[QUOTE=louhema]Hello all,

In first, excuse my english, i will try to be understable but i'm french player [QUOTE]

Louhema, Welcome! You're English is fine--much, much better than my French!!

[QUOTE=louhema]if you are ok, i will post it on french forums and i will say that you are the creator, naturally![QUOTE]

Wow, I'm honored. That sounds great! Let me know where you post it--I'd like to see the site.

On Character Alignment:
Basically, a character can be anywhere from very evil (-5) to very good (+5) with neutral being in the range from -1 to +1. If you you roll a 1, your sim starts off life with a "good" alignment. You may either choose to give that sim a +5 or roll again to see where to start them off, i.e. between +2 to +5.

Behaviors influence Alignment: often a good or an evil behavior will have some effect on character alignment. For example, Tax Evasion, an "evil" behavior results in a -1 impact to character alignment, so a very virtuous sim would move from +5 to +4 if s/he committed that behavior. Neutral behaviors don't have any effect to character alignment but may affect other scores, like Royal Favor or Clerical Favor.

Behaviors are not limited by social station. Any sim can perform any given behavior--but social station may partially determine the outcome of a given behavior. For example, rich, well-educated sims will have a higher probability of "getting away" with evil behaviors. Similarly, evil sims are more likely to succeed at evil behaviors, and good sims are more likely to get caught doing bad things.

For this reason, the player has complete control over how to play the game. You can make your sims as virtuous or as evil as you want to play them, so that you can experiment with all of the possibilities and variations of possibilities, which are virtually infinite. How will your sim reach the top of Warwickshire? by playing it safe and being virtuous or by becoming the conniving Machiavellian villain? The choice is yours--but some routes may be faster than others.

I have to admit, I haven't been using the alignment options too often, everyone in my game so far has either been Fortune or Popularity. I can't wait until I roll a boy romance sim!

About the farm animals, they didn't work out, so I switched to the version recommended in this thread

And here is another update, since I've been off work for a few days!


1610

Cococure, I'm really enjoying your blog.

I'll be using alignment more with the second generation, since CAS sims are sort of boring. Second gen always have personalities and connections and stuff, and thus alignment based behaviour will be more fun.

The family I mentioned that didn't have an heir yet finally managed to birth a son, the 9th child to be born! Of 9 children only 4 survive to adulthood! Unluckiest family in my game. With ACR it's pretty much gauranteed that the mother will fall pregnant again next round, and thus die what with the survival odds after so many pregnancies.

Since I have two families that will be bourgeoise within a season or two and the first lot of teens will start moving out soon, I've started thinking about what sort of businesses will be appropriate. I find it fun for everyone to have distinct professions. Thought I'd share the first bunch that I want established, and was hoping someone might have more suggestions?

Apothecarian
Baker
Barber
Blacksmith
Butcher
Candlemaker
Carpenter
Cattle Farmer
Fisher
Fishmonger
Grocer
Innkeeper
Meade Brewer
Miller
Miner
Orchard Farmer
Pig Farmer
Potter
Sheep Farmer (Wool)
Tailor

OK here are a couple, and some with explanations for the simmy workaround.

Ratcatcher: i.e. Exterminator. This sim should breed cats and be "on call" for every roach extermination in the neighborhood. You got bugs? Teleport him over!!

Moneylender. Short on funds for that spring planting? No problem: this sim lends money at a price. Just don't forget to pay him back!

Cooper: this sim just sells barrels. For putting things in, of course.

Chicken Farmer

Cartwright: a maker of carts (could be only decorative, or could be "cars" made medieval--plenty of these to download)

Horse Breeder: to put in front of the carts, of course.


And one that would be soooo cool, but I don't know yet of a workaround:
the Falconer. Who probably isn't a merchant, come to think of it, but I want one anyway.

