I never liked the way the sheets felt on my body if I tried to sleep naked.

How do you define rotational gameplay? Unless you only play one family you're going to rotate between them.

Well I guess I just mean those who play from Monday to Monday, or day each, or such, so that each household gets a stricly equal amount of time

Not me then. I just play whomever I feel like playing.

I don't know if I'd say that you're missing somethin. I see it as no different than the people who like Sims 3 or 4. There are those who prefer that style of play and think that's the best way. In truth I don't think there is a "best way" to play sims. Would you find that way of play fun? You might, but then again, you might not and only you can say .. that is should you give it a try ..

For me personally, I do prefer the more strict rotational play. I tend to play roughly 3 days per family in a home hood, I stop the day at 4am while everyone (most) is sleepin so they start that way the next time. Uni hoods play out a little different due to how time works there. With aid of the sim manipulator I will also set the day, time, and season for any new household added to the play to be in sync with everyone else.

Thanks @Bulbizarre !.

That;s a mod I hadn't noticed before. I'll certainly try it. (I use Dolphin's Control This Sim in almost every play session.) But I'm also wondering what to do when the obnoxious reporter does come back. I know it's tempting to tell him just what you think of him. Telling him a few home truths may make you feel better for the moment, but it's unlikely to do you much good. He'll probably write an even worse review. Poking him (if you're a Sim) will probably make things worse still. So do you just swallow your pride and suck up to him? Should Josh try to build a good relationship with the cantankerous busybody? Maybe call him and talk on the 'phone? And then, see if he'll write a better review for you. It seems so shallow to me -- that you're bringing yourself down to their level?

The Sims 2 can be so like real life! But what do you when a really unpleasant person is in a position of power over you? In such circumstances I like to try solutions that might work in real life too. And hopefully allow my Sims to retain at least a vestige of their self-respect.

I play in a rotating manner so that the ages are more or less synchronized, but I don't write anything down. So I have lost count on more than one occasion, especially with the megahoods. xD It has also happened to me that some home becomes very interesting and I don't want to change. xDD

Don't know how accurate, but:

"This brief action... will be your only clue." Other than the wild appearance of the reporter with the most unusual clothes and hair. With my mods the reporter sometimes comes shopping without being a reporter. That was probably not possible. We jump to please him, and then he just walks away with a discount.

I don't understand these guide books that you could buy for money. They tell you exactly what to do even in the simplest of games and where most secrets are. Then you get no satisfaction from finding them.

They don't need any relationship with someone to be attracted to them. But your sim does have to be attracted to at least one gender to be attracted to anyone. Do you just want to see what the chemistry numbers would be ahead of time before deciding who they are attracted to? You can get the numbers from Cyjon's debugger.

Maybe he should commiserate with Andrew. It sounds a lot like his experience with the Headmaster.



They can be helpful if you're having problems with something. Plus, often they have things you never did discover by yourself. XD

I do strict rotational play because I like having all my sims age up together. I find if I don't there end up being families I lose interest in and end up not playing, which messes up the ages when the kids of one family are adults whereas their childhood friends are still children. I play where 4 days = one year and edited an auto-save mod to prompt me to quit the family after that "year" is up.

I also love spreadsheets. I have five spreadsheet books on the go for my BACC hood for a whopping total of 57+ individual sheets that do auto-calculating and data compiling based on what I've input about the town and the residents. And yes, I am fully aware that this is overkill for most people, but it makes me happy and enhances my enjoyment of the game.

So in answer to your question I would say no, there isn't a huge benefit between rotational and desire-based play. (Is that the correct term? I'm going to pretend it is.) If you're looking to try a different way of playing it's worth giving it a shot, but ultimately it's about what makes you (and your sims) happy.

You'd better be careful on MTS; I'm pretty sure we've given away some spoilers here, as well as given people help on making mods and stuff. Maybe we should just let everyone figure it out themselves? Imagine the WCIF forum- "Where can I find this hair?" "Sorry, can't tell you. But have fun finding it!" Satisfied?

