Hi everyone,

I posted a few months back that I was thinking of working on a new Build-A-City-Challenge variant. Well, I've finally gotten around to it and am midway through drafting the rules. I think it's going to be really fun! One issue is that the rules are turning out to be REALLY LONG. Rather than subject people to a REALLY LONG draft of rules that may not be very workable, I'd like to get some feedback on the structure and on what people like/don't like about BACC challenges in general. So I'm going to describe it briefly with a few samples/snippets from the rules I'm developing, and then ask a few questions. Answers to the questions (or any other comments or feedback) would be tremendously helpful to me as I finish developing this! At this point I really think it can be done, but I want the first draft released to need as few revisions as possible. So that's why I'm posting to look for feedback now, with it half-done.

BASIC CONCEPT: The basic goal (build a city with structured rules about construction, lifting various career and gameplay restrictions along the way) and win condition (get to 50,000 sims using playable sims and multipliers) are the same.

KEY DIFFERENCES:

1) Wealth brackets for sims. Your starting sims (you get 4 families) and future CAS sims that you earn are assigned to wealth brackets with a set amount of starting simoleons per household or per sim. This introduces a little economic diversity into your neighborhood and makes some families easier or harder to play.

2) Public vs. Private community lots. There are two types of community lots: Public and Private. Private lots are purchased and owned by a playable sim using Simoleons. Public lots are purchased using Tax Points (earned by the player through game events that would improve your city's tax base, such as sims aging to adult, sims getting jobs, businesses doing well, etc.) Various kinds of lots and their prices, requirements, and benefits are listed in the rules (this is part of why the rules are so long). For example, a grocery store allows your sims to order groceries on the phone. Many lots open one or more job slots in related careers.

3) Specialty Districts. These are the sub-neighborhoods, including universities, downtowns, and shopping hoods. But, riffing on Kat's idea for a military base in her original rules , I thought, what if there are a bunch of different kinds of Specialty Districts? They each cost Tax Points to build and each have different benefits: some allow special buildings to be built (example: a Research Lab, which opens slots in the Science career, can only be built on a Military Base or a Public University). Others, such as universities, allow sims to qualify for a wider variety of careers. Public Universities and Military Academies are bought with Tax Points and tuition is free; Private Universities are bought by a sim with simoleons and cost the student sims a lot of money! And, if your sim attends a Military Academy, s/he is required to serve in the military for 7 sim days after graduation. You can also build an Arts District which gives you some free Arts-related buildings and allows you to create a bunch of (mostly destitute) arty/bohemian Sims in CAS. Most Specialty Districts earn you some number of CAS sims of a specific wealth bracket that makes sense for the district (Private Universities attract wealthy sims). The choices you make about which specialty districts to build, and which community lots to build, will really shape the character of your city.

4) Increased Probability of Sim Death. For me, in the normal course of game play, my sims rarely die. But, deaths can be interesting for story purposes and mandated deaths can also introduce an extra challenge! So my rules allow for a possibility of sim deaths. For example, at the beginning of the game, medical facilities are nonexistent. Until you build a Hospital, plague may sweep through your city. So, at the beginning of each play cycle you roll a die, and if you roll for plague, you have to randomly determine if each individual sim dies of plague. Building a Hospital removes this risk, so it can be a good use of Tax Points! Another example is that, if your supernatural population gets too large, the regular sims get suspicious and afraid and they attack the supernaturals and kill some of them. But, if you build an Institute for Paranormal Studies, increased understanding helps keep this from happening!

Some sample snippets from my rules behind the spoiler...

SPECIALTY DISTRICTS


CAREERS


COMMUNITY LOTS/BUILDINGS


There's more -- and will be a lot more by the time I'm done-- but that should be enough to give you the general idea of how careers, specialty districts, and community lots will interact with one another. Please note the costs may need to change by a lot; I have to figure out how to balance it right.

Now for my questions! Feel free to answer any or all or none of them.