I'm already planning to do loans through taxes. Loans will be called the Crowns Bounty, and can be acquired to assist in enriching the economy. Only the bourgeoise can apply for loans to help get a business up and running, and the amount available is the amount of unspent taxes. Interest will go back into the royal coffers. If in a round there are multiple people that want a loan then they'll each receive an audience with the Queen - after the audiences, the families will get preference based on who the Queen likes the most. If the first family happens to take all the money, then too bad.

I'm halfway through reading your very detailed ruleset, and I just wanted to say how much I appreciate the time and consideration which has gone into this challenge. I consider myself a fledgling medieval simmer and am seriously thinking about starting a new hood to do this challenge with- my current hood is story-driven and I'd probably be too tempted to cheat the system in order to save my precious sims!

I'll be back with any questions that crop up once I'm done with the read-through. Many thanks for creating this challenge.

Monzz, thanks for your interest in the challenge. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to read it--I welcome any feedback you might have And, of course, I do hope you'll consider starting that new hood to try it out

Hi there, i have a question about royal favor and clerical favor. Is the favor earn for the entire family or just for the sim who earn it?

Another question : about behavior and outcome. When a sim do a global good action like pay the tax in time, the +1 is give to this sim or to the family?

Thanks for your answer

The way I've been working this out is behavioral outcomes go to the sim who performed them. The head of household (usually the father, if the only living parent is mother, then she will be head of household) pays taxes, so the +1 goes to head of household. For behaviors that involve multiple people, like raising 6 children, award the points to both people who engaged in the behavior. The same is true of the royal favor and clerical favor points earned. If it is too difficult to track individually, it might make sense to just keep tabs on the whole family--it's up to you, so that you create a system that works, makes sense, and is playable. I have definitely been discovering that I need better record keeping forms! For now, I am inundated with lots of scraps of paper and a few notebooks. Sorta works ... I think

Here is another questions :-p

At first, i need an explanation about the roll : when you wrote "Natural chance of survival - Men" 13/20, if i roll a dice, i need to do a score between 1 - 13 to survive? If i roll 15, my sim die??? It seem logical for me...

And, p5 of your pdf, about Living and dying... You wrote that every class above peasant earn +1 to their natural chances of survival. So a gentry sim have +2 natural chance of survival or only +1?

I prefer asking you a lot of things because i want to translate good your awesome rules

A 13/20 chance means that an event has a 65% chance of success. You can decide whether you prefer to have high numbers or low numbers "win"--I find it works for me to use the high numbers. So for a 13/20 chance, every number at or above 7 is a successful outcome, i.e. survives, since 20-13 = 7. I don't think it would make any difference to reverse the numbers as long as the percentile odds remain the same.

For higher classes, add the given number of increased odds of survival, so a male toddler of the merchant class will have a 14/20 chance of survival, instead of the peasant's 13/20--the toddler of the gentry class will be +1 more, so 15/20. This is owing to better nutrition, supervision, shelter, etc--all the things that make life easier when money is to be had. It will certainly make playing those upper classes more calm. I have poor babies dying left and right, not to mention their mothers. It's brutal.

OK, after having sat on this for a while now and wanting a break from my desert 'hood, I have decided that I might want to give this a shot, although I think I'm going to put a little spin on it and make it sort of futuristic, set on an alien planet with a group of bold, space-faring, but class-conscious and in some ways backwards people who have unexpectedly crashed on a harsh and uninhabited planetoid. Their tech has gone bye-bye as a result. I know that's probably out of the "spirit" of the challenge. I just really like the whole structure but am not feeling like going historical right now.

However, I have a basic and possibly REALLY stupid question: For all the parts where you have a chance of something happening, it'll say something like "roll 12/20." Does that means there's a 12-out-of-20 chance of that thing happening. I believe I've seen notation like this with role-playing games, but I've never played a role-playing game. Or is it something completely different? Someone help the idiot, please?

EDIT: Oh geeze, never mind: I see that louhema asked the same question. Serves me right for not reading the latest posts. *laughs* Never mind the idiot!

