Town: if you don't mind my asking where did you download the gun that Jasper is using in those pictures? I have a few guns for my sims but they don't cackle with glee after shooting a zombie...assuming it's based off the repo gun?

I have never downloaded a mod like that, but I checked anyway and did not find one. For this challenge, the only mods I use are ACR, inteen and the blender and job noticeboard. I guess my game just glitched or something. It made me wonder about people who were complaining that their criminal bills were too high, if their aspiration rewards were driving up their lot value. Because my bills were $24,000 (impossible to pay) but they were computed correctly since my lot was worth $49,000 with the elixir of life. About putting it in inventory, I didn't notice it until I was ready to delete it, probably after about 3 sim weeks. It probably won't happen again since you can redeem aspiration points, but if it does, I'll remember to check next time!


It's one of Ja's assault rifles and it is based on the repo gun. I love them! It's hilarious to watch him gun down zombies. She cautions that some sims won't die unless you add them to the household first, and I found that this mainly relates to premade sims. So far, all townie sims that have been shot have died (remember, you can't move the graves though) but I tried to kill a premade zombie (my Patient 0 zombie who has his own lot in the neighborhood) and he did not die, just reset.

Sorry to double post, but I am so upset! My founder, Jasper lifted Military and married the cheerleader from Uni (who is level 9 in Culinary) named Chris. They had 2 children, Haytham (named from Assassin's Creed 3) and Lorrell (named from Dreamgirls). Haytham was an awesome kid. He rarely complained about being his hygiene and he had 10 neatness points, so when one of the sinks broke, he spent hours happily mopping up the puddles. By the time he was a teen, he had 8 cleaning and 9 logic. He also started working on the restorable car and gained 3 mechanical points. He was a shoe-in for lifting Medical. Lorrell, is a very bad kid who has a 2 in neatness and won't do any skill building because of her hygiene. All she does is sit around and complain. Finally fed up with her, Haytham and Jasper took her down to the First Aid station so she could bathe.

(In my last iteration of this challenge, I started with one zombie. He was really tame; he rarely tried to eat brains, and when he did, he almost always lost. So this time, I started with 3 zombies and gave each of them a body point.) When they got to the first aid station, Lorrell was in the shower when 2 zombies showed up. They immediately attack and created two more zombies, then all hell broke loose. There was a rifle at the First Aid station, and Jasper was trying to kill off as many as he could, but there were 3 fights going on at once, and then Haytham was attacked! He had zero body skills and was quickly turned. Jasper had no choice but to take him back home and shoot him. Lorrell's aspiration dropped to red (probably because of her guilt) and Chris won't do anything because she's crying every 5 minutes.



So now my Medical golden-boy is dead and I'm stuck with a bratty kid who hates to clean.

Can anyone encourage her to be neater? That would at least make it easier once she's a teen--of course, once she's a teen she can sponge bathe, too. A lot of dealing with early apoc kids is keeping just them above the social worker line of misery/failing grades. You can still do this, and if you're making a story (even just for you) you have a perfect reason for her to become neater by her father or mother's encouragement: all her guilt over what happened to her brother.

Question: Is anyone using Inteen along with the set of mods? When I try and get teen Lorrell to 'try for baby", it won't q up. This is the first time I tried to get a teen to try for a baby and I was wondering if there was a conflict, or if anyone else was successful in teen pregnancy.

Edit: I got it. My inteen settings were set to "Unmarried TFB is Not Allowed".

Edit 2: Another Question: If someone offers a level 3 job (in a career that has not been lifted yet) through networking, are you allowed to take it? Or do you *always* have to start at level 1?

Last edited by ttowntallyho : 5th Mar 2013 at 05:32 PM.

