Who Says Money Isn't Everything?

[Blackrosea]

Congratulations ClayMask on winning the challenge. Great info. Glad to see you back on the forum.

Great job everyone that participated.

[Ferretmania]

Congratulations ClayMask. Several things in your strategy I didn't think of

[Tixxis]

@ ClayMask: Thank you!
The use of moodlet solvers varied as time passed. I noticed that bladder needs decay faster than hunger needs. Hunger needs decay faster than energy needs. Isis used a toilet until she purchased a steel blader (day 5). She would grow hungry before she became tired. But she could not die from that. I had her wait until energy hit the red and then she drank a moodlet solver. The hardly hungry award aligned hunger needs with her energy needs. These would now decay at more or less the same speed.
Isis never had more than two needs in the red at any given time. For safety I counted for 2 moodlet solvers a day, but in reality, she drank one every 20-22 hours. I deleted the empty glass with the buy-mode sledgehammer.

[Carl]

Congratulations to ClayMask for the first win of the new Tourney! I'm really surprised so many participated given Forum membership is not so high right now, but that just says how well the team did in crafting the event. Well done, to the Challenge Team on that! I am thankful to have you all around and your hard work in providing some fun direction for players' gameplay

[Metropolis Man]

Thank you, Carl! 

[londonsim]

Congrats everyone! I'm learning a lot reading this thread

Here's a quick overview of my strategy:

My Sim was Loner, Creative, Cheerful.
She joined Level 1 of the Art Career (for sell to gallery) but then never progressed further. I had her leave and rejoin the Art career when vacation days were used up (before fired).
Otherwise all she did was paint, paint, paint.
Aspiration rewards in order - Marketable, Creative Visionary, then Inspired and Sleep Replacement.
I also had her Aspiration Switch to fortune and cookery for an influx of points.
She mostly painted small Abstract paintings.

My biggest challenge was getting "Inspired" or "Very Inspired". I don't have the Mood lamps. I did use the photo memory technique and thoughtful showers. Then would spend aspiration points on the "Inspired" reward. But I'm wondering if there's a quicker way to get the right mood (if you don't have the lamps)??

Great info here on the pay-off between large and small paintings. I wasn't sure and so stuck with small Abstract paintings. It sounds like large paintings may have been the way to go.

Thanks again for a fantastic challenge. I really enjoyed it - especially my brief spell at the top of the leader board!!

[MissZoef]

Congrats ClayMask

My sim also had the 'loves the outdoors', 'loner' and 'creative' trait. With the painter extraordinair aspiration. I wanted to max out the painting skill as quickly as possible. She never had a career. I put two inspired lamps down and gave her a shower, toilet, fridge, sink and bed. She lived outdoors mostly, just a small room functioning as a bathroom. I didn't think of putting more inspired lamps out, because I wasn't sure how much it was going to do for her.
Then I just started painting. I started with a few small classic ones and kept painting classic ones until she had a high painting skill. I figured that this should give her the most money, since you can make those of a higher quality first of all the styles. I couldn't figure out which painting style had the highest value (now I know). So I started making large surrealistic paintings only, since some masterpieces gave me over 10k with that style.
I got the 'marketeer', 'creative visionary', 'steel bladder', 'never weary' and 'hardly hungry'. In that order I believe.
I completed the painter extraordinair and fabulously wealthy aspiration, so I got an intrest of that aspiration as well. Which gave me a little more money. She only ate quick meals from the fridge since I thought that this would cost less money than ordering pizza (I can be wrong though).
I think I did quite well

@ClayMask : what was the reason for getting that disco light? does it give another moonlit?

[Nutella]

Not Claymask here, but I do know the disco light gives a +1 Happy just by being near it, plus you can watch it to increase fun.

[ClayMask]

Yeah, the reason I put out the laser lightshow was the +1 happy for being near it.

[MeestorMark]

Congrats to ClayMask and the other top acheivers. And thank you to ClayMask as well for sharing your insights. I had the same basic plans, but can definitely see some of the little, finer tweaks that put you out ahead.

I am kinda kicking myself for not plopping down 3 more inspiration lamps. I thought +2 was max. Oops. Lol. That probably would have let me keep the inspired mood going all the time instead of popping back and forth between inspired and confident every time he cranked out a masterpiece.

I tried the ordering pizza route too, but the first times I called nothing ever showed up. Not sure what the issue was there, or if I am still missing something. But that lead me to going the quick meal path, which I think doesn't have nearly as good of a time/benefit ratio as pizza would have. I did finally figure out the last week how to have a sim not waste so much time with random animations while they eat. If I would have figured that bit out earlier it could have helped a lot too. I wish I could figure out how to make them skip all of the time wasting animations while they paint. That would REALLY help.

I also spent too much time in the painter career and actually sending him to work until he got the "professional slacker" achievement. I must confess I didn't know anything about using vacation days until someone just mentioned it here. Another oops moment. Lol. Once I got the "professional slacker" for him though, he just skipped work and yet still had the benefit from the career.

One thing I think I figured out his last half week came about as a result of me fighting the confident mood from masterpieces. I started purchasing the inspired potion for him with satisfaction points. Then I bought a total of 8 easels and would have him drink the potion and then start the paintings until the image actually started to show. Then move on to starting the next in the queue. Once all 8 were started this way, I would have him go back to cranking on finishing them all up. I would get a MUCH higher rate of masterpieces this way as the paintings were all started while Very Inspired. It didn't seem to matter if his mood changed to confident, happy or whatever after they had already been started. Would be interesting to know if this was just my imagination or is that how the game is coded?  But I think that would have made a big difference in the money he made had I stumbled across that strategy sooner.