EDIT 2: Regarding, record-keeping. I am very fond of creating spreadsheets and databases to track things. Since I play the game in windowed mode, I can keep the game and my tracking paraphernalia open at the same time. If I come up with anything good for this challenge, I'll share templates, if anyone's interested.

iCad, sounds interesting The only thing that makes me wonder is the uninhabited part--there may need to be some sort of system for the people to struggle up through ... not sure how it would work with no one there since the question lies more with whether one wrangle up through the existing ranks of society. In this way, it does differ from the BACC challenge and lots of stranded/survivor type challenges. The problem is that there is an established order you're trying to have a go at. That said, I love your scenario, and I do think this challenge could be easily modernized.

Hi M3g7e,
I'm fond of medieval neighbourhoods so I loved your challenge and set up my neighbourhood immediately - 3 serf households, 2 noble, the royal family. I have a few things I'm still unclear on:
- When it comes to rolling for the survival rate at every life stage, for some age lines there's a " -- " sign, does that mean you're not supposed to roll, or that the chances are the same as the line above? It seems weird that the survival rate for infants should be 100%, yet I don't know of a way to kill babies, so I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
- I've had 2 plantsims already - I shouldn't have let them use pesticide, not very medieval huh? You admit plantsims in the game, since they can be gardeners, but I find that they make the game way too easy: no need for food, no need to sleep, easy way to grow plants. Is there a downside to being a plantsim that I missed?
- You mention that the positions at court (gardener, maid, ratcatcher, etc) can be held by serfs. However, can we create townies to fill those roles until our serfs can? I just can't picture Queen Vivian cooking or cleaning the loo.

Yeah, I realized that with the "uninhabited" thing. So I guess it's more like they'll be the descendants of a group of bold, space-faring, blah blah, people who crashed on an uninhabited alien planet a few hundred years ago or something. So there will be a system in place already.

I'm envisioning a kind of mish-mash of futuristic and very primitive, almost post-apocalyptic, I guess, so that it's neither a modern or "sci-fi" neighborhood nor a distinctly recognizable historical period. Plus, they'll all be "aliens," at least in the sense that they will have non-human skin colors, perhaps with the color denoting one's class...but maybe not since the point is to move people up/down, so that would get confusing.

Anyway, I don't know that all this will actually work. I'm very dubious of what the buildings will look like, for one thing. *laughs* But it'll be a nice challenge, both playing-wise AND building-wise, and it'll be an excuse to use the neighborhood terrains that I never use, dirt and concrete, and see what I can do with them. I need to get me some CC, though. (Like I need an excuse for that... ) If I can't pull it off, I'll just do something modern but mysteriously "tech-less" maybe. I like playing "realistically" historical neighborhoods, in general and have done so before, but I'm just not in the mood, at the moment.

I can't wait to see the world you create--something quite otherworldly I know what you mean about the "more CC" need--it seems that I can never get enough .... I always need MOAR!!

M3g7e, what about baby plant sims? Are we allowed to make some of them? In which measure? Is there any rules for them?

Plant sim babies, like Plant sims fall under Neutral Knowledge--no adverse effects; however, in my own neighborhood, I am sending them off to live in the fae subneighborhood with the elves and other supernaturals. It's up to the player how to determine this--you might even decide to have it fall under "evil" as a perversion of nature to spawn a plant baby. I did not relegate adult plant sims to this category because so many serfs and peasants will naturally have this state fall upon them due to all of the gardening they do.

Ok, in fact, i've got a sim becoming plant sim, i let him pop another plant sim, then i have call the gardening club (buying a phone just for this and selling it juts after have called) and buy a potion to inverse the transformation. I just keep so the baby plant sim.

How have you begin your game M3g7e? Personnaly, i've create 3 serf families, 2 merchant families and 3 nobles families (and a royal family for sure). But at the point of the game, i've never play the nobles families and i think i will not play them. I prefer playing the serf and the merchant and let them grow up. But, i want to know how you have begin your game.