1) Is there anything about the original BACC challenge that you found too easy? (Earning money, unlocking careers, earning multipliers, other stuff)
2) Was there anything that you found too difficult or just not fun? (for example, in my own case, I hate running restaurants because I suck at it, so under the original rules I just never unlocked the Culinary career).
3) What number of families or sims (actual, not multiplied) became just too much for you to handle? I've attempted the BACC several times and I find that after I get to a few dozen families it's just too much and I end up abandoning it and starting over. If that's true for you, where's the threshold?
4) What is the most fun aspect of the BACC for you?
5) If you have any suggestions for buildings or specialty districts, fire away!

I expect people's answers to these questions will be very different from person to person, but the better idea I can get of how people like to play it, the more likely I can come up with a long ass ruleset that will benefit others besides just myself!

Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing what you think.

sounds interesting i'll wait for a full draft release before I ask questions because I think most of mine will be answered in the full edition.

By all means ask them now. Maybe you thought of something I didn't that I can account for as I'm working on it.

It looks interesting to me, too. I like the idea of job slots becoming available with a special district or a lot - actually, I like the idea of there being more than one route to achieving a goal, like slots in the paranormal career opening with more graves OR with more supernatural sims, or buildings in special districts opening culinary career slots (or other careers). It makes the challenge more flexible to different player styles. I also like the idea of random deaths being incorporated into the challenge - have you thought about tying the chance of death into a sims career - like a 1 in 20 chance of death in a season while serving in the military or police forces? I remember seeing something on a thread here where someone posted how they worked the chance of workplace deaths into different careers and career levels, but I'm sorry - I can't find it, and don't recall who posted it.

For your questions:
1. I can't address this one - I use BACCs as inspiration for how I start my 'hoods and for some ideas on how to guide my own play (career restrictions, lot ownership, and unlocking things like vacations by building certain lots), but I've not closely followed a challenge and used multipliers or had a population target in mind. I keep meaning to set up a game folder without mods other than essential ones for challenges like this - probably my next new 'hood.
2. I don't like running restaurants beyond having one player owned one (OK, maybe 2 - a formal one and a fast food/pizza joint). The others, I build and then donate to the community. Again, I don't like there being only one path to opening careers; sometimes it makes sense that a career be opened before the requirement outlined in the challenge rules is met. This could apply to any career, but here I'm thinking of law enforcment - x burglaries can take a while; I modified my game-play rules to consider 3 burglaries, 30 newspaper thefts (should have upped this - my sims love stealing the paper), having a mayor and another sim who owns a police station, OR more than 10 playable households with at least one person employed as a criminal.
3. The number of playable sims in a neighbourhood that is manageable will vary widely in the community. I've currently got 26 non-university households and four university ones, and I'm comfortable adding a fair number more. I've been rotating through all of those households by season. I could see it becoming unwieldy at some point but not anytime soon, and there are some households I like more than others. The ones I don't like are few, but I could see giving some sims a house and a needed career, and then ignoring them. I'm not planning on doing that with my current hood (right now, I'm just looking for ways to make them interesting), but you may want to consider some route that allows players to remove a percentage of lots from their play rotation, or play some houses less often than others (like every other rotation). With my old 'hood, I moved the sims I wasn't enjoying onto the same lot - they served their purpose to the community with their careers, and I got through all of them at once.
4. I like the integrated aspect of the 'hood - money paid to bills doesn't go into nothing, it serves to fund unowned community lots (I tracked how much was paid); additional fees and taxes go to sims in public service careers; sims can't order a pizza or groceries if there isn't a place to order from.... It makes the little pixel's lives make sense to me.
5. How about a rural/resource based sub-hood - farms, fishing, logging, mining and so on? My farmers and fishermen have businesses (home and community) and they were well established before my sims bought a regular grocery store. I also have some sims in a custom agriculture career (not necessary, since I could employ them at the home businesses, but my farming families are currently large enough to handle their workload). My miners use the crafting stations from Plumbob Keep; eventually, that will enable my town to have a factory (custom career, and I'll build a lot near the rail yard that will also be built). One of my shopping districts has a harbour and beach area - ferry for easier travel, cargo shipping to lower costs of goods in stores, a lot associated with the oceanographer career, a beach and boardwalk and gift shops for tourists.