If you go to a forum it is a bit different. You seek an answer to a specific problem and you don't pay any money. You can also ask to limit spoilers if applicable. But a book like this gives you everything on the plate. And because you paid real money for it, you might be encouraged to take a full advantage of all the hints to get its full worth. There are games that seem to be specifically designed to give business to the book author by including lists of collectibles that can't be practically discovered. Mod making is still a challenge the asker needs to complete on his own, otherwise it will not be his mod but someone elses.

Oh yes, I do see what you mean- but most people bought the Prima Guides for Sims 2 back in the very early days of the game, back when there wasn't too much information about the game on the internet, and when a lot of people had limited internet access anyway! We used them to find out things like, how do I build my own dorms? And what are the cheat codes? Now, people buy the Prima guides for nostalgia or collection purposes.

I play like this too I would hate to have to play in a forced order or a strict number of days, and not be able to jump back and forth between families when I feel like it. Sometimes it's my favourite thing in the world to play a single adult and really focus in on all their stuff and the intricacies of it. Other times I find that boring and crave the stimulation and challenge of a busy lot with lots of kids. Sometimes I want to play a sim who is a party animal and who is always jumping in taxis and zooming around different lots and sometimes I really don't have the patience for loading screens, and prefer to stay on the lot attending to whatever is going on there. Or I might have a relationship going between two sims and really want to follow up the other side immediately.

I have had various setups in how I kept the families synced up, because I do prefer them to at least roughly be synchronised in age.

Sometimes I use spreadsheets, or notepad files, sometimes I don't bother. I like writing in sim bios and family bios because that reminds me what I was doing. (I still miss that in Sims 1, you could read another sim's bio by clicking on them in the Relationships bar!) I don't like using a website, because running Chrome at the same time as my game tends to cause crashes and pink/invisible soup. Plus, I get distracted and go off to various other sites and forget I was playing the game.

For age sync, I most often use Pescado's Lot Sync Timer. It adds a timer to every lot so you know which day they are all on, and you can see at a glance by clicking the timer what day other families are on. For example, one family might be on Day 15, another family might be on Day 12, and so on. Then I've let that dictate which families I play in one of two ways.

Either, I pick the earliest day in the hood that anybody is on. Say that I have families anywhere from Day 9 to Day 15 - I'd choose out of all the Day 9 families to play, play as long as I feel like, and then any time I quit to neighbourhood or close the game, that family likely isn't on Day 9 any more, so I can't pick them again. Usually I can get through all the Day 9 families without finding anybody a chore to play, because I enjoy playing different family types at different times depending on my mood. But if I am bored with a family and they are the last on Day 9, then I would probably just fast forward through to 6pm to push them to day 10 and then save and quit to neighbourhood. Now I can choose from all families on Day 10, etc. This works well for a very large hood with a large number of families. I did it in my Uberhood like this.

Or, I might decide to play until a certain day - this is more likely when I either have something big planned on that day, e.g. adding a bunch of new families or a subhood, or when I have made the effort to sync up all seasons and weekdays to a chart (which I just keep on a spreadsheet somewhere, or I can calculate by just counting e.g. multiples of 7 are always Sunday so I count forward or back from there, days 1-5 are Season 1, 6-10 Season 2 etc. If anyone moves house, goes to college etc, I use the lot sync timer itself to change the weekday, and Paladin's Weather Control Vase to change the season (or, for a while I just used the aspiration reward). So for this I might say OK, Day 15 is when the Big Thing happens/is the end of Summer, and I want to play everyone through Summer, so everyone is somewhere on Day 11-15, and I can play any family but not let it tick over to Day 16.

