Now, this isn't a thread asking for help on how to customise the settings on ACR. I do that myself on a regular basis. No, what I'd like to know is how do YOU customise ACR for use in your game? And not just how do you do it, but why you do it in that way.

Do you leave the settings as they come when you download it? Do you change some of the global settings for your 'hoods, perhaps to disallow teen woohoo or to allow unmarried TFB? Do you change some settings for all of your sims, for example changing the TFB chance to 100% for all adult sims, or changing the risky woohoo chance to 10% or 2% or whatever? Or do maybe you customise settings for each individual sim - altering one sim's risky woohoo to 16% and another's to 2%, or making some sims unable to get pregnant?

And whatever you do, why do you do it that way? If you chance individual sim's settings, how do you decide what to change them to? Do you use complicated calculations based on things like aspiration and personality, like I do, or do you decide based on how you percieve a sim's personality, or something else?

Obviously this thread is aimed at people who do actually use ACR - all of these questions are irrelevant to you if you don't use it, for whatever reason! :-D

I kept this separate, as it's my answer to all of (or at least some of) my questions. And it may turn out to be a tad long!

I change individual sim's settings in the following ways:

I change risky woohoo based on aspiration and personality, based on the way katya_stevens does it but adapted slightly for my own use. The formula I use to calculate the risky woohoo percentage is:

Risky Woohoo: Failure = ((10-(Neat-Playful)*(((Primary*2)+Secondary)/3)/3

Knowledge = 1, Fortune = 2, Popularity =3, Grilled Cheese = 3, Family = 4, Romance = 5, Pleasure = 6

I also calculate each sim's ideal family size, using the following formula. I used to not have the -1 on the end, but all my sims ended up with large(ish) families and I hardly ever came across sims who didn't want at least 1 child, so I changed it. This is also adapted from the way katya_stevens calculates it.

IFS: ((1/3(Neat + Outgoing + Active + Nice))/(((Primary*2)+Secondary)/3)) - 1

Family = 1, Knowledge = 2, Grilled Cheese = 2, Fortune = 3, Popularity = 4, Pleasure = 5, Romance = 6

I do these calculations for every sim when they become teens, or for CAS sims and premade sims when I first start playing them.

I have just started changing the required relationships for the different aspirations - in fact, that's what inspired this thread :-) I have increased the required relationships for all of the aspirations, as they seemed unrealistically low to me. I know a few people in RL who totally seem to have the Romance aspiration, but even they don't generally go off and have sex with people they've just met and chatted to for a few minutes, and never even flirted with or kissed! I have also come up with calculations to change the required relationship for every individual sim, based on their primary and secondary aspirations and on how shy/outgoing they are. The required relationships vary between STR:36, LTR:6 for very outgoing Romance or Pleasure sims to STR:94, LTR:64 for very shy Knowledge or Family sims.

I also disallow woohoo for teen sims who are under 16 yeardays old, unless I think that underage woohoo fits in with the character, as I interpret them. For most sims I have unmarried TFB disallowed, but I allow it for long-term unmarried couples - sims who aren't interested in marriage but are committed to each other and ready to start a family together.

I haven't had acr in my game for that long. I set the risky woohoo to the lowest percentage possible. I also set it so my sims can't autonomously try for a baby. The main reason I did that is because I played the neighborhood for a while before I added acr. My population is growing rapidly so I want to be able to control how many babies are born in my game. I would probably set the risky woohoo percentage higher if it wasn't such a huge neighborhood already.

I don't allow my teens to woohoo since I don't have inteen. I figured since my teen sims can't get pregnant anyway, there's really no reason for them to woohoo. It's awesome when they get to college though, because woohoo is usually the first thing they do. lol

I have to say that I'm glad I added acr to my game. I have seen some funny and interesting things happen since I added it. I can understand why so many people like it.

For the most part, it's on the default settings. I don't allow teen woohoo in my neighborhood and when I play university, I turn off autonomy for the students unless they've already had their first woohoo because I like to control when they have their first woohoo. I also turn off try for baby because I don't want unexpected babies, though sometimes I forget to turn it off so there are some unexpected children in my neighborhood.

Risky Woohoo is currently I believe off the top of my head is at 50%; but thats because I didn't want to control who has a baby or not so I just have them woohoo and if they get pregnant then thats fine, if they don't then that's fine too.