Would your challenge start with empty templates, or would there be restrictions on interacting with townies until the community reached a certain size? Will you be setting the challenge in a completely unmodded game, or will you have options and handicaps associated with common mods that affect game-play (aging mods, slower or faster skilling, community lot skilling, ACR, inteen, assorted annoyance fixes, autonomy mods, ...)? If you are interested in including custom careers as an option, I use the NPC careers by TashaFaun and one way to unlock NPC services in my game is by having sims employed in those careers.

What you've posted so far has me looking forward to the rest of your challenge. Good luck with it.

This is well thought out and interesting. I currently really enjoy playing mine using the original clintcasey BaCC rules and intend to finish it before considering any new variants.

I do want to give you feedback on your questions though, I hope they help!

This is great! Thanks so much, stitching, it really helps me as I think through this to hear how other people like to play. I have certain "problems" (annoyances, difficulties, etc.) that I was trying to solve with my new rules but you're already pointing out ones I hadn't thought of that the rules can easily address, so this is very helpful.

One of my goals is definitely to make it possible to have multiple paths toward various goals. Partly so that if others like us hate playing restaurants, they have a different way to unlock culinary. But also partly because a huge part of the fun of a BACC, for me, is that it can make TS2 a bit more of a strategy game, where you are deciding how to use your resources (simoleons and, in my variant, tax points) to reach game goals (unlocking careers, getting more sims, getting certain types of buildings, making bad stuff stop happen). Finally, I have it in mind that taking different paths can change the character of a neighborhood... obviously if you built a Military Base and a Military Academy you'd end up with a different neighborhood than one with a Public University and an Arts District, or a Private University and a bunch of Business-Related districts.

I came up with the tax points because I was trying to keep track of how much money I "taxed" my sims, but I kept forgetting to tally it in, and it ended up being a huge annoyance. But one thing I did find fairly easy was to use my spreadsheet to keep track of what sims I had and what community lots I had. So if I forgot to update it one play cycle, I could go back and see that yes the Jones family has 2 adults and 3 kids and these are their names and ages, and put in the update. But, if I didn't remember whether I had taxed them 10% (or whatever rule I had in place) well that information was just lost to the ether. So as I'm putting this together I'm trying to make it be the first way as much as possible, where you could set up a spreadsheet that tracks pertinent details and then you can go back and check them to keep yourself on track. I plan to provide a spreadsheet that can be used to track and play the game with the finished rules.

Another fun aspect of the tax points for me is that it makes the distinction between sim-owned lots and community-owned lots meaningful in the game. And, the degree to which you focus on one or the other, or try to find a balance, also will affect the character of your neighborhood.

That's a great point about having a way to get rid of annoying or boring lots. I had been thinking of adding other kinds of disasters than plague and anti-supernatural riot: maybe some should be lot-related. What if a satellite fell on the house instead of in the yard? Likely everyone in there would die, so if you rolled that disaster you'd have to kill the entire family by satellite. I also considered including a mechanism for players to choose to have a disaster. So maybe you could choose to wipe out one of your households and get some Tax Points back (not super realistic, but more of a bonus to make it worthwhile... I guess maybe FEMA wrote your city government a check, if you're in the US). This would allow people to get rid of unwanted households AND provide a mechanism to sacrifice a family to get some desperately needed tax points. That could work really well. I'll be brainstorming more ideas for disasters so if anyone has any, fire away.

I don't plan to require an empty-template start, because I really like having townies. (I actually get super particular about designing them myself, and making sure that my neighborhood is racially and ethnically diverse, but that may be just me...)

