How to get into private school/win the headmaster scenario in The Sims 2

First, a disclaimer: This is certainly not the only way to succeed; probably it isn't even the best way. But I know I was totally lost the first few times I tried this and now I have it down to a science, so take what tips you like and use them as you will.

SEVERAL DAYS BEFORE

1. Make sure your house sits relatively close to the street and is easy for Sims to navigate. Remember that stairs are like Sim kryptonite. Relatedly, try to have at least 4 or 5 good-sized distinct rooms on the ground level of your Sims' house. (If you have an eat-in kitchen, you might consider putting up a wall and archway, etc.)

THE DAY BEFORE

2. Decorate! Flooring, walls, and lights are the essentials. (I always forget to give my Sims lights until it's time for the headmaster to come over. Good thing they can read in the dark...) Then plaster the walls with paintings. I like paintings best because they don't take up any floorspace, and there are quite a few high-scoring 1-tile paintings, so you should be able to fit them in between windows and doors. To test your decorating abilities, select a teen/adult/elder Sim to wander around and make sure their environment motive stays in the high green.

It is not necessary to decorate anything other than the ground floor of your Sims' house, for reasons that will become clear in a moment. You also do not need to decorate really tiny rooms.

2b - The Quick and "Dirty" Decorating Method: Buy one high-scoring statue (in the description, it will say "Environment 5", "Environment 10", etc). Buy Mode is still accessible during the headmaster visit, so you can pick up the statue and move it from room to room as your Sim gives the tour, thus giving you a higher tour score without tedious decorating or spending tons of cash. In this case, statues are better than paintings because you don't have to spin around looking for a blank wall. Just plop that sucker down in the middle of the room.

3. Have the teen/adult/elder Sim with the highest cooking skill start cooking as soon as "Serve Dinner" (rather than "Serve Lunch") becomes available. Try to have them cook something nice, like pork chops or salmon or turkey or lobster thermidor. (I've gotten 45 points from lobster thermidor alone, seriously.) If they burn it, make them try again until they get it right. Once they succeed, put the leftovers in the fridge and don't let anybody eat them.

(Step 3 only works if you have Seasons, I think. If you don't have the ability to "Put away leftovers", don't worry. I'll address that in a minute.)

THE DAY OF

4. "Invite headmaster" is its own tab on the phone. I am reasonably certain that teens can call the headmaster; I don't know if children can. The headmaster will arrive at the first 5 p.m. after your call. (So, if you call at 4 p.m., he will arrive an hour later. If you call at 6 p.m., he will arrive the next day.)

Don't bother inviting the headmaster if no child/teen has a grade of C or higher. (I am not sure about C minus; I think that might be too low.) This does mean that you can invite the headmaster as soon as your child ages up, since they age up with a C.

(For my readers playing a non-English game: The school performance bar has to be at least halfway full.)

5. As soon as your children get home from school, PUT THEM TO BED. If they're not sleepy, confine them to an out-of-the-way corner with a skill book or something. The goal is to have them doing something that they will keep doing for 4-6 hours. Lock them in the basement if you want; I don't care. The headmaster doesn't care either.

Do the same with other extraneous Sims. You should have no more than 2 teen/adult/elder Sims up and about by about 4:55 p.m. (Sim time, of course.) One of these Sims will henceforth be referred to as Tour Guide, and the other as Chef, for reasons that will become obvious in a moment.

6. The headmaster arrives at 5:00, as I mentioned above. Have Tour Guide go greet him. Click on the headmaster and select "Entertain > Give Tour." Have Tour Guide "Go here" to whatever room in the house is prettiest. Click on the headmaster again and select "Show Room." Then repeat until the headmaster thanks you for the tour. (This usually happens once you get about 45 points, which usually takes me 4 or 5 rooms, though I think I've gotten it with as few as 3.)

This is the part where my advice to make the ground floor as nice as possible comes in. DO NOT TAKE THE HEADMASTER UPSTAIRS. I once had a headmaster stuck upstairs for hours. I don't care how pretty the rooms are up there, it's not worth it.

I also generally avoid bathrooms or other tiny rooms because of potential route failure.

If you have shown all the rooms you want to show, you can also click on the headmaster and select "End Tour."

7. While all this touring is going on, have Chef pull out the leftovers from back in Step 3. If you don't have Seasons, have Chef cook. If Chef burns food on the first try, have Tour Guide kill time by serving the headmaster espresso or bar drinks. (I'll cover these topics later on.)

When the food is set out, click on the headmaster and select "Call to Meal." The headmaster will sit and eat for what seems like forever, and the food score is all or nothing...if you time out when he has 1 bite left, TOO BAD FOR YOU. So try to serve food fairly early on in the evening. If time is running short, don't let your other Sims sit and talk to him while he eats; that slows him down and the schmooze points are negligible.

8. If you want schmooze points, do NOT use the "Schmooze" interaction. Just build relationship as you would with any other Sim...talk, joke, etc. I don't usually get a lot of schmooze points, so I don't have any other tips for this category.

