Ayre is a Sims 2 neighborhood I began building from a blank sims 2 map on October 6, 2018. To read the story from the beginning, you can start with the Berry family, Spring of Year One, and follow links in chronological order from there. For abbreviated summaries of the challenge so far, recaps for each season begin here. The most recent post is Year One, Autumn: The Faber Family. The Table of Contents is also available.
If you’re a Sims 2 player, you might find the prologue interesting; it covers details of initial set up of the neighborhood. Brief pictorial highlights of the development of Ayre are found here, and some of the notable places of Ayre, here. Discussion of aging and the passage of time is here.
Ayre was made to play a modified version of the Medieval Charter Challenge. “…[T]o take a small and struggling Settlement and build it up into a thriving Medieval Charter City.” In March 2020, I put Ayre aside after my computer died, but now, in April 2023, I’ve managed to perform a new art that is some kind of mix of troubleshooting and necromancy, and I think Ayre is back. Hopefully, it will not be fatally flawed in this reincarnation.
Founding Families for Ayre were randomly rolled. Each household is played for each five day season in rotation and pays Rent, Taxes, Tithes, Fees and Fines to the Treasury, after midnight on the last day of the round. As the Treasury balance grows, different types of lots can be added both publicly and privately, through business, and new families are added to Ayre.
While playing the Medieval Charter Challenge, I am trying out a few of the gameplay mechanics designed by Heloise for her Warwickshire Renaissance Playstyle & Challenge. Heloise’s incredibly detailed and rich playstyle for Sims 2 will help give my play in Ayre a medieval world view and grounding as well as infusing it with random, challenging factors.
According to the Warwickshire instructions, I have randomly rolled a starting moral alignment for each sim and am working on discerning or assigning ethical alignments to current sims. Tracking of health scores, moral and ethical alignments, oaths, and other sim data are tracked, here. I plan to start the health scores rolls as babies are born in Ayre. (The current sims survived the plague and I decided against including them in the total and random health roll system, at least for now.) For now, I don’t plan to track Clerical Favor or Royal Favor, but for momentous choices I plan to use moral alignment, ethical alignment, and aspiration to roll for the likelihood of good or bad behavior and give the roll a heavy weight in the sim’s eventual behavior. The Warwickshire manual will also be a helpful guide for betrothal agreements, outcomes of romantic affairs, property and title lineages, education and trade, so I want my readers to know that it is Heloise’s published work that I am relying on for these ideas and their application to Sims 2.
With Love From Ayre 