I've heard several of you use a schedule of fines for your sims. I'm not sure how much or why they pay those fines. I've also created a set of goals; for example, "if you want to get married, you need to have 15,000 in savings, then change walls,carpets". None of this is programmed, nor required for the game, but it has two purposes. Make the game challenging, and teach some psych-life lessons (yes I could use some education). I want to brainstorm some ideas. I want to see what you've done to your sims.

Well I generally only let my sims get married if they got 3 bolts. Exeption is of both REALLY want to get married and keeps rolling that want.
ACR takes care of woohoo and babiemaking. I dont control that at all.

My sims can only get married if both of them roll the want at once (once one rolls it, I lock it). Otherwise I see them as an engaged couple who is serious but have no need to quantify their degrees of love. My other ruled is that every married or joined couple must have or adopt at least one kid, but any other kids will be the result of a want-roll on the part of one of them.

How much should having a baby cost? .. As we know, Sims 2 health care is free, maybe non-existant. Spin around, and she's done.

We could take historical taxes as an example. A Russian tsar (I think Alexander I, no idea) enforced a tax for beards :D

Edit: And when Napoleon conquered Germany there were taxes for windows in homes. The people simply bricked some windows shut to save taxes :D

How about a tax for flashing blue accessories?

I make sure that when my sims get married they have 3 lightning bolts and 20,000 in savings between them and they both want to get married. also when they have a kid I make sure they have at least 20,000 saved up for all of the baby things and such

I had one sim who collected a triple fortune due only to moving out and in a couple times. I instituted a tax of buying a dozen 1,000 price grills and letting her get taxed for four weeks. She also had the misfortune of setting four of the grills on fire.

Macaroodle, cool name. Also, I'd love to tax or perhaps execute for any neighborhood threatening bug. My current sims live on a florida island. I prophecy a hurricane some generations in the future, but that's apocolypse, not a tax. Maybe I can give them a tax of 1,000 for any fire, fist fight, or birth of a child.

I do taxes and mortgages - on a spreadsheet then take the money off family funds. Sims have to get a C or above to go to college (not hard). I have several other rules as well but my mind just went blank - I usually remember as I play. Must be my age...

I don't do taxes, I highered the bills and lowered the wages by mods and that's okay to me. My families are most of the time poor.

@Sarahsalmon2011
20,000 dollar for one kid?! What do you buy for them?


LOL.

A spreadsheet?? .. Well , if you've mastered those.. I think I'll use an interest calculator online and find a way to rob them of the money. I have CJ's mod for 5x higher bills.. And one lesson i've learned is, my sims really need bigger houses. A lot of them still live in starter homes, so it's no wonder they're only paying 200 in taxes each week.

I don't do taxes or anything like that in my game (except for in Uni, where everyone has to pay fees every semester); my sims have enough to worry about, what with the fires, the enemies, the low motives, the aspiration failures, the constant visitations from Grim... Money troubles seem a little too mean, coupled with all of that. It's balanced out, though, because most sims in my game don't get above entry level positions at work; the only way they can progress up the career ladder is if A) it's their LTW, or B) they actively wish for a promotion/the skills they need to get the promotion. Unmotivated sims stay at the bottom, possibly for their whole lives.

When it comes to marriage and kids... Generally, if they wish for it, they get it. Eventually. I do have a 'rule' that I'm not allowed to select "Try for Baby" until the family can afford it (except for Pleasure sims, who are, in my game, an irresponsible bunch who get whatever they wish for, when they wish for it, regardless of the consequences). But sims can still get pregnant thanks to ACR and risky woohoo.

The only real, consistent one I've always stuck to, though, is that families building their own home can only move new people in (either through marriage, birth, etc.) when they have a minimum of $3,000 in their funds, and that's mostly just to cover the costs of expanding the house and furnishing the new room. Otherwise, I tend to just follow my sims' leads :P

I'm thinking to make a custom career which would be called Unemplyment Benefit.
I think 350 simoleons would be enough to survive on (for one week). The sim would sign in at a job center once a week to receive their allowance. ( I would set the working hours to Mondays 9-10 am and no work the other days). If a sim is not able to walk to the office, he will go there with a car pool. The problem is the levels because it seems boring to make a career with no possibility to advance.

Well, to make things easier, why not just use a chance card. I have a family who had a celebrity actor, who passed away. They were rich, they had like 50000 or so, and when a chance card popped up for the mom in the Gamer career, she's at the top, I chose the alien scenario which backfired and they lose 45000, all they have now is 12000 or so. However, not all chance cards act this way, in some, your sim will get demoted or even fired!

I gave up on taxes because I often didn't remember to collect them or couldn't remember whether or not I had collected them from a household, and I can't imagine having a roster of little taxes that I'd have to remember to collect. I'm far too senile for that sort of thing.

But I do have some "You can only do X if you have Y amount of cash" sort of rules. For instance, my Sims can't go on vacation unless they have $40000 cash-on-hand at the time that a want for one is rolled. (I don't actually deduct that much from them; they only get deducted whatever they spend on their vacation. But I don't want to actually play vacations all that often anymore and, given my other methods of keeping Sims poor, not many of my households have $40000 on hand at any given time, so that solves things nicely.) Also, a kid in my game can't go to college unless his/her family has "X" amount of funds on hand. (How much depends on which college they're going to; in my rules, some are more expensive than others, but some careers can only be maxed out if the Sim has a degree from the most expensive school. And in this case, the tuition DOES get deducted from the family's funds.) But my Sims can marry (and have kids) no matter how little money they have. I like poor families, plus, in the real world, it's actually fairly cheap to get married if you forego all the "having a wedding" hoopla. Kids in the real world ARE expensive but...meh.

