Montrose Legacy - Completed 5/31/18

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Teresa
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Montrose Legacy - Completed 5/31/18

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Since September 2, 2014, I have been attempting to complete a regular 10-generation legacy. Nothing unique, nothing special, just a normal legacy. I have started many, many, many, many, many, many, many, way too many games trying to get past the second, third, and fourth generations. One thing or another has stopped me. Death of my only heir by embarrassment (Lightning Legacy), unrecoverable glitches (Babbling Brooks), boredom – detachment – disinterest.

In March 2018, I decided that I was going to create a sim and play through Jungle Adventure. A single sim and after she completed learning about the jungle and archaeology, she would have a child. One child. That child would then learn about pets and become a veterinarian. As I always do, I started the game using modified legacy rules – no cheats, empty lot (Twin Oracle Point) – just in case. After the veterinarian came the detective, scientist, and doctor. I had fun learning about this part of the game I had never delved into because I was always raising the kids. This time, each generation had only one child and only after completing their goals so I was able to focus on one sim at a time, for the most part. I didn’t get bored, I never lost interest. I did have to fight the urge to have more kids though. Generation six was a barfly, generation seven was a collector. At this point I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of the collections, which led me back to the legacy. Using my favorite legacy tracker, Hilliee’s Legacy Scoresheet, I went ahead and caught up the legacy spreadsheet. I was still legacy legal and, without playing for points at generation seven, was at around 50 points. Generation Seven was at 50 points out of 103 possible points. Not shabby for not consciously trying. Generation eight was supposed to be my retail art gallery and generation nine was my restaurant owner. However, by this time my game was starting to show signs of bloat, my townies were getting tired, and the glitches were popping up more frequently. Grim was freezing and not reaping. It was time to wind down this save file. Generation eight sold the gallery and focused on earning creative points, generation nine skipped the restaurant and focused on earning food points. Once generation nine reached the point where they could not realistically earn any more legacy points and still bring in generation ten and get them to teen age before dying, it was time to finish up the legacy. Since I did not start any writing until after I finished playing, I was able to complete the legacy game play in three months.

And just to reiterate that – I completed my very first (and probably only) Sims 4 Legacy! Yes, I am just a little excited. I have now completed a legacy in Sims 2 (Trek Universe) and Sims 3 (Heavenly Stars) and now Sims 4.
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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Introduction

Legacy Rules
Expansions and Packs – All
I have all expansions, game and stuff packs. All careers, skills, and aspirations are installed. I do not play with mods except for the censor blur remover. Any new releases were installed within a day of the release. The gameplay began on March 5, 2018 and ended on May 29, 2018.

Gender Law: Matriarchy – The Founder must be female. Only girls are eligible to be named heir unless there are no female children, at which point boys become eligible for that generation.
This didn’t start out as a matriarchy. After the fifth generation was born naturally born female, I bowed to the gods and decided it would continue to be all females. From that point on every pregnancy included a diet of strawberries.

Bloodline Law: Traditional – Children who are naturally born from the previous generation are eligible to be named heir. Adopted children are ineligible to be named heir unless there are no naturally born children, at which point they become eligible for that generation.
I never considered adoption for this game play so this was the logical choice. Well, I did consider adoption when I was thinking about the 10 children in one generation point – but decided against it since they would have had to be infants. Next time.

Heir Law: First Born – The oldest, by order of joining the family, eligible living child is named heir.
Again, with only one pregnancy, unless there were twins or triplets, this was a logical choice. First born, only child, same difference.

Species Law: Tolerant – The species of the child has no impact on their eligibility for heir status.
I chose tolerant so that I would have the option, which did come into play in the later generations.

Rule Modifications – Minimal
I did not adjust out money brought in by spouses nor did I purchase the suit of armor at the beginning. I play to the spirit of the challenge – no cheating, start from nothing, build a legacy. I did not worry about points, at least not until the end.

I did not roll for traits, well not all of them. Mostly I chose the traits since I was exploring certain aspects of the game. For the toddlers I used each of the eight toddler traits. And, I learned a lot about the character values.