At the moment, no one really has more than 2 kids in my game. The only people that do/will are Daniel Pleasant and Mortimer Goth. Simply because there are with new women in their lives and I felt bad if they married then and died from old age, that the wives wouldn't have a child with them to remind them of their life together.

I think that makes sense. Lol.

*waves*

If I'm playing a build a city hood (like my newest one) I only change one thing -- risky woohoo is at 10% instead of the default 5% until the town unlocks a position in the Medical career. Helps me towards a slightly larger population until then, and in my mind also reflects that, in a town with little medical stuff, the birth control options available are a little less effective than medical methods (condoms vs. the pill, for example).

With either Adamswater Ridge or Cresdale, my two long-aging hoods, like Laura I base things on a sim's personality:

Birth Control Failure = ((10-Neat+Playful)*Aspiration)/3

Where Aspiration values are: Knowledge = 1; Fortune = 2; Popularity = 3; Family = 4; Romance = 5; Pleasure = 6. I don't use secondary aspirations in the calculation even though teens get a secondary as soon as they grow up, but maybe I'll have a play around and weight the secondary.

With this formula above I've seen risky woohoo percentages from 1% up to 25%. Obviously, a sim that is sloppy, playful, and a Pleasure sim is much more likely to experience an accidental pregnancy than a very neat, very serious Knowledge sim.

For ideal number of children:

(1/3(Neat + Outgoing + Active + Nice))/Aspiration Bonus

Where the aspiration bonus is: family = 1; knowledge = 2; fortune = 3; popularity = 4; pleasure = 5; romance = 6. Most of my sims tend to hover around the 2-4 mark, with some outliers at 1 and 7 (1 is usually Romance or Pleasure sims, 7 is usually Family sims). However, just because a sim wants [x] number of children doesn't mean they'll get [x] number, especially when you factor in some of my other edits and changes. For instance, Chelsey Meeker has an ideal number of children of 2, yet thanks to risky woohoo and multiple births she's on track to have at least 5 (two singletons, one set of twins, and she's pregnant again).

Some sims can be infertile (only applies to Cresdale), which means pregnancy odds of 0 from whenever it occurs. A sim has a chance of being infertile from the start, ot become infertile after a birth. Either way, the only way they'll have children is through IVF ($10k a pop and no guaranteed chance of success: the highest odds are 50% for a sim aged between 20 and 24) or adoption. Aimee Lyndhurst became infertile after the birth of her twins, and after rolling a lot of try for baby windows she and Aaron adopted.

Risky pregnancies are also subject to abortion and adoption rules, and I'll leave this link here for anyone interested.

All odds are calculated the moment a sim becomes a teen or they join the hood (through moving in or making new ones in CAS). I have disallowed pregnancy for any teens until they've got ten days left as I was starting to have quite a lot of young teens getting pregnant. I've not yet gotten to the point where I've allowed an unmarried couple to autonomously try for baby; any sims who would like to start a family generally roll marriage wants, and those that don't get hit by risky woohoo sooner or later.

I use Katya Stevens rules as well but for some reason there is still a part of ACR that just confuses the crap out of me!!! I don't know why I cant seem to understand it but oh well.

There's two settings for pregnancy right? There's odds and risky? Lets say one of my simsrolls a 23% chance to be able to get pregnant, should I only be changing the risky woohoo for this or both? Right now I'm doing both but I feel like thats 23% chance of her getting pregnant from the 23% odds, am I correct? So that'll make her practically impossible to get pregnant accidentally?

To stay OT, I follow Katyas rules and I also change the cheating settings depending on the sim. For instance if in high school/college a sim had many lovers then I'll leave the settings as is unlike a sim who only had one lover I'll change the setting to 'stay faithful' Of course when I installed BV recently it rest all my stats so a couple sims accidentally cheated on their spouse. Also when my sims are married I try to change the jealousy settings but Im not too sure Im doing that correctly either lol.

Pretty much all of my settings are default, except no autonomous Try for Baby. In my Apocalypse hood, I got caught with twins when one of my unmarried sims autonomously tried for a baby. I turned the setting off, then a few generations later, I had another unexpected pregnancy when my married sim tried for a baby with her husband. After that, I made sure all TFB was turned off!