In the Unemployed career, Maybe they would not get any money in the first level. Because they are waiting for an appointment with their social assistant.
In level 2 they start getting unemployment benefit.
Level 3 maybe should be some kind of actual job.

Actually, I found (or rather it was briefly posted at Simbology) a hack that does exactly that-the sim applies for welfare, and gets a check every day based on their skills, and number of dependents.

Because the site that it was originally on is gone, and the downloader at Simbology also removed it, there's no place to get it. I'd share it but because it's another creator's file, I'm rather hesitant to do so.

But an unemployment job would be a good replacement-although I do recall that there was a 'happily unemployed' and "Social Security Recipient' job listed at another site.

Yes that one was discussed in the Hacks you'd like to see thread, and Mootilda posted it there as an attachment.
But I could not use it because it said I must have Free time.

I will google the "Socal Security Recipient" job.

update: yes it is here http://www.insimenator.org/showthread.php?t=22809

Hmmm - interesting. I make careers (for fun!! Not really) - I like the challenge of writing them - that one might have legs. We could think about it. Start with jobs levels and then chance cards. Chance cards are the killer - difficult to do. The thing about careers is that you don't actually have to have 10 levels.

Yes, I downloaded your Cleaner career, it was really nice, a few of my sims was in it. It must be really difficult to think up chance cards. Anyway the unemployed sims could get some extra money from charity if they were lucky.

(Hmm, they might also get a job of course. )

Goodness, some of my sims would be dead and never have kids if I waited for that to happen. I don't know how people have such rich sims. Even before I put on halved wages, slower skilling and no 20 K handout my sims seemed to spend their money quite quickly in renovations to their houses-the ones that were allowed to or if they were wealthy I'd buy a business and they would be back 'poor' again. Not really poor, but kicking around a large house with about $1000 to hand.
I like playing dirt poor families, they're fun. Gives me a reason to use that cardboard box and dresser draw cot (crib)



That^ I don't even collect Taxes in my BACC, I just add things like Uni when I have other requirements met.

Cool, thanks for the link. That's just what some of my dead beat dads need.

My sims need 10,000 in an individual bank account on the day of adult transition to go to Uni. Private school kids need 15,000. If not they just become an adult and cannot go past career level 5 later in life. One kid gets to move back into the family home after Uni. The rest (unless I make them townies) need to buy their own home and take out a mortgage with Moniques computer or the loan jar to do so. Any 20,000 start up amounts get deleted from any characters who receive them.

Same sex couples need to pay (donate via computer) 10,000 to adopt or 15,000 for reproductive assistance to have their own (in vitro, surrogate, etc). This must be saved for and cannot be acquired through loans unless they're near becoming elders and still childless.

Sims who are sick must still go to work unless they have a vacation day and 5000 or more in household funds. After 3 days of cold or flu they must be moved to a residential lot that is the hospital. They pay 1000 per day they are in the hospital and cannot go home until well. Pneumonia, food poisoning, and mystery illness are instant hospital trips rather than waiting 3 days.

I've never used fines. Taxes yes, but fines no. I guess my Sims don't have so much money that I should get the urge to take it away from them.



::shudders::
hweldon81, you're a cruel god. I submit to your Sims that they can have asylum in my hood if they can perform necessary Sim Surgery by themselves and move over into my PC.

What do you do if they have no money to pay for the hospital fees? Let them die?
I must admit that I've never even tried to force myself to follow rules like these. They'd certainly make me want to cheat my way out of my own rules.

About careers. I used to have those happilly unemplyed and self-employed careers someone mentioned. They had no hours and no wages but the notification that the carpool was coming was there, though it never really arrived. I'm afraid that you can't make a career that would give you money but no schedule because it works on hourly bases - you determine what the Sim would be payed by hour. The Sim needs to spend time at work to get any money, no way around it, as far as I know. I've tried once to do a similar thing as this unemplyment career and had to give up because of this.

Last edited by Simsica : 5th Jul 2012 at 08:13 AM.

General life costs (Taxes , adoption cost, wedding costs, funerals, IVF and health care.)

A bachelor's degree costs $10k, a Master's costs $7k, and a Doctorate costs $20k. Only sims with high motivation are guaranteed a Doctorate if their LTW career requires it, but that does still mean they need to pay $37k in fees for their education (they can take out a loan to pay for it, but then they're charged interest).

I dont do taxes so much as I would forget to do it consistently and I'd hate doing it to poor simmies. I do have fines and bonuses and fees depending on the public opinions of my neighborhood. It has the potential to change at the start of each playthrough based on how my sims's public opinion has changed. Most recently, a bonus has been granted that allows families with four kids (baby - teens) in the household at the start of the play to get an extra 1,000 simoleons (my neighborhood is pro family right now).

Only families with 100,000 simoleons may send their kids to private school. It's subject to change based on how many families I perceive to be over/under that mark.

There's also a fee in place of 250 simoleons in order to buy a marriage certificate. They just stop at the city hall and buy the item like any other item (its just the wall decor item that looks like a certificate/award). They also must go and buy rings at the jeweler.

I thought about adding a fee that requires teens to buy a license too in order to drive, but I havent implemented it yet. Similar to the marriage certificate, go to the DMV and buy the item.

College costs 10,000 to go to Sim State University and La Fiesta Tech. They can choose to go 2 years to the school for 5,000. La Academe costs 20,000 and there is no two year option.