On this one hood where I was testing a challenge, I decided not to bother with the timer and instead just synced it using the seasons because this is visible in hood view. This works best in hoods with all 4 seasons. So for this I know that for example currently I am playing "Spring". In the neighbourhood, I can see some families with the Spring icon and some with the Summer icon. I am only allowed to load up the Spring families. I play them for as long as I feel like but as soon as it ticks over into summer, I quit to neighbourhood and play another family. Doing it this way is nice because I feel as though I am playing through a whole season at a time. During Spring and Autumn, I change everyone's outfits to a warmer-weather or cooler-weather one respectively. So during those seasons, people are dressed in a mixture of clothing - short sleeves and long, sun dresses and jeans. But the further we get through each changeover season, the more clothing you notice relevant to the next season and it gives a sense of progression. (It also means that sims get an outfit change at least every ~10 in-game days, if they don't age up in between, so I try to reflect their age in their outfits too.) By summer, everyone is dressed in clothing for hot weather and don't look strange swapping from a bikini for a dip in the outdoor pool to a full sweater and cords. So I quite like this, and keeping seasons and days synced with the other method is good in this way, too.

I don't really bother to celebrate "holidays" in the TS2 world. It would be too repetitive for me to make everyone celebrate them individually. Events like weddings and graduations, yes. I sync college a bit more than this even with my more haphazard system of synchronisation, because too much repetition is boring. But things like in the "Day" method, sims can go to college on an even day only, which forces certain sims together, which I like. And for the seasons, I had one intake of teens each season, which was another way that I pushed them together, and I liked this even more for that smaller hood. I'd like to expand out to things like a school prom, funerals, and maybe community events like a summer fayre. To avoid having to play the same event out multiple times, I use things like a community lot and invite everyone to it so I can see them interact on that lot. Sometimes if it happens to be an IRL event and the sims I'm playing are in the right season, I might add some themed thing in. But usually it just then looks strange when I next play them and it's still there

Honestly, I don't see that other people playing in a stricter rotation are getting something better than I am getting. I think it is just a playstyle preference. I see that some people play by assigning aspiration based on personality, or they only ever play one family, legacy-style, or they "see themselves" as the "main" character. Or they make their sims do the same thing as each other, always following LTW, always having the same number of children for example. There is nothing wrong with playing that way. But I would be bored. I like my sims to be unpredictable because that is what I find entertaining. Somebody else might find the repetition, or the ritual, of knowing what to expect soothing or relaxing, or they might play a system with finances which requires careful note-taking to keep track of it properly so that it makes sense, and their play order is calculated to keep all of this up to date. I don't have the patience for this and I see the sims' money as an approximation anyway. As long as they are roughly where they are (struggling to pay bills, swimming in cash, somewhere in between) it works for me.

Sometimes if you have a very integrated hood or sims jumping back and forth between homes (e.g. parents with shared custody, or a boarding school or army barracks lot) it can be important to keep certain lots in order or you end up duplicating days which is a bit of a pain.

@simsfreq, the love button is not enough! Thank you for your thoughts, and for letting me know the sync timer exists!
*takes notes*

Maybe it is just rotational... FOMO on my part as with anything nowadays, probably due to having access to so many people on the internet, or it's that awful nagging voice in the back of the head that makes you question everything you enjoy

Are there any mods/fixes that make winter more playable? At least for me, during winter sims will have TERRIBLE routing and the game will lag/freeze more, independent of snow. So I tend to just skip winter altogether on large lots but I'd love to play it again if it'd just... work.

There are mods for less snow and less extreme temperatures. I don't really understand why your sims are having issues routing without snow, though.

@MickeyIan It's indeed that one. Hope you like it.

Now I feel reassured!

The reason I play rotationally, (and usually in a fairly static order) is because I have this need to devote the whole time I'm on the lot to that family alone. I depend heavily on the LST and when it goes off (a reset, for whatever reason) I get very irritated. which is why I take detailed notes of that day and family.

I play for the 12 hours of that day, and it's very immersive. I do write down what happens on that lot, who stops by and things like that. It just feels orderly for me to play this way.

I'm pretty big in real life about routine and this carries over to my play style. I just don't like things out of order, and that's true of my neighborhoods.