I used to increase the required relationships for all personalities also, but then I found that there was absolutely no ACR at all. I guess I had the settings too high. Now after about 3 or 4 visits to a community lot, it's almost guaranteed that some townies will at least flirt with each other or get crush hearts. One thing is that I always use "High" when randomizing gender preference. Before when I was using "Low", I found that it was easy to switch a sim's preference from one to the other, which I though was unrealistic.

Yes, there are two pregnancy settings. One is the odds that your sim will autonomously Try For Baby - this one declines over time, presumably to simulate either the gradual loss of fertility due to age and/or the gradual decline in the want to have a baby, also due to age. I don't change this one myself, I leave it as standard so that it declines over time. When male sims reach 0%, however, I do change it to a static 10%, so that older male sims with younger partners can still end up getting their partners pregnant (which I actually think they could anyway, even without me changing it).

There is also the risky setting - this is the one that I change to simulate how careful each individual sim is about using birth control. The percentage set here is taken as a percentage chance of the TFB odds when it calculates whether your sim has become pregnant accidentally. So if the TFB odds are at 70% and you set the risky woohoo to 10%, then your sim would accidentally get pregnant 7% of the time - 10% of 70%. This is expressed on your sim's ACR token as XXX/10,000 odds.

Reading back over this I'm not sure it even makes sense to me, but oh well! I know what I mean! :-D

I change settings by the lot, and the individuals. In University dorms, it's usually a "no jealousy" free-for-all (I set kids I'm going to send to college as Romance or Popularity, to be changed when that comes up), where I usually send a whole group at once & let them pair up. In lots I seldom set an override, but usually set up every adult, and some teens. Each setting depends on my story for each person, from old-fashioned happily married to swingers. And even with that, I still see my shy Victorian ladies being pestered until they are "compromised" by some pushy guy (like at a community lot, where I'm not controlling either of them).

I never knew you could change the stats for individual sims, I though it changed everybody. I'm going to use the formulas here to play around with things next time I play.

Previously in my game I had try for baby at 50% and it was the only way I'd let my sims have kids unless both parents has a baby want, then I would direct them to bed. Population seems okay, but I'm only a couple of generations in. I've recently started using ACR to pick my sims spouses, and it comes up into some relationships I wouldn't have expected. I'll have to see how things work out for my simmies once I change the settings.

For the most part I leave ACR on its default settings, but I do make some changes. I disable cheating through the neighborhood setting since I don't want Sims cheating. I don't mind Sims being romantic with their spouse, I just don't want them cheating on their spouse. I disable unmarried woohoo and disable woohoo for teens. Depending on the Sim's circumstances, I either have birth control on or off. I also adjust the ideal number of babies depending on the Sim's circumstances. Even with the Birth Control on there is still the 5% chance of risky pregnancy from the default settings, so I have had one or two ooops babies, but not very many. Most of the time when I turn Birth Control on they are not getting pregnant.

I allow try for a baby unmarried. A lot of my couples may never marry (mostly only my family sims do) so I always adjusted that. I also adjust the odds of trying for a baby because it does seem odd that they try all the time/succeed often. I also change the levels based on asp to be more realistic even romance sims aren't super slutty. Family sims don't require you to almost marry them in order to have sex. Risky woohoo gets a bump up again to be more realistic if you aren't using birth control you have a much higher chance of becoming pregnant the default isn't very realistic imo. I adjust by lot I don't normally mess with the tokens unless something doesn't fit that sim's personality.

Yea, it's all about the individual sim (to me). One of the first things I did was make Brandi Broke super fertile, since I always thought she was trailer trash. And Nina (DINA?) who is not only wild but stupid.. you ALWAYS run risk of pregnancy! So I give her a day of throwing up, then she takes the "morning after" pill. OH, and except for very odd men (and with a hack, women) in my "alien" hood, guys just do NOT get pregnant!

Reading all these, I keep remembering things I NEVER use! Actually, I seldom play creatures, they are either too HARD (vampires) or too easy (plants).
OH, and I've learned the hard way to NOT let them learn vacation gestures - you can't stop them from teaching others; why or why is it coded to be so "fun" ?!

Just went through and calculated for risky woohoo, I also did motivation while i was at it, and the results came out interesting. Some I expected, Don Lorathio and Peter Ottomas have a high chance of risky woohoo and only average motivations. Dina and all three of her kids are low motivation high risks, but Nina shocked me as she is a high motivation low woohoo risk Now I feel slightly guilty for getting her knocked up and making her go insane so much.