OK, I'm starting to set up my neighborhood for this. I've decided to ditch the alien concept and place it on Earth (Mostly so that I don't have to come up with alien names, because nothing really came to me!) but to make it a sort of alternate-reality post-apocalyptic-y sort of thing. It's a time/place where catastrophe has happened of some sort, and in the wake of that society world-wide has been greatly restructured into a sort of "industrialized feudalism," based on a strange combination of corporate structure and "standard" feudalism. So as a result my rank structure is going to be a bit different, certainly with different names, and perhaps a bit simpler, reducing the total number of ranks. Other than that, I think everything is going to "translate" fairly well with just a few tweaks here and there. (We'll see how it goes as I play! *laughs* ) However, I don't have Apartment Life, so I can't have actual witches and don't have the life skills, so the requirements for "royal" appointments will be a little easier unless I can think of other ways to make them harder.

The "story" will basically be that the tech-less and hovel-living Laborers (Serf-equivalents) "employed" (Really meaning "owned") by their sectors are restless after generations of oppression at the hands of the corrupt and decadent elite, and they want change and a fairer and more equal society. But rather than risk life and limb in an outright revolt they've decided instead to see if they can take over by slowly infiltrating the upper ranks of society and/or (in the case of more evil-oriented individuals) actively causing the downfall of the current elite families, eventually replacing some or all of the current elite and then establishing a new order.

I've got my main 'hood, which will eventually be the merchant-class's domain, and a number of sub-hoods created, including two agricultural ones, one for farming and one for fishing, an industrial subhood where there will be factories where Laborers drudge their days away. For those, I'll be making heavy use of SimWardrobe's employee gardening/fishing objects and his packing stations, plus his candy-making factory object...which I'll be pretending doesn't just make candy. *laughs* Then there's an "elite" subhood for the nobility-equivalents where they will live their decadent and jaded little lives. And there' a "church" subhood for the cloistered clergy-equivalent. (The non-cloistered "clergy" will be distributed amongst the other subhoods and the main hood, centered around each "parish church.") I haven't decided whether to make the clergy Christian-esque or to come up with my own weird religion for them. I'm leaning toward the latter, but it'll be harder to do, so I might just wimp out and do the former and imagine that it isn't really Christian but representing something else.

Still need MOAR CC! But I think this is going to work pretty well and be fun. Lots of building to do, though! *laughs* I'm really looking forward to actually playing. *laughs*

One question, though: Regarding "plot size" for the various classes. I'm assuming this is the lot size to be used for the households in the various classes. Like, the serf's plot size is 9. So a 3x3 lot, then, since 3x3=9? Or am I way off-base? 3x3 for a serf seems big to me, although it does give room for them to garden and house a boatload of children...

In any case, thanks so much for this challenge. I think it's going to be hard to keep track of everything...so my next task after I get all the infrastructure in place will be coming up with some way (probably a spreadsheet) for senile me to keep track of all of the minute details...

Heodez

My apologies for not reading the thread closely enough--missed your post entirely. This end of semester has really got me beat! At any rate, I'll try to (belatedly) answer your questions. The survival chart does not have a requirement to roll for infants since they cannot be killed in game. When rolling for toddlers, you are in effect determining whether they have lived through infancy. At one time I thought it might make sense to roll at adolescent birthday to see if the individual survived childhood, but it is already so brutal to roll twice for children--and I've had such a large number die that I really don't have the stomach to roll three times. That said, the numbers I had originally considered for the adolescent roll were 16/20 for males and 17/20 for females, if you want to play the hard core version.

As for those royal appointments: given that the game is designed to simulate an already established system, it would make perfect sense to have those positions already filled by capable hands. The more put together the neighborhood feels, the more opportunities there are for your playable sims to create possibilities for advancement through friendships and to create intrigue, etc. And, of course, no one would ever expect Queen Vivian to clean the loo! At this point, I am trying to have some of my playable sims land a royal appointment, but most of them are waaay out of reach for illiterate peasants who don't have much opportunity to skill build, what with no bookshelves, or time .... and what with the incessant childbirth, and dying .... they're pretty busy mostly trying to survive.

