Tip: Rotational Play

[MarianT]

Welcome to the forum, Jules!

You can find out how to delete cache files here:  http://www.carls-sims-4-guide.com/forum/index.php/topic,21899.msg401662.html#msg401662

I use index cards myself, but I don't go into as much detail as you do. What generation are you on for your sims? I tried a 10-household rotation, but I've since cut back to 3 households.

[JulianneALee]

Thanks for the welcome and the information, MarianT.

Yes, I keep way more detail on my Sims than is reasonable. I'm sentimental, and like going back over the databases to reminisce about my old neighborhoods. In Sims 2, which I played from first release to last fall, I had dozens of households, about 600 Sims total, and had reached generation 8. I'd still be playing it except that when Sims 4 came out I liked the idea of different-sized Sims and wanted to play with those genetics. In eight generations of Sims 2, as a sort of breeding experiment, I noticed how the families mixed and developed their "look." So far in Sims 4, I'm seeing similar things, but more complex with different body types. Some Sims are skinny for life, some need to exercise, and some are just hopeless.

I've played Sims 4 for a year now, and have reached 18 households and three generations. According to my ancestry program, I've got 81 Sims, living and dead. My first generation are all dead, except for one wise woman who Knows Things and will live forever. My goal with numbers is to have as few NPCs as possible, deleting all that are spawned and leaving only the mailman and maids. I have to be careful in purging the ones that come with an expansion pack. For instance, with Get Together the Maxis households are also group members and deleting all of them would make the groups a little weird. So until I get my own Sims settled into groups and decided which groups I want to keep, I've just evicted all the Maxis households without deleting them, so I can use their houses. So far I'm keeping the total population at about 200, and that seems to be working.

Jules

 

[Playalot]

@MarianT I rotated back to a married household to find that the sims were no longer married, in fact they had to be reintroduced to each other again. The only thing I can think of that might have caused it was since playing on this rotational save file I did a uninstall/reinstall. Have you had this happen to any of your married sims while playing rotationally?

[MarianT]

Yes, if I look in the relationship for one sim, she's married to a young adult female. But her husband's relationship says that she's still his spouse. I'm not currently playing the family, though.

I've never done an uninstall/reinstall on an active so don't know what other pitfalls might lurk.

[Shewolf13]

Question for you rotational players, especially you @MarianT

I'm currently playing a family that I adore.  I want to keep the town alive but I'm not as interested in playing all of the families, especially not as much as I would play my main family.  I know I can go into manage households and play with genetics, etc to add kids and whatnot.  I'm just trying to think of the easiest way to do it.  I plan on playing my main family for 2 weeks at a time, then switch to just kinda deal with the other families.  What settings should I use do you think?

[MarianT]

Question for you rotational players, especially you @MarianT

I'm currently playing a family that I adore.  I want to keep the town alive but I'm not as interested in playing all of the families, especially not as much as I would play my main family.  I know I can go into manage households and play with genetics, etc to add kids and whatnot.  I'm just trying to think of the easiest way to do it.  I plan on playing my main family for 2 weeks at a time, then switch to just kinda deal with the other families.  What settings should I use do you think?

I think the simplest thing would be to turn aging off when you go to play the other families in town and then turn it back on again when you return to your main family.

[Shewolf13]

@MarianT

Thanks ^^ That's what I was thinking too.  I haven't played around enough with some of the settings to know them as well yet.  Appreciate the advice ^^

[oshizu]

@MarianT

I'm having a problem with unwanted ageing in my current challenge file.
Sims who max their career are moved out to a house during their adult phase, so they can enjoy eternal life while looking good.
My settings are
Auto-Ageing (Played Sims): Active Household Only
Auto-Ageing (Unplayed Sims): No

Premade and townie sims who have never lived in the Challenge House have not aged at all.
When I move a sim out, their new household sometimes get the Played Sims symbol, which I click to remove so that they don't appear as a Played Household.
However, I kept getting birthday party announcements for sims who have moved out of the Challenge House.
Oddly, however, two such sims had a baby (she got pregnant while still living in the Challenge House) but the baby had to be aged up manually.

What happens to household members who move out is not part of the challenge, but is important to my playing enjoyment.
In your RDC, when the heir moves to a new place, the family left behind stops ageing.
I wonder what I'm doing wrong or if the two scenarios are fundamentally different.

[tjtemple]

@oshizu I had the same thing happen with a previously played sim, but actually when I switched across to the home of the sim with the birthday invitation they hadn't actually aged at all from the last time I played them.  So hopefully the birthday message is a glitch/bug.