I couldn't quite figure out how to set up ACR for individuals, but I found a way to set it for households, so I set each household for the higher risk. I'm going to see if I can find a tutorial and set everything up individually. At any rate, even with it set for households it should make the game very interesting.

Soooooo if I want my sims to have a 13% of getting pregnant in general I should change the settings to 'no TFB unless married' and leave the odds as is until they turn into adults/get married?

Ummmm..... I'm not sure. What do you mean by "in general"?

What Gcgb seems to be having a problem with is reducing overall fertility to 13% with ACR instead of just risky or just TFB.

No teen woohoo, no teen/adult attraction, and no autonomous woohoo, period. I got sick of having to cancel woohoo every time I wanted my Sims to do something else. I had autonomous Try for Baby on for a while, but turned that off too when a bunch of combinations of Romance/Popularity/Fortune couples kept trying to have 3+ babies, even with ideal family size set at zero. I leave cheating on, because it makes for some interesting storylines. I have chance of birth control failure set the lowest it can go -- 2% I think?

Oooh, interesting question Gcgb. I'm not sure. Requires much thinking!

I *think* that if you changed TFB to a static 100% but disallowed autonomous TFB for everyone and then set RW to 13% that everyone would then have a 13% chance of getting pregnant at any time. That way nobody would autonomously Try For Baby, so they would always have casual woohoo, and the odds of an accidental pregnancy during casual woohoo would be 13% of 100%, which is 13%.

But I'm not entirely sure - I'm sleepy and unfocussed and may well have made up the maths a used to reach that conclusion! (I used to do that a lot in Maths lessons at school too - teachers tend to disapprove!) :-D And I'm still not entirely sure I understand your question!

Orilon was right. Don't worry Lauratje86 this too confuses the bajesus out of me ;D Then I over think it too much and get even more confused and just ignore it for a while until it starts bugging me again lol.

In my Pleasantview Challenge, Im trying to keep the population under control so I have auto TFB turned off for everyone and RW is set to 10%. Unmarried RW is allowed as well as Teen, though I set teen preg on an individual basis if the Sims story seems to point to recklessness and the Risky Sneak Out & Risky Runaway options provided by Inteen have created fun in my game already in the Pleasant household. I roll a general number of kids per family once a couple marries. One of them must be Family asp to get any higher number than 6. So Romance & Pleasure Sims won't end up rolling 10 in my game. Family Sims get an individual 20% bump in the RW (because they want children and therefore won't be as vigilant in the use of birth control).

I might try those new equations though. It might make things a little less random and fit my Sims personalities better.

I set the STR and LTR to somewhat higher values, but then I had casual woohoo rejected by two romance sims with mutual crush and love and a relationship of 100/100, so apparently ACR gets wonky when you fiddle with that. When sims are married I set autonomy to spouse only, but still I had a married popularity sim trying to flirt with another popularity sim, even though he has three bolts with his wife and only two with the one he wanted to flirt with. This annoys me greatly, to be honest. Sims trying for baby without me knowing it can lead to funny surprises, but that too is getting old quickly. General Buzz Grunt is married to Bella Goth, and she has recently given birth to their first daughter. The General ages to elder withiin a few days, so his need to try for baby should be very low, and yet when I let them have their casual woohoo, I heard the familiar jingle... I'm currently torn between sitting more on top of my sims and cancelling actions, or deleting ACR from my game.

I allow everything and set jealousy to Maxis (Crush). I like that my sims can have one night stands and get pregnant from them and I also like everyone to freak out if they catch a partner cheating. DRAAAAAAAMA!

My personal choice (unless the hood's current situation demands otherwise) is having the TFB set to "allow unmarried" on all lots, and setting the "risky woohoo" odds to 20%. I don't want all my sims married before children - some get pushed into it because they end up with kids, some refuse to marry pointblank, and the rest just go with the flow and may marry later, but it's no big deal if they don't. I use InTeen so yes, those teenagers have to be careful if they want to woohoo! Having said that, teenage pregnancy in my hoods isn't as common as one might expect...
Jealousy usually remains Maxis unless the lot is a special case, but those are few and far between. As for truly "oops" babies, I've only ever had that happen ONCE - in my Apox hood.