Well, after a long break, I dove back into Loch Namara.

Founder Brian Dayraven wasn't much of a farmer, so he became a painter instead and opened the first business with his wife Marie: an art gallery. Together, they had five children: a daughter and four quadruplet sons (I nearly keeled over and died when that came out - they were penniless!). Brian recently died ( ), but Marie was quite a bit younger than him, so she transferred the business ownership to one of their sons and still works in the Entertainment career as a Ventriloquist.

Eldest and only daughter Amy is now married to townie Clarence Phillippine with three children (twins Berwyn and Kevynne are now toddlers, and little Eloi is still an infant). Clarence and Amy are both Family sims, and operate a small personal-use farm - originally I had planned for Amy to open up a clothing and sewn goods store, but she's turned into a baby-making machine, so that's on hold for a while. Clarence also supplements the family income by writing novels and working in the Law Enforcement career.

Quad # 1 (aka Ballard) is also married now, to townie Kaylynn Spitzig. They're not doing so well - the Repo Man came, so now they're living in a tiny one-room shack with nothing (absolutely nothing - literally, there's only a fridge). In a dramatic twist of irony, Kaylynn gave birth just after they were relocated to their new digs to daughter Clarie. Ballard, who is a Romance sim and prior to losing everything had been a toymaker, is devastated.

Quad # 2, Cordell, is a newlywed. He and his wife, ex-townie Lyndsay Louie, are both Fortune sims and work in the Law Enforcement career.

Quad # 3, Dalton, remains in the family home with Marie. He's a Fortune sim and is the new owner of the Dayraven Art Gallery.

Quad # 4, Elijah, hasn't been played yet since moving out. He's a Family sim, and will open up a robotics and electronics store once he gets some cashflow. He's got a gold badge in Robotics.

Once the quads grew up and moved out, I had enough households for a community lot, so I placed a grocery store (Brian's initial attempts to operate a produce stand threw me off wanting a player-owned grocery store). I also have a free slot in the Law Enforcement career, and I have to check what level the art gallery is at, because that may be ranked 5 now... and 3 CAS points. I'm planning on creating a young family, just to spread out the genetics and relations a bit in the town.

Okay, so I'm not going to be restarting this challenge...I've gotten Ambitions and have officially made the leap to Sims 3. I did, however, tidy up the spreadsheet a teeny bit. I also added lots and lots of notes, so it SHOULD be pretty easy to understand. If I missed something (or if it only made sense in MY head, lol) feel free to ask for clarification. The file is attached.

What's In It:

Career Rules and Slots - a breakdown of every career with the rules for opening/unlocking it, as well as a place to keep track of how many positions are open/filled.

Population and Multipliers - this page keeps track of LOTS of data: the number of households, businesses, 'hood demographics, CAS points, town income/gov't budget, your multiplier, actual and BACC populations, fires, and burglaries. It also contains rule reminders, a place to keep track of your building plans, and an explanation of how Income tax works (the actual calculator is on another page).

Military - the rules governing the military career, as well as an active duty roster and a place to keep track of open/filled positions.

Taxes and Fees - another big page...this one contains suggested amounts for incidental taxes, as well as a couple (social security/school tax) which are included in the actual tax calculator. It also has a chart for converting the GPA given by the GPA calculator into a letter grade, a suggested curriculum, and a list of "school clubs" related to each hobby (and how to implement them.)

You'll also find medical fees, hood welfare guidelines, and calculators for pensions, child support, alimony, and Life Insurance.

Household Info - a place to keep up with your rotation schedule, any money they may get/lose during the course of the season, and a business directory. I never got around to adding a ROS file, but there's space to note what random events each household rolled if you have one of your own.

Rosters and Generators - the name is misleading, as I never ended up with any rosters on this page. It does, however, contain generators for a random sim, a random family, grade and high school GPAs, and seasonal taxes. There are notes on each explaining how they're used and a few ways to customize them.

rand. data sheet - just a warning ahead of time...I'm not really an excel expert; my formulas are clunky and ugly, so I've hidden most of them on this page and referenced them where needed. I'm sure some of you know how to clean this up much better than I did...but please be careful when messing with anything on this page.

This spreadsheet grew as I found myself needing different things, so there's not a lot of rhyme or reason to the layout. feel free to edit/delete/add to it as you see fit. I know there's a lot here, but hopefully some of it will be useful to ya'll!

Oh, I am itching to go open it up RIGHT NOW and take a look - in fact, I think I will! Thanks!

