Hey guys,
I'm Lizz and I posted in the Sims2.com BBS, but just in case no one reads that very often I thought I'd start communicating here. I've been playing my TOT neighborhood since March. I'm just entering the Roman Era and am playing a classic version of the challenge, with a few different twists. For example, during the Roman Era I created a few of the Roman/Greek Gods for fun. For the most part they won't have any effect on the neighborhood, except for being friends/enemies with the sims and fathering just a few children.
Also, I created an Egyptian part to my city. My families include the Shezan's (Skin 3, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Arab looking type people), The Froders (skin 1), the Pushkins (skin 1 & 2), and two African families named the Doli's and Raisa's. I've created 2 CAS's just entering the neighborhood named Helen Cerilinae and Ghalib Junaid. My other new sims for this period ended up coming from NPC's but I only choose one's with appropriate names with the right looks. The only last name that was gained from those are the Charvat's.
I love Sims 2, but this challenge renewed my passion for it! Im loving it and if I ever start anther challenge like this, I'd do it with another planet theme like some of you are doing.

Yes, the ancient(Roman) decor is Custom Content (CC). If you browse through the downloads here, you'll come across quite a bit. As for the heat need, do you have Seasons? In the summertime, if your sim stays outside too long, they get overheated and need to drink water from sink. If you don't do that, they will have a heatstroke and pass out. Then another sim will need to "dowse" them to wake them back up.

BTW, welcome to all the newcomers playing this challenge!

Welcome Lizz ! Im glad you posted here because its been awhile since Ive been over to the BBS. The last time it did seem it was back to moving quickly again. Too bad it took so long tho and we moved over here. ST really created a great challenge and Im sure she would be delighted to see how many of us still are playing it ! Do you have a blog or website where you show your progress? Even the BBS would work for uploading stories or pics *hint,hint* lol

LoL Anna, there WERE lightning bolts from the sky didn't you see?! And we're expecting a thunderstorm tomorrow - what next. I can hardly believe it still myself, yet somehow here I am in the Roman Era. I played all day Sunday but had to work all day Monday and it took me all afternoon to update today because so much happened, and now I'm off to bed looking forward to the morning when I can finally start playing again! (addicted much?!). I think last I checked you still had a gen to get through right? Keep going! It's well worth it!

Good to see the challenge just keeps increasing in popularity too.

taliah~

I just spent the morning going thru your new update Taliah ! I love what you have done so far with the buildings. I think you are going to have an over abundance of babehs again if you let them do as they please LOL You have given me lots to look forward to.

ahh ok and yes i have seasons, but i wasn't aware of the heat stroke. Thanks

Ok, another quick question, does anyone have any neanderthall pregnancy outfits? I found all sorts of other stuff, including other clothes, so my sim woman is quite out of place in her t-shirt while the dad wears his caveman clothes. I've searched and searched with no luck...

This Download is what I use for my hoods. I don't know if it'll work for you but it's the closest I could find here.

- VT

Help me stay strong here, folks. I'm getting so frustrated with all the little brats (babies and toddlers!) that I'm starting to consider aging them all to children! I am used to having nannies to care for them at this stage and it's hard doing without them!

Oh thats a cute outfit VT ! I just used undies for my sims when they were pregnant which I thought worked well since they are in the tropics and dying of heat lol Nooooo Sandy !! Keep at it. It wont take long for them to grow up. The best part of this challenge is playing differently then I usually do so I am experiencing new things.

Really? Most of us find nannies frustrating and useless.

First trick to managing lots of toddlers: leave toys and pet mats/toddler rugs scattered around. In a Neanderthal setting the pet dishes also make gobs of sense! If you have an activity table that fits acceptably with your "prehistoric" theme, they can also take care of their own fun and social needs. And make sure they have a nice cool interior to retreat to so they don't get heat stroke! Then all you have to do is stay alert for when they need to be potty-trained. Since your cavemen aren't going to jobs and leaving them alone, that fixes the social worker. With babies, feeding them and changing diapers is all you really need to worry about. If you feed the baby as soon as he's born and put him into the crib, he'll eventually cry for a diaper change; change the diaper, feed him, and put him back to bed. It's suboptimal, but all their basic survival needs will be met.