I did not restart after bad events except when it was necessary to save my game during the Grim Reaper incident and when trying to fix the Handyman glitch. I fixed the Handyman by evicting the family and then reinstalling them into the house. Grim is still a problem, but the legacy is over so I am not going to worry about him now.

When the town became boring and the houses barren, I did not reseed the town. I just lived with the homeless townies. However, I did delete the households that were only elders so that the game would generate a new household of appropriately aged townies. It is possible this is what broke Grim as before generation nine was ready to find a mate, I deleted all homeless townies and had the game respawn everyone.

I do not build anything, everything is downloaded from the gallery. I try to use Maxis created buildings for community lots, but not always. The legacy house is definitely not Maxis created because it has a lot more room than they normally allow. I don’t like crowded spaces and I prefer single stories.

Naming Theme – Irish
The names are Irish, the pronunciations are mine. My Texas accent is strong so be assured these are not going to sound like they are being said by an Irishwoman – they are going to sound like a Texan trying her best to not get them too wrong. Even if they are wrong, this is still how they are pronounced for this legacy, bless their hearts.

Montrose (mon-troz) is of medieval Scottish origin and is from the coastal town of Montrose, situated between Aberdeen and Dundee.

One Last Thing
This is not a story, I would love to tell you it is, but it isn’t. It is a lot of information and a lot of pictures. I mostly take pictures to document births, deaths, and toddlers. For the entire legacy I have just under 400 pictures, mostly of birthday cakes and dead sims, and toddlers. So, I will curate them down to a few for each generation, with hopefully at least one good headshot of each sim of the family and whatever caught my attention as the game was played. My focus was on playing and enjoying and picture taking was an afterthought.
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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Re: Montrose Legacy

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Scoring - Final

Scoring (70 out of 103 possible points)
Family: 9 points
I did not have a generation with 10 children, but it did cross my mind.

Creative: 10 points
Generation 8 (Finola) reached level 10 writing and wrote a biography for all heirs and spouses before her death. I do have the new magic painting and I wish that had come out before I started. But it didn’t.

Fortune: 6 points
You would think after 10 generations that the family would have more money, but several generations didn’t work, they played. And there was never many in the family – just the heir and spouse for each generation. They were within §100,000 of the next point but did not have enough time to do anything of value to get it.

Love: 6 points
The 9 spouses brought 20 unique traits – 1 short of another point. And, while both Love aspirations were completed, they were not completed by the same sim.

Knowledge: 7 points
Ahh, knowledge. Over the course of the legacy, skills were mastered 59 times. Generation 6 (Roisin) mastered the most skills with 10. Unfortunately, not all skills were mastered: Guitar, Mischief, Pet Training, Pipe Organ, Violin, Wellness. Our toddlers never mastered Communication or Thinking. Thinking is always the hardest skill for my toddlers to learn. I find they learn Potty, Walking, Imagination, then Talking, and maybe Thinking.

Athletic: 8 points
Aspirations were completed 39 times. Generation 7 (Laoise) completed the most aspirations with 7 (but she was a vampire – even so, none of the ones she completed were related to being a vampire). They never did complete all aspirations once, skipping both Deviance, all the Family, all the Vampire, Grilled Cheese, Mansion Baron (you would think I would have set this up to complete as an easy one, but no, I didn’t), City Native, Outdoor Enthusiast (it is so hard to get the 5 nights in the tent to register), and Party Animal.

Nature: 7 points
Generation 7 (Laoise) completed 13 collections and set up the consumable aspiration rewards while Finola painted all of the emotional paintings. The only deaths on the lot were Old Age, Overexertion (no, I don’t generally kill my elders through woohoo, nope not me, can’t prove nothing), and Sunlight (the Count came by for a drink and forgot to go home afterwards. I don’t know why, but serves him right. Seriously, this one wasn’t me). Because I wasn’t worried about regular careers, the only ones that were completed were Detective (gen 3), Doctor (gen 4), Scientist (gen 5), Mixologist (gen 6), Start-Up Entrepreneur (gen 7), Art Critic (gen 8), and Chef (gen 9). None of the spouses reached the top of their careers. None of the teens ever took jobs – they were too busy working on skills and values.

