Before even starting a practice run, I went through the Sims wiki and compiled a list of all the townies and their skills. I mean, I wanted a list of all the townies for the current vampire challenge anyway, and I'm a self-confessed spreadsheet fiend! The general idea was to use larger households (3-4 residents and SKL's 5) for quick skills or expansion pack skills that no townie had any points in whatsoever, and pick smaller households (1-3 residents) based on their particular profiles. Karaoke Legends is an obvious example: Akira, Miko and Darling have skill levels 7, 8 and 9 respectively, so they were a shoe-in for singing!
Households with generational spreads needed careful treatment too, but fortunately the game has some skills that children can learn without having maxed any of their specific four. Vampire Lore and Bowling were the two I used and there's Pet Training and Media Production too. The only opportunity to use the former with kids is the Delgatos, but I don't think Blue would have approved, and despite trialling the latter after seeing it on the internet, it seems to only be the video side of things that kids can do, not the music. Levelling by making videos is so much slower that it just didn't seem worth it. Even then, I didn't have to discard "adult" skills entirely - Elsa Bjergsen begins the game with maxed mental, which I took advantage of, and Christie Sigworth has Creativity 9, which I didn't! For all other households with kids, I had to wait until they'd waged up after the first two weeks - this led to a somewhat awkward episode where... uh, I'll quote my notes, which I'll stress were written in media res:
| [Comedy is] something that can be done while Skylar finds and befriends as many children as possible. Ergh, that sounds bad, especially 'cause I'm about to say "I wish I'd done this earlier"... still, having the kids in Skylar's relationships panel will make it easier to tell when they age up and there's no way of writing about this without sounding incredibly creepy is there? |
No, past me, there isn't. Anyway, the other factor in deciding which households to vist was the timing/order of operations. This is where I'd argue my score could have been improved upon! Sometimes I did it right - I took the Bjergsens to GeekCon to do Video Gaming and the Landgraabs to the Humor And Hijinks festival to do Mischief, and my first five skills were chosen very carefully, but it was only about a week or so in that I realise I hadn't really accounted for fame properly. I had planned to try for CelebuSerums, hence why I was actually chasing fame, but they were a right bust. Moving households so often confused the
game postal service into only ever giving Skylar two - the first was an energizing one after he'd already maxed Fitness (I think Wellness might have been okay with it too, but I never got round to that) and the second was a hygiene one deliverd two days before the end that I straight-up forgot about. No, the potential benefit I hadn't considered was the celebrity perk "Rally!", unlocked at four stars, which allows you to give an inspirational speech. Its listeners gain an Inspired +2 moodlet for four hours that also improves their skill gains - I didn't know how much by when I decided to aim for it (heck, I didn't even know the strength/emotion of its moodlet!), but in
Carl's most recent super sim video he says it's +50%. An ideal path, therefore, would have given me more time to earn fame earlier on in the challenge and stacked as many of the skills with Inspired as their ideal mood at the end. Getting four stars takes time, though, so by the time Skylar had reached that tier there were only two days left - by sheer coincidence, though, it was while he was finishing up Piano and getting ready to move on to Mixology, with Writing penned in for afterwards!
(Caveat: my plan for the very end of the challenge, based on my wiki research, was to finish with Vlad's already-maxed Pipe Organ skill, and for the household beforehand to either be Gardening with the Fyres if I had >24 hours or Writing with Salim Benali otherwise. As a consequence, I'd practiced Writing, and can say that the inspirational rally knocked a grand total of half an hour off my expected time. Caveat to the caveat: only the listeners benefit from a rally, and given that the whole point of doing Writing with Salim was to bump his level 8 up to max and have him mentor Skylar asap, I don't think this instance gave me enough time to gauge its full potential...)
Now on to the actual playing of the challenge! Finally!
