#and a comp one wouldn't be significantly different play-wise

[dramallamadingdang]

The college madness continues. :)

So I'm sort of done hammering out the structure of this, but I'm putting it all behind a cut because it's really long (sorry to those on mobile where cuts don’t work) and is probably only of interest to people who are sort of nerdy and who like to make the game stupidly difficult for themselves. :)

First of all, I rearranged @dunne-ias's Uni/career structure as far as assigning Maxis majors to certain colleges. Mine looks like this now:

It just made more sense with all the custom majors I added, so that Sims looking to enter into certain careers will tend to sort to a certain college. (More on that further down.) So, here are my three schools:

ALT somehow became Texas A&M. :D (Only without the military aspect that that school used to have.) So, now I’ll probably use pics of that campus to inspire the layout of this one, although I’m thinking it’ll be on a lush terrain with ocean/beach access and a warm-ish year-round climate, given its oceanography and agricultural programs. Anyway, I think it'll be the most fun to build/play, with its agricultural aspect. It's the home of all of the life/health/natural and physical sciences. Pretty much all Sims with LTWs for science-related careers will go here, as well as those desiring culinary or sports greatness.

LFT became a business, social studies, and computer school, so it’s retaining a tiny piece of its “tech” moniker. :) If a Sim isn't wanting a science- or arts-related career (and there are a lot of the latter), they're most likely to end up here, but also have a fair possibility of ending up at ALT, since it has Psychology. I’ll probably keep a desert theme for this one because...Hey, I’m a desert girl. :) This one’s most likely to keep its premades, too, since I’ll likely do it as a makeover of LFT rather than a custom build. I’ll probably dormie-fy them, though because I tend to turn premades into townies when I use them at all.

SSU is essentially an arts and letters school. Musicians, dancers, fine artists, writers, and folks of a religious/metaphyical bent (AKA the "Paranormal" career) will end up here. Slackers, too, because where there are musicians, there are slackers. ;) (As a musician, I'm allowed to say that. ;) ) Anyway, given its arts main focus, I’m thinking this should be small and have more of an upscale-urban feel, like Juilliard, my alma mater. :) I’m thinking it also ought to have some sort of “audition” or portfolio requirements, for those entering into the arts majors, because all such schools do.

Of course, if I'm going to build two or three custom Unis (GOD HELP ME!), they're not going to have Maxis names, but I used the Maxis acronyms because it's what I've got right now.

Basically, how this is going to work is that Sims who have any career-related LTW -- even the Slacker one -- will possibly go to college. To get there, they have to fulfill the academic/extracurricular requirements dictated by Dunne-Ias's form. (Although for my playing I'll be altering those requirements quite a bit, mostly because the first neighborhood in which this is going to be attempted is an age-modded one that has a much-harder-skilling mod that goes with it, to stretch things out over a much longer lifespan. So, skill points are going to be worth a LOT more than grades in my scheme, and managing to qualify for a skill-point-related scholarship will be HUUUUUGE.)

IF they get into college, then a whole bunch of avenues open up. Like, say they have an LTW for the Show Business career. Well, here are their major options as they stand right now:

All of those are custom majors that for the purposes of this whole structure I have deemed to be "related to" one or more of the Maxis majors. (The related majors are in a hidden column so that I can look at/adjust them if needed.) This is how I determined which custom major would be assigned to which college, according to the structure in the first pic of this post. Some, like all of these, are only assigned to one college. Some are assigned to all three. Some are assigned to two of the three in different combinations.

So, for the Show Biz-bound, first they have to get into SSU, because for them it's the only school that offers the coursework they need. (That isn't the case for most careers, though. Most of the artsy ones are this way, though.) From there, the "Interests" and "OTH" columns will be used to help sort the prospective student into a certain major and thus guide how they'll be played as a teen.

So, say that the prospective student has the Show Biz LTW and the Film OTH. Well, then they might go into Animation, Film Production, or Theater. All of those have "Culture" and “Entertainment” as "required" interests, but where Film Production and Theater also have Fashion as a "requirement," Animation doesn't. It has Sci-Fi instead. So, say that the Sim in question has enough Sci-Fi interest for that major -- which would make that one more "attractive" to them because that's unique -- as well as enough Entertainment interest, but not enough Culture interest. So, that Sim would then have to gain Culture interest as well as have the required number of skill points in both Creativity and Logic as well as any badges or other miscellaneous things they have to do/learn/earn (Which I haven't determined for that major yet, hence the empty square), all BEFORE they can go to college. Fulfilling those requirements that they don’t already have will occupy them for their entire teenhood, pretty much, especially given that skill points take a LOT of time to acquire, if they need to do so. Of course, they also have to keep their grades up and maybe have a job and maybe some semblance of a social life. (Or maybe not; such are the demands of academic aspirations. :) )

So, that's pretty much how this is going to work in terms of what happens BEFORE the Sim gets to college. I need to finish filling in all the "requirements" for all the majors. Right now, there's 104 of them, total, including the ones I want to make -- which I want to add mostly to add more interest/OTH/skills diversity as well as more majors for certain already-specialized careers that don’t have many, like Oceanography -- and the Maxis ones I'm going to use, which isn't all of them. (Like, there's really no need for a catch-all "Biology" major when I have or will make a major for lots of different individual life/health sciences. Yeah, I know that's not how it works in real schools, but it works better for this scheme here.)

Next on the agenda is figuring out how Uni will be played once a student makