Cats & Dogs - First Impressions

[meubanks]

I was never into pets in TS3 much, but I would have bought this just for the new build items and hair, tbh. Content wise, this is a good pack. My only real complaint is that pets count against the household limit, from what I've gathered. I tend to play big families. However, I don't think I'd want pets and toddlers in the same household, so it shouldn't detract much from my playstyle.

I created a new family with two sisters, a dog and a puppy. Of course they spawned outside the house, and apparently puppies can't climb stairs. I picked the dog up, but couldn't find a command to put it down where I wanted to. It may be my issue, and not the the level of intuitiveness in the game, though. Progress in the pet training skill seems painfully slow, so if they have skill books I may have to use them. In most cases I think skilling up organically is faster, but this may be an exception. Of course, I just might be missing the trick so far. I'm still exploring the content, and at the moment I'm more into exploring new build possibilities than playing with the pets.

I don't regret buying it, but I have a feeling that pet focused game play won't become a major focus for me, just an occasional diversion when I want something different. If I like the vet career it could change things, though. I haven't tried it yet.

[scoed]

OK I gave it another try after losing hours of play to undo unfortunate bugs. And well other than it is very buggy, I can see its appeal. I now have two ghost pets to go with my vamp family. They where strays straight from the pet cemetery. They are cute in a spooky way. The cat is a scaredy cat and always hiding. Now I am passed the wall of bugs I started off will, I no longer hate it. Still way, way to many bugs. Doesn't EA ever test their games? It gets old constantly figuring out how to play around bugs.

[Shewolf13]

I'm a bit late to the party.  I didn't get Cats & Dogs until yesterday.  In fact, my simming came to a halt for several months due to life cropping up.  But finally caught up on the stuff packs I missed and of course, Cats & Dogs.  To echo many, I LOVE the world.  Brindleton Bay is my favorite part, hands down.  Hehehe, love the cheap starter house that sits on the beach.  I could go on and on about how pretty the world is, but I won't XD.

CAP is pretty cool.  I've enjoyed it quite a lot so far.  Created my actual kitty plus a dog I had growing up.  It's fairly intuitive, though was a little disappointed that you can't save your breed template.  Probably shouldn't have been (by template, I mean, saving the dog or cat you created as an actual breed in CAP that you can use later).  I eventually figured out how to save things to the gallery so wasn't too bad, just one of those things in my wishlist that would be cool, one less step type of thing.

Game play is where I'm not as- fond of it, sadly.  While I understand not being able to control the pets, I would at least be able to look at their stats.  Ages, family tree, etc.  Simple things.  So that I'm a bit meh on, though I'm ok on not being able to control them.  I played for several hours, created a sim and her dog.  I created another sim and his dog and moved them into Brindleton Bay.  Eventually, there was some romance between the Sims and they combined households.  Now, this is where I'm very annoyed and it's actually putting me off playing again until they fix it.  The dogs are opposite genders.  Both Sims are good friends or better with both dogs.  I have used the "Be nice to" command multiple times as well as the "Encourage to mate with".  And it has never happened.  They seem to get along well enough otherwise, but I have probably encouraged to mate over 50 times with no success.  While looking up this problem, I found others have had similar issues, as well as issues when a successful breeding has occurred.

My plan was, to eventually see how a breeding business or pet-type business would work.  Which is another reason I wish I could see at least the ages and family tree of the pets.  But at the moment, my game has come to a grinding halt.  Over all, I do like the pack, just- very frustrated at this kind of game-breaking bug.

[Trip]

@Shewolf13: does this happen with all dogs? I don't know if it's a bug or a feature but rejecting one dog doesn't necessarily mean that you can't encourage mating with another (that worked for me anyways).

[Shewolf13]

@Trip
Heya ^^ I did try with some strays and same result.  Now, I didn't try all eligible dogs lol, but I did a few more, just to check.

[Playalot]

@Shewolf13  this mod might help. Haven't used it myself though. (Click)

[Shewolf13]

@Playalot

Thanks ^^ I haven't used mods yet with Sims 4.  If it doesn't improve or get fixed soon, might have to use it.  Which is a shame.

[Playalot]

@Shewolf13  have you tried the Lot Trait 'Breeding Ground'? Not sure if it increases the chances of mating or of larger litters but it might make a difference.

[Shewolf13]

@Playalot
No, I didn't, mostly because when I read the description it seemed to just increase litter size but wouldn't hurt to try.

[MystiKitty]

Great! Now I can create my own version of the Second Chance cat mysteries by Sofie Ryan!  (It's a series of novels involving a woman who runs a antique store in Maine and she has lots of elderly friends who end up forming a detective agency, and the main character has a little black cat called Elvis who can tell if someone is lying when they pet him.)

Seriously, I am glad they finally put out a pets expansion. I don't mind that it's only just the two usuals, cats and dogs, because when I tried to play Pets on the Sims 3 the game glitched out badly and the pets looked like mutated Escher paintings. Now I just need to see if I can afford it.