*runs off*

I decided to have a go at this. I normally have issues with long challenges, because I get bored (it's amazing, in real life I normally have a really long attention span, but start up The Sims 2 and all of a sudden I have about a 5 second attention span!) but I'm enjoying this one so far. I'm playing it for fun rather than to get to the 50,000 population mark (that's so never going to happen), and it's really holding my attention!

I have two households so far. My first household originally consisted of one adult female, who got a Gold Fishing badge and got a job in Oceanography, alongside moving in her townie boyfriend and having three sons. Their eldest son is a teen, and is in the Entertainer career because he maxed out his charisma, and the other two are children (not twins). Townie boyfriend Tony bought a sports-themed community lot, which is currently a Rank 1 business, and by doing so has unlocked the Athletics career for all sims. My original CAS sim is now an elder. The second household consists of an adult female, created in CAS when the town got its first community lot. She is in the Law Enforcement career (3 fires in household 1 opened 1 position in it), and has 2 kittens, both of which will take Law Enforcement jobs when they become adults (all pets owned by someone in Law Enforcement are allowed to). She's saving money to start a community lot business, not sure what it'll be yet though!

So 6 sims, with a multiplier of 2, equals a population of 12...... I'm working on it!! :-D I'm really enjoying this playing style, it makes a nice change! :-D

Just thought I'd mention that we did have someone actually finish the challenge over in the boolprop forums. To get your population really high, you need to do it with the sim multiplier. This means you need LOTS of universities. While Business Districts also affect SM, it is harder to get a huge number of BD as you need to top the business career for each one (plus you need lots of community businesses). Getting lots of universities in turn means having lots of money to pay for them (DAZZLING for simoleans, in other words).

Someone got to 50,000? Eek! I'm up to 42 now, with 14 sims in 9 households. Definitely never going to hit 50,000, but wow! to anyone who manages to! :-D

I started this challenge for the third time now. Didn't get as far as I did the first time, but I will soon I check and update my stats once a season and last time I checked my population was 24 but has grown since and the SM will increase when Dan opens his dance studio, the 5th community lot. I also have a CAS point which I plan to spend by placing a florist in my city. I already have a gallery, a bakery, a mechanics store and I placed a graveyard after the fourth household because Alvin Futa died of disease and I didn't want to keep his grave on the lot. I'm having lots of fun with this challenge :D
I was wondering if you get a CAS sim for every community lot or do they have to be sim-owned? And I would love to see pictures of your cities :D

I know it's been a while, but...Well, if you're playing by my original rule list, then you get a CAS sim for every community lot placed, Sim-owned or not. Although now that I've played this challenge more, I find that I no longer need CAS sims after a certain point and so I no longer keep track of them after that. The already-established families give me PLENTY of Sims/households to play since I play every in-game-born Sim from birth to death and I have rules as to if/when they move out and create their own households.

As for me, I think I have finally refined this challenge to my likings. It took me a while and a number of stabs at a city, but now I have rule additions that make the whole thing more interesting and fun to me. Perhaps I'll share them if I sit down and write them up.

But anyway, my latest incarnation, which is I think my sixth attempt, just passed a population of 4,000, and I finally have a Uni. YAY! It takes FOR-FREAKING-EVER to get through a rotation because I'm still playing each household for a Sim week and I have...a lot of households, but I try to have something interesting going on in every household. It doesn't always work, but I try. The stumbling block for me with this challenge has been keeping it interesting once there are more than a couple dozen households to play.

I'm taking a rather unusual but exciting shot at this challenge: I'm going to try finishing it without unlocking ANY careers, just having all Sims running some business or other. The sheer amount of community lots will rack up the multiplier quite a bit, I would imagine.

Anyway, here's my founder, I just finished playing her household: http://swear-bear.deadjournal.com/10782.html

I've not done that in a BACC, but I do have a neighborhood that I play where no one has a job unless they are employed by another Sim. Some own businesses (and they're only allowed to hire playable Sims as employees, not townies), some are artists, some are writers, some date like maniacs and sell all the gifts they get, some are farmers, etc. It actually works quite well, although I confess that I usually end up playing some of the households on "ultraspeed;" it gets kind of boring watching a Sim paint or work on a novel all day.

Good luck with the city!

Next household: http://swear-bear.deadjournal.com/11110.html

I would love to hear your custom rules, personally. I really love my BACC so far, but I'm not sure it'll stay interesting once it starts taking me forever to get through a rotation.

Currently my population is 84, which is 28 playable sims in 13 households with a 3x multiplier. I'm on the third week for some of them, which means some of the kids are starting to become children and learn skills and do well in school. It's kind of fun. Others are on their first or second week and getting ready to have kids.