The plant sims are pretty much an unavoidable outcome, unless you never spray the plants ... which is probably an impossibility at least until that much needed gold talent badge comes along, so no penalties for plant sims. And I've discovered even though they don't eat, they are still a bit of pain to keep track of since they drain their energy every night and then spend most of the next day po'd about it. I think if you find them too numerous and too easy to play, it would be a reasonable rule to have them required to purchase a potion and return them to normalcy. Perhaps exact some little penalty, too--loss of clerical favor perhaps? Though, I do think it wise to limit how often they are allowed to spawn. All of my plant babies will be immediately removed to a separate subneighborhood I have populated with elves. And this I don't anticipate being a very routine occurrence. I think I will probably work in some sort of penalty for it, but for now it's not something I do, so it doesn't seem pressing.

iCad: what a great scenario. I really like how you've translated this challenge for your own storyline. It's really cool--I can't wait to see some pictures. Sort of reminds me of that wierd film (think it was also a book) The Road. I can't wait to see some pictures!

You've got the plot size exactly right. And yes, 3x3 did seem big to me, too, but what with a pond (which pretty much every serf needs to eat once that refrigerator is bare), and a garden, and a big enough house, it fills up pretty fast.

On a similar note, I've been looking over the scales for how big a barony, march, duchy, is and keep wondering if I'll ever actually fill a subneighborhood that full. Right now my main hood has 187 plot squares occupied, counting residential, commerical, and clerical. Though I could see having it fuller (more full?), I don't know if I would ever have it be more than 250 squares occupied, but maybe if the individual plots were larger it would reach that size. Just don't know yet--but I'm thinking those numbers may need to be adjusted down. I'm open for suggestions.

Louhema
I started with one royal family, a king and queen, and one noble family, a lord and lady, and three serf families. I've played every family in rotation since the beginning of the nh, including the royals. When playing the royals, it is the only opportunity I have to help them make friends, etc, since it is an "evil' action to actively solicit their favor. Only a few of my more conniving sims are brave enough to try it since the King and Queen are known to have quite a temper. Since the beginning of the nh, I have added a prison, a convent, and now a monastery. These will also get worked into the rotation to keep all ages correct. So far, I've played four seasons past 1600. The year is now 1619, but it really feels like so much more time than that has passed since these sims live much shorter lives, and have so much more happen to them in that span of time. In that amount of time, one of my families has graduated into the bourgeois class, through a good deal of cheating. The most virtuous sims are the poorest sims. One family has gotten poorer, rather than richer. They are paying all taxes, tithing, and endured a horrible summer with the plague, losing most of their crops to a drought (no one was well enough to tend or water them). So, not too surprising, really.

I was never able to stick to a challenge before but I'm having the time of my life!
I've already got one ruined maid: noble teen Nora Dixon yielded to the call of desire (also known as ACR) and lost her virginity to adult serf Kerry Lynch. I couldn't believe my eyes! I nearly stopped them, but then I told myself, it's the game!
I'm suffering from a serious lack of marriageable males at the moment, but fate seems to counterbalance it since I've got two young ladies bound to become spinsters (Nora and her younger sister).

I will definitely share some pictures...once I have something picture-worthy! *laughs*



I might adjust the plot sizes down for the ag-sector "serfs" for my purposes, only because I'm thinking that one of the "privileges" of being owned by an ag sector is a portion of the harvest, although it will have to be purchased from the Overseer. So, I'm thinking they won't have to fish/farm for themselves. Since I'm going to be running the farm/fish farm as a big, owned community lot with members of the sector's family as employees of it, they will earn money. However, I'm not sure that it's all going to work the way that I'm thinking that it might. For one thing, I'm not sure that there will be enough produced in the very beginning to keep everyone alive! I've given myself a bit of an advantage because of my Sp-Su-A-W season set-up, making winter the last season, so I have some time to bring in a crop before winter arrives, but still... Anyway, I might either cheat and allow the "serf" families to buy what groceries they can afford and then refund them the money and then have them redirect the amount to the Overseer. Or if that doesn't work I'll just go back to them having a family farm. (After all, it occurs to me just now that I'll need something for the females and children in the family to do, eh? Assuming that they aren't all busy dying from plague. *laughs* ) In any case, I'm going to run a few...uh, simulations in my dedicated testing neighborhood to see if my ideas will work at all before I actually start playing the "real" neighborhood. If they don't, then it'll be back to the drawing board.



