Career Caps and New Digs

[Metropolis Man]

That's a wrap. Grats to drift on a truly mind blowing score. Thanks to all participants in this one. It was really fun. I do not have much to add this time around as far as strategy -- I did what I felt was only pretty obvious -- combine skills, careers and professions that all mixed well together to allow the maximum number of moves. For example, one of my Sims did both Music careers. Then they did a quick run through of the self employed Band career since they already had maxed guitar and got a lot for tips. Along the same lines I had a Sim do the self employed Painter career after they finished both careers in Law Enforcement since the DNA branch has painting as a metric.

[Chuckles_82]

I did the same sort of thing - although I did have some cross-over.

With the professions you will notice that your sims level up faster when they start with no skill and level it up to gain experience - like in the firefighter profession. That meant that each of my sims both maxed logic and painting - as I had one do Ghost Hunter, and the other Private Investigator, for example.

I started with careers that required little or no skill levelling, so that they did not run out of time to max out performance metrics, and gain enough LTH points for the much needed entrepeneurial mindset, fast learner, and multitasker rewards.

Mass producing items while on vacation also helped for some self-employment careers, sold en-masse upon arrival back home. That basically meant there were a few careers that could be maxed in just a day.

My sims were ambitious, which adds to their performance, workaholics, schmoozers, charismatic and born salesman/woman. Twallan mentioned a VERY helpful point about ambitious sims only needing 40% performance when asking for a promotion - so it saved my sims a lot of time when working from home. Also it was helpful to pinpoint that you can only ask for promotions once every 3 days. Plus, if your sim finishes work, say no later than 3pm, it is possible to get enough progress to ask for a second promotion that very day.

I'm not sure where the line would be drawn with the rules regarding the architecture career - so I didn't go there - but I suspect one could gain a VERY high total house value by adding a fountain of youth or two to homes that way, to boost their value before wating for them to become vacant and then scooping them up.

I'm fairly certain I could have gotten at least 4 more careers, but I finished a few weeks early due to poor time management, and my perfectionsim. I had 'horseman/woman' in the works, and the second film career to do with only 5 levels, and the babysitter with only 5 - so maybe even 6 - but I just ran out of time. I don't think I could have managed better house value though.

[drift9999]

Heh I was asked to write briefly for the HoF interview (I don't think that was much of a success, unfortunately ), so here goes a slightly longer strategy post.

Career Caps
Essentially, the approach is to start with Professions, as they reward you with lots of job experience for building skills. I sent Kanye to China on Day 1 to grab the books and ore spawns ("Telescopic Metal" opportunity). Smelt the bars, sell all of them along with the books, and you should have 50,000 for Swimming in Cash. Then get Entrepreneurial Mindset and Fast Learner on one Sim and Motive Mobile on the other.

Once a Profession is done, I would pursue normal rabbit-hole careers utilising the skills built in the profession. You'd want your Sims to have Ambitious, Workaholic and Schmoozer traits to push the Ask for Promotion mechanic as far as possible. By the time Sims start doing actual careers, you'll want them to have Multi-Tasker too. Also, once you quit Level 10 of a job, you can start again at level 5 in the career. Thus, for the double-branched careers like Evil or Film it's best the same Sim does both branches.

In particular, for the Criminal career, you'd want to Work from Home enough so that you can fill the bar even with only 2 or 3 hours of "Work Hard", cause there sometimes are bugs with the career. I'm not sure it was the best decision (I picked it 'cause it's a double-tracked career) - I fell behind schedule when Drifter got arrested!

Finally, there is bound to be down-time while you're pursuing the rabbit-hole careers. (You can only Ask for Promotion once in 3 days). So use this down-time to train up the skills needed for self-employment careers and earn money. Do note that since the credit for selling items depends on when the items were sold, not on when they're made, you can just save up everything, go to City Hall, register for the job, sell, and BAM! Instant Level 10.

