Completing an Immortal Dynasty Hints and Tips (Not Questions)

[jesirose]

Ah, forgive me, I was unsure as to who you were addressing.

No worries, I could have made it clearer

[Trip]

Just wondering, what do you guys think are the best Skills, Professions, LTRs, LTWs etc. etc. for earlier generations? The most useful, easiest, ones to avoid and so on. Would gardening be a good choice for Founder? I'm planning for my founder's profession to be Chef, as I can't think anything more useful.

For a founder, it's best that they have a skill that is useful yet possible to compete given the fact that they are starting out with nothing. I went with cooking for my founder. She needed it to make ambrosia anyways (which, granted, was about three times thanks to the food replicators), and everyone in the family would need to eat. I also wanted to get the fancy fridge from the culinary career as soon as possible. Therefore, my founder could spend the rest of her days cooking perfect meals and imparting sweet 75+ moodlets to anyone who eats them. Gardening is doable for a founder; I did it once, but it is monstrously time-consuming. Being a self-employed gardener is also a difficult profession due to the sheer amount of money you have to make for it, but I would actually recommend that over being a cook on top of it. Supermaxing gardening requires a lot of attention, and doing an unrelated career on top of it makes either the supermax or the career suffer. So either make them garden and nothing else, or put them into business (requires no skills, super-easy to max).

My founder did gardening and fishing on the side, though. Cooking is a very easy supermax. She could pay attention to other things and still get her supermax done before elderhood. Even with housemates, it's hard to have your founder do just one thing. Having a set of goals that allows for other tasks to be done too is great for the beginning of a dynasty.

(I also realize that people have had multi-tasking gardening-supermaxing founders in dynasties. I just personally find it difficult.)

If I was to do the dynasty all over again, I would make my founder a painter or a sculptor instead. As Livvie said, you're going to need a painter throughout the dynasty, and many people do elect to do sculptures as well. But my real reason is actually for the museum value! And I love having mortals do museum pieces for the death bonuses, but having an immortal train in an artistic supermax from the start gives them more time to perfect their skill, considering that the biggest calculator for the value of paintings and sculptures is how many of them your artist has done. I had my third generation supermax sculpting, and by the time my last mortal sculptor died, her sculptures were worth 4,000 or more (and over 6,000 if they were masterpieces), which is good, but if I had my founder supermax sculpting, she would probably have more valuable sculptures by the time I needed to rely on an immortal sculptor due to the larger amount of time she would have had to add to her sculpture count.

Careers, I think I made my love for the Culinary career and its fabulous fridge apparent! I can list off some exceptionally easy careers. There are some really easy self-employed professions. Alchemy and Nectar count any elixirs/nectar sold, not just those made by the sim. So you can stockpile nectar throughout the dynasty, let it appreciate, and have a later generation max the profession by selling the stockpiled nectar. Or just take some very valuable gems and metals to the Transfiguration Display and create a bottle of nectar worth 50,000 simoleons or more (more on that on the guide). Alchemy can be maxed by flipping the Elixir Shop a few times. Sculpting self-employment has a really cheaty shortcut; if you turn sculptures to gold with the Midas Touch Elixir, it counts towards money made sculpting. The Art Appraiser career can be maxed quickly because you can force opportunities through the Criminal Warehouse, and ops for that career give an instant career performance boost. The Ghost Hunter profession can be maxed quickly by reading logic books (quickest way to level up in logic) and maybe doing a few jobs.

While I would recommend taking a career that is related to your immortal's supermax whenever possible, I'm also the person who had a sculptor who was a magician and an inventor who was a ghost hunter.

LTWs are best when they're related to either your immortal's career or supermax skill. Such as Professional Author for a writer, Chess Legend for a logic supermax, Become an Astronaut for an immortal in the military, and so on. Money-related supermaxes are really easy, though. My founder wanted to Live in the Lap of Luxury. Marry a rich guy, have her dog find tiberium, LTW done before two weeks pass. And money LTWs get easier later in the dynasty. Can't think of a better LTW for generation six than Swimming for Cash? Collect money from your properties and that should fulfill it.

LTRs, well, I think Livvie covered that really well.