Second trick: It takes a village. Children can play peek-a-boo and teach the nursery rhyme. Teens can do everything adults can do. The toddlers may want to interact primarily with their parents, but they'll soon become devoted to older siblings, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and visitors who interact with them. This is how it's done in real hunter-gatherer tribes, too - the adults go about their business, the kids run around, and when the kids need something they can't do for themselves, or discipline is required, the closest adult deals with it.

Third trick: If you don't have support adults and teens, invite some! Visitors are great when you have small children. I don't recommend influencing them to cook (this only ever has two results in my game: Instant Meals, or a complaint that there isn't enough fish to make the dish the visitor picked), but they can and will cheerfully repair things, clean up, and interact with whoever you think is getting neglected. Toddlers can even ask for attention and food from them, and influence them to play with other toddlers! In a pinch, you can run out to greet a random walk-by, but established friends and relations work best. If you use Social Groups and ask people on an outing, "Just for Fun" to take place entirely on your lot, they'll hang around gabbing with each other, eating the meal you set out, and doing what you influenced them to do even while the person who invited them is asleep!

One of the benefits of this challenge is learning to do things in different ways, so embrace it and experiment.

Edit: Silly me, you can't invite people without the phone! Better stay alert for Walk-bys, then. Is ACR installed? When people drop by for Booty calls see if you can divert them to childcare. It's only fair.

I've got that stupid rabbit sitting in the room for the toddler to play with, so that's taken care of. Will they really eat from the pet dish?? I don't have AL so will toddler still nap on pet mat? I'm still holding on but it's getting hard in some households.

AFAIK napping on pet mats came with Pets, not AL; someone else may know better. Put one down and see! And yep, they'll eat kibble! Shovel it down, grinning from ear to ear, and killing their hygiene score, but the Family sims around them are going to obsessively bathe them anyway and a kid who's too clean is a kid who's not living right.

Peni ! What great tips. I find the babies are no trouble at all. Leave them in the crib like you say and they are fine. Toddlers can sit and play with a toy for hours on end and only get interrupted when they need food, potty training, changing or sleep. You dont even need to teach them to talk and walk if you dont want too. Practice makes perfect Sandy lol You can do it !

Ah, my skin 1 father just became a plantsim!! Have you guys ever had this happen? Now I have to decide whether to leave him like that or buy a phone real quick and call the garden club... As you can tell, this hasn't ever happened to me before, I was never into gardening when I used to play.

Oh and thanks for the link to the Castaway Maternity, she fits in much better now

The opinion of the person watching from the peanut gallery is that this is an opportunity not to be missed. Plantsims would be a huge boon to their families - able to work tirelessly producing food without consuming any, immune to heatstroke (am I right about that? I haven't had a plantsim yet), and aren't they functionally immortal? I'd make him a shaman, his family gaining status, everybody hanging on his wisdom as he gets older and older. You could even structure the start of civilization around his story - either he's the future emperor, and the social classes are built around the relationship of different families to his, or somebody resents and rebels against his dominance and sets up a rival faction that overcomes his Old Religion commie-hippy way of life and sets up the Empire. All kinds of story threads could lead out from developments here.

Even though I know they didn't have phones back then, I use them anyway b/c they still wrote letters and sent messages by word of mouth to their relatives. When one of mine turned into the plant sim, I called the Matchmaker (from NL) or Garden Club for the potion and then replaced the money into the family's simoleons using the kaching cheat, or the familyfunds one.

I don't know anything about them either, other than tidbits I've read here and there. Can he still father normal children? None of my sims have even had children yet, he does have his girlfriend pregnant though... If he can still father regular children, then I guess I might leave him like this, as I did notice he only needs Sunlight, Water and Love, that would be easier to handle. If he can only have plant kids I'll have to buy the potion though

cksmith, he can still have kids the normal way, don't worry

and peni, i love your idea for what to do with him and your tips on the babies. i already use most of them for my normal games, but then hearing them squall at me from cribs for hours b/c the adults NEED a little sleep and constantly watching their hunger bar gets annoying. so they sleep on blankets on the floor and eat from the automatic pet bowl i DLed from somewhere. Although i never thought of inviting people over for childcare... might have to start doing that. ~VP

Wow, so much activity lately! I can barely keep up!

cksmith, you're welcome. I do try to help out the other players here as much as I can.