Drifter: Firefighter - Pro Sports - Military - Investigator - Thief - Photographer - Angler - Band - Evil - Rock - Symphonic - Inventor (12)
Kanye: Stylist - Ghosthunter - Medical - Forensics - Painter - Business - Spy - Actor - Director - Sculptor - Education (11)

Several people accomplished 24, which I must say is impressive - it's pushing it. (I shouldn't have done Pro Sports...) 25 or even 26 is probably just about barely possible - I should have shot for Gardening, which can be done (I think) by planting 4 money trees in a house then moving out. I didn't do Writing (the whole skill slipped my mind), and I wonder if Daycare is possible to clear efficiently. I assumed Architecture was illegal (counts as modifying the houses).

New Digs
This challenge MUST be played in Union Cove to maximise the score from moving. Otherwise, there simply aren't enough premade high-value lots to get a big score; Bridgeport and Sunset Valley have potential house value totals around 5-ish million, but Union Cove's potential house value total for 23 careers would be close to 11 million, I think.

As part of my research, I emptied the town and took note of the values of the lots. This should give you an idea of which houses you should try to incorporate into your plan.

Now, you'll also need to somehow remove the Sims already living in the houses. You can't use Edit Town to evict them, so... you'll have to do things the dirty way i.e. starve them. You can't use Build Mode to put them in a room, but there wasn't anything in the rules against locking doors - so you can still lock them in the house. Be careful doing this though - one of the Sims in the town (Moira Dernier O'Carter, if I remember correctly) has the Loser trait, so you cannot kill her in this way. Leave the Modern-O'Co and Affiliates household as it is.

As for the items, focus on using them to buff the value of the house as close as possible to the next house (without going over or equalling it). Items bought depreciate to 85% of their value when the value of the lot is calculated, so bear this in mind when buying the items to close the gap. (if the difference is say 1,000, you'd want to divide it by 0.85 to get an estimate of the value of the items you'll need to buy - in this case 1176.) I managed to score a few "direct hits" with houses being worth exactly one less than the next house.

You'll need a lot of money for the moves, but should be pulling in a lot from your career topping especially with the self-employment careers. However, when moving to the final house I made sure I had at least 2 million Simoleons, as the best thing to do to jack up the value of the last lot is to buy four Leon's Fountain of Youths (495,000 each, total value 1,980,000). Also, to avoid depreciation, only move in on the final day. (It's quite a risky move, I admit. If Story Progression moves in a household on the final day, you're stuck.)

To rake in the Simoleons as rapidly as possible, I trained Drifter up in the guitar exploit (to about 2500, I think) during his holidays to China. Thus he blasted through the Band career and had several millions in tips by week 12. Also, note that taking two Sims together with Prepared Traveller grants a total of +6 days to both Sims on the trip, giving me even more time to "play" guitar.

I'd believe an optimal score is around 11.5 million and 26 careers or 41,400,000.

[MarianT]

I'm still curious about how people got high house values, although I never thought of using the architect career. I did play in Union Cove, where there were more expensive houses and more of them. I added 3 jet fighters (75,000) to the last house, but didn't have enough money for a 4th.

I didn't know about the 40% but my ambitious, workaholic Sims did manage to get a few promotions. Besides entrepreneurial mindset and multitasker, I picked up the motive mobile and prepared traveller early. One bought a lot in Egypt, where they planted a garden. While in Egypt, they worked on painting, sculpting, gardening, inventing, photography, and nectar-making. If I did this again, I'd use the display table for nectar-making and concentrate on fishing, even though I can't bring fish back from abroad. Like Chuckles, I went into firefighter, ghost hunter, and private eye with low skills. I skipped stylist and architect because in my test game they took forever.

Just saw Drift's -- yeah, the Fountain of Youth would help!

[ratchie]

I knew that you had gotten the high house score by playing in Union Cove unfortunately for me my game runs really slowly whilst playing there so I would never have completed any of the careers in the time given.

