Note: This is written from the perspective of the end of Week Six, so if you don't want spoilers, don't read it.
I tend to think about potential future spouses for my Prosperity Sims while they're still in elementary school. This is partly because I'm just controlling like that and partly because I want to intermarry them as much as possible rather than having a constant influx of townies.
There are a couple of factors which complicate intermarriage. One is a gender imbalance. I currently have five single women living in two different houses because there simply were not enough men for them without bringing in a ton of townies. I kind of wonder if the girl skew is built into the game somehow; I know a lot of people who have it.
I actually don't have a girl skew among my current batch of teens and children, though. Prosperity Plains currently has 24 residents between the ages of 5 and 22 years; of those 14 are male and 10 are female.
"Great," you think, "That just leaves 4 guys who have to find townies or marry some of those older women or something."
Not quite. We now come to the second problem with intermarriage: Once you've done it for a generation, everyone is related. Of those 24 young people, no less than fifteen are Beata Riedmayer-Landgraab's grandchildren. Namely: Landon and Ginny Whitfill; Joe, Seth, Jeannie, Gabe, Edward, and Brian Pons; Todd, Fritz, and Charles Riedmayer; and Lauren, River, Elijah, and Tamara Whitfill. (That's 10 boys and 5 girls.)
All the Whitfills listed above are cousins on their fathers' side to Emmy and Shelley Whitfill.
Emmy and Shelley are cousins on their mothers' side to Caitlin and Patrick Seifert.
The only kids who don't have cousins are Alexis, Silas, and Priscilla Kules (Alexis is aunt to the other two), and Charles and William King. (Charles and William are half-brothers to the three Riedmayer boys, though.)
I'm sure you're not following at all at this point, but that's okay.
So, let's look at it from the perspective of the Riedmayer-Landgraab cousins. There are 10 boys, most of whom want wives. They cannot marry their first cousins, so that leaves them Emmy, Shelley, Caitlin, Alexis, and Priscilla. Already that gives us 5 single guys instead of the 4 we would have if nobody had been first cousins.
Meanwhile, there are 5 girl cousins. They have a little more choice, with Patrick Seifert, Silas Kules, and Charles and William King. (Though that does mean that two of them will have to marry their cousins' half-brothers. My brain hurts.) Still, that leaves one girl who won't have a husband unless she goes for townies or marries a much younger man.
It'd completely take care of the problem if Ginny or Tamara rolled Romance (or Pleasure with a 50 first dates LTW), but if not somebody who's Knowledge or Fortune can be an old maid. (If any of the non-cousin girls roll Romance, they're getting rerolled in college.)
As for the guys: Joe Pons and Charles Riedmayer are Romance (20 lovers LTW, too) and Todd Riedmayer is a 50-first-dates Pleasure. So those three will probably establish a happy bachelor pad. None of Joe's brothers can join them, though, because six of the seven Pons children have to marry to fulfill Joan's lifetime want. (So far, Joe has the most family-unfriendly aspiration.) Landon Whitfill can't join them either, because he's the heir to an original house and has to marry and keep it in the family--which means that if he rolls Romance he'll follow in his father's footsteps and reroll in college. Fritz Riedmayer is Family aspiration and I'd like one of the those brothers to pass on their genes so I'd rather not reroll him. Elijah is the only prospect, therefore; I guess we'll see what he rolls when he becomes a teen.
(There is currently a female placeholder in college who will marry the last spare boy, probably one of the Ponses, so there only need to be 4, not 5, in our hypothetical bachelor pad.)
This is why I don't do love-matches. Even if there are a handful of girls who aren't your cousin, some of them are probably your cousin's cousins and you have to marry the one who isn't so your cousin still has someone to marry... Better just to say to my Sims from the beginning, "Okay, Brian, I realize you have three bolts with Priscilla, but if you marry her Landon won't have anyone to marry. So you can marry Shelley; I'll even have her dye her hair to the color you prefer." (All of the Sims in that example sentence are still children, so I don't know how their attraction scores will end up.)
That was random, but I had fun writing it. I promise the next post will be Week Six Part One.
Phew! I admit marrying off your Sims sounds like you really put in a lot of thought!
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to too many Sims being related, I have a similar problem in New Maximiliania: all the half-Aliens are half-siblings, so there won't ever be any romantic feelings between any of them. I quite regret that, since I would have liked to see an all-Alien family one day.
As for everybody else, if possible, I let them make their own choice. 3-bolters have a clear preference, but if two Sims without much chemistry fall in love on their own accord (it happens a lot at college) and their relationship does not ruin any lifetimewant plans I had for one of them, then so be it.
Unless their lifetimewant is the Golden Anniversary, I let my Sims only marry if one of them has the want.
Of course, none of this is set in stone - I do make an exception every now and then. These are, after all, my own rules :-)
I actually had spontaneous love happen to a couple of my Sims recently...I was feeling bad about all the arranged marriages in my game, so I invited a guy over to check out two girls, either of whom he could have married without majorly messing up my plans.
ReplyDeleteWell, as soon as he was greeted, he grabbed one of the girls and kissed her. It so happens that this was the one I wanted him to marry, but they have only one bolt and I think he has two with the other girl. I guess he figures looks aren't everything, though. :)
(I don't even have ACR, so spontaneous romance is pretty rare.)
Wow - a whirlwind romance if there ever was one :-D
DeleteWhat is ACR?
Well, they were already friends, so it was more "seeing each other in a new light". :) (In real life, my parents got married less than 3 months after they FIRST MET. Now that's whirlwind.)
DeleteACR is a massive hack that does a lot of things, but the thing it's most famous for is this: You can adjust the relationship level at which your Sims will accept a given interaction. So, I've noticed that Woohoo usually takes a daily relationships score of 85 and a lifetime relationship of 70 (love). I could use ACR to set it so that Woohoo takes a daily relationship score of 20 and a lifetime relationship of 0 and leave my Sims to their own devices, so they'd go at it like bunnies. At least that's my understanding; like I said, I don't have it, so I don't have firsthand experience.
(ACR stands for "Autonomous Casual Romance", by the way.)
Thanks for enlightening me about ACR :-)
DeleteSince I play entirely hack- anc CC-free, I wasn't familiar with this one. Sometimes I wished that woohoo was possible with a lower relationship score; in real life, a lot of people hardly think twice before going to bed with someone they have only just met, and it would be useful for some of the Romance Sims. But I have decided to stay away from hacks, and so my Sims have to work on their relationships like everybody else :-)
I think ACR can also be used to set a Sim to "Spouse Only." So, a happily married Family Sim with 5 children at home won't give in to a Romance Sim's seductions even when their relationship is high. That's always bugged me about the base game, that there isn't some kind of fidelity mechanic.
DeleteI still play a very basic game (it's amazing all the things I am discovering even after years and years) but I have started venturing into the world of CC lately--mostly hair and clothes and fairly low-impact stuff like that. We'll see if custom hairs are the gateway to major mods like ACR. :)