9. You can get bonus points for three things: Espresso, drinks from the bar, and hot tubbing. To get the espresso points: Buy an espresso machine. (Obviously.) Have your Sim (usually Tour Guide) "Serve Espresso" rather than "Make Espresso." (The former produces 2 cups; the latter only 1.) Have your Sim drink one of the cups. The headmaster usually takes the hint and drinks the other cup.

Drinks at the bar are similar. Serve, partake, wait for the headmaster to catch on and join you.

For the hot tubbing, get in and ask the headmaster to join you. (He might also join you on his own; I don't know.) I dislike this bonus point opportunity, though, because it can lead to lots of route failures if you're not careful and that's just a pain.

10. Once you top 90 points, the headmaster will say "X, Y, and Z have been accepted into private school", shake hands with one of the parents, and leave. (People can get more than 90 points, of course. Say you have 85 points and then the headmaster eats lobster--you'll end up with about 130 points total because of getting 45 in one shot.)

I find that a good tour and a good meal can be enough all by themselves, but if your Sims can't cook lobster or something it's easy enough to nudge the points over the top with espresso or drinks. As I mentioned above, I almost never use schmoozing or the hot tub.

Using this method, I can get private school admittance in less than 2 Sim-hours, and I think the headmaster scenario lasts for 4 or 5 hours. It's been a while since I've timed out, so I'm actually not sure.

I hope this post is helpful to somebody (is anybody still new to Sims 2 in 2013?) but if not I had fun writing it anyway.

I made a banner!

Hey, everybody! I hope you didn't miss me. We've been a) busy and b) sick over here in real life, so I haven't had much time for Simming. But look up there for what I made!

The banner is currently the Riedmayer-Landgraab family in 2053. I'll probably change it once a round or so. I wish I could get it to stretch the width of the blog, but it's disappointingly grainy when it's blown up anyway. I might have to check my camera settings and see if they got bumped down when I installed new stuff.

Speaking of, I have Pets and Kitchen and Bath stuff now. (Courtesy of my husband's grandparents, who sent me cash for Christmas. They're the best.) I don't have Apartment Life yet, but we'll see what happens.

Hopefully things will slow down around here and I'll have more time for real blogging soon.

For anyone who's curious, the banner pictures:

Top from left: Edith Riedmayer, Thomas Dai, Francine Whitfill, Jihoon Whitfill, Blake Whitfill, Millie Whitfill, Malcolm Landgraab V holding Malcolm Landgraab VI, Theresa Dejackome holding Melinda Landgraab, Marion Landgraab holding Michael Landgraab, Maggie Landgraab, Greg Pons, Joan Pons.

Center from left: Ingrid Riedmayer, Charles Riedmayer, Elijah Whitfill, Tamara Whitfill, Beata Riedmayer-Landgraab, Malcolm Landgraab IV, Jeannie Pons, Gabriel Pons, Edward Pons, Brian Pons.

Bottom from left: Todd Riedmayer, Fritz Riedmayer, Lauren Whitfill, River Whitfill, Landon Whitfill, Ginny Whitfill, Douglas Long, Sarah Long, Joseph Pons, Seth Pons.

P.S. Credit goes to Carla at Sullivan Sims for pointing me towards pretty much every piece of custom content that I used to create the banner. Most of the custom hairs are from Almighty Hat, but a few are from Garden of Shadows.

A small announcement, a minor correction, and a very large piece of evidence supporting my hopeless nerdiness

First, the announcement: Starting in Week 7, I am going to shorten my rounds to 3-4 days instead of 7. So, the next Kules update will be "Week 7 Part 1.0", covering Monday morning to Friday morning, and then "Week 7 Part 1.5", covering Friday morning to Monday morning.

I could do Monday 8 a.m. to Thursday 8 p.m. if I wanted to be even, but my Sims are often in the middle of birthday parties and such at 8 p.m., whereas at 8 a.m. there is less going on. (I long ago developed the habit of pausing as soon as a lot loads and sending all children to school immediately.)

I am motivated to do this partly because a round takes SO LONG that I get bored and start to forget what happened in the early houses and such; cutting the time spent at each house in half will enable me to cycle through them more quickly and hopefully keep things fresh.

I also did it to keep my neighborhood more in sync; a week is actually a really long time when you're a Sim. It was having a negative impact on friendships among kids from my 'hood; children are only children for a week so it is hard to have a back-and-forth friendship; teens are sometimes teens for only four days. It makes dating really difficult. For example, say you have a child in House #1 who ages up to teen on Tuesday night and thus will be going to college the following Monday morning. All her peers in the other houses on the playlist are children and will remain children as long as I'm playing her house. She will still be a teen after I leave the house (I send them off as soon as I load their house again on Monday morning) but if her intended life-mate grows up to teen on Thursday night in his own house that gives them only one weekend together instead of the two they would have gotten if they had been aging more in sync. (Well, they still would have only gotten the one weekend, but they would have gotten to live it twice over, once in each house.)