I play rotations - usually one day but there is nothing I always do in every household in every hood - for multiple reasons. One, I learned in the original Sims game that it's a lot easier to maintain friendships and accomplish goals in one household if you also play other households. In Sims I'd typically play three days: one day for adults to both go to their stupid rabbit hole job and do basic jobs; one day for one adult to stay home and actually do things like skilling and inviting friends over; one day for the other adult. In Sims 2 I like to play single days intensely and then I'm ready to move on to the next house. Two, I really can't play the same family for long at a time. I lose focus. Even in hoods where for some reason I'm playing multiple days three is my absolute limit. Reason Three - and this is the biggie - playing rotations gives me a beautiful tapestry of the whole neighborhood, with threads starting in one household weaving their way through all the others, all the stories of all the characters influencing each other, and a real sense of time passing for everybody, actual time to be a child, University students not losing track of their families at home, people meeting and making an impression on each other in the backgrounds of other people's days, characters developing naturally, and it's all just so aesthetically satisfying I don't know how to express it.

I do take notes, or even write up the stories, dialog and all - I can "hear" what sims are saying, all I have to do is record it. This is really important in big hoods - I think Drama Acres was taking me about three months to do one rotation before it crashed and burned - just to keep track of things. In smaller, less thoroughly documented hoods where I'm doing something besides straight soap opera I might get along with just broad-strokes highlights in the bios and family descriptions.

I wouldn't use Lot Synch Timer if you paid me. So what if it's summer on one lot and winter on another? It just adds to the sense of time passing. I tried, in my broken Strangetown, to keep everybody on the same day of the week, and that took some work when people graduated at all different times from LFT. It made some of my rules about the limited economy easier to frame (new houses only built on Mondays, the number based on the nuber of people in the Architecture career) but wasn't really worth the effort otherwise; especially since Strangetown was S/S/S/W (I've lived in the American Southwest and this is accurate). The seasons were going to be whack between the main hood and LFT anyway. If twins living in different houses get their ages out of whack I have ways to address that. I live in the moment and so do my sims.

Mostly I go clockwise around a hood, because it's easiest to keep track of where I am like that; but sometimes I reverse it, if I have a reason to. And the map doesn't always line up neatly clockwise, either, and a long street will have me weaving back and forth. I don't do strict anything.

Flexibility is the key to enjoying myself.

Lot sync timer doesn't change the season or the day. I do that manually because I like the seasons to line up

I agree 100% with your last sentence.

In a couple of my hoods (and now I've added Widespot, pray for me and them..) the seasons are not what you could all 'orderly. I put the desert neighborhoods on Spring/Summer/Fall/Spring setting, because of course it doesn't snow in the desert-the LST also keeps track of when certain events happen, like a pixel growing up to the next stage of life, or dying.

I like having a certain sort of order to plotting out events-and if I know when a pixel is growing into a certain stage-(especially YA, because that's part of the 'college in the hood' that I have the college adjuster for) I can expect some part of that day being devoted to their growing up, or dying.

BTW, the LST does NOT have ANYTHING to do with the seasons at all.

It just ticks off the count of the days in the game. I've had it from before I had Seasons and it doesn't affect seasons whatever. It's just a physical manifestation of time. Because the days do change at 6 pm and all changes to any pixel happen then, which is why it is so useful to me-I can expect 'so and so' will grow up to teen, or whatever age.

I just like to have some expectation of events as they occur. You can mark ahead those days on it, so you can plan out whatever is going to happen a bit better.

I use to play 'strictly' rotations. Every family had to be played the same amount of days, following the first family of the rotation. If family 1 was played Monday thru Thursday, then the whole rotation was Monday thru Thursday. Spreadsheets were used to keep track. Lot Sync is fine, but I prefer spreadsheets.

I abandoned that playstyle, when I decided to give the Story Progression mod another chance. With my last hood, I jumped around and played families based on activity-level. I had one family who had a bunch of children, so they were played more than single sim households. It was fun to bounce around without having to worry about aging up the rest of the hood. I didn't use spreadsheets, as the hoods change at a fast rate with Story Progression.