Interesting calculation
May. 4th, 2015 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
katrisimsI'm suddenly a lot more active, hmm?
Yesterday's post made me think about the future of Alphabetia, in earnest. I realized that by journaling my progress, I can calculate my speed at playing the Bookacies. And I already have an estimate of my current playing speed: roughly 1.5 households with 5/6 days each per week. That leads to some interesting calculations.
This is gonna get long, and I apologize. Feel free to skip, I fully understand. I just need to write this down to process it myself.
So. I'm currently at generation D of the alphabetacy, meaning that (unless I counted wrong) I've got 22 generations to go. Now how long is that going to take?
Well, let's first see how long it takes to play one generation. If we assume that a generation always takes the shortest amount of time possible, while still giving teens some time as teens and playing through college, it comes down to this:
Baby: 1 day
Toddler: 3 days
Child: 7 days
Teen: 10 days
Young adult: 4 x 6 days (24 days)
Pregnancy: 3 days
So this would assume that birthdays would be celebrated as soon as possible, sims would leave college right after graduation, and new adults would get to making babies on their first day as adults. Oh, and the firstborn always inherits, so that the heir is always born as soon as possible.
This would mean that one generation, from birth to birth, takes a minimum of 48 sim days.
I play a five-day rotation, except in college, where one rotation is six days (two semesters). If we assume there are no rotations where the nest is empty and the adults with their kids in college would get a single day of play, this means that one generation makes 4 rotations in college, and 24/5 = 4.8, in practice 5, rotations otherwise. So 9 rotations total from birth to birth.
Currently, I have 24 houses in one rotation, 18 in the main 'hood and 6 in college. If we assume that the number of households stays the same (and doesn't increase, which is likely to be the case in reality), and I'm able to play roughly 1.5 households each week, that means one full rotation takes me 24/1.5 = 16 weeks.
A year has 52 weeks, so each year, I would get done 52/16 = 3.25 rotations. If that's the case, then 9 rotations, that is, one generation from birth to birth, would take 9/3,25 = 2.8 years.
And with 22 generations to go, I'd be looking at... 22 x 2.8 years = 61.6 years from now on to complete the challenge.
Yeah, you can see the problem. I'm over 30 now. With this - rather optimistic, I should say - estimate, I will in all likelihood literally die of old age before that happens.
This doesn't even take into account periods of time that I will not be able to play or write (due to real life), side projects, levels of interest fluctuating, writer's blocks and what have you. So there's clearly only one conclusion to make: if I ever want to get anywhere with this challenge and this story, I need to do something, and I need to do something radical.
I still love my sims, and I still like playing rotation style. But let's face it: I'm kind of drowning in cousins, and it's only generation D. Another fact is that, since this is a legacy, none of them are actually contributing to the challenge, and only very few are contributing to the plot. I sort of enjoy keeping track of the family tree and going "oh, let's see, so X is Y's nth cousin m times removed", but really, story-wise it's only confusing. I already have to step into the story and explain who some cousin or the other is every so often. And, I'll confess, although seeing them get up to all kinds of mayhem with ACR and whatnot is entertaining, since they're all basically just very minor side characters to the legacy, it does get repetitive sometimes.
So what am I going to do?
The obvious answer is staring at me in the face: leave most or all cousins behind at the rebuild that I'm facing, and take a different playstyle in the new 'hood in order to keep the population smaller. Much smaller. Possibly: don't even play it in rotation style at all. That would require a plotline that would explain why things suddenly changed so drastically, but I already have in mind one that I was going to use at the first downgrade anyway, and I can easily imagine how to modify it so that it explains more than it was going to.
I suppose the real question is: can I do it? Can I leave many of my dear sims behind? A lot of what makes or breaks a challenge/family/neighborhood for me is the feel of it. And Alphabetia has had a very specific feel for me all this time. I'm already afraid of the rebuild a bit, since if the neighborhood doesn't feel the same, or the sims don't feel the same, that might be it for the family. The same goes for the extended family. If they're part of the feel, the new 'hood might not be the same, and it might cause loss of interest. On the other hand, I might just have to take the risk, and the rebuild might not be soon enough to take it. According to the calculations above, as Dirk is three rotations away from graduating - that is, almost a year in real life time. If I start feeling like I'm stuck on generation D forever, I think I'd be dealing with waning interest anyway.
It's a kind of a simming epiphany, really, and a long time coming. I think I'm going to finish the rotation the usual way, since I'm so close, but after that, I'm not sure yet how I'll proceed. But at the moment, I'm feeling kind of... radical. Perhaps slightly sad, but mostly I'm thinking something good can come out of this.