Anywho, sorry, that was long winded. I have a minor question to those who have completed a ID, how many weeks were you in?
I ask because, I'm at 30 some-odd weeks in Dragon Valley (almost finished with my LSD) and I'm not having a bit of trouble. I tend to run into trouble with most of my other towns, so I just want a general idea of how many weeks out I'll have to go (though I know it does vary, I just want an estimate as right now I have no number to go on) when/if I attempt my dynasty. It will also give me an idea of other towns to try to see if they'll survive the multiple weeks it takes.

I haven't completed my immortal dynasty (still on generation seven), but I'm on week 63, which is longer than most immortal dynasties run. The amount of time that it takes depends entirely on how far apart you space the births of your heirs. Most of my immortals were adults or close to it when the next generation was born, and generation five was 82 when his wife was born. Other players like to get started on the next generation almost as soon as their heirs become young adults. The latter method will give you a run-time of at least 41 weeks, though not more than 50. It's when you let your heirs settle down first before making nooboos that you get run-times beyond 50 or 60 (or 70) weeks.

Anyways, my dynasty is still running reasonably with such a long run-time, even on my less-than-stellar laptop. It's probably because I chose the town that runs the best for me. Definitely keep past experiences with towns in mind.

[Trip]

Double-post, for a good reason.

A little over a year ago, Rosa posted an excellent spreadsheet showing which mixology drinks are available in which venues. It's truly awesome for anyone with an heir supermaxing mixology. It's also downloadable as an Excel spreadsheet. Anyways, with her permission, I uploaded it to Google Drive for anyone who finds that more accessible. Here it is.

And Misc. Mixology Tips, from someone who just had a sim supermax mixology:

The venues I put bars on were a Big Park, the Pool, the Art Gallery, a regular Hangout, the Graveyard, the Gym, and a Fishing Hole. You could probably do with less (I hear that Big Park, Art Gallery, Graveyard, and Pool is the magic combination), but I just wanted to be careful.

It's good to hire a maid while you have a sim actively supermaxing mixology. Whenever your maid's shift is over, any trays of drinks left out disappear, and mixologists create more drinks than you'd like to manually clean up.

If you're looking for good mixologist traits, you might want to consider Neurotic, of all things. Mixology is actually a stress-building skill, specifically when creating custom drinks. I ended up not making my mixologist neurotic, but it would have helped if she could just freak out! Night Owl is also a good option. It gives them a good moodlet for staying up late, which they'll be doing plenty of.

Because there is no career tied to mixology, your mixologist will have to take up an unrelated one. If you go the rabbithole career route, choose a career with daytime hours. I went with Education (logic and charisma are free skills), but depending on what skills you do or don't have open, Business, Politics, and Law Enforcement are also good options. This is because the hours for bars and clubs are skewed towards the afternoon and evening, while bars placed on other community lots seem to have general hours ranging from about 15:00 to 4:00 (I know that mixologists on those lots always call it quits at 4; I just don't know exactly when they arrive). It's guaranteed that work won't interfere with peak bar-hopping hours.

(Granted, doing a later job can also work. While it limits the amount of time your sim can spend bar-hopping, it can give them a better sleep schedule. Between the Motive Mobile and energy drinks, my mixologist never slept anyways)

Grab the Observant LTR as soon as possible. This helps your mixologist learn drink recipes faster.

Even if you place all of the clubs to get all the drinks/are playing in Bridgeport or Union Cove, place a bar on a non-club, open-24-hours lot anyways. This gives your mixologist the ability to moonlight at any time of the day, because they don't have to deal with the venue closing. Unlike with clubs.

Also, perfect energy drinks are amazing. Thanks to a lot of practice and the Better Mixologist LTR, my mixologist consistently makes perfect energy drinks, which result in an eight-hour moodlet that negates tiredness. Better than coffee! I wish she'd make some for me in real-life.

[LivvieLove]

Those are some great tips on mixology Trip! I've always avoided the harder-to-supermax skills (like nectar-making, mixology, riding and several others).
I recently fooled around with Nectar Making in my LS Dynasty. I've found out very quickly that if you're going to do that skill - always, always, ALWAYS - do the traveling before you start towards that lifetime wish. Any traveling you do will reset two of the counters. The Mix Master and the Homegrown one. Keep a manual count, but always double check with the challenge team to use your manual count. Also, I've found the career can be very hard to grumble through, as it takes aging to get values that are worthwhile. I sent my Sim to France had had him buy up 70k worth in nectar just to sell for the career. It's a little "cheap" that way (using cheap to mean feeling pretty cheaty), but it can knock the career out of the way while you focus on the painstaking counting that comes with the supermaxing.

