on the play schedule of Alt-LH in TS3
I'm finally settling on playing 24 Sim-days per year, which gives me 2 days per story month. I started out trying to play with half of that (12 Sim-days per year), but my seasons ended up being SO short. This way, my season length is 6 days, and that feels perfect for me! Pregnancies will last 18 Sim-days, and my standard lifespan will be 1560 Sim-days. Also, now that I have about 18 households, two days per month was needed to visit everyone I wanted to, get story pics for the stories, and still do gameplay things like seasonal festivals and birthdays.
I do NOT want to go any slower than this though. I'm holding myself to that, lol! I'm writing and playing this story/neighborhood for fun this time, so I want the pace to be just fast enough that I don't get bogged down in the storytelling, but just slow enough that I can actually pay attention to the details of their little pixel lives.
Yearly play schedule (where "???" marks a not-yet-decided Sim or Household I'll follow):
Jan:
- ???
- ???
Feb:
- ???
- Winter Public Holiday, Winter Festival
Mar:
- ???
- uni kids - spring break
Apr:
- ???
- Public Record Day
May:
- secondary kids update
- Memorial Day, Spring Festival/Public Holiday
June:
- graduations
- ???
July:
- ???
- ???
August:
- ???
- Leisure Day, Annual Lakeshore Days Summer Festival, Fireworks
Sept:
- back to school, elementary kids update
- ???
Oct:
- uni kids update
- ???
Nov:
- ???
- Halloween/Fall Festival
Dec:
- ???
- New Year's Eve
I'm not going to give everyone equal playtime here, and I don't feel bad about that either. Especially in TS3 where they'll age regardless of whether I check in on them or not, not all families will get a story update in each year. If nothing interesting happens, they'll just live in the background. And that's fine with me, because I think it was my downfall in the gameplay of TS2 LH by trying to make everyone have an interesting storyline -- the fallout was that I couldn't keep up with writing all the stories.
From my experience, I gather that if I'm going to be blogging about a whole neighborhood, some of the residents NEED to be boring! So those families won't get story updates. They might get a group update or mention over here, just enough that you know they're still alive, but I won't be writing stories about them all. Definitely and enthusiastically not, lol!
And so the story updates will follow about what you see up above, and the rest of the year will be filled with the family or character updates from the Sims I *will* be following closely.
And so that's the structure for how I'm playing Alt-LH in TS3! What kind of lifespans and season lengths are you guys playing with?
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Sounds good! I think sticking to this sort of format will definitely help keep things fun for you.
ReplyDeleteI'm playing 21 day seasons right now, with three families getting 7 days of play time within that. I would like to play shorter seasons because they are really long sessions! But it's hard enough for me to remember to switch families every Wednesday morning. Having to count forward six days, or five days, and remember what day I started playing them would be a nightmare. I proved that with TS2! I play with aging off, so it's not the aging that concerns me but the seasons. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but me! I still have to think of a better solution, I think.
By the way, I'm not sure if you deleted your banner or not and that's why it's not showing up but Sari and I had a similar problem recently, with new and existing banners. We had to change the name of the folder the image was in and redirect. For some reason, that got it working again!
Mine is twice yours, lol. I play four days per month, with 12 day seasons and 36 day pregnancies. This feels like a good length for me. It's enough time for me to do things with the families, but not so long that I feel like the playtime is dragging. By the fourth day, I usually feel so ready to move onto a new family! ;)
ReplyDeleteWow @ both of you guys! 4 and 7 days are really long play sessions, lol! At the moment I'm forcing myself to stick with one family for about 12 hours just because I don't want to botch up the kids' prom, lol!
ReplyDeleteI suppose I'm short attention-spanned with my Sim families! ;)
But I really love, LOVE being able to skip between the families with no loading screens in this game!
I have been losing their wishes lately though -- it seemed an older version of SP kept them for me just fine, but now they don't stick, even when I mark them to stick in the SP menu. Weird. Not a super big deal though. I kind of like to pretend that they change their minds about some things if it doesn't happen to roll up again.
I have the wish loss issue as well, and at first it bothered me, especially when it was for big stuff like marriage or babies. Now I just figure that if I know they rolled it, I can still hold them to it later if I like, and I let their subsequent wishes tell me the direction of their thoughts. It sounds like Shana and I play the same: I do 4-day sessions, and my Sims years are 48 days. With some families, it feels like forever, but with others it isn't nearly enough time! If something big crops up, I'll hang around a bit longer. I have 36 day pregnancies as well. I really like that, because I am not controlling their pregnancies or romances as closely as I had hoped. Every time I think about barring pregnancies and romances, I think that it kinda makes it more realistic to let them choose--so when I leave them to their own devices and come back, often there is quite a bit to blog about because I have received notifications that someone is knocked up or there has been some flirting going on between two people I would never have dreamed of matching up. When I finally get back to that household, I have to think of ways to explain the crazy crap I saw coming up in the story notifications. :)
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