That also brings me to college...if Girl Sim grows up on Tuesday night, she will be "17 years old" by my reckoning the following Monday and therefore eligible to go to college. Boy Sim, having grown up Thursday night, will only be 15 and thus will not be eligible for college until a full week later, when he is 22. So Girl Sim and Boy Sim will not be able to marry until a full week after that, when he is 29 and she is 31.

Under the new system, Girl Sim will grow up on Tuesday night and then I will leave her house on Friday morning. Boy Sim will grow up on Thursday night and I will leave his house Friday morning. Then back at Girl Sim's house she will get to spend the whole weekend with her beloved and then he will get to spend the whole weekend with her at his house. She will still leave him behind when she goes to college on Monday (boohoo), but he will leave for college on Friday and join her when she is a junior and he a freshman.

"Wait, what's that about leaving for college on Friday?" you say. "I don't remember you mentioning that!"

That's because I didn't yet. As part of this new system, I will be doing two college "calls." Monday morning, everyone who is at least 16 years old will get packed off to college. I will play them through their first two years. Friday morning, everyone who is at least 16 years old will get packed off to college. They will get played through their first two years and the other batch will get played through to graduation. After one round of this, it will mean that nobody is older than 19 or 20 when they go to college, and a range of 16-20 seems more realistic than a range of 16-22, without having to send every single Sim the year they turn 18 and having chaos.

(They will be between the ages of 23 and 27 when they graduate, which might seem weird, but I decided to do it that way because Sim college always seems like college + grad school to me, what with them graduating and immediately becoming General Practitioners and such.)

This will have the side-effect of eliminating the need for townie placeholders, since there will be a batch going Monday-Monday and a batch going Friday-Friday. Unless I have a baby drought, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

The only negative effect will be on students who want to move out and found new lots. See, if they leave on Friday and graduate a "week" later, it will be Friday for everyone else in the 'hood, but on the new lot it will be Monday. I refuse to allow that sort of discrepancy. So for the time being I am going to say that any Sim who is not permanently moving back with parents or moving in with a significant other has to temporarily move in with a sibling or friend or some such person who has a properly synced lot. 10 days later, they can move out on their own. (10 days and not 3 because part of the challenge rules says that college grads have to stay in their first post-college household for at least 7 days.)

You are probably hopelessly confused, dear reader, so I will give you a pretty picture to make you feel better.

Clicking on that should enlarge it. I made it this morning; it is an index of every playable Sim in the neighborhood, unless I am forgetting somebody. (68 living, 4 dead.) Someday I hope to have all sorts of interesting information in here, but right now it just has names and birthdates.

Right now they are sorted from youngest to oldest, except Ryker who has 0/0/0000 as his birthdate because I couldn't be bothered with giving him a real birthdate. The kids who have birthdates like 0/0/2053 are babies/toddlers and I would have to check in game to know exactly how old they are and then randomly generate a birthday for them. (Actually, with the babies I would have to wait until they become toddlers to know how many days old they are.) I don't have time for that at the moment (too busy making spreadsheets), so they have placeholder birthdates.

Then they are color-coded by when they are going to college. The Pinks are going to college at the beginning of Round 7. Most of them are currently frozen in time with their hands on the telephone waiting to call as soon as I reload their lots. There are 5 of them, which is a nice number, and they even have a good boy/girl ratio. (Their aspirations are respectively Family, Romance, Pleasure, Pleasure, and Popularity, though, so I have a feeling there will be more socializing than studying.)

Orange and Yellow would have all gone to college at the beginning of Week 8 according to the old system. There are FOURTEEN Sims in those two color categories. FOURTEEN. That is way too many to have in college at all, but if I stagger them at least I will only have to deal with 14 students for half a round rather than a full round...though before and after I will have 12 students total (Pink and Orange together, and then Yellow and Green together.) 

Blue and Purple are both more modest and will probably remain so, though if Joan Pons can convince her husband to adopt 3 more children (to meet her impossible want of 10) there might be 1 or 2 more Blues and 1 or 2 more Purples. I also have a pregnant Sim who has been eating cheesecake like it's going out of style, so I anticipate another set of twins in 2054 (just in time for the Purples). 

A couple of quick notes, and then I have to go cook dinner like a normal person:

1. Age is calculated for Sims kind of like it is for Thoroughbred horses: They "age up" on January 1. So, for example, Emmy Whitfill's random meaningless birthday is December 20, 2042. This means that on January 1, 2043, she was considered to be "1 year old." She is only about 6 weeks older than Landon and Ginny Whitfill, but they will always be listed as 1 year apart in age. Fortunately, Emmy will be "eighteen" years old when she goes to college, which makes her 17 1/2. The youngest Sim to attend college for the forseeable future will be Charles Riedmayer, who will turn 16 in September 2057, right around when he leaves for college. (I imagine them going to college sometime between July and September, depending on if they call the taxi before or after school.)

2. I realized when making this spreadsheet that I grossly miscalculated Caitlin and Patrick Seifert's birthdays, originally listed as being in 2033 and 2036. I calculated it out and realized I probably meant to write 2043 and 2046, so birthdates have been updated accordingly in the spreadsheet and in their family's update. 

May the odds be ever in your favor: A brief digression on intermarriage

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.