It had so much potential but I'm so glad I waited to see the reviews, I'm definitely not getting it now.


This challenge is really open to so many different playstyles and interpretations, that's one of the great things about it. Wow that seems like a good idea but I shudder to think of the population explosion. If you're careful with marriages you won't ever have to marry first cousins but I don't think it's possible to avoid marrying 2nd cousins (who aren't recognized as family by the game) or the odd step grandmother and weird things like that.

You definitely can keep them going by marrying 2nd cousins, it will work, but the second gen kids will only have a handful of unrelated people to marry (as in their aren't even second cousins by that stage, just cousins or unrelated except by marriage). If they aren't compatible with any of their possible spouses then that will, at the very least, stress me out by trying to make them fall in love with people they don't particularly like. I did find an arranged marriage mod so I might add it to my handy dandy collection of mods. Obviously not everybody has to get married and have kids as that will help control the population too.

Which, with regards to a population explosion, the way I see it is the population is already expanding exponentially every turn, an addition of a couple sims won't make it much worse in the short term (in the long term it will but by then I won't even care to notice the difference).

Just coming here to mourn, my Langdon twins' (shared) husband died today. I loved that polyamourous household to death and he was one of my favourite sims, plus only two kids had been born so far, so I let one of his wives plead with the grim reaper, but he died again a few hours later! I decided his time must have come Those dang ghosts!! *shakes fist*

I don't want to add sims whenever I feel like it because I like the idea of all my sims being traceable back to the original 5 bloodlines, and enjoy the challenge of trying to pair them all off (so far), but that's just me. I too love how versatile the challenge is, it's refreshing when so many challenge out there have such a rigid set of rules.

I lost all my CC when I uninstalled to install The Ultimate Pack. I can't find Realistic Sickness anymore. Does anyone have a good link?

I did a bit of an update on my site because some mildly crazy things happened and I didn't want to forget the weird details.
Only two kids? That's a shame I'm always terrified one of my sims will die before their time.

That is an attractive goal to me but I love diverse genetics and I know I wouldn't be able to resist adding more bloodlines. I'll probably not add as many or add none at all when I have a billion sims and diversity galore. But I'm glad to see some are up to the challenge of the original rule set I figure if somebody else can bear to do it then I should be able to at least do it with my own version of game play.

The grandchildren of the founders do have a harder time of it than any other generation but at least in my game it isn't too bad. I've found that there might only be a few unrelated sims of appropriate rank and age but since I'm prepared to ignore crazy age differences and set up my rankings so they could marry. I find it nice to have the odd arranged marriage where I'm afraid one sim will murder the other. It adds drama but then everyone has a different playstyle.


That's a shame :/ Why is it always the really fun households?


http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...pic,8062.0.html
I suggest downloading the one from a few posts down. The original one is insane.

That sounds good, I might try that. I'm fine with enemies, old with young, even cousins marrying (I'd use SimPE to get rid of the family flag). However for the sake of ranking and to save myself a headache keeping everything straight I want to try and keep some uniformity in the skin tones till the Roman era starts. (At which point I hope to start mixing things up like mad so I can have an S4 be ruler if possible.) Who knows everything may work out though so that I don't even have to add sims. We'll see. That's what I love about this challenge. You have so much time to try everything.

Here's an update on how my challenge is coming along. I have four tribes. Air, Water, Fire and Earth, each with two couples. To decide the couples, I am matching them based on chemistry (the male will choose the female he has the highest chemistry with, in the event two men being equally attracted to the same female, then she chooses the one she is most attracted to).

I have decided to play supernatural sims from the outset. For each founder I rolled to see if they would supernatural and what kind. Then, for each child born to a supernatural sim, I roll to decide whether that child will inherit it when they become an adult.

In the Air tribe, the first couple, Asher and Mehitabel had twin boys named Mordokhay and Isais. Asher is also a werewolf and has passed on the gene to his son Iasis. The second couple, Cephas and Yedidah also had a son named Ouri. I also think there might be an affair brewing between Cephas and Mehitabel.

My Water tribe was very fun to play. My first couple are Sindiri (a good witch) and Borghildur (an evil witch), they had the first ever quads of the game. A little boy named Jonaton and three girls named Dagny, Njala and Raglheidur. .