Honestly, I really need to give some of these skills another go, so I'm going to run some unique tests and see what kind of madness I can get up to. I'm going to take some notes and see what kind of tips I can come up with for those skills that a lot of people avoid in dynasties. If anyone has any ideas just let me know, and I'll give it a test!

[dontmindme]

Honestly, I think deciding which skills are open to everyone is more important in the beginning than which skill you choose for a founder. Knowing ahead of time what you CAN'T do makes deciding what you can do a bit easier.

That said, fishing is an easy founding skill if you can be self-employed at it. Once your fisherman gets to lvl 7, send them to the graveyard, catch 10 death fish, then stock your own pond to get the death fish whenever you want (do the same with angel fish and once you run out of bait, just switch to them). Death fish are worth about $200-300 a pop before you consign them so while you have to catch a lot, it's manageable. Cooking is a rather easy supermax, given that you can raise the skill at work. Creating the 75 meals is a grind and can hit the pocketbook hard if you're going for anything but autumn salad or the like. I waited to have a cook mostly because I wanted to make sure I had the fast learning stove for them and that I could easily keep the rest of my dynasty from cooking at all. Athletics benefits from teen-hood but can be accomplished by a founder, especially if you have access to some energy management (motive mobile, potent invigorating elixirs, etc). From what I've heard, charisma is fairly easy to supermax. The danger is that you can't put the genie back in the bottle so if another generation gets a skill point, you're looking at a race to accomplish everything and then locking them up so that they can't interact with anyone.

I've left making a painter until Gen 4, when space is starting to tighten up and I need one anyway. Gardening has become a dynasty skill as there are plenty of opps for it and because it is so dang time consuming. Even our little garden, which has just been maintained since the gardener's death, takes a good chunk of the day to deal with. If you have University, I don't recommend the Social Networking skill mostly because it's very easy for sims to autonomously gain skill points at it. Handiness is an easy skill to supermax if you have a witch in the house who can use the ice spell. Use it on the dishwasher, counts as an electrical appliance. Use it on the toilet, counts as a plumbing appliance. That's pretty much all I did for those two supermaxes, witch breaks dishwasher, heir fixes dishwasher, witch breaks toilet while heir fixes dishwasher, heir fixes toilet, and so on. 

[Trip]

I didn't know that dishwashers counted as electronics. My fourth generation was a technophobe and her husband was a witch, so they still managed to break things, but it would have been easier to just have him break dishwashers. I like handiness and inventing as supermaxes because I rarely, if ever, see sims autonomously invent or fix things.

[KRae]

I leave logic, fishing, and charisma as open traits. Logic is good for the odd extra op. Fishing is a great way to keep elders occupied and out of trouble. The ease of making friends after having 25 acquaintances and best friends after making 10 best friends is just too good for me to pass up. As far as cooking goes, if you keep everyone fed, they don't seem to autonomously cook.

[tirajm]

If you're playing in Dragon Valley, try to avoid using any of the skills that the baby dragons can raise as your SuperMax.  Your sims will autonomously talk to the dragon about Athletics/Gardening/Charisma/Logic and start gaining skill points.  I've been using the red dragon to keep my founder from having to sleep, and she hit Athletics 2 without me even noticing.

[LivvieLove]

Social Networking isn't an awful skill for supermaxing, but it does depend on a whole lot of luck. You would have to get your blog up to 5 stars and sell 5 of them (which you don't always get the option to do). It does come in handy for those best friends though. And when I had my 6th generation max it in my life states dynasty the most skill points that another Sim had in it within the household was about 2 maybe? Or 3 if they were lucky. You need a blog to really start cranking out the experience, and texting just stops cutting it after level 2. They also won't autonomously update their blog, so I'd say this skill is much safer than charisma, but it's a massive gamble.

