So, I'm planning on having a go at this! It
seems approachable enough for my first attempt at a dynasty, plus it's the hot new thing in terms of challenges - what's not to like? I've played a little dry run of a first generation, partly to get a handle on what I need to achieve, but mainly to acquaint myself with what normal gamespeed is like, and things went well enough. I mean, I didn't actually meet all the requirements in time, but that was only 'cause I knew I was only playing for the one gen...
Many of the questions that crossed my mind during the test have been asked and answered here before: spouses/spares can max anything, community lots can be lightly edited, life extension is permitted, festivals count separately for lot visits, gender customisation is fine, switchining aspirations for points is okay and clubs are allowed. Somewhat inevitably, though, I have new questions...
- Are there any restrictions on when a spouse can move into the household? Or, rather, can they move in the moment I'm sold on them becoming the spouse? Personally, I'm not likely to do so until they are formally dating my main sim, but I wouldn't mind knowing if it could be done earlier, just in case I find myself in circumstances where it might make sense...
- Though the topic of "what lots can I add" has been brought up many times already, I'm here to dredge it back up again! Specifically, I had a crack at fleshing out Newcrest using the metric of "any Maxis lot that provides something the built-in ones elsewhere don't is allowed", and in amongst the spas and restaurants I found a pair of lots that occupy something of a grey area. Luxe Health Club, from the Spa Day pack, is listed as a gym but has plenty of spa equipment as well, and Vital Climb Gym... well, okay, it's a gym, and I really don't think it should count, but I was desperate enough for 40x30 lots that I justified its inclusion by it being the only Maxis lot to offer climbing walls and now I'd like someone to tell me that's a bit of a stretch...
- When it comes to mods, I usually play with a few that don't affect gameplay and thus I would assume are okay: CleanUI (a return to the previous colour-coded one), Smaller Mosaic, TidyCAS, More CAS Columns and a handful of sliders for increasing the diversity of body shapes, facial details, height and so on. But then there are two others...
- I like RoBurky's Fitness Controls since it gives you the power to change both the fat/muscle range for sims and their "metabolic rate", so to speak. By default, it slows things down, so that weight and muscle changes make a lot more sense when playing with long lifespans... or even normal ones, judging by my test game! As far as I know, sims' fat/muscle levels have no effect on the gameplay and are purely cosmetic; they're not even tied to the Fitness skill, I think, but since I'm not hugely experienced in the game's mechanics I'm willing to be corrected. The only thing I could think of was the Athletic aspiration and its goal of attaining "maximum body potential" - a little testing suggests this triggers when a sim reaches +80% muscle, so as long as the mod is set up to increase the range by more than the metabolic rate is lowered (which it is by default*), this goal will actually be harder to reach!
- The other mod I use is, on the face of it, a no-go: MCCC. But, due to its modular nature, it's possible to strip out all of the game-changing stuff (story progression, automatic repopulation, etc.) while keeping the basics in play. The main feature I'd love to be able to keep is its autosave, but there's also the Dresser module that helps stops townies from being so unfashionable (though without the Population module I'm not sure how much it can do), aging and death notifications for NPCs ('cause I like to keep tabs on how the worlds are doing and it saves having to trawl the Unplayed Households list every now and again) and automatically pausing on arriving at a lot (because seriously). All that said, while I am reasonably confident in my ability to set the mod up so that it only does permissible things, you'd only have my word for it, and it's entirely possible that it'll act in ways that I can't anticipate or even see, so it would be entirely understandable if it were considered verboten. I probably wouldn't even ask after it if it weren't for that incredibly appealing autosave...
...that's an awful lot of text there, considering that none of my issues are all too big, so thanks in advance for any answers/counsel/healthy doses of realism!
(*specifically, a base-game percentage point is weighted by 4/7 and is covered at 1/3 of the rate, thus taking ~1.7x as long, and my current settings have the weighting as 2/3 and the rate as 2/5, which would be only marginally faster than that)