The second Water couple is Fridrik (vampire) and Jona (plantsim). When I discovered they had high chemistry, I began to worry about their future children. Just after Jona got pregnant, she rejected Fridrik's marriage proposal and a fight broke out. Fredrik lost and had to die (he stood outside in the sun all day because he couldn't bear being rejected by Jona). After all that, Jona had a little girl named Anna. I am thinking of allowing Jona to have a plantbaby just before she reaches elderhood in order to try and continue this line.

Good luck with that I can't imagine how much more difficult the marriages would be if I was bothered about skin colors and keeping them uniform. Although next generation I think I'm going to start trying to get the families back to their orignal, hair, skin and eye color as an added challenge.


Your game sounds really interesting I'm only just getting plantsims now and have only hade werewolves for a generation or so but now I'm kind of wishing i started with them from the start it sounds like so much fun! Personally when it comes to plantsims I'll let them have 1 plantbaby with the multiple odds set kind of high but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Hi y'all! I restarted again and I've played a round of Attempt Number Three. So they're up on my website for all who care to look. Also I re-did part of my site, and changed its theme, but that's all explained over there. And somehow two of my families ended up with the exact same number of everything that I'm counting to determine rankings. Literally the only difference between them is that one has a daughter and the other a son. Though the one with the daughter will be expanding sooner than the one with the son, so they'll likely jump higher next round. Though these guys rarely do what I expect so who knows? Anyway, I'm off to play some more. ~VP

Wow supernaturals, that's a cool idea. I did get one plantsim naturally but he was too hard for me to take care of during the night. I have wanted a way for my sims to naturally becomes supernaturals but I'm not sure how to do that when interactions with townies are technically "banned". For now I'm content with just trying to juggle all the sim babies.
Original eye color even? I guess I should be wishing you good luck with a task like that to consider.
Are you counting funds in your rankings?

It might still be possible I have a sneaking suspicion I've lost the grey and light blue eyes but hey I might just get lucky and have them pop up again.

I'm trying to get all the supernatural by the end. Servos, plantains, werewolves, zombies, the genie and aliens will be quite easy to get without breaking the rules. Witches, bigfoot and vampires will be harder without moving into the grey area of the rules but I'm still going to try. I might come up with alternate rules for them or simply not count vampires, bigfoot or witches as townies... I suppose I could do a flat chance of sims resurrected by the genie becoming vampires but I'm only in roman so I've got plenty of time to work it out.

Wow that's awesome. Now I want to read your updates even more. I must find time to do so.

Also a question to any who read this: how often do you personally make your sims try for baby in the Neanderthal era? I know it says as soon as possible and pretty much all the time but I myself am kind of half letting ACR nudge them, and half making them try for baby myself.

Funds are a part of my calculation, but not a major part. I actually have a weighted formula to determine my family's ranks. First I rank each category (Popularity, or number of unique family friends, Number of children, Cash, Lot value, and finally Total Worth, which is really just cash and lot value added together.)The more you have in a particular category, the better the rank, such as currently the Giampa family with three children holds first rank in that category. Then the ranks get averaged out using the weighted formula, which took a while to get weighted so that it did what I wanted. My social classes are going to be determined by popularity for the most part. So that category is weighted at 39. Number of kids (anyone living on the lot who is teen or younger) is weighted at 13. Cash is weighted at 3, Lot Value at 2 and Total worth at 1. Essentially I'm averaging out 58 numbers. And since I have an excel spreadsheet to track all of this, all I have to do is plug in the numbers for # of friends, #of kids, cash and lot value. It does everything else for me. Took a while to track down the formulas for that, but...
For my sims, I make them TFB the first time, and ACR does most of the rest of the work for me, especially since I have version 2.0 and set their ideal family size to be rather high, so they're nearly always TFBing with ACR. And most of them head for the bed 8 to 12 hours after the baby is born. so I don't have to do too much in terms of keeping the females pregnant.

Speaking of pregnant sims, I can't wait for my gen 2's to grow up enough to be walkbys. I have pregnant sims banned from lots via the Visitor Controller, so as to not mess up pregnancy controller times, so right now, I generally only have five sims eligible to be walkbys. And that gets boring fast. Especially when one of those sims is ineligible to be a walkby because he lives there. Hopefully I'll be able to get some major playing done on my day off, so that I can get through four days in my round and have some children in the 'hood and vary my walkbys a little bit. ~VP

In the neanderthal era I had sims TFB at some time before the next evening and often they beat me too it with ACR. With families I was stressed about and needed a baby now I would have them try immediately after the birth but for the most part they had anywhere up to 24 hours to try.

