@cyclonenic As usual, our thinking was very similar regarding strategy. I also planned a staggered start, adopting the first toddler at the very beginning of the game, and then staggering the next five over several days, with the last one aging up just before the first one became a teen. The first one moved out with the last three, but the second and third one stayed. I kept the second one for most of the game to help out, and the third one moved out when she aged up to teen. That gave me two houses to move the next children into, and then close to the end, the third one, now YA, moved out giving me the third house. I planned all the adoptions and age-ups on a calendar, which helped me stay on track adopting at the right time.
I also used the electric bin to get money, but I did give the dad a job (Tech Guru). I was surprised at how much money the bin actually provides, especially when Watcher grabs any unattended bowls and tosses them
. I was worried that wouldn’t be enough, though, for the 21 toddlers I planned to adopt plus all the toys. But I did sometimes send dad off to adopt right before he was due to go to work, or spam him with toddler requests and successfully kept him from going to work some days. Toward the end, I tried to make him miss work every day in hopes that he’d get fired, as I had enough money, but wasn’t able to make that happen.
I used the baby tablet, a mirror, nesting blocks, various toys and toddler books, the dollhouse, and the slide, along with play with parent and running around naked (which was hilarious – at one point I had 5 toddlers running around the lot naked-so funny). Having all these on the lot caused whims to come up for all of them. The toddlers got between 1750 and 2675 in satisfaction points each, with most of them over 2000, and inevitably as their skills improved, they spawned more and more whims that involved parental attention. So it helped to mix the focus on skilling and the focus on whims throughout the 3 days. Having a teen stay on the lot helped because the toddlers would spawn wishes to engage with her.
I also didn’t focus on potty training, just used the diaper. Baths gave good attention and moodlets that were helpful in spawning
wishes. [Correction - whims. Whew! Flashback to Sims 3]
The first key thing that I learned about a week in that was big for me was that watching raises thinking. I didn’t know that, and it seemed like thinking was taking forever to raise in practice, so I planned to just focus on getting 1 skill from thinking. Once I realized that watching was such an effective way to raise thinking, I was able to get 8 skill points for a lot of the toddlers and 7 for the rest. And they spawned a lot of wishes to watch their parents and their siblings, so that helped too.
The other key thing was that toddlers sleep much faster in a highchair than in a bed. I was trying to get the parents to get two tods out of highchairs and into beds – mom was on it, but dad was clueless, and the toddler trying to get his attention fell asleep in the highchair. After one nap in the highchair, her energy was in the green while the toddler in the bed still had a yellow bar, despite not being as exhausted when she went to sleep. So I paid more attention and found that a completely exhausted, in-the-red angry toddler can fill the energy bar with 4 naps in the highchair, which takes about 4 hours. A toddler in bed needed over 10 hours to fill bar with green. After that, every time they ate, they napped in the highchair - none of them ever went to bed again. This was also helpful because getting mom and dad to get the toddlers out of the highchair when I needed them to was difficult – having them sleep there gave me more flexibility with parent time.
This was really tedious, though. I played on normal speed the entire time, and I think my game was paused about half the time as I scrolled through the tods checking for new whims.
@clyclonenic – I’m sorry you didn’t get to play this. I think you might have beaten my score, given that you knew about the watching/thinking from the beginning, you had dad at home to help more, and if you didn’t know about the highchair, you likely would have discovered it as I did. Good luck in your interviews. I’m sure you’ll be great!
And a huge thank-you to the Challenge Team for giving us back Hand of the Watcher. Without it, I don’t know if I would have been up to attempting this one. Practice without Hand of the Watcher nearly did me in.