Challenge-wise, I'm doing pretty well and I only have about 5 careers left in R2 to lift. Play-wise, it's tough because I have 9 sims in the house. (A freak accident since I don't have any mods to allow more than 8 sims, unless it's built into Inteen or ACR. I don't think the unselectable elders count towards the household limit, because I had 8, and had options to Try for Baby, but now that the new baby is here, the option is gone.). At one point I had 4 babies and toddlers, but thankfully, the oldest one just grew into a child.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting is because I'm having so much fun watching these crazy sims with ACR. The most recent episode had me shaking my head and clucking. So one sim named Connor queued up "Relax" and I just assumed he was getting ready to get busy with his wife, Maddie. I busied myself following the toddlers around making sure they were ok, and next thing I know, Connor and Maddie's mother Celeste (an uncontrollable elder) are making out naked in Connor and Maddie's bed! Maddie is walking by right outside in the hallway, but the noise of the bed rockin' is unmistakable. She busts in and catches Connor and Celeste doing the do. She slaps Connor and promptly attacks Celeste. As Maddie's celebrating winning the fight against her elder mother, Connor comes up to her and tries to caress her cheek, which she of course rejects. Celeste sees the gesture and instantly becomes furious with Connor and slaps him.

The funny thing about Celeste is she's just one of those sims that EVERYONE is attracted to. When she was younger, her teenaged nephew (by marriage) tried to have his first kiss with her through ACR, which she rejected (twice). Later on after her husband died in a fire and her nephew went steady with a girl from school, they woohooed before I could stop them and now he is scarred for life. Even though he's happily married to his high school sweetheart and they have 2 daughters, occasionally he still tries to ACR with Celeste when his wife's at work. I cancel it out. Celeste has also seduced one of her coworkers and one of her best friends. She's a family/knowledge sim so I don't know where all this romance is coming from. I guess she never got over her husband's death, because before that, she was 100% faithful to him.


ETA: I JUST FINISHED!!! Woot woot! Below is my final family tree.
This is the most number of generations I have ever played a family, and one of the very few times I've ever played "rotation style" (I tend to play one family at a time and use aging cheats if need be to keep other sims on the same timeline). I enjoyed playing this, but I'm glad I'm done. The last career lifted was Entertainment and the first thing I did was make everyone in the house tell someone a dirty joke. I have seriously missed that interaction!

On to the next challenge!

Last edited by ttowntallyho : 5th May 2013 at 02:30 AM.

Oh help, I'm caught, I'm caught!

This is just the sort of generation-spanning, poverty-ish challenge likely to grip me and suck three hours out of every day, starting with Sims who have next to nothing and slowly trying to lift restrictions. BTW, I love that entry text - the idea of superbowl creating an apocalypse is so deliciously weird and wicked, it fits the style of Sims at it's best.

Phaneo, thanks for posting this and creating mods for the challenge is a great (and to my will power, dangerous) idea!

ttowntallyho - may I ask how you made that genealogy tree of your Sims? Does it require some program?

As for having 9 Sims in a household, ACR ver. 2.0 does have an option to set up a number of Sims you prefer to have in a family, including over eight Sims in a family. I never used it though.

I keep returning to this thread to read how players went through the challenge, I think I might try it out too.

Digging through my sims folders in anticipation of starting a few new challenge games, and I found the secret to the death of my Apocalypse family: There were only three ghosts after all, they just took turns.

Still, eff ghosts. If I knew anything about modding I'd touch up Phae's mod and make Supernatural a tier one career just because... eff ghosts.

I used paint to make the family tree, so no special program required ! Each generation, I opened up the family tree under the relationship panel in the game, took a screenshot, then pasted it into paint. I used the "Resize" feature in paint to make the tree larger (I think maybe by 300%? Can't really remember). Then I just replaced the portraits with in-game screenshots (again resizing them so they would all be approximately the same size) and manually typed the names and the lifts using a text box.


I say go for it! It's a lot of fun, especially in the beginning. Towards the end it get's pretty easy, though. That's why I was glad when it was over. If you do, I would highly recommend the zombie apoc mod and the assault rifles, and ACR of course.

Edit:

@Proxian_girl, you don't need to know anything about modding. I actually decided that Athletic would be a tier 2 career (it's dumb that after lifting architecture, sims are strong enough to build fancy houses, or that Captain Hero can fly and beat up bad guys, but too weak to move a cheap coffee table or jump rope). When I lifted all of R1, the Athletic career showed up in the paper and I just allowed my sim to join. Once he reached the top, I just remove Athletics from my downloads folder. So you don't have to change any of the actual files. Just let a sim get a job in Paranormal, and when it's lifted, delete it from your downloads.

