Congrats
@cyclonenic and a HUGE thank you to the Challenge Team. This was a great year, and this was a really fun final challenge.
I completely agree with what cyclonenic said about moving around in the aspirations - I was constantly changing those depending on what my sim was doing. There was very little either sim did that didn't somehow move him/her closer to completing an aspiration. For example, if fun or social needed to be raised, I looked for some aspiration assigned to that sim that could be helped by a fun or social activity. I pre-assigned most of the aspirations to one or the other sim so that I could do this. But I did keep a couple of them back, unassigned with neither sim working on them, and then did them late in the game when it was more clear which one would have the time to do it.
I did a lot of research and practice for this, mostly to figure out two things - First, vampires. I'd only played with vamps during the Super Parent challenge, and the focus was completely on completing that aspiration, so there was much about vamps I didn't know. But I wanted to take advantage of the faster learning of a vamp, so I needed to learn about them. I'm not sure how long I would have gone without playing them more fully, so I'm really glad this challenge allowed the vamp - it pushed me to learn about them and I have to say, it was fun playing one. Second, I was really working on a way to meet the "friends with 3 of your children" requirement of Big Happy Family without relying so fully on getting lucky enough to get triplets.
I had the same thought as cyclonenic - that it should be the male teen that should go for Big Happy Family because he wasn't limited to one birth. But of course, the complication was that the teen's children couldn't live in the household. This strategy did not work for me in practice, because although it covered the "Be friends with 3 children" requirement, when I had one of his daughters marry a son of my YA Vamp, the game did not recognize/award the "have a child get married" requirement, and when I had my YA Vamp and her two sons all become good friends with another child of my teen, the game did not recognize and award the "have a child with 3 friends" requirement. Now that I'm typing this it occurs to me that I could have PM'd the Challenge Team to see if I could cheat that milestone in the real game if I did meet it this way, but that didn't occur to me when I was practicing. So I went back to trying to improve my odds for triplets. In doing that, I ran a bunch of research experiments - trying the various methods that improve the odds of triplets. The only time I got triplets in practice was when I did ALL of these things:
1) Fertility Reward for both parents (meant the teen had to age up and have the babies with the YA vamp)
2) Herbalism Elixir of Fertility
3) Fertility Massage
4) Had the mom-to-be watch kid's tv and listen to kid's radio. I also threw in some reading of children's books when she was really bored with kid's tv, but I'm not sure that helped.
5) Ley Lines Lot trait set continuously from before the Try for Baby until after the birth
6) Also had them woo-hoo multiple times before taking a pregnancy test, and had them woo-hoo a lot during pregnancy - I haven't tested either of these, but I've seen some comments that some people think it helps, so I threw it in there.
The first time I did all of these things, I got triplets. So then I wanted to see if that was repeatable. Out of 5 experiments, I got 3 sets of triplets and 2 sets of twins. So it wasn't sure-fire but did seem to improve the odds. At that point, I started my actual game, did all of these again, and got triplets - so the result for me was 50/50 for twins/triplets, even with doing ALL of these, and I was just fortunate to get trips in the challenge.
@cyclonenic - I read through your very awesome and detailed notes and other than a few details, my strategy was nearly identical. It's really cool reading through your strategy and seeing how much your thought processes exactly matched mine!
But I was too quick to abandon my strategy to have the teen complete Big Happy Family. I see that I was on the right track having my teen impregnate my YA, but I was so focused at that point on getting triplets that it didn't occur to me that I only needed one child that I could control. I made a lot of work for myself on this.
But this is one of my favorite things about these challenges - I always learn new tips, strategies, and solutions.
I really enjoyed this year of challenges - I had more time this year for research and practice, and I really enjoyed that. I was feeling sad about the challenge year ending, and then I read the comment from
@Metropolis Man about posting the first ruleset for 2018 next Monday, and started feeling excited about the beginning of next year rather than sad about the end of this one.
Again, a HUGE HUGE thank-you to the Challenge Team and to everyone who shares strategy and tips. This game is so much more fun for me because of all of you, and I really appreciate you all for that!