Peni, you are one brilliant sideline observer. Plantsims aren't actually immortal, but I love the idea you've come up with. Reminds me a bit of my Nuidya tribe, the four-and-a-quarter year old hood I named my account after. All supernatural species are revered by the Nuidya (which is mainly why the only one in the hood at the moment, alien boy Zareb, is frontrunner for the position of Shaman Viru's apprentice - Viru's daughters are using that as an excuse to take every opportunity to fight for the attentions of Zareb's older brother). While they don't have any divisions of class, race, gender or anything like that, they do acknowledge that different people have different talents, and so it would make perfect sense for a plantsim (if I had any there) to take on the role of shaman or herbalist or something similar.

I'm in the process of rebuilding the hood (again) and I have briefly kicked around the idea of adapting either the original or mashed-up challenge to it, but then I remembered that the Nuidya don't have or like cities, technology or any form of social status except the Kenja, or chief of the tribe, and I don't particularly want to change that as it's part of what makes the hood what it is - so as soon as classes came into play I would have a major problem on my hands. I'd love to be able to share what's going on there with my ToT friends without going off topic, but I have no idea how it would work once it got past the Neanderthal age...

- VT

ETA: I've just thought of something. MATY has practically everything from the old Castaway Stories game extracted, and I have the lot of it in my own game (used for the aforementioned Nuidya, BTW). It suddenly came to me - maybe while reading Sandy's post about the rabbit - that some of it might be useful as less anachronistic replacements for some of the game objects during the Neanderthal age. Just thought I'd post this little nugget of information in case anyone found it useful. I'm here to help!

I dont bother with spraying the trees so I never turned anyone into a plantsim. Ive also never played one before ! hmmm maybe that means I should turn one into a plantsim ! One of those old men who dont have a mate might have a new story line now lol I do use the ladybug houses to cut down on the bugs for my plants because lets face it ladybugs have been around a lot longer than chemicals in a container lol In the rules it does state you can buy the potion to turn them back to human but since we are all doing our own take on this challenge it is really up to you what you would like to do.

Peni I think you should join the players and get off the sidelines You would have an amazing civilization for sure !

Hmmm I may have to use the ladybug houses so it won't happen to any other sims. The father that became the plant sims was already going to be my ruling family. I've only two families at the moment. The skin 1 (now plantsim) male and female, and the skin 4 male and female. Neither are married but have the same name as their "boyfriend" as I made them together in CAS. I figured I'd introduce the concept of marriage in a few generations. I am going to introduce more CAS sims later, I plan on making it seem like they've left their previous tribe for this one. I don't want to play more than two right now since it has been so long since I played, I've forgotten quite a lot actually lol. I looked at some of you alls websites last night and got a lot of good ideas. I wonder is it hard to set up a blog site like that and is it free? If it is easy and free I may look into it, that is if anyone would be interested in following mine anyways....

Peni appreciates the compliment but is way too involved in Drama Acres to commit to this at this time, thank you! I have to occasionally write something somebody might be persuaded to pay me for, do housework, and play with my tabletop RPG group, you know.

Setting up a blog is in fact easy and free - just look at how many people do it! Take your time and look at a number of different platforms. Google, Weebly, LiveJournal, WordPress, probably a dozen others are all about equally easy to use overall. It's just a matter of which one you find most intuitive, which looks best to you (not all are optimized for all browsers; Google won't let people on some versions of Explorer see the picture in my blog header, for example), and which is most accessible to you and those you wish to communicate with. The easiest way to start is to follow the links on blogs you like to the host platform, and seeing what they have to offer.

And I think I speak for everybody here when I say that, anybody who wants to post blogs about their sims games also wants to read blogs about other people's sims games. At minimum, I suspect anybody who hangs out in this thread would at least go give it a look. But if you want people to keep coming back, you need to keep giving them new stuff to look at. Better a lot of little posts once a week than one ginormous post at irregular intervals.

lol Peni I will keep at you. Either way its good to have you here to chat with ! You are an honourary member of the ToT'ers You are a writer ! Make no wonder you come up with such great ideas. Whats Drama Acres about?

CK I use blogger.com and it seems really easy to use tho I do love the layout of the Weebly sites as well because it has different tabs for other pages. Ive yet to sort that type of thing out with my blog. Sign up with one and play around with it. We will come and look for sure. Ive been slack with updates but hopefully that will change now.

I've been finding some appropriate outerwear for my sims, but none for Teen males and very little for other males and elders. Where have you all found period appropriate outerwear?