I only run businesses with plantsims, witches and servos, because they're the only ones who can keep their needs up indefinitely and not run out of energy. Unfortunately, this rather limits my options, especially since I need two witches/servos/whatever to run a business properly. I nearly always use greenhouses so plantsims are unlikely, and I'm kind of ambivalent about servos. I've compensated by loading up on the witches. Most of my CAS sims are knowledge sims who become witches, and I've also married a couple of High Witches into my sims' families. Unfortunately the good warlock is an elder, so I don't really want him, but the evil witches are young, entertainingly malicious, and come with maxed creativity. One day I will feed the elder warlock to a cowplant in the hopes of generating a younger one, because I am shallow and capricious and don't like townies very much.

Still, though, I only have three Sim-owned businesses. I need two more in order to get a business district. I see more Servos in my future, I think, but I just don't like them all that much. Part of it is that I just don't like the way they look -- but Almighty Hat's wood replacements will help there. Another part is that they don't age, have kids or go to college: their lives don't progress. And the third is that they make superfluous meals all. the. time.

Unlocking careers is coming along nicely. I've completely unlocked the business track and the athletic track (I think--I need to check the price on my roller rink lot). I've also unlocked a position in the law enforcement track, another in the architecture track, and a third in the slacker track thanks to an expensive, unowned club.

Unlocking a university is coming along less nicely. I've been playing with 5% of net worth per week, as per the original challenge rules, but it's going slowly. Currently I have only collected about $50K. Once I finish this rotation, I may raise the tax to 10% or even 15%.

I have a few questions for those who've played this challenge.

1. What is a "dance studio" supposed to look like in TS2, and how do I get one up to level 5? Do I just put in a few barres and a bunch of mirrors and charge people to stay there? I doubt they'll pay much to stick around; the ballet barre only gets you 1 fun. Should I put in a DJ booth so there can be dance contests? And how do you make those pay-to-stay lots profitable, anyway?

2. How do you play universities? Do you still do seven days at a time, or do you do one uni year or two uni years or what? When I get my university, I'll probably lean towards two uni years. If I just do seven days, it'll take them four rotations to graduate, and their parents may well die of old age before their kids graduate.

3. Can the familyfunds cheat (which is necessary for taxes) distinguish between two households with the same last name? Let's say John and Jane Doe have a daughter, Jill, who grows up and moves into her own house. Her household will be called the "Doe" household as well. Is there any way to distinguish between the two Doe households when using familyfunds? Do I just have to keep all my kids in their respective households forever or lose my ability to have a working tax system?

My way of making a dance studio is to put some Ballet Barres up (with mirrors behind), add in a couple of stereos, and use the bandanatron to charge sims per hour. Despite the Ballet Barre only being 1 Fun, it's actually one of the items sims will be highly attracted to (at least, from what I've seen).

There are two ways to make a pay-to-stay lot profitable:

1) Have your one sim on the lot have <8 Playful points and 3 or more Logic points. Set the bandanatron price to cheap (so that customers should buy the tickets without prompting), and have your sim meditate (to freeze their motives, preferably in a small office room). With no employees to pay, funds will go up in small but steady increments. Certain events such as a fire starting in the same room will break a sim from meditation.

2) Have a sim with a gold Sales badge, put the price of a ticket up high (9,999 simoleons is as high as I can reasonably do it) and Dazzle the customers. This works best with a Plantsim (no energy bar = no energy loss from using Dazzle). I've found that I can get tens of thousands if I put a Bubble Blower on the lot, Dazzle in a few customers and meditate -- the customers wil stay there for at least a few sim-hours and after the initial batch have been Dazzled in, you'll only need to stop you sim meditating to Dazzle in a new customer when the old one leaves.




For me, University exists in a bit of a time warp. If possible I play through the whole of university in one go, but it only corresponds to four days in the main 'hood. Using TwoJeff's College Adjuster, I have my sims play through semesters 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8, and on occasion I speed up the time until the end-of-semester exam (if the sims have a full progress bar and there's nothing else for them to do that semester).

I also make a note of when a teen sim leaves for college, and when they're supposed to come back. For instance, say a teen sim 'graduates' (I play with InTeen) high school on a Monday -- they officially start in college on a Tuesday, and are due to arrive back in the main 'hood on Saturday. There's a day changer on this site which allows the day to be changed as you wish, which I use to set the correct day when a sim arrives back.



The familyFunds cheat only seems to recognize the most recently-created household with the name. In your example, familyFunds would remove the money from Jill's house, but never John and Jane's house.

