Top 10 Aging Actions in The Sims: FreePlay

02. Relationship

The relationship side of your Sim life is among the most complicated of them all, which is why it places so high on the list and lands in the number two slot. The reason it scores so prominent a place is not due to the desirability of a good relationship in the life of your Sims so much as it is the inevitable presence of this time consuming aspect.

What do we mean by its inevitable presence? Well, first of all your Sim is literally defined on its various relationships from birth. You were probably thinking - hey, I just won't expend more time on having my Sim date than I have to! Would that it was actually that simple!

What do you think we call the conversations and support that Mommy and Daddy Sim give to little baby Junior Sim? Why, relationship time, that is what! To clarify the impact that this has on your Sim life, let's look at the relationship issue from birth to death, shall we?

In terms of life this is perhaps the most damaging relationship stage for the typical adult Sim, because your little bundle of joy exists in a crib, and their every need not only ages the Infant Sim but it also ages the Adult Sim who is taking care of that Infant!

When the needs meters for the Infant are low, an Adult has to step in and meet those needs - and thus the timer for each action is carving time off of both the Infant and the Adult Sim.

The thing is your Infant Sim has to be fed, had to be cleaned, has to be changed, and it has to be talked to and emotionally tended to. It also needs to rest and sleep - but that particular action does not deduct time from the Adult - just the Infant.

So how do you reduce the impact that having a baby has on your family and, in particular, the Adult Sims? The simple answer is that you apply the same basic logic that you apply in real life, in the real world! You share the actions - both good and bad - among the two Adult Sims who represent the parental units.

Have them trade-off Infant duty for the tasks you have no choice in dealing with. That will reduce the overall impact of the tasks on an individual basis.

If you are not as concerned about trying to accomplish the various voluntary goals - and as far as we know they do not apply to Infants yet - the best strategic choice is for you to have both parents share the entertainment and tending tasks for as long as it takes to establish the close parental relationship with the Infant, after which point you try to have the infant do NOTHING bur Sleep.

Remember, sleeping is a task, and that means that every minute and hour your Infant spends actually sleeping is time being carved away from the timer for that life stage. Since you want your Infant to reach the Toddler Stage and its limited independence as soon as possible, using Sleep as the key to burning up the timer is the way to go.

Once the Infant has burned away the timer they will automatically age up - remember this new system removes the need to spend LP and time via the Birthday Cake Route.

Toddler Sim

This is the fist life stage in which the Sim has semi-autonomy. Specifically while some actions still require the active participation of an adult, others do not.

An Adult is required - and loses some time off of their life timer - for Hygiene (requires a bathtub), Hunger, and Social Needs. The rest - Bladder, Entertainment, and Sleep - are autonomous actions that only deduct time from the life timer of the Toddler, not their parents.

But bear in mind that the Toddler stage is where the goals-oriented activities actually begin. Right now there are not a lot of those but we expect that eventually that will change, and the activities that the Toddler is capable of in terms of goals will improve.

What this means is that you probably do not want to accelerate the aging process for the Toddler stage and certainly not of you are trying to accomplish goals that might lead to a better orb retention plan.

This is also the first stage in which you should begin to plan out the life process. The basic strategies that we presented above for needs and time management apply, though with the caveat that very few of the hacks that your older Sims can use will work with the younger ones. Just saying your Toddler cannot use Espresso as a substitute for sleep!

Preteen Sim

This is the first life stage in which full autonomy for personal actions - basically the meters - applies. At this point the Preteen Sim is now fully responsible for the loss of time on their life timer.

There are definitely going to be life and orb related goals for your Sims who are at this life stage, and as time passes and the game matures there are likely to be additional goals added.

The hacks for the meters will not all apply here, but some of them will. There is also the issue of Job - which for this stage really means Education. Since Education is intended to play a significant role in the goals process for Sims at this Life Stage, that is also something you will not want to shirk.

Remember though that these intermediate Life Stages are not as critical as the Adult and Senior Stages are - and specifically your concern at this point should be to maximize the benefits of the autonomy for this stage. What do we mean by that?

First: USE this specific Life Timer as effectively as you can. Have all of your Sims who are below the Adult Life Stage - which means Infant, Toddler, Preteen, and Teen, be as social with each other as you can. There is plenty of time in the Life Stage Timer here for you to indulge in having all of your less-than-Adult Sims work to establish, at a bare minimum, Best Friend Status with each other.

They should already have Best Friend status with their parents as a result of the Infant stage... Just saying. By building that relationship level during this stage you use up a lot of the timer that you would ordinarily be forced to use via make-work actions, so by using it almost exclusively to build the relationship levels with all of the younger Sims you are putting it to very good use!

A note on hobbies for this stage: the ONLY use for the hobbies for your Preteen Sims is running them through the Competition Center. If doing that is important to you, then having these Sims do the Ballet or Martial Arts hobbies may be a good idea. For harvesting LP though the only two hobbies that will work and that your Preteens can do are Diving and Figure Skating.

But as those two hobbies are good ones for farming LP they are worth doing once you've capped up the relationship side of the Life Stage! Ideally you will master - or come close to mastering - the hobby you choose before the change in Life Stage but, either way, you can continue the process as a Teen so no big deal...

Teen Sim

This is the stage when things get interesting. For one thing your Sims at this stage have access to some of the hobbies - so in addition to the life and orb goal-oriented tasks as well as their education tasks you should be focusing their free time and efforts on mastery of the chosen hobby.

Hobby-wise your Teen can do the following: Broomstick Flying, Diving, Figure Skating, and Teen Idol. Which you pick really depends on your game play style and frequency, but it should be very seriously emphasized that you should try to have at all times at least one Teen who is working the Teen Idol Hobby in order to ensure that you have a Sim available if a Task crops up for that hobby for the Weekly or Social Tasks System.

Focus upon maintaining their relationship and, if this Sim was already a Teen when the life timers kicked in, focus on capping their relationship with all of the other younger-than-adult Sims. Remember that when they all reach Adult, those are the Sims from which your Teen is going to be seeking a mate, so you already want them to have Best Friend level relations so that you do not have to burn valuable minutes getting there!

Adult Sim

This is, again, a tricky point for you because the Adult Stage is the most productive and often important Life Stage for your Sims period.

You want them to find a mate, move in, get married, and have kids. You want to have them master a career in as short a time as possible - which means working the career stats at home and not at the office. In fact you want to avoid the office as much as possible! Ideally they will only go into work twice in their entire life - for their first day of employment and their last.

The secret to reducing the impact of relationships on the Adult Sim is to deal with the core requirement as a pre-Adult stage Sim, then doing the minimal required actions to cap off the relationship with the Sim that they are going to marry and live with.

Building a relationship with their children is unavoidable - and despite the way that this works in real life, pawning off the care giving tasks on Grandparents is not the recommended path for this game. When your Sims reach the Senior Stage you want to stretch that out as long as possible since that is the repository for a lot of valuable skills and knowledge you will want to use for the Weekly and Social Tasks system!

Senior Sim

As noted above at this stage in their life you want to reduce ALL ACTION to minimal. There are some exceptions however. For example time spent capping their relationship with grandchildren is really time well spent - don't begrudge your Seniors that pleasure.

On the other hand with the exception of a Grandchild and Child, and their Spouse of course, you do not want to do the relationship thing with anyone else!

Posted: 12th Jan 2015 by CMBF
Tags: The Sims FreePlay, iPhoneiPad, GameCube,