Yeah, the two tile restrictions on the Athletic stuff is a little weird, but it's not entirely off base. If you find you can't stand that part, consider lumping those bits in with Military (tier 1 and deals with Body skill), but leave the rest of the Athletic restrictions where they are. That part of the rules isn't covered by a mod, so it's easy to reassess.

So, here goes - Bienvenu au quartier "Superbowl Sinistre" !

(I installed my game in French to get some language practice.)

My starter Sim, Christina Pois, is just in her third year at college. (I'd include images, but sadly, the icon refuses to work. Image of Christina is here:

http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/four...9/70239_600.jpg)

She's eager to meet new people, study hard and amass cooking and mechanical skills like any modern young woman which is in no way connected to any premonitions of End-of-the-World events to come. Don't look at me strange.

Christina is doing really well and making friends, and late one evening she is actually picked up by this huge black limousine. Obviously, just the thing to expect in college, so she hops in and is chauffeured to this huge mansion which for some reason she never noticed before.
http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/four...9/70999_600.jpg
Some strangers and some friends of her great her and hand her a snazzy black suit all of her own - Christina is now the newest member of a secret society as well as a top student. Such a great life, what could possibly go wrong?

Dang. Yet another question, I'm sorry.

My poor Sim just made it back to her home hood, all desert and three army lots build on the quick to provide medical supply, army base and food.

Two things I'm still not sure about:

The way I understood the rules, I have to get my founder Sim to the top of one career (medical, military, culinary) _before_ she can even marry. But a lot of comment here mentioned a spouse before the first restriction was lifted.

And how can the founder meet men? As I understand the Intelligence rules, no non-friends are even allowed to enter the lot; I guess that means no greeting or even befriending the townies who walk by.

She has a sweet-heart from college, but frankly, he was behaving a bit like a jerk and I don't want her to marry him simply for absence of someone more suited to her.

Food. Right now there's eternal winter, poisonous earth and water, no harvesting, no ordering groceries. Buying new fridges makes little sense - how would they be delivered stocked with food in a place where one can't even buy groceries? The only thing I can think of is the either the soup kitchen or fishing on the secret lot for nature enthusiasts. Which does make sense - in real life catastrophies and dearths, inhabitants of cities and towns usually travelled to rural areas to get some food.

How did you solve that problem?

@ alchemist: In a crisis situation, she might have to marry her college beau.

The Intelligence rule means strangers are not allowed inside the house. Your sim can still go outside to meet and talk to passersby, just not invite them inside or talk on the phone. The food issue is presumably why Culinary is a Tier 1 priority.

Darn it, you guys are making me want to play this challenge again.

Your founder does need to top out her career before she can marry, but she does not need to top out her career before you get her pregnant.

You can greet the townies but you may NOT let them enter your house or get insider your compound's 'perimeter' (I'm assuming you have a fence up to protect yourself from zombies - can't get inside that.)

Go to the soup kitchen. You may not fish yet until you've lifted Oceanography, and secret lots are not allowed at all (or until you've lifted the corresponding career). Buying new fridges is ok if you think about it like you are raiding your more unfortunate neighbors. They didn't survive so you are scavenging their houses. Others may have better solutions though. I would not be against buyable food rations.

Looks like it's the college beau's lucky day, then.




**looks up the exact words of Intelligence restrictions**

Oh goodie. Apparently townies can get into the house if they are friends. That saves my sim from getting pregnant _outside_ of her house and/or perimeter - what with nuclear winter all year round I think that wouldn't have been very romantic. Or successfull, for that matter.

Thanks for the answers!

One trick I used to do was greet the walkbys and let them chat long enough until the Hang Out option turns up. Then I have them hang out until they are friends. Otherwise, if you leave them alone, even for a few seconds, then first thing they do is walk into the house!