For me, when I need to tax my houses I buy (an) item(s) of the approximate value (as close as I can get) and stick them in a sim's inventory (usually the one who's likely to die first). Another option I've heard of is to use MATY's Money Order to send money to a random stray animal -- I've not used this method myself, so I have no idea what would happen if you adopted that animal in to a household later on.

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In other news, I started another BACC (yeah, I like starting them, but continuing on is another matter) called Albion Falls. So far it's got 25 sims, 6 households, 10 Owned lots (plus Military), 1 Business District, an SM of 8 and a population of 200.

My goal is to have every adult playable own at least one business, and for every sim who has an impossible LTW (or has completed their LTW very early on) to go in to the Business Career to open up Business Districts. I've also got a graded tax band, so that sims who have more money pay more taxes. It only affects physical money that sims have, so some households can get away with not paying taxes if they remodel their house or buy a community lot and end up with funds of less than $5k.

I'm actually enjoying this 'hood a lot more than others I've done, so hopefully I can stick with this one until it explodes -- even if I do hit 50k population, I'll be playing the 'hood for as long as I can.

I fix the problem using SimPE.

To use my hood as an example, I had three boys with the name "Appleby" move out of their mother's house leaving their sister (and heiress) there. Now, the original family will stay "Appleby" so the other three need their names altering.
Two of those boys have since married, and in keeping with their family's matriarchial system have taken their wives' names (Owen and Carlson). I saved the game, altered the "family name" of those two boys in SimPE to the new ones, then returned to the game. The third brother isn't married yet so he's still "Appleby".

In regards to the taxation system, I've set up an "owing" column in my spreadsheet for this situation. Those whose family name is repeated due to new generations moving out are taxed as normal on paper BUT the money isn't actually deducted at the time. The outstanding amount is simply added to the "owings" and will be collected as and when the cheat will work again. In the example quoted above, the original family and the third brother won't be physically taxed for the moment, but their "arrears" will be noted. The two other boys will pay off their accumulated debt on their next rotation. Once brother #3 moves in and gets married I'll change his name and all debts will then be paid off.

My official University fund however only accounts for the money ACTUALLY paid - arrears are unofficial

Taxation sounds unnecessarily complicated for me. I'm just going to have a rich sim donate for a private university, then make it as lavish as possible. :D

Also, I think I found a hack exploit: use Monique's hacked computer to borrow a million simoleons, then pay off the debt using the sales badge exploit.

Thanks for the tips. I like the way you think! I'm a huge fan of plantsim + dazzle and servo + dazzle too. I didn't think of putting the price up that high, though. Does it really work at $9,999 with just ballet barres and stereos? Maybe if I put in really nice stereos... hmm. Something to try, certainly.

My pay-to-stay lots don't literally lose money, btw; I don't use employees in any business, so the expenses are pretty much nil. They just don't earn enough to make a significant dent in the cost of the lot and the items on it, which is normally in the high five to low six digit range, so my sims never make back the money they put into the lot. If I can raise my prices as high as you suggest, or even half or a third as high, I'll be golden.

A question about meditate, though: will the sims' aspiration level also stay static? And what's the benefit in having <8 Playful points and >2 logic points -- are playful or illogical sims incapable of meditating?

I have more questions and things to say, but I have to go, so for now I'll just say thanks to both of you for your responses. And katya_stevens, I friended your DW so I could keep up with your BACC updates. I'd love to see how someone else plays a BACC. I'm metatwaddle, obviously.

Venue lots always start out slow in terms of making money and raising the level of the business. You want to have fun things to do (like play cards or blow bubbles) and sims also like things that will raise their skills and give them a choice of what to do. I like to actually teach dancing at my dance studios as I greatly prefer sims hulaing to music rather than smustling to music. (The dancing requires Bon Voyage as vacations are where you initially learn the hula, slap dance and Ti Chi.) I also usually put a couple of hot tubs upstairs so sims have some place to raise hygeine. I actually had visitors using a tub and showers that time I put those mood raising flowers downstairs (as no one left the lot when they got stinky). It was kind of funny as other visitors would complain about the stinky ones. But, of course, the complainers were stinky too.

In my experience, if you Dazzle customers they will stay and pay at least once. I don't think better stereos mean that sims will stay longer (again, something to check/try out), but having a wider variety of items to fulfill more motives would mean sims stay longer. Obviously the specific items would change per lot, but for a dance studio I'd plan to put in a shower room, maybe a couple of the vending machines from AL, and a couple of high-comfort sofas.



