On Rotational Gameplay
@webbymom asked me if I had ever written up how I do rotational gameplay in TS4. I’m pretty sure I once made a rather lengthy post on the subject on TSD, but since that is gone now and things probably changed since then as well (especially with the addition of seasons) I figured it would be a good idea to write a post on the subject on here.
I have been playing the game rotationally almost since it was released. My current save is still the one I started back in early 2015 (Feburary, I think). It started out as an attempt at a BACC and has since sort of evolved past that. The one thing that’ll never change for this save is that it’ll be played on a rotational basis, though.
I’m still not quite sure on how to make sure seasons work correctly for this, but more on that below.
All the details under the cut.
The Basics
The first thing to decide on is the amount of days every family is played for. I simply go by the ingame week, starting and ending each week on Sunday, 6am. That way I don’t risk getting out-of-sync. One could also decide on shorter times to play each family for, but I’d be prone to forget when exactly I started playing a family and thus when to switch households. So having one fixed time of the week to switch and then playing each family for a week works best for me.
Aging settings
The most important thing for me is to have the correct settings to ensure that my currently active family ages normally but my inactive families don’t age when I’m not playing them. However, I do also want townies that I never play to age.
TS4 does have the settings to make that feasible, although it does require a bit of attention every now and then:
I have set up my game so that the “Auto Age (Played Sims)” setting is set to “Only Active Household”. That way, the Sims marked with a bright green plumbob in Manage Households won’t age unless I’m actually controlling them. “Auto Age (Unplayed Sims)” usually isn’t toggled. It prevents townies from ageing. However, I do toggle that option once every round, making sure that townies age in sync with my played sims. The way I manage to remember doing that once every round is by having selected one family (Filmores) in the beginning and then making sure to toggle the option whenever I play that family. That way I’m less prone to forget about it.
That is a very personal preference, but I also use custom age lengths (via MC Command Center). The biggest change is that my adults and elders do have longer life spans, meaning my sims live longer in general. I just felt that it was odd that my sims could never meet their grandchildren, because they’d die before they were born.
I did also toy with the idea of having ageing off completely and keeping track of sims’ ages manually, but even for me that would be too much nerdy keeping track of things.
Pregnancy
This one is a bit tricky. I’m usually trying to avoid having my sim ladies still being pregnant when I switch households. The only way to ensure that is by making sure they don’t Try for Baby after Wednesday. If my sim ladies then use the toilet to check if they are actually pregnant that puts them in the first trimester immediately, making sure they give birth by Saturday. There is a mod that pauses pregnancy for inactive sims, but it doesn’t so much pause pregnancy as it stops delivery. I tried it once and it simply didn’t work for me. My poor sim ladies would still go through pregnancy normally and then be stuck in labour limbo until I switched to their family again. Thus I decided against using the mod.
Now, then a sim actually gets pregnant after Wednesday (I do have Risky Woohoo enabled via MC Command Center) I’ll just accept that they’ll give birth without me being there. I try to avoid it, but if it happens it’s not that big of a deal.
Seasons
I’m still not 100% sure on how I’ll adjust my play style to seasons, but after having gone through half a rotation with seasons being a thing I’ve got a basic idea of how it’s supposed to work:
Season length doesn’t really matter. I have set it to two weeks because the default seven days felt a bit too rushed, but that’s just a personal preference. I think four weeks might be a bit too long for me to be able to make my rotational plan for seasons work permanently, so two weeks is my comfort zone regarding season length for now.
What I’m trying to achieve with seasons is to make sure that every family experiences seasons passing as they would normally. That means that family A, who experienced spring last round, are going to be in summer this round. Since seasons arrived in the middle of my last round and I changed the season length from one week to two weeks after going through each season once that needed some fiddling with the order in which I played households when I started my current round.
My goals regarding seasons were:
No “break” in-between rounds; I finished round 14 on the first week of spring, so I wanted to start round 15 on the second week of spring;
The same goes for households. A household that I last played during spring (when the seasons were still set to one week) had to be played next during the first week of summer. A household that was played during the first week of autumn (when the seasons were set to be two weeks long) had to be played during the second week of autumn now.
As an added bonus I tried to play households living in the same world consecutively, to experience the change of seasons in the worlds more naturally, instead of jumping between worlds all the time.
The result was the following table:
I was lucky that I ended up with exactly 17 households (some of my YA sims had plans of moving out of their parents’ homes anyways and I did want to add a new sim to town as well), ensuring that the seasons will be exactly one week further along for round 16. I’m not quite sure yet how I’ll deal with it when I have less or more households again. I might temporarily set the seasons to last only one week again near the end of the round to make sure it evens out again for the following round, but then the families might end up out of sync. It might turn out that seasons can never be incorporated into a rotational play style perfectly and I’ll just have to deal with that, making the best of it I can. I’ll see how this goes in a few rounds (i.e. months).
These are the big things I’m paying attention to for my rotational gameplay. If anyone knows a better (or just different) way of doing things, I’d be happy to hear of their experiences for rotational gameplay. Especially when it comes to seasons.
