Have you (or anyone) looked at Romantic Standards? I'm curious what people's thoughts are about it.

I haven't installed it into my non-ACR game yet - I'm still trying to read and understand what it does as it has been updated a great number of times. However it does appear to massage the autonomous behaviours more depending on Aspiration (e.g. Family Sims flirt less and accept fewer romantic overtures, Romantic Sims flirt more and accept more romantic acts). It also seems to try to fix jealousy reactions and "romantic loyalty" a bit as well.

There may be a playstyle thing or unintended mod combination consequences to autonomous flirting. I don't need ACR at any level: I don't want them woohooing randomly and my sims flirt autonomously all the time even when I haven't trained them. And it's not just because I like to start my years in Spring. My Strangetown only has summer and winter, and that bunch is hot to trot. I sent Sandra Roth to an LGU set fall/fall/spring/spring and moved her in with the Nerdists, all of whom I had carefully not allowed to do any romantic interactions during development. Practically the first thing shy Knowledge sim Hugh Knowe did on seeing her was walk up and start flirting, and this is fairly typical for my game. It's rare that I have a chance to steer anyone toward anybody, or control who they pair with.

Yet Jo has a problem with her sims not being proactive. Is it something to do with the randomizer? Is it weird mod combos? Is it something about how the different machines we're on handles the game files? Nobody knows.

And this is one reason why we have different mods for different things, and big sprawling mods like ACR that allow a lot of fine-tuning. Not only do we all want different things and view different things as "problems," or at least as suboptimal to our enjoyment; but our games don't all behave the same.

I've been using the mod and enjoying it. It does make it a lot harder for my romance sims to find people to woohoo. Biggest thing I've noticed so far is if a sim is already in love with someone else, they are highly unlikely to accept any romantic actions from my sim, which makes sense for the most part. Romance aspiration sims are an exception sometimes. I've still had romance sims reject advances, but not always. It seems like if you can get a romance sim to accept a date, they generally will accept other things. I honestly just have a use for the love potion 8.5 now for those tough to convince sims. I do use the just be friends social from midgethetree for sims that aren't interested in each other anymore so that they won't reject advances from a different sim should one come around. Also for jealousy I've had one sim who caught their crush on a date with someone else. He got upset in the background and lost his crush, but he just left the lot. He didn't go yell. A different, more outgoing sim, caught her love on a date and immediately ran over and started yelling at them both, but no slapping. Although that might have been because they were sitting down eating. I did like that difference in response.

and


Well, that's not exactly what I said....

Here's the thing: What ACR actually does is give you individual control, down the to Sim level if you want to go that detailed, of romantic/sexual behavior in your game. So yes, you can turn on (or off) certain modules if you don't want some kinds of behavior to be autonomous but DO want other aspects to be autonomous. That's what the multitude of settings is for. It's all up to you, which makes it the most flexible romance mod out there. You can use it to make a completely asexual/aromantic Sim or entire neighborhood. You can use it to completely disable cheating or jealousy in your game. (IF, in both cases, you also disable all autonomy of Maxis romantic interactions, since those are different interactions than the "mirror" actions that are part of ACR.) Or you can ramp up cheating and/or jealousy if you want "drama." Or, you can make a neighborhood that's a 24/7 free love orgy if you want with no jealousy, babies, or committed relationships. And anything in between. All up to the user. There is an array of neighborhood-level settings where you can, just as an example, completely turn off autonomous woohoo/babymaking (as well as a bunch of other things) if you don't want that aspect but DO want some of the other things that ACR brings to the table. The entire point is its modularity and flexibility. It doesn't do just one thing, so turning off one aspect of it that you don't want doesn't turn off or diminish the other things that it can do that you might want. The issue is that most people just seem to drop it in their downloads without touching any of the settings or reading any of its documentation...and then they complain that it doesn't do what they want it to do. And, well, yeah! It needs input from the user to work properly. It's not a mod you just drop in and forget.