The only thing I could add is that it in the ghost buster career I had my kelpto Sim steal peoples stuff while he was supposed to be hunting down ghosts. Also in the firefighter proffesion you can go into the office,so to speak,at weekends to upgrade the fire truck. My guy got to level ten without putting out a single fire.

Rachel

[BellaClo]

Great explanations! Thanks for sharing and congratulations for such a big score Drift.

I never thought about using Union Cove because the world is a tad little bit too big for my old computer. But with a total houses value around 11 million $, I can see how useful it could be for this challenge :-) I played in Sunset Valley, and I had counted a grand total in house value of 3,8 million $.

I had much trouble to "influence" townies to leave their expensive houses. I thought about using birthday cake to age up some male Sims up to elder, with the idea that they would be a (great) step closer to their graves. But I only did it around week 6 and it was probably a bit too late for some. And then Story Progression was against me sometimes, like when Darlene Bunch moved in with Morty Goth just 2 days before he passed away. At least, I know who I'll evict first in the clone challenge  In households where they were female Sims, my male challengers made babies with them. They were swimming in LTHP so they could buy the clean slate reward whenever their romantic reputations was too awful.

For fishing, I trained one of my Sims in vacation for the commercial fisherman challenge. So that, back home with the angler trait, he could catch deathfishes whenever he was not at work or working from home (and I had stocked a venue pond with the first 10 "cheapest" deathfishes).

Another tip for the horseman SE career: once you've trained and sold a horse for a nice value, you can buy it again and sell it, over and over.

I messed up with gardening and missed this 25th career by a mere 30 k$. I used the omniplant at the Science Facility in SV and fed it with the most expensive fishing book, over and over. But I started too late to have enough books to reach level 10.

[Wench]

I did mostly the same as everyone else, so I guess I was on the right track.  Due to me coming to this late and having to rush the game at the end to get to finish before the deadline, I made many mistakes.  This was the first time I'd ever really tried playing with ambitious/workaholic/schmoozer combinations and asking for promotions so on several occasions I managed to have a day go by with no promotion. 

I'd figured Union Cove would be where you needed to play due to the sheer number of high value houses needed (although I hadn't thought about using darker methods to move the sims out - nice one Drift!), however I kept ending up with so many bugs that when I was allowed to restart I decided Sunset Valley would be the safer option.  Less house value but at least I managed to get to the end!

Having only acquired Late Night and Generations at the beginning of the year, I was still a little new to some of the things introduced by them.  I stumbled upon the motive mobile late in the challenge and was kicking myself for not thinking of it earlier.  Likewise, afterwards I thought of vampires.  As your skill raises faster on a vampire at night and they get no fatigue penalties for working out, vampires could have made a huge speed improvement on the job progression. 

This was my first ever challenge game and I thoroughly enjoyed it

[GlazeyLady]

Actually, I figure the rough approach taken was probably about the same, or 6M would still be very tough, especially considering you had 15 houses only (average of 400K). More careers = more moves = more houses to count value, though!

I'll put up my strategy tomorrow - not sure when the challenge ends for everyone.

I did follow pretty much the same strategy, just missed a few critical things:
- Locking Sims in a room and starving them never occurred to me - I used the "cake up" method to get them to elder at the beginning of the game and then waited for them to croak (and I have to say Pam Marsden is one tough cookie!  I caked her up one day after hubby Joe and she outlasted him by almost 3 weeks!)  The biggest downside of this wasn't using up the 4 items (although I'm not sure the cakes had to count - I bought them at the grocery store, so they went into inventory, they are consumables, and most of the time I did the deed on a public lot, so I never placed them at home.  But I counted them to be on the safe side.)  The biggest downside was that the decisions about who to take out had to come at the beginning and there wasn't time to change that later, so in the end I ended up with 2 additional finished careers and no more moves to make.
- Storing up items and selling them later - I sold everything immediately based on the rule that you can't place them.  It never occurred to me to put them in inventory until I was ready to sell.  Dumb, dumb, dumb that I didn't think of that.