I'm unsure if their aspiration level will stay the same (something for me to check next time I have a meditating sim), but highly playful and/or illogical sims cannot meditate.



You're welcome I hope you enjoy reading about Albion Falls.

Yeah, I'm definitely going to use those snapdragons as soon as I get some people with gold badges around. They're lovely for keeping my business-running sims happy, if nothing else.

Think I figured out what my plan is for taxation, too... I don't want to bother with SimPE or put off collecting money for years, so I'll do the inventory thing that katya suggested (thanks). Then I'll give the item to a townie friend, just to make sure that I don't accidentally sell it later when I'm going through my sim's inventory to get rid of the unnecessary crap that invariably piles up there.

Edit: Test run on the dance studio is done! The price is $2,000, and that seems to be working well (read: they're making money hand over fist). Two dazzles will usually get a sim into the lot, and I'm hoping it'll be just one once my trusty sales-servo gets her Convincing Personality perk. I caved in and put in a bubble blower upstairs, as well as bathrooms and showers. The barres and stereo are downstairs. But the most important thing is the snapdragons I've scattered around the place. The lot's tiny (1x1), so I can't squeeze in everything I want, but it's working fairly well nonetheless. Some of the townies stay until they have energy desperation, which I consider a victory -- it's about as well as I can do.

Loyalty stars, though, are hard to come by. The business is only level 3 with 15 loyalty stars, even though it's made some $400k so far. I need to get it to level 5 for my servo to fulfill her dream of being a world class ballet dancer!

On the whole, these venue lots seem promising as money-making ventures. If this keeps up, the family who owns this business will be in a position to donate a private university soon!

So right now, here are my stats:

Population = 256: 32 sims in 13 households with 8x multiplier
8 community lots: 5 owned, 3 unowned. I need to work on this number! Unfortunately, most of my sims aren't rich enough to outfit a community lot properly, and of the ones that are, most of them can't run businesses as capably as I'd like them to. When their energy goes down, I have to send them home.
1 business district
Progress towards public university: about $80k
Careers unlocked completely: Athletic, Business
Positions opened in: Law enforcement (1 of 2 filled), architecture (1 of 2 filled), criminal (1 of 3 filled), gamer (1 of 1 filled), intelligence (0 of 1 filled), education (0 of 1 filled)
This isn't counting the squillion sims with gold gardening badges or 10 masterpieces to their names. I can't take advantage of the natural scientist or artist career tracks because nobody's been to college.

Currently starting this challenge. THIS IS GETTING TO BE FUN, btw, even if they are still so few!
You can see the first update of the founder's household right here.

...but the neighborhood is deleted not by me :/
I need to start over :/

Going by the goal of "you win when you build a University", I won in the fourth week. My founder sim built an art gallery, got it up to lvl 10 in two weeks, and made enough simoleans with it to be able to donate 1,000,000 simoleans to charity (university) and send his teen-age girlfriend to college in the middle of week four.

I didn't do a very good job of documenting my last attempt at this challenge, so I decided to restart it and keep track of everything on a website.

I am currently still on a population of one - the founder, James Kimball, but it's coming on fast!

If anyone would like to have a look at the website, you can find it here. There's a guest book on the site - I'd love to see some more comments! :-D (so far there's one comment -from my Dad!)

**EDIT** Population 4 and counting! And several updates to the site :-)

Heya, all you BACC peoples.

I've taken multiple stabs at this challenge over time, and I have modified my original rules a bit to suit my likings/style. Since I am currently dedicated to actually documenting my latest stab a this challenge, I sat down and wrote down (Well, typed ) my various additions, deletions, modifications, and tweaks and have posted them to the in-progress website I'm building for documenting purposes. You may like them, you may not. Feel free to adopt any ideas you like and ignore any of them (or all of them) that you don't like.

The page in question is here: http://redmond-flats.weebly.com/rul...and-tweaks.html

PS: Don't worry, the original rules are still available, too. It's why I did the tweaks separately, because I know people are still looking at the original rules.

Wow. This looks incredibly complex, and really fun. You must have put a huge amount of time into writing these rules, and now I have a humungous urge to try it out! Unfortunately, I don't have OFB and I don't have the drive to change everything OFB related. I'll just wait until my birthday and ask everyone for it then :D

It is incredbily fun! I am playing at the moment using a slightly modified version of iCad original rules (and will be changing a few more things to take her modifications into account - or at least the ones I like the look of!), and it is extremely entertaining to play.

I would indeed not recommend playing it without OFB, it wouldn't be half as fun imo, so I hope you manage to get it for your birthday! :-D