Hi! I found the Immortal Dynasty challenge while looking through the Guide for building tips, and I thought it sounded like loads of fun so I'm giving it a go. Fortunately pretty much all my questions have been asked and answered in the prior 200+ pages (including "No, you can't turn off vampires in Sunset Valley", grr) (and no, I didn't read all 200+ pages, but Search is my friend, yes?
), so I got started a couple days ago, setting up in Sunset Valley, with something of a plan for how jobs, skills, and LTWs for the eight generations should go.
So far....I'm astonished at how far the starting player money doesn't go! I do plan to build a big house, over time, but right now mostly what we've got is different areas laid out with the free floor tiles. But Christopher Steel was a good choice of husband for a female founder - he was, well, kind of easy to woo, he's got good traits to be the cook for the first few batches of Ambrosia we'll need, and he brought enough cash to the wedding that we could move the bathroom indoors.
He's learned painting pretty quickly, too; after two weeks, give or take, my founder sat for her first portrait (which turned out to be more of a silhouette, thanks to a badly placed light near where she was standing, so she posed a second time, and I think we'll have time for one more crack at it if that one's also unclear), and a couple days later the happy couple became the parents of a baby girl.
The biggest challenge I'm anticipating is the real estate purchase requirement for my first generation (I did luck into a money tree seed, at least; here's to hoping the tree drops more...) - although making six best friends might also be tough, given that out of five coworkers, three just aged up to Elder pretty much simultaneously, so they're probably a good 20+ days older than my Sim. At least her boss got turned into a vampire, and is therefore likely to be around for the foreseeable future...