[MarianT]

@oshizu, The birthday party invitation can come whether a Sim is ready to age up or not. My Sims have received several from their older relatives. You can send your Sim to attend, and the Sim might age up -- I think that happened for me quite a few months ago -- but might not. As for babies -- I'm not sure how long the game will let you go before aging them up, but I usually do it manually unless it's in a house I intend to play soon.

[oshizu]

@tjtemple and @MarianT

Thank you for your replies. I'll try ignoring the next birthday party invitation my sims receive. I feel compelled, though, to send my sims to attend the birthday party of their siblings and relatives, lol.

[MarianT]

Playalot alerted me to a problem for rotational players -- the patch for Dine Out introduced relationship decay within a household. This means that if you have an infant in a household, the relationship with the parents may decay to 0, causing the infant to be taken by the social worker. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the next patch, but in the meantime, it's a good idea to check on your families with babies once a week and to keep the relationship at "friend" if not higher.

[zembee]

MarianT,
I've been playing my single save file for awhile not knowing that I was doing rotational play. I've been playing this for quite awhile now with the Patel's, Holiday's, and four other families along with my original Sim that I built for the initial game, so that makes seven families total.

I basically moved all the sims out that I wasn't playing and kept the houses empty, in fact I bulldozed the original houses since I enjoy building in this game.  Building a house as the family goes through it generations gives the a bit of history.  I just kept the families that I was interested in, pulled a few 'unplayed' sims in to satisfy a cousin problem I was running into.  Currently the Patel and Holiday family is into their sixth generation, soon to be seventh.  I had no major problems as of yet (knock on wood).  With the genealogy, the family tree gets quite interesting.

I play with aging set to long time span, this gives me ample time to spend with most of the Sims, but I do concentrate mainly on my original Sim family.  I keep a spreadsheet of all the sims and produced some story lines as time goes on. I like this style of play because when you see the other sims, around parks and other venues you know who they are.  I must admit though keeping relationships is the most frustrating aspect of this style of play, since upon returning you find the child's BFF is no longer in her relationship list. I was hoping the MCC mod would fix this but it appears to only work on the existing family being played.

The families are spread across the different neighborhoods, of which most are located in the new neighborhood of Newcrest.  I abandoned Windenburg but kept the venues, three families were added from that expansion, the Villareal, Fyres, and Bjergsen.  Theses three families are in their third generation are are like a half generation apart from the Holidays, and other original sims.

I play matriarch style in naming, since that is the game's default and I pretty much allow the game do the naming of the babies.  I don't age via CAS, for it retains the number of days, if I want to age up a sim, I use the birthday cake, for it sets the days to zero.  This almost messed me up.

Reading these posts was quite interesting, for I'm pretty much been doing what was described in your first post.  I haven't checked my game save file size, probably something I should look into, but I'm not experiencing any lag.  I do get a few sim resets, but I been seeing those occur since the beginning.

I'll be keeping up with your thread, its nice I'm not alone.
Thanks. z



 

[MarianT]

Welcome to the forum, zembee!

Back when I was playing TS2, I didn't think of it as rotational play, either. I just had a few families that I circulated among, first in Desiderata Valley and then in Veronaville. But when TS3 came along, I discovered that I couldn't play that way anymore. TS4 enabled me to come back to playing several families -- a whole town if I wanted. So I wrote about how to do that for my friends on the forum, most of whom came to TS4 after TS3.

As for the relationship decay -- I'm hopeful that they'll fix it in an upcoming patch. Currently I'm rotating between 2 families in one game and 3 in another and haven't had any major problems, but then I don't worry too much about friendships. A BFF should stay a BFF, though, and I do hope they fix that.

I'm a little less worried about file size than I was when I started the thread and wrote the chapter in the guide -- TS4 seems to be much more stable than TS3 was. As long as you're not experiencing lag, you're probably okay.

[MarianT]

Some people have had questions about using "Save" vs. "Save As" when playing rotationally.

I use "Save as" only when I'm creating a template. If I've done a lot of work on buildings -- placing venues or different houses, then I use "Save as" for my town.

For regular rotational gameplay, I always use "Save." If something happens to corrupt my current game file, there is a small save icon at the bottom of the load screen that can be used to recover a previous file.

I would not recommend using "Save As" for each different family in a rotational game. The reason is that you'll lose the progress of your other families that took place in a different file. The single "save" file will keep track of everyone in your town, no matter which family you're playing.