And I don't understand why people say they use it for "drama." The way I use it -- especially now that I've nuked autonomy for the Maxis romantic interactions, leaving only the ACR versions of them as autonomous -- it greatly decreases drama (when I want it to) because usually I set it to make my Sims in committed relationships less prone to cheating and Sims in general less likely to fly off the handle because someone they have a CRUSH on flirted with someone else. Those are both behaviors that happen often in non-modded games because Maxis has a ridiculously low jealousy threshold AND it doesn't seem to make Sims in committed relationships less likely to cheat. Both of those are things that I really don't like about the game's unmodded behavior. I suppose ACR might create "drama" if you just stick it in your game with default settings or if you set it so that everyone's at the highest cheating level allowed AND the lowest jealousy threshold -- which pretty much makes it Maxis settings, actually. Then you'd have lots of "drama." And if that's what you want, OK. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting drama! But that's not what I want.

Overall, I would say that the only bad thing about ACR is that for it to really work in a very finely customized way, in addition to setting your playables you also have to catch all your townies and set their tokens, too, so that they're not all on default settings. That's one of the first things I do when I create a new neighborhood, if it's one with townies. Otherwise the default-set townies will screw things up. So there's that. It's a pain in the butt to set everyone, but if you want a really customized experience, it's the only way to have it.

Anyway, yeah, I don't mean to evangelize or anything. It's not a mod that everyone's going to want and that's fine. But statements like "all it does is turn Sims into sex-happy sluts" or "all it does is allow Sims to make babies by themselves" really downplay all that the mod can do if one takes the time to set it up properly for the behavior that one wants. (And if you aren't one who wants to mess with all that, but also isn't fond of the standard Maxis drama, then there are other mods out there -- like Romantic Standards -- that influence romantic behavior but that, for my own purposes, aren't flexible enough.) IMO, ACR's name is kind of a misnomer because it can do much more than just "enabling autonomous casual romance."



If you use ACR, it has its own birth control and risky woohoo settings. If you want no "oops" babies at all, you turn on birth control for the Sims you want to prevent from having kids and you set the chance of risky woohoo at 0%, globally. There's no need for a separate risky woohoo mod if you use ACR. ACR does it itself, and you can set the percentage chance of an oops happening to suit what you want. Much more flexible.

And another excellent feature of ACR V.2 in terms of "birth control" is the Sim-level "ideal family size" setting. You can set it to between 0 and 12 kids for each individual Sim. When a Sim hits their ideal family size, pregnancy is less likely to happen even if it's a try for baby woohoo, especially if both of the pair have reached their ideal.

Okay now I think I understand. It's a mod that, among other things, allows you to decide the individual, sexual and romantic behaviours of each and every playable Sim, or tweak those behaviors on a neigbourhood level. And if you want you can also set it so that Sims choose their own partners, flirt with strangers and have "surprise babies".
Did I get it now?

Also please don't me dismissive of the mod or anything, I've just always been genuinely confused on what exactly it does if I don't want the random behaviour (and I really don't)

You mentioned that it can be used to create ACE/ACRO Sims, can you also use it to stop homosexual Sims from accepting romantic interactions from opposite sex Sims? because, you know, the in-buil "gender preference" does basically nothing.

Yep, ACR does it all (sort of). You can set the gender preference for one sim, or the whole hood. But (just like RL), there are lots of other things to SET. "Gender preference" (in MY game) DOES work; maybe in your game it doesn't work because you're not setting the other stuff. Is your gay man ROMANCE? Even if you have a Romance Sim you cam set him to be faithful to his partner, refusing even a casual flirt from anyone. Since he is Romance he will still THINK about flirting (etc) with other men, but he won't do it unless you tell him to. And since he is set to gay, he would ALWAYS reject a woman. And if some other man is a good friend, and you don't want them kanoddling in the background at a community lot, you can set them as "just friends".

I would say that's a good summary.