I am curious if anyone tried the perfectionist trait. Would be interesting to know if the extra time cost/more valuable paintings ratio is worth it or not.

And finally, the reason I think this challenge had so many participants. All the quick-hit challenges like this are more appealing to me personally over the longer ones, but this one had other things going for it as well. Money is something sims can use down the line. We all want to know the good strategies for for making money for when we are actually playing a sim or a sim family. So there is application for all the tricks people may learn for their later games. That could bring out people who don't usually enter. Also, making a really rich sim who is only just now becoming an adult is also a sim that has a pretty good start on life if we actually want to play them. Lol. I know this is the benefit that pushed me into playing this challenge as opposed to say the repair man type of challenge. A sim with a million in readies and still reasonably young is a VALUABLE sim in my library; as opposed to say an adult sim who upgraded a lot of things and has several hundred unbreakable umbrellas in his inventory, as was one of the Sims 3 repair strategies.

Anyway it was a great challenge for me to get my feet wet with challenges here. If I do end up playing this sim again, I am sure he will be happy to finally talk to someone, get off his aching feet, and have a good nap.

[ClayMask]

Meestormark, I have some questions and some comments about what you said.

How did you skip the eating animations?  Was it starting and stopping eating?  I may know what happened with your pizza delivery.  If you order pizza in the middle of the night, it doesn't show up until 8 AM the next day.  I think it's either 1 or 2 AM that they stop delivering until 8.  Did you look for the pizza delivery at 8 AM?

From my understanding of the perfectionist trait, it improves the quality of the product.  It isn't long though before your painter makes at least excellent quality paintings all the time anyway, though.  I'm not sure if perfectionist improves the chance at masterpieces at all, but Darkwalker didn't mention the trait when he looked into the code for what improved masterpiece chances.  He listed these on the skill thread.  Even if it improved the chance slightly, I didn't think it would be worth the time.

[Slarts]

Congrats to Claymask and to all who participated! Normally I'm a pretty casual player, preferring to play on long lifespan and just reacting on whatever the game throws at me, so this was a real challenge. I'm learning so much by reading all the different strategies here.

My Sim, as most challenge sims here, was also a painter - creative, perfectionist, loner- living outdoors with only an indoor bathroom with toilet and shower. She combined the painter career and skill, because I wanted to get the first reward easel. When I got the easel, she took up all vacation days and painted continuously (mainly large abstract paintings) and living off salads and sleep potions during the rest of her days as a young adult, making about 230,000 in the end. However, reading all these clever and creative strategies, I realize now that she could do much, much better and I may just have to repeat the experience to see how much better my score would be now . But first, I have to tackle the next challenge .

I have been lurking on the forums for quite a while, but the idea of participating in the Sims 3 challenges was way to daunting for me. But when I stumbled upon the start of this challenge series, I just had to participate! I'm looking forward to whatever Metroman and the rest of the Challenge team will come up with. Kudos for this fun experience  !

[MeestorMark]

Here is how I maximized eating time to stop the wasted animations:

Send him to the fridge to grab the cereal and his first animation after grabbing it is always taking a bite. So far so good. After this first bite though he would often do a look around or chuckle animation that did nothing to move the food bar or consume the food. Often several of these before taking another bite that did any good.

So I started to have him view an inspiring work on the wall by his fridge after he started the animation of taking his first bite. The view inspiring work animation is really quickly accomplished and he would always follow that up with an immediate bite of his food with this multi-tasking stuff they gave us in TS4.

He almost always had just finished a painting before going to the fridge as well. (Later on, had often finished several too.) So after starting his second animation of taking a bite of food, I would click on a painting on the easel to sell, also pretty near the fridge. This is another quick animation that does something I am going to have him spend time on anyway. Again, he would immediately follow that up with taking another bite of his food with no wasted animations. If I queued up several selling painting actions, he would do them all before taking another bite of food. So I would just do one, let him have his bite, sell painting, have a bite, etc until he put the bowl down from being finished. He would fully consume a bowl of cereal in four bite animations. Not sure how many pizza would take.

Anyway that is how I finally got him to not waste any time with nonsense animations while eating.

I never gave him a counter either, so he would always just put the bowl down on the ground where he stood and never traveled anywhere to do it. Then off to his next activity. I then would just drag the bowl myself with the mouse to the back of the lot where it getting funky later was out of his moodlet range. I ended up selling these later into the nano trash can after I was sure he had enough to make up for the depreciation cost of purchasing it.

[IronicBeauty]

I am curious if anyone tried the perfectionist trait. Would be interesting to know if the extra time cost/more valuable paintings ratio is worth it or not.

I'm torn a bit on this too. I normally took the perfectionist trait when doing painting along with creative. From what I could tell it does take longer to paint but the skill building is faster. So if it is between building the skill and maximizing the time in order to sell the paintings I might should've forgone the trait all together.

Edit: To further explain the increase in quality towards cost of a painting this is how I saw it played out: With the perfectionist trait it seems to have an extra multiplier that increases the chance of getting more for the sell of something crafted but it is not a guarantee. I typically saw paintings being sold for a decent amount at lower levels but they took longer to craft. Once hitting about level 8 there didn't seem to be any difference in pricing. Or, the amounts were in the thousands anyway so a couple hundred wasn't a big deal.

[Poffin]

I ran Perfectionist on my Sim. In my testing, small paintings only took about 15 minutes more to complete with the trait. In my opinion, it is worth in on small pieces. On large paintings, it probably would be detrimental.