Skylar Bhattacharya (left, probably) is a perfectionist insider who loves the outdoors. He made good friends easily - the first few relationships relied on photography (hence my query as to how far into level 1 I could push a skill), but eventually Popular Club + Pristine Reputation + Cheerful Introduction could have someone become Good Friends with him by introduction alone, especially once he'd become a celebrity. This was partly why he pursued Charisma as his starting skill, but it was mainly chosen for the way it meshed so well with farming satisfaction points. Friend Of The World, Leader Of The Pack and Serial Romantic all have goals for achieving various Charisma levels, netting a fair chunk quickly, and combined with some vampire research at the Willow Creek Archive (with the action cancelled almost immediately to keep him at level 1) plus a handful of whims, he was able to purchase Great Kisser at 8:45pm on the first day.
Spending the daylight hours of the first day in the library also provided Skylar with a steady stream of people that he could invite to his freshly-formed club, Skillazillas. The club was absolutely essential: as well as the skilling perks, Skylar also survived on Rally The Troops for three weeks straight. Just like Adam in my attempt at this year's first challenge, he visited the loo in the library, ate dinner with his club (though Skylar did so in San Myshuno as opposed to at the grills by the lake) then never considered his hunger, bladder or tiredness again. Assembling a six-person club with various socials as its actions has served me well for farming club points both times now - actually, Adam farmed a fair amount by having everyone work out at Burners & Builders, but Skylar didn't have time for that. I also added romantic socials to the permitted activities for Skylar's two dates with Marcus Flex - well, he was the first single male sim to pass by the library, so I could hardly say no. Both dates took place at the Stargazer Lounge for its lot trait - I forget what it's called, but sims either get a confident or a flirty moodlet when performing romantic socials there, and while the former was desirable as the ideal mood for levelling Charisma, the latter opened up Passionate Kiss to allow Skylar to cycle through as many different types of kisses as possible.
Sunday night is Guys Night at the game's bars, so once Skylar was done with Marcus, he dragged the Skillazillas to the Old Quarter Inn. It has a closet. Skylar was low on fun. Need I say more? Trouble was, because he'd also stopped by 2A Jasmine Suites in order to befriend Arun Bheeda and add him to the club, he arrived so late that his options were limited. Kaiden Corbett was a married man, part of the family the game had generated for Oakenstead, but Skylar was desperate. Besides, Kaiden had two kids, so his four-person household had already gone on my list. This is where the "luck" that I mentioned in a previous post came in; though there are a few houses in Willow Creek and Oasis Springs that can support a family of four, the game doesn't always fill them. One or two is the norm - in my playthrough I got three. Admittedly, this only really adds a smidgen to the multiplier, but it's still something.
...Skylar's third first kiss was with the mixologist on duty, because like I said, he was desperate. Now, there's absolutely no way he'd have otherwise considered snogging Dennis Kim, but needs must. The above image now gets its proper context: once he'd maxed Charisma and got Dennis into Skillazillas, Skylar moved in with the Bheedas to work on Cooking, where he took several pictures like it in order to become good friends. I'd been planning to go Bheeda-Rasoya-SKL, but Dennis existed at me and forced a minor alteration there. Anyway, using the Bheedas for Cooking and the Rasoyas for Gourmet Cooking made a lot of sense to me: since Jesminder's unborn child(ren) remain unborn for the first few days of any playthrough, there's a fairly narrow window in which their household has only two members, so I figured I'd use Jesminder's level 6 Cooking skill while I could. Raj and Geeta have Cooking levels 10 and 8 respectively, so they can both cook gourmet dishes from the get-go (and Raj in fact has level 7 in Gourmet Cooking already) - so long as Skylar had maxed Cooking before moving in with them, he could too. A general point to note: upon moving into a household, Skylar reconfigured Skillazillas to have only the place's occupants as its members (except for when he got into a long-term relationship, but that's by-the-by) and had them all buy a club perk each so that they could work through Leader Of The Pack - there are a lot of easy satisfaction points in it, and moodlet solvers, Morning Sim and/or Night Owl were alway highly desirable.
I was gonna talk moodlets, but it's got stupidly late and I've written way too much already, so it's time for the summary:
