I have to say, I am really loving this EP. EA did a great job.
First observation: save your game before traveling, and then also do a "save as" to a different game file name to travel. This way if your travel save gets corrupted, you can always go back to your pre-travel save under the earlier name that won't have any travel bugs that might pop up. When you are completely done traveling, check your relationships, etc., pretty thoroughly to make sure there haven't been some bugs. I am sure there are other bugs to traveling, but relationships and cloned people seem to be the two I have the most.
Second observation: (others may have covered it) but save your game before you go to graduation. The pile up of sims at the entrance door made me re-load three times in order to get in the door on time.
Third observation: all the social groups (nerds, rebels, and jocks) love the "goof around" interaction. If your sim has the "never dull" lifetime reward, getting to the tops of all three groups is pretty easy by just telling three or four jokes and then mashing the "goof around" interaction. The early levels fly by. Even the upper levels seem to be completed in 5-7 interactions. If your social standing in any of the groups drops down from ten, it takes no time at all to get it back to ten with the same strategy as well. It works well enough, that some might call it broken, but I love that it actually makes the "funny" category of social interactions between sims useful for something other than the 100 joke achievement or a short-term mood buff.
Fourth observation: the social networking skill has a great reward (I think it comes at level 6 or 7), the "relationship transmogrifier". Once the skill is maxed, you can set the relationship level between two sims to whatever you want it to be. It works on your own sims relationships as well. Want your sim to break-up with that pesky boyfriend/girlfriend with no hard feelings? This is a snap. Just use the option under the "social networking" option of your smart phone, and you can set them to friend, good friend, best friend, disliked, or whatever; all without any of the heartache associated with normal break-ups. Lol. Tired of those pesky slanderous stories by the paparazzi messing with your celebs' relationships and killing good friendships? Again, just use the option on the smart phone and restore the situation in a much shorter period of time. The relationship states you have to choose from improve as the social networking skill increases. It is definitely worth spending the time to develop this skill if you are one of those players that finds the relationship building and maintaining part of the game a bit tedious at times.
Fifth observation: I love the analyze feature of the science skill. Tiberium farm here I come!! Lol.