Food: 5 points
I thought this would be easier, but seriously not. The fridge and stove was a piece of cake (pun intended). Generation 9 (Aoife) mastered all four skills – cooking, gourmet cooking, baking, and mixology. Generation 6 (Roisin) and Generation 9 (Aoife) each reached the top of the one of the Culinary careers. Both of their spouses got fat. During Generation 6 there were many dinner parties with at least 6 sims sitting at the table eating, and still silver was the best Roisin could do – yet, Aoife earned two gold medals on her only two dinner party attempts.

Popularity: 4 points
Speaking of parties, just for the record, I hate social events. The only one I can do well is the Dates. Which don’t count for anything but the number of Gold Medals. Generation 6 was the party generation and Roisin got at least silver on everything she threw. The one event type never attempted was the Wedding Party. She only achieved Gold on the Date and Play Date. As mentioned above, Aoife got Gold on the Dinner Party. Throughout the legacy, the family as a total of 3 Bronze medals, 12 Silver medals, and 21 Gold medals. If my math skills don’t fail, that means those 21 Gold Medals consist of 2 Dinner Parties, 1 Play-Date, and 18 Date-Dates.

Deviance: 8 points
This category was the easiest, but caused me the most heartache, and led to the one time I considered going back to a previous save. Only briefly but the thought crossed my mind. Over the course of 6-7 generations, each sim, as they were dying, would bequeath their inventory to their heir. Potions accumulated. Inventory grew. By the time generation 7 (Laoise) was working on the collections her inventory was massive. She was trying desperately to get the last damn void critter card. She seriously only needed one card. Buy, open, sell/delete. Buy, open, sell/delete. At some point one evening, I was delete-delete-delete-deleting. I must have accidentally deleted a stack of Potions of Youth. I didn’t realize it until the next day when I went to count it for the spreadsheet. I believe it was well over 99+ but I couldn’t prove it. I thought about going back to a previous save from the day before but would have lost so much collecting progress and the thought of replaying was not palatable. So, I sucked it up and pulled up my big girl panties, whimpered a little bit, and moved on. To put this in perspective – generation 6 alone completed seven aspirations and my sims don’t get to buy Moodlet Solver potions or very many traits, so that was a lot of aspirations points to spend. They spend their points at the end of their life on Potions of Youth to score their success. Generation 7, 8, and 9 busted their collective asses and managed to earn back 47 bottles of Potions of Youth. The remaining 33 bottles were only worth 2 legacy points but would have taken 49,500 aspiration points so we are happy with the points earned.

Parenthood: 1 point
Every heir had five-character values when they aged up to young adult but I was not able to get Argumentative, Insensitive, or Irresponsible. I tried but I just couldn’t play that way. It is easy enough to achieve all five-positive value on a single sim. During the child age, have the parent teach to say sorry (conflict resolution) and teach please and thank you (manners) until they are in the range. Then during the teen age, have the sim spend one weekend doing six volunteer activities back to back for empathy. They should also jog to clear mind for emotional control every day. Responsibility comes from doing their homework daily. The hardest part is keeping them from asking for advice. They will always lose ground on one value, which then must be made up. Conflict resolution can sometimes be made up by asking an elder how it feels to be old and then apologizing, but not always. Negative traits are hard for me to do, but the two I did get, I found it is easier to start as a toddler when the behavior was still cute. And it was fun to watch my adult sim throw a tantrum and belch and fart. Keep in mind that every so often, a fart is not just a fart and Laoise would go take a shower.

Handicaps: 0 points
Nope, no extreme start for me. I like Twin Oracle Point – nice size, no neighbors.

Penalties: -1 points
One time, one freaking time, I forgot to pay the bills.
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Re: Montrose Legacy

Post by Livvielove »

Oh my gosh! Congratulations!!!! :party: This is fantastic Teresa! You've got me all inspired to boot up and try my hand... but my hands are a bit full at the moment, lol! What an awesome achievement! I'm so glad your family found you and you found the spark you needed!
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Re: Montrose Legacy

Post by Teresa »

Thanks! I didn't even let myself think of it as a legacy until generation 7. I didn't do any writing, just took some pictures but nothing too involved so that I could just play. Of course I was in school and this was my stress relief but once I realized I was past the hump and close to finishing it became a thing - I even called off work in order to play the last generation :shifty:
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