Wow that's pretty intense. I am also using formulas in excel to do my calculations but some categories give a rank (1-5 since I'm in first gen) and some just add points. Because of that I wouldn't really be able to weight them even if I wanted to although that does sound like a reasonable method.

Thanks both of you for answering my question. It sounds like ACR (I'm using version 2) is being nicer to you guys than to me because they keep wanting to woohoo while pregnant but not after. Even if I cancel the autonomous woohoo to keep their need for woohoo high until after the birth. I did put their ideal family sizes high originally but for some reason I decided to get rid of it. Might put the setting back.

I also use ACR version 2, and aside from putting the ideal family sizes as high as I could, I also put the risky woohoo chance as high as I could and I also believe you can put try for baby higher. I just went throught the options and put everything to do with trying for baby as high as possible. It also helps if you have triplets and quads - I just have that on the normal settings, but it gives chances of more babies per pregnancy. This seems to be working so far for me. In my Hitch in Time neighborhood, you'll see in in later posts that .

Those are good suggestions. If I put the risky woohoo setting higher will that increase the odds of try for baby being successful or will that just increase the odds of them getting pregnant if they do regular (risky) woohoo. Because most of the time when my sims do try for baby, their chance of it being successful is about 40%. I guess what I'd really like is to increase their fertility. Maybe I should use inteen for that.

If you up the risky woohoo, then you up the chance of normal woohoo resulting in a baby. If you like to increase their fertility, I think there's a setting under global overrides or maybe the lot settings where you can change the % of try for baby (like it might be 60% of the time they try for baby and you can up it). Inteen is good for increasing the chance of try for baby being succesful by giving fertility treatment to the women.

I did a census of my hood and found out I have at least two sims showing each eye color (plus a few more I know are carrying the rarer colors) so my goal of bringing the original appearances back is possible

Well good thing theres still all of the traits still there ps glad you got your colosseum build im still in gen 1 of my challenge but i finally got a good start on it pps whats the prize the winner gets from the palace?

For now I've been giving the winner a statue worth $1000 they can use/sell as they see fit. I was originally going to free the slave but my population can't support that.

That's awesome. I went to read your Test of Time challenge but I couldn't tell if you started updating in the Roman era or if I just can't find the beginning. Either way it looks exciting. Especially I can't wait to figure out what this prize money is about.

I only started updating in the roman era which is why you can't find the Neanderthal updates. I kind of wish I started updating earlier but that's just the way it turned out. A word of warning the round 2 Harmon update is missing pictures and I (still) haven't got around to fixing it.

The prize money is just another half baked scheme I'm afraid. If a sim saves up something like 5-10k they may be able to buy their freedom (nearly impossible with the amount of money I'm having the slaves donate to the emperor each round) but if a sim wins enough times which might happen if my werewolves get chosen a few times they will be able to become plebeians but at this rate any sim who survives isn't likely to survive long enough to win that many times. Although I may have an option of volunteering for Sims who have already won a few times or nearly have enough money saved but I haven't fully worked it out yet. The other option is having any sim who wins twice being able to volunteer to go in a third time and if they win they might be automatically freed in that case the money from the prizes would go to furnishing the apartment they will move into upon being freed. It's still very much a WIP

Hey everyone! \o/
So, I'm currently kind of stuck with my challenge for two reasons. First of all, because of these cuties (2nd and 3rd gen of a kind of legacy I started ): But I fear you won't be able to help me with that first problem, so on to my second one: the roman houses. I built quite a few, but somehow I can't manage to make something I like? =/ Those of you who already play the roman era: How did you built the houses for the different classes? Did you use any real roman houses as reference? Or did you simply went with something that was close enough for you? Does anyone play with apartment houses for the lower classes? And while I'm at it, I also decided that I don't want to give any of my sims normal jobs (in maxis' careers), but built a closed economy with as less money appearing out of nowhere as possible. I'm still unsure though how that should work exactly, though. XD