I'm not surprised because most people seem to be confused and just assume its only function is to make the game a sexual free-for-all. Which you CAN use it to do...but you can also use it to do the exact opposite. The most important mod to me when I play the monastery/convent neighborhoods I like to play sometimes? ACR, ironically.



Yes and no. You can do ace/aro by simply disabling various levels of romantic autonomy AND also using mods to nuke the Maxis interactions, which are actually far more likely to cause problems because you can't control them outside of cancelling actions in queues for playable Sims. With ACR (and other mods, including the Sim Blender), you can set gender preference to extremes, making Sims very gay or very straight. This affects chemistry (Sims with max homosexual preference will have no chemistry with opposite-sex Sims even if all the other boxes are checked in turns of mutual aspirations and turns-on/off) which in turn affects whether or not Sims will autonomously interact romantically under either Maxis or ACR interactions. All that said, I THINK (but do not know for certain) that the ACR versions of the romantic interactions are more sensitive to the Sim's set gender preference, though ONLY if both Sims have gender preference settings. (There's a randomizer in ACR that one can use to give all the townies/NPCs in a neighborhood randomized settings, and you can give it target gay and bi percentages, with the remaining percentage being for straight.) I've used ACR for pretty much the entire time I've played, so I don't remember exactly how it worked before, but in playing it seems to me that if a Sim autonomously does something outside of their gender preference, it's usually because they're using the Maxis interaction rather than the ACR one. (You can tell which because the ACR interactions show as, for instance, "Kiss Tenderly (ACR)" as opposed to just "Kiss Tenderly" for the Maxis interaction.) So, this leads me to think that the ACR versions are more sensitive to this, but I don't think they're 100% infallible.

More and more I've come to believe that if you use ACR and set it up properly in a finely-detailed way and you want that fine of a level of control, it's really best to disable autonomy on the Maxis romantic interactions because ACR can't control those and they tend to gum up the works. I just recently disabled the Maxis interactions, and it's made a difference.

I have not looked at Romantic Standards @HobbesED I will do so.

What I use is a combination of smaller mods.

Romance mod by pescado
No instant love
Adults go steady
Risky Woohoo
Triplets & Quads
Gender Adjuster -this allows for sims to be 0 which is the only mod outside of ACR that has that.
simblender

Along with sim wants and dice roll.

Missing is birth control.

@Peni Griffin I am not saying they don't autonomously flirt at all, I just think Maxis needs a bit of a push or at least it does in my game. But a bit more interest is a long way from randomly kissing a sim they barely know. I mean I laughed when, I think it was an elderly Cassandra grabbed some uni boy to smooch in a recent lets play, but only because it wasn't my game if you kwim.

@iCad That's the thing though, setting it up correctly sounds like quite the job and what puts me off is most of it I don't need or want. Watching let's Play's and stories over the years have definitely influenced me not to try it. Also the thought of getting a large mod for probably just a 1/4 or less of it's purpose and it possibly clashing with other mods also puts me off. Then if I set it up wrongly and for sure I will, then I will be scrambling to mop up a mess I bet. Every now and then I do think about it though. Relationships I think are a much higher priority for you and many others. I often pair sims up simply because I think they will make me interesting babies and hey they like each other well enough and have a bolt or two.

Yeah, myself I'm doing pretty well with just the romance mod and roleplaying my characters. Plus I'm a bit reluctant to implement a large mod halfway through a neighbourhood's lifetime.

@joandsarah77
Yeah, "big" mods always have some cost/benefit analysis to them. Probably all of ACR's features are available in separate mods somewhere, same as with Inteen nowadays. It's really only if you want the whole package (or at least most of it) that you'd necessarily want the "big" mod over a cocktail of smaller ones that can do only the things in which you are interested. For me, I play a lot of "niche" neighborhoods where specific types of relationships and/or behaviors are desirable or, on the other hand, need to be stopped entirely. Like, free-love communes where I have to nuke jealousy and want to encourage other behaviors that are outside of "Maxis normal." Or, oddly, neighborhoods that have convents/monasteries attached so that I want some Sims who can't do romantic interactions at all as well as a general population that can. ACR's good for that kind of thing, with its Sim-level controls. If you just do "normal" things and you're OK with Maxis behavior (Maxis's ultra-sensitive jealousy really ticks me off, personally), then you probably don't need a mod that can have such wide-ranging effects but that you do have to fiddle with to make it work as you want.