Yeah, with the brutality of this existence (Which I love, BTW), I'm thinking it might be hard to have enough Sims stay alive long enough to fill all those positions. Or at least I'm thinking that it will take a number of generations with enough survivors of each to get some of those positions filled. But to that end...

I'm thinking of maybe starting out with more playable households than the challenge dictates and set up pre-existing relationships and such. That way, I won't have to do so much world-building, so to speak, and can get right into the scenario at hand. I'm personally not afraid of the huge, long rotations that doing something like that will create; my Build-A-City neighborhoods often end up with dozens of households pretty darn quickly, and I play each of them for a Sim week, Monday to Monday. So it takes...a long time to get through a rotation once I hit about Week 5 or thereabouts. But I actually LIKE that; it prevents me from getting bored with any one family/household. So, I might start out with more households than you recommend, just to have more structure and simply more people already in place from the get-go, especially since I'm going to ignore townies for the purpose of this scenario. It'll make my ag set-up more workable, I think, for one thing, and will provide more marriage possibilities. Plus, since my scenario is one of a mass infiltration attempt, so to speak, I kind of need a pre-existing structure actually in place to infiltrate/replace. And as I said, the thought of playing a bunch of households from the start doesn't daunt me at all, especially since the season rotation will knock 2 days off of the week-long rotation that I'm used to playing! But maybe it's a bit of a cheat? I don't know. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Speaking of which...My game always starts on the last day of the first season I designate...so I guess that means the first rotation is only a day long in each household? That'll actually be hard! I'll want more time!

But anyway, if anything occurs to me that might be applicable for the non-modified rules in the medieval setting that this challenge is supposed to have, as opposed to my weird offshoot, I'll be sure to let you know.

Hi everyone!

Long time no see! I've been playing WoW for the last few weeks, but I haven't forgotten about my sims! I've been checking in on this thread and I'm glad it's getting a lot of coverage. It's always nice to see how other people interpret the challenge.

I've got some questions about child rearing.

How many of you are using the pregnancy accelerator? I haven't been using it, and I've had a single sim produce 7 babies from 5 pregnancies. 3 babies died, and she was saved from death once. What are your experiences with childbirth? Do you have a fridge that allows bottles? If not, what do you do if a mom dies in childbirth?

Do you find your houses get too crowded? If you play one house per season, and a season lasts 5 days, you can have 5 or more babies. Does the natural death odds help keep your population under control?

Naming themes - Do you guys use them? I'm going alphabetical (one letter per generation).

I accelerate pregnancies and find that everything pretty much balances out - for first gen I had one family with 9 babies born and 4 surviving, another with 5 babies born and 3 surviving, and another that had two marriages - the first marriage had twins that survived, and the second had 4 babies with 3 surviving. Everything pretty much balances out because I find the mothers tend to die before they can really have too many children.

Plus, it doesn't really work out to a pregnancy everyday, since you can't accelerate before the first bump - if you do then sometimes when you reload the house the baby will have vanished like it never existed. And I never command my sims to woohoo, so if they're busy harvesting a big crop or whatever they don't really get any idle time to go make a baby

I can't stand toddlers so I use the toddler blanket and the bottomless bottle so that I can pretty much ignore them. But yeah, if I didn't use that my fridge allows bottles. I'm not playing a historical hood though

For names I try and use letters from both parents names in some way.