As far as mods, I use a lot of Pescado mods in my game and a few others but I'm fairly conservative about what I add. I think people will find something like the Monique computer extremely useful for being able to choose your job instead of waiting for it to show up in the paper, and for taking out loans (which will be unlocked when you build a Bank, I think). But I'd like for it to be fairly flexible with different people's mod preferences. For example, I know some people have mods to prevent kids going to school, but I don't use those. So people could either stop their kids going to school until they build a school, or just handwave it and pretend they aren't going to school (which is what I plan to do). Hopefully the game will be able to adapt to whatever mod configuration people prefer.

I really like the idea of NPC careers unlocking services, thanks for linking me to those -- I wasn't aware of them. I have not yet used custom careers in my game but I'm open to them, especially for this challenge. I hope to design it so that people don't HAVE to have them, but maybe as add-on options that make the game more interesting.

Great point. I've never actually reached 50,000 -- I would get bored with my neighborhood and walk away for a while, and then just make another instead of picking it back up. It does seem really difficult and time consuming and maybe "winning" shouldn't take years and years. I'll definitely re-evaluate that when I get to figuring out the numbers. Thanks!



This is also super helpful. If other people have opinions about this or would like to join in spitballing about the numbers, I'd love to hear thoughts.



Makes sense! Part of my goal with the rules variant is to tighten up the framework in the sense it becomes a little more internally consistent and a challenging game in its own right, but I also want it to be flexible enough to accommodate a wide variety of preferences and play styles.



That's two votes for this! I'll have to sit and think about how it can be worked in. Do you also use mods for your rural/farming district?



Ooh, yes, actually I agree completely with you. I like them, but not everyone does (and even I don't like all of them -- zombies, ew) so they won't be required at all. Having them makes it easier to get a lot of paranormal slots, but if you don't use them, you could still have a few slots, and you wouldn't have the risk of getting them attacked by the "normals".

This sounds very interesting! I have adapted the original BACC rules (using elements from many of the rule alterations that other people have shared) for my own use and, though I am unlikely to ever play the BACC exactly according to your rules, I am very interested in reading them when they are finished!

In the meantime I have a request: please can you expand on how Tax Points would be earned?

Sure, lauratje86! I'd be interested to read your rules variant as well, is it posted anywhere?

Here's the section of the rules I wrote about tax points. The tl;dr version is that you get tax points from (1) businesses gaining rank & getting best of the best award, (2) born-in-game sims aging to adult, (3) new households being formed either by existing sims moving out or new CAS sims forming new households, (4) taking on extra, optional game conditions that make it more challenging.

The numbers are going to need tweaking when I get more of the framework settled. And I may want to add in more ways to earn Tax Points before it's done.



Here's the text about how to set up your initial families, included because there is an example of an "extra challenge" game condition you can pick that earns you extra tax points.

I'm pretty sure I never actually posted it anywhere. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never actually wrote it up in full! I've never gotten past about a dozen households in a BACC, so most of the rules and things that only become relevant as the population expands have never been relevant to my game-play. I tend to combine the BACC aspects with various other ideas that I like and just go with that.

Your tax points certainly sound interesting! I am looking forward to reading your rules in their entirety. It's hard to reach any conclusions without reading everything, but I'm excited to see what you've come up with! I think that I will struggle to gain tax points under your system as it stands - businesses are not my forte and I don't think I've ever gotten a business to level 5, even! Well, maybe once, but that's it. And I know for sure that I've never reached level 10. Perhaps it'd be nice if there was 1/4 of a tax point available for the first increase in level for a business as well? Especially when the population is small it would be very difficult to gain those levels. I expect that most of my tax points will come from sims aging to adult!

I like the set-up rules for the families. The wealth brackets are a good idea though the wealthy one seems *very* high to me. Is it allowed to gain extra tax points by dropping households down by more than one wealth bracket? So, for example, one could start with all four households being destitute and earn 6 tax points right from the start?

Can you give any more example of "extra challenges" that earn tax points?