@Orphalesion
I would not recommend adding ACR to any large, pre-existing neighborhoods, no. Not if you want to tinker extensively with the token settings, anyway. That would be a lot of work. If you do ever want to give it a whirl, I'd recommend making a test hood just for that purpose. Plop down some playables and townies, set tokens, let 'em loose for a while, and see if you like what happens.

Does anyone else's ghosts go back to their graves when a Sim in the household says "say goodbye... everyone" to visitors or is my game acting wacky again? :P

Awwe, your ghosts have manners. I have no clue if this is normal behavior or not, I rarely have ghosts...

I can't help you with the others, but "Cheer up" does what it says: When a Sim is seriously upset, the interaction becomes available for other Sims to try to cheer the unhappy Sim up. I remember Andrew using it multiple times when his mum Gloria was given a Dishonourable Discharge by the military. She was so upset that she was refusing other interactions he was trying, and she took a lot of cheering up before she finally agreed to play red hands. After that I was able to persuade her to look in the paper. where she found a job in Athletics -- her LTW career. (Since then she's scarcely looked back.) It was years ago, but it still annoys me: Gloria may indeed have made an error in carrying out her duties, but I still hold that the imputation of dishonour is totally undeserved.

How many subhoods do you have ? At this time, I have 2 shopping hoods and 2 downtown hoods.
Thought about adding a 3rd shopping hood for purposes in my story. does anything 'glitchy' happen if there's that many subhoods ?
Haven't noticed anything wrong with the current total of main hood and 4 subhoods.
Tia.

about Townie-types and sub-neighborhoods; I think the "neighborhood" box on the household's family instance is one factor. age might be another factor.
University's Dormies kind of live in university sub-neighborhoods.
Nightlife's Downtownies kind of live in downtowns.
Bon Voyage's Locals kind of live in their respective destination type.

Thanks, what I meant was is there a slower-moving neighborhood with more than 4 subhoods ?

I used the University for create-a-family (downloaded a young adult and put him in my main hood after 'dropping' out of college) ; but do not have my teens go to uni.

Haven't noticed a slower working neighborhood with 4 subhoods. But I was thinking about a 5th subhood. (shopping)

Lot Adjuster program.
"Front" without "building over road"; would positions of lot's content change?

Romance mod and no instant love toned down Maxis jealousy enough for me. Romance and pleasure sims do not react to 'cheating'. That whole light kiss at the end of a date equaling instant crush drove me nuts enough to fix. Really the only things missing is birth control. I would love a separate mod for that. What I do now is let my adult sims sit on 5 day to elder for 14 days, this equals menopause. For younger sims I also check inventory for 'sprog controllers' which they can buy at the pharmacy. So if they have one and risky woohoo kicks in I roll a dice to see if it will go ahead or cancel it on the simblender. Not a great system but it kind of works.

i have 9 subhoods, a downtown and the 3 unis and have no problems.

Chris Hatch has a birth control mod.

This option should add space between the road and your building, so yes, kind of?
As far as I remember, expanding 'over the road' unlocks the road tiles so you can build above the road and along the far side.

How does cheesecake work in your game? In my game with up to BV installed if you ate cheesecake you got twins. In my full game twice now I've had my sims eat cheesecake and no twins. Does anyone know if they changed how it works with the later packs?

I have all packs installed and I always get twins if my sim eats cheesecake..

There is a mod that takes away the power of cheesecake, maybe you got that somehow. I never have them eat cheesecake I would just set it with the trips &quads mod, but mostly I click randomize. You can also use the force twin cheat.

Thanks guys, will look through my mods again!