I also had issues playing in Union Cove - by the end it was very slow and lagging a lot.  But I'm glad I played there and got to know the town - the houses are awesome!  The floor plans are creative, the various decorative styles were fun to play with, and overall, it's an awesome town!!

[Chuckles_82]

I haven't actually downloaded UC so it didn't occur to me that that could have been the reason for the high house values. I checked out the value of all the houses in the EA towns, and found SSV to have a higher total value, but still went with AP in the end. I liked how central everything was, and prefer a smaller map. I was hoping that house value would not have as much to do with final score as it did in previous challenges (but I still upped the value using the 85% rule, and still plonked down some fountains of youth in the last house).

I made my sims vampires right at the start for the skilling bonus, and when you combine that with entrepeneurial mindset and fast learner, it is possible to max firefighting career in about 24hours. The other professions took slightly longer and required me to complete a couple of jobs towards the end, but still were done in only a couple of days. Once all professions were cleared, I got my sims the cure so that they could once again enjoy daylight.

Great tip on the horseman career!! I've never actually sold a  horse or completed that career path before, so it's good to know for next time.

[Precious5881]

When I saw drift's scrore compared to my own testing scores in various cities and doing research in those, I knew there was some way he was getting it (and it was driving me nuts).  Then I found UC and saw metro's mansion and it dawned on me.  I had to play THAT map in order to do this challenage.  I lowered my graphics as much as possible to be able to play it.

Both my sims had the workaholic trait (work from home), lucky (I had done research and was told this was how to get promitions fast, they lied!), born salesman, ambitious, athetic.

Haru - LTW - lvl 10 i paranomral
Naomi - adopt 6 animals

Getting lvl 10 paranormal was easy, the skill books can easily get you to lvl 7 or 8 without doing the job.  Naomi started off with firefighter.  I also got them both the motive mobile and once they was done with firefighter and paranoraml, I moved them on to the careers.  While they did the careers, I had them work on sculpting and painting.  Once I had them "save" up enough paints or sculpts I had them consign them and instant lvl 10.  RREALLL easy there lol.  After that it was only a matter of getting the right houses.  I put down cars for my house value increases.  I completely forgot about asking for promotion (smacks forehead).

All in all I did 13 jobs including the daycare one.  And oh yes, I did test out architect.  When you buy a house you've remodled it reverts back to it's orginal.  So architect COULD have been done but it took my sim way to long to do it.

[Chuckles_82]

IT DOES WHAT??!! I'll have to test that one!! I've never gotten far enough in a dynasty or challenge, but I like to make custom houses for my sims - I'd hate for them to revert.

[Precious5881]

I get greats in all my reviews because I put down things for the kitchen, paintings I've painted, and sculpts that I've sculpted.  I tested it on 3 houses while trying this one and I know for a FACT that I gave this house a better bathroom AND a better "TV" room.  When I moved my sims in there, it all was as if I hadn't of touched it.  I thought it was a bug, so I moved them into another house I had previously remodeled via the arch career and yep the same thing.

[Metropolis Man]

Hey, drift -- thanks so much for putting everything right in this thread. That makes my job for the HOF interview super easy since I'll just make a hyperlink right to it.

[ClayMask]

Drift, I'm curious about how you lock Sims in their own houses.  I tried it in my own town and couldn't interact with the doors at other peoples' houses.  Am I missing a step somewhere?  Or did you mean you locked everyone in your Sims' house?

[drift9999]

Drift, I'm curious about how you lock Sims in their own houses.  I tried it in my own town and couldn't interact with the doors at other peoples' houses.  Am I missing a step somewhere?  Or did you mean you locked everyone in your Sims' house?

I locked them in a room in whatever house my Sims were occupying, usually the bathroom. The Party Animal trait + calling for a party, or just having good relationships can work well with this... as far as I know, there's no way to lock others' doors.