**ETA** I just realised that I never answered your questions from your first post!

1) Is there anything about the original BACC challenge that you found too easy? (Earning money, unlocking careers, earning multipliers, other stuff)

Nope, not really :-)

2) Was there anything that you found too difficult or just not fun? (for example, in my own case, I hate running restaurants because I suck at it, so under the original rules I just never unlocked the Culinary career).

It's not something that was "too difficult", as such, but due to the way I play it's very very rare for my sims to reach the top of a career (I play a wants-based game, so if my sims don't roll a want for a promotion they don't work towards getting one (though they may get one anyway, if they happen to have or roll wants for the required skill points and number of family friends). That meant that I pretty much never unlocked careers, because they tended to only be unlocked when a sim reached level 10. I barely use careers in my BACC 'hoods as I play them as "self-sufficient" 'hoods, for the most part, so all of the sims who have jobs must have a) a part to play in running the town (like being a teacher in the playable (using mods from Simlogical) school, or being the postman, or owning the local pub) and/or b) a visible workplace within the town (so there may be some sims in the Science career track if there is a research laboratory in town, for example). As I said, though, I'm basically going to steal bits from your rules to alter my BACC rule-set, so I don't mind if your version doesn't make sense with the way I play! :-D

3) What number of families or sims (actual, not multiplied) became just too much for you to handle? I've attempted the BACC several times and I find that after I get to a few dozen families it's just too much and I end up abandoning it and starting over. If that's true for you, where's the threshold?

I don't think I've ever gotten past about a dozen households or thereabouts. Maybe 15 max? That's not so much because it's too much for me to handle, though, and more because I get distracted by another 'hood that I want to play (or a different game or hobby!) and then I don't go back to the BACC later on.

4) What is the most fun aspect of the BACC for you?

Having a connected population living in an environment that really feels like a village/town. I love it when my sims all know each other and have their groups of friends and favourite places to hang out and everyone has a part to play within the village/town. I also love my playable schools, and I always have one right from the beginning (so I'd mostly be ignoring your rules for unlocking each school, though I'd like to include your tax points idea in my game - so I'd probably have it that they could found a school immediately but it would cost them the tax points that I'd earned by creating households in lower wealth brackets). It just makes sense to me that there would be some kind of organised education available, even if it was just someone doing some informal "unschooling" style lessons in a little hut in the village, and I love the way that having a playable school connects all of the children and teens and gives them a chance to get to know each other from an early age.

5) If you have any suggestions for buildings or specialty districts, fire away!

I can't really think of anything! The rural/farming district that some people have suggested would be cool for later on in the challenge, when the original town was quite populated and built up - but as I said earlier, it's unlikely that I'd ever reach that stage! :-D Oooh, a playble prison/jail would be quite cool, but I'm not sure how you'd unlock it - and it would probably require mods (like the ones from Simlogical) to run it properly, which some players may not like.....

I don't see why not. Maybe you should even start with a few tax points in the bank.

Or!! I just had this idea, but maybe there should be an "advanced start" option kind of like in Civilization where you get to pick some buildings your city already has at the start of the game -- you'd get a set number of tax points and a specialty district of your choice, and you could set up a more advanced neighborhood to start off with. I wonder if, with your play style, you might enjoy that more than all the grinding to get well started at the beginning of the game. I think you would have a similar situation under my system, that it would take you a long time to advance in the challenge, so it may be more fun for you if you can set it up closer to your ideal situation from the beginning. I get the sense one thing you might enjoy is how I try to make the rules have an internally consistent IC logic to them.



One is that if you decide not to used a hacked computer or similar object to select your job, but wait for the right job to become available in the computer or the paper, you get a hefty Tax Point bonus at the start of the game.

I haven't thought of others yet, hopefully I will come up with more because I want people to have a lot of flexibility both in difficulty and in the number of Tax Points they start with.