As for Riding, I messed around with it in Appaloosa Plains. Honestly, it really wasn't a horrible supermax, the only trouble was you needed a LOT of horses in the house (at least, I found that easier to make friends with them that way as they wouldn't suddenly need to be elsewhere) or a lot of friends who had horses (like in Appaloosa Plains). If you're going to do riding, do it early on to have enough space in the house for a few horses to run free. The problem I saw with Riding was that it was simply a space-stealer.
In short, if you normally do a challenging Dynasty (where you don't have too many helpers in the house at once in the beginning and focus on skills that won't help you to achieve immortality) then Riding could be no problem, but if you do like to have a lot of spares/helpers I would avoid this one over another skill.

Also, if it wasn't for Underwater Spelunker, Scuba Diving could also be a do-able max in any town.

[Shirin]

I haven't seen this mentioned (or I forgot in my old age), but when teaching a teen to drive, use the Motive Mobile. The adult will never get stressed out.

[KRae]

I've been accepting opportunities for my elders that I never intend to complete. It keeps new opportunities from popping up constantly. The celebrity ops are particularly irritating to me.

[Lisa46]

For Dragon Valley players, here are some tips:

The Burb and Pleasant family is great- level three of cooking, gardening, and painting.
Doreen Delaney is awesome. Seriously, he is Gardening 7.
The Byrne-Dolan family is good. Wynn is Cooking 6, Finn is Gardening 5, and Sarah is pregnant with her first child.
Nessie has painting skill 3.
I can't say more for Lorna McAnn. She is Cooking 7, Logic 7, and gardening 3. Potions galore!
The O'Connels: Shauna is Cooking 4, Gardening 4, so she has potential. Seamus is Fishing 4, and his daughter Morida is too. They also have a dragon egg under the house.
Conor O'Reilly is Gardening 4, but he has a wife and kids.
Also amazing: Mr. Daric Orhden. Angler, loves the outdoors, Loner, Green Thumb, Fishing 3, Gardening 7. LTW? Perfect Garden. Dining room contents? Dragon egg.
Aislin is pretty good, she can max culinary for you and has Cooking 4.
My favorite answer: move in Daric and Lorna. Yes, both. One marries your founder, one just spends their life alone. Need another sim? Try Doreen.

[dontmindme]

In DV, I tend to move in one or two homeless townies plus one townie with a high paying job. The reasoning here is that if you look at the homeless population, most of them have one 6+ skill plus another in development. Many of them have a decent gardening or cooking level and one or two have high skill levels in other skills. I don't think there's one in the bunch with terrible traits, either. Michael in particular is a catch with his traits and closeness to elderhood. He makes a great babysitter and seeder for the town. Nuala O'Ryan's my absolute favorite, she's lvl 9 in logic and 7 in gardening, is a young adult, and has traits for gardening and the arts. The sim with the high-paying job is there to give our funds a boost as the homeless townies are utterly broke. Aislin and Bradan are good choices here, Bradan especially because his next promotion fulfills his lifetime wish.

[Trip]

If you have University Life, you can also scout out a townie who has a degree generated for them. They can get a rabbithole job and excellent pay off the bat.

[hazelnut]

On the subject of charisma, the challenges seem to have an effect even without unlocking the skill.  Burl, my Immortal Dynasty founder, had to be locked out of parties after a while because he made best friends so easily, even though he had no charisma skill at all.  Of course, if I'd realised that best friends don't have to be completely unique in the Immortal Dynasty, he could just have got on with socialising...  Since then, I've always had charisma as a free skill, so it may have changed on one of the many intervening patches, but the heirs in my 4x4 who haven't unlocked charisma lead me to believe that it's still true.

Conversely, charisma skill gain is easy to limit if you control their friends.  However social the Sims are, if they don't have enough acquaintances or friends, they can't reach the next level.  I owe this tip to Alex, by the way.  We were discussing Life States Dynasties and I was intrigued by the way she'd split the charisma challenges between heirs.

For Immortal Dynasty starting skillls, I went for cooking, then sculpting and painting the first time, with gardening free.  The second and third tries (which fell prey to bugs and a late attack of idiocy, respectively) both had sculpting founders, followed by artists.  One of the sculptors was also a chef (he was called Chip and worked at the diner  ).  The other was self-employed.  In both cases, generation 3 was a gardener (one self-employed, the other in the culinary career).  None of my dynasties had helpers, although the first attempt had a generation 2 slave spare.