Yesterday's post made me think about the future of Alphabetia, in earnest. I realized that by journaling my progress, I can calculate my speed at playing the Bookacies. And I already have an estimate of my current playing speed: roughly 1.5 households with 5/6 days each per week. That leads to some interesting calculations.
This is gonna get long, and I apologize. Feel free to skip, I fully understand. I just need to write this down to process it myself.
So. I'm currently at generation D of the alphabetacy, meaning that (unless I counted wrong) I've got 22 generations to go. Now how long is that going to take?
Well, let's first see how long it takes to play one generation. If we assume that a generation always takes the shortest amount of time possible, while still giving teens some time as teens and playing through college, it comes down to this:
Baby: 1 day
Toddler: 3 days
Child: 7 days
Teen: 10 days
Young adult: 4 x 6 days (24 days)
Pregnancy: 3 days
So this would assume that birthdays would be celebrated as soon as possible, sims would leave college right after graduation, and new adults would get to making babies on their first day as adults. Oh, and the firstborn always inherits, so that the heir is always born as soon as possible.
This would mean that one generation, from birth to birth, takes a minimum of 48 sim days.
I play a five-day rotation, except in college, where one rotation is six days (two semesters). If we assume there are no rotations where the nest is empty and the adults with their kids in college would get a single day of play, this means that one generation makes 4 rotations in college, and 24/5 = 4.8, in practice 5, rotations otherwise. So 9 rotations total from birth to birth.
Currently, I have 24 houses in one rotation, 18 in the main 'hood and 6 in college. If we assume that the number of households stays the same (and doesn't increase, which is likely to be the case in reality), and I'm able to play roughly 1.5 households each week, that means one full rotation takes me 24/1.5 = 16 weeks.
A year has 52 weeks, so each year, I would get done 52/16 = 3.25 rotations. If that's the case, then 9 rotations, that is, one generation from birth to birth, would take 9/3,25 = 2.8 years.
And with 22 generations to go, I'd be looking at... 22 x 2.8 years = 61.6 years from now on to complete the challenge.
Yeah, you can see the problem. I'm over 30 now. With this - rather optimistic, I should say - estimate, I will in all likelihood literally die of old age before that happens.
This doesn't even take into account periods of time that I will not be able to play or write (due to real life), side projects, levels of interest fluctuating, writer's blocks and what have you. So there's clearly only one conclusion to make: if I ever want to get anywhere with this challenge and this story, I need to do something, and I need to do something radical.
I still love my sims, and I still like playing rotation style. But let's face it: I'm kind of drowning in cousins, and it's only generation D. Another fact is that, since this is a legacy, none of them are actually contributing to the challenge, and only very few are contributing to the plot. I sort of enjoy keeping track of the family tree and going "oh, let's see, so X is Y's nth cousin m times removed", but really, story-wise it's only confusing. I already have to step into the story and explain who some cousin or the other is every so often. And, I'll confess, although seeing them get up to all kinds of mayhem with ACR and whatnot is entertaining, since they're all basically just very minor side characters to the legacy, it does get repetitive sometimes.
So what am I going to do?
The obvious answer is staring at me in the face: leave most or all cousins behind at the rebuild that I'm facing, and take a different playstyle in the new 'hood in order to keep the population smaller. Much smaller. Possibly: don't even play it in rotation style at all. That would require a plotline that would explain why things suddenly changed so drastically, but I already have in mind one that I was going to use at the first downgrade anyway, and I can easily imagine how to modify it so that it explains more than it was going to.
I suppose the real question is: can I do it? Can I leave many of my dear sims behind? A lot of what makes or breaks a challenge/family/neighborhood for me is the feel of it. And Alphabetia has had a very specific feel for me all this time. I'm already afraid of the rebuild a bit, since if the neighborhood doesn't feel the same, or the sims don't feel the same, that might be it for the family. The same goes for the extended family. If they're part of the feel, the new 'hood might not be the same, and it might cause loss of interest. On the other hand, I might just have to take the risk, and the rebuild might not be soon enough to take it. According to the calculations above, as Dirk is three rotations away from graduating - that is, almost a year in real life time. If I start feeling like I'm stuck on generation D forever, I think I'd be dealing with waning interest anyway.
It's a kind of a simming epiphany, really, and a long time coming. I think I'm going to finish the rotation the usual way, since I'm so close, but after that, I'm not sure yet how I'll proceed. But at the moment, I'm feeling kind of... radical. Perhaps slightly sad, but mostly I'm thinking something good can come out of this.