Build it with tax points, I imagine -- maybe it comes with the police station! As to how it would work to play it, I'm not sure, as those kinds of mods tend not to be my play focus, but it amused me to think that the criminal sims locked up would lose their "job" in the criminal career track for not showing up to work, so maybe it would be a more effective jail than real life jails

I started my current 'hood with the rural district - without farmers and fishermen to supply food, the population would have starved. I didn't have a grocery store in my town for a couple of sim years, until my farmers had successful markets. Besides, real towns often start in a particular area because of either food production or resource extraction and the local economy is normally dependent on these things until the community grows and develops new businesses that can be primary employers.

I've been mulling over this rural district idea. For those of you who like to play rural districts with food production mods: would you find it fun to earn extra sims or population modifiers by producing a specified amount of food? So many fish = you get a new CAS sim, or so many crates of apples = +1 to your multiplier? This would allow people to either grind on it to raise their population quickly, or just play normally and raise population at a more modest pace, but quicker than just by the zillion-babies route.

Does that sound fun, boring, annoying, interesting?

@stitching @lorinsv60 and whoever else likes to play with that stuff

I usually don't play with mods, and don't think I would be interested in production goals. The only specialty CC I anticipate using is a more varied selection of crops. I don't even know if I will be using any farm animals. My rural district is mostly for a more "simple" atmosphere and style of playing. For instance, I will keep an eye on positions in the career tracks to make sure they're suited to a small rural area, like in Law Enforcement, a Desk Sargent (Level 4) is as high as I would allow them to advance because Vice Squads and SWAT Teams don't fit with how I envision my rural district.

I think keeping track of how much food that has been produced could be tricky; I normally have sims selling and eating the food, and unless it's an owned lot, the food harvested/caught is spread among the lot resident's inventories. An easier in-game metric to track would be things like gardening/fishing badges and the number of sims that have them (for those with seasons); the number of plots in each garden; or for lots with home-based markets the business rank of that market.

Linking food production to population increase (a new CAS sim or the multiplier) does make some logical sense to me, but the way of tracking it would have to be easy, or it would get annoying.

I've previously required my sims to have home businesses with a high business total rank (I used 20 ranks as a goal, so two farms at 10 or more farms at lower ranks such as four at 5) before opening a grocery store and allowing sims to order groceries (now I also require a sim employed as a delivery person for delivery).

I LOVE the idea BaCC. However, as with most challenges, I tend to get lost in tryin to keep up with all the rules, which is why I generally don't do them.

My eyes start to glaze over and my brain tends to veg out when there are all sorts of do's and don'ts to try and keep track of. (This also applies to long posts that have no break in them, but that's another story.)

So, for me, if there was a 'lite' version to follow that might be, well I don't want to say easier to play in play sense, but more of an easier to follow along sense.

That's a really excellent point. So, badges, business rank for farms, and maybe something like -- cultivating 12 garden squares from planting to harvest gives you 1 CAS. That way, you can put down squares in some multiple of 12 and whenever you harvest from them, earn your CAS. Although, I guess it could get annoying to track again if you were planting different vegetables and they took different amounts of time to get to harvest. The two ways around that would be (1) every time you harvest, count the plots and add it to the spreadsheet, and when you get to 12, earn your CAS (personally I would find this annoying as heck), or (2) plant 12 of one crop (this could be recommended in the rules). If you want multiple crops just plant them in multiples of 12. I guess big farms that specialize in a crop are more productive, anyway, haha.

So, maybe something like this?

Haha, sim colonialism! That cracks me up

I am terribly sorry for the necromancy at play here, but, did this challenge ever get any more development? I've been slowly (very, very slowly) working on my own variant for over a year (a combination of BACC, Apocolypse, Prosperity and Self-Sufficiency/Integrated hood challenges). Its no where near completion, but this one was off to a great start! I really hope the OP sees this and decides to keep going with it.

Thank you @bloodstained_black_lace for the kind words and encouragement! I have been playing Oblivion a lot more than sims 2 lately is all, because I am a nerd for old games. The nudge is appreciated because I was thinking about coming back to this...