something similar for both the Poverty & Legacy challenges. I have no suggestions on how to incorporate OFB though... I don't own it, and I've only played it a few times.

Re: dates & inventory items... I would disagree with you, Peni. Things "earned" from dates should have to stay in the inventory until the sim dies. There's a huge money-making advantage if you sell the items and it would take some of the difficulty out of the challenge, especially if sims are allowed to ask their dates if they are rich. (UNLESS you wanted to play one family member, maybe of the second generation, as a money-grubbing social climber who has to earn all their income from dates and the like... maybe as a bonus, like a mini-challenge? It would make for fun stories.)

Do you want this to run for X number of points, or is the goal to assimilate within a certain number of generations? (Also, how are we defining assimilate? Connections to native Simericans, graduates from University who can get better jobs, etc. ... anything else?)

I would also consider giving points if your family earns enough to be able to "upgrade" to a nicer house. (For example: +2 points if they can buy a home worth at least $100k... +1 point if they renovate the existent lot and add at least 2 new rooms)

Can the original simmigrants use the bookshelf for skill points, or are the books in the 'new language'?

I would let them use the bookshelf; however, they cannot study Physiology (which I'm considering banning from all my personal Sims because it feels like cheating!) as it makes gaining skill points too easy.

I see your reasoning on the date rewards, but since the prime restriction on the challenge, as originally conceived, is that the family cannot move out of the apartment except for marriage or University until assimilation takes place, making them keep date rewards in inventory seems less restrictive than requiring them to take up space. Extra money can be spent to upgrade the quality of stuff, but since you can't expand the apartment you'll soon crowd yourself out if you keep adding stuff, and the money becomes less important than other things. Which option works better in practice would require a playtest.

I keep thinking of different ways to do this depending on what family situation you're simulating, and am planning to fill up the fourplex I built with four different kinds of simmigrant families and try out the ideas; but it's going to take me a loooong time playing them in rotation with my established families; so reports from people who try variations on this would be welcome.

It seems to me that the most important elements of the challenge (apart from the aesthetic ones of having "foreign looking" sims running around the game) are:

The restriction to the apartment.
The requirement to start with at least one representative of each age category (creating an extended family).
The limitation on homework help for students who have no "learned to talk" memory.

Not learning to study makes the school years much, much harder in my experience, and this combined with a big family in a confined space, particularly raising at least one toddler will make at least the week till your first teen can go to college really hard. It might get too easy after that, though, depending on how you designed your family. My first test family, consisting of adult head-of-household Luz Iana, elder Abuela, teens Lourdes and Luis, child Lucas, and toddler Lisandro, will have to go through three kids who can't learn to study, and I'm adding the restriction (for this family) that Abuela, who is staying home while Luz works, can potty-train Lisandro and teach him to walk, but her Simglish isn't good enough to teach him to talk, thus putting an extra time burden on those who have to make good in the outside world. If Lisandro doesn't learn Simglish by the time he goes to school, he won't be able to learn to study either and I'm going to have all my subadults in a state of perpetual fun desperation. Having only six members takes off some of the space pressure and in practical terms removes the possibility of adding a baby (though I could still do it if I wanted to bad enough) and having only one elder at home to babysit increases the chance of the social worker coming, since she could easily die in a fire or something while Luz is at work and the teens are at school.

I wish I could think of a better system than points, especially since I'm not sure how to set the point goal and I don't trust numbers, but different routes to assimilation should be possible just as different kinds of assimilating families should be possible. If you look at assimilated immigrant populations in the US, you'll find lots of groups that are assimilated but still identifiable as a group because of the business, educational, or marital choices they make (or which society makes for them, but that would require creating a top-down social system for your entire simverse and is way beyond my ambition). We may find in play testing that a single route to assimilation is the most satisfactory in play, but for now I'm thinking we should try it with an arbitrary goal of 100 points, and give the player flexibility in which points he goes for.

I see I forgot to put a value on children gaining public service jobs. That would be 4 points (and the child can be a university graduate who didn't come back to live at home, as long as he's still tight with his family).

Also, if someone marries INTO the family, that would be worth 0 points; or -1 if you're playing with an ethnic neighborhood and marry within the neighborhood.

Looking at the Iana family and this scale of points I think my best bet to do this before Luz dies of old age is getting the kids into University and pledging Greek Houses to make lots of friends. If I give Family 2 more adults, jobs and promotions will be more important.

Sorry to be all scattershot. Y'all are very helpful. Should there also be point awards for things like getting LTWs?

Oh, and I forgot to say - that "social climber" mini-challenge sounds brilliant! I'll see if I can work that in to my busy simming schedule.

This sounds like such an interesting challenge!

Lauratje, for the police-career, you need an extra group, the Irish (Who are traditionally in Law-enforcement and Fire-fighting.) Afro-simicans for culinairy or the military. Your basic Causimicans for the slacker and/or artistic careers. I like the idea that careers are culturally affiliated and that for an immigrant to get a foot in, he/she needs to be friends with a certain number of the specific culturists.

Even I don't escape from these cultural confinements. I'm Asian and am *ta-da* working in science (lol) as anthropologist with the U.N. XD It would be even more affirmative if I were a math-professor!

Hey Peni, I have been building some lots for this challenge... but I am slightly confused by your lot size descriptions since I don't have AL. Does six squares mean the house/apt is only 6x6? Or do you mean a 6x6 lot, which is gigantic? (I am building my "apartments" on 1x2 mini lots.) Also, are there any restrictions on what kind of things you can put in the yard? I feel like AL players would be at a huge advantage since a) rent is cheaper than buying a house; b) you get more money straight out of CAS; c) there is common space on apartment lots that can be used for free.

If you marry a sim out of the family/simmigrant community, do you need to keep playing them after they move out? And if so, does a separate apartment count as a new household, and would it be okay if non-AL players have a "multi-unit" lot so it's easier to play more than one family at a time?

Do you have any restrictions on application to university based on grades, or do you think the scholarship requirement is enough? (I ask because I play with the Harder Homework mod by Cyjon as well as this mod from MATY that makes passing grades virtually impossible in poor families without a lot of skill objects.)

The point of moving them into an apartment is to limit their/your control of the space. Apartments use only a portion of the total lot size, with the rest of the space devoted to communal area and to other apartments. Also, once built, apartments cannot be increased in size; the player loses a lot of build options under that zoning, even in an empty apartment. Basically you can change cosmetic things like wallpaper and flooring, but if the apartment was built with a bathroom too small to contain a tub, sink, commode, and potty chair you have to decide which of those things you can live without or place elsewhere, and if the windows are in the wrong place or you don't have a patio for that telescope your date gave you, that's your tough luck. This reduces the advantage of the extra money you get with a large family in AL, as you can buy high quality stuff, but what's the point if you have no place to put it?

You are also likely to be disturbed by the neighbors, who generate random noise through adjoining walls in the wee hours of the morning when you're half-dead of sleep deprivation. Most apartment families just move the bed away from the wall, but once you get eight people in an apartment you may run out of suitable space. (I'm obviating this problem in the Ianas' apartment by building a set of four stacked units - no adjoining walls!)

The advantages of the apartment to offset the lack of control are that you spend less money up front (but nice apartments with good communal areas can be very pricey!), you can ask your neighbors to watch your kids while you run out for groceries, and you have access to communal areas. If the apartment has a playground, you don't have to buy as many fun things for your kids, and they can get body points from some of the play equipment, without the direct adult or teen supervision required if you want to send them to the park. You can also use communal areas for parties.

So if you're going to play this without AL, you should decrease the lot size; however, by a "six-square" lot I mean containing a maximum of six squares - a 2x3 or a 3x2. This may still be too big, but only playtesting will tell for sure. Try it with your minilots and tell me how it works, as obviously a really good challenge would need variants to accommodate different combinations of EPs.

I am envisioning this as a challenge that eventually sprawls over the entire neighborhood, as I don't see any way to get to 100 points without playing the family members who move out to University, and while it's relatively easy to maintain an absent family member at BFF if you play both families, if the family in the apartment has to do all the relationship work it will be much harder, and you risk losing the points for that connection. The extended family assimilates together or it breaks up into smaller families.

Hmm - it occurs to me that I've been assuming relationship points would lost with the relationship, and never mentioned it. Bad idea, or not?

The obvious corrollary, of course, is that as long as the core family maintains the connection to the member who's moved out, they should be able to count that family's friends and connections toward their point total; which could quickly get mindboggling to keep track of. The more I think about this scenario in detail, the more I think it's a good concept for play, but has some basic structural flaws as a challenge.

Hmm... I don't think relationship points decay quite that fast, unless one of my MATY mods adjusts those... but I've always found it relatively easy to keep relationships decent just via phone calls. (Also, family members don't count as friends for work even if they live in another house, so for people without the patience to rotate between more than one or two lots it might be okay to let the family members all live in an "apartment complex"... if they can afford to upgrade.)

I like your thoughts on using apartments to constrain the space available. But for non-AL players, a 3x2 lot is actually huge if you're a good builder... a limit on the dimensions of the house itself would be better. Maybe a total number of tiles, so you can use different configurations of dimensions when building. And I'd cap any home at 3 floors high. If you want I can send you screenshots of the lots I built and if they work I'll clear out the CC and submit them as a set.

The relationships don't decay quickly, but if you're juggling a lot of them from a single household they can take up a lot of your time; whereas if you play a lot of people with common friends, a couple of homemakers or singles with undemanding jobs can arrange outings and parties and keep everybody tight. That would be a personal judgment on how to play the challenge; but my job is to figure out whether to encourage multiple-lot play with how I work the scoring.

For non-AL players, yes, a 3x2 lot is too big, and I should have thought of limiting the height of the house myself. Even three floors is kind of big; I'd say cap it at two-and-an-attic - attics are so tiny they're hard to make good use of.

The trouble with faux apartment complexes in non AL lots is that they're going to be wandering back and forth wanting to use each other's stoves and sleep in each other's beds all the time, and the people in one unit are going to suddenly take it into their heads to go two units over and hold the baby. In theory, this would simulate the extended family that is always up in each other's business and lives in a compound. In game terms, with the fondness sims have for doing things as inefficiently as possible, you're likely to spend a lot of time tearing your hair out and yelling: "Why are you going all the way over there to cook on Mohinder's stove when you're just going to come all the way back to serve it on Indira's table anyway? No, you may not feed your niece - your sister just fed her!"

But if you're game to risk it, I'm game to let you, and I'd love to see your screenshots. One of these days I'll read the relevant instructions and figure out how to show y'all the Iana's apartment block and solicit critique.

If I really want to playtest this properly I should start a new neighborhood just for it and stop playing my existing neighborhood for a few weeks; but I'd miss them all so much...I don't get to play Ernest and Sage Ann often enough since they graduated, as it is. (Yes, I am pathetically co-dependent on my sims.)

I attached a zip with a couple of pics & description.

To avoid that problem of families intruding on each other, I currently use Pescado's hacked burglar alarm from MATY that lets you lock doors to limit access. Tunaisafish also has lockable doors that are compatible with basegame & up which are much easier to configure and available here on MTS. (They just don't work with Uni+NL for some reason!)

I know you're not really supposed to do things to the lot or the furniture, but what about baby stuff? Is it cool to inventory the crib or stick it in the attic with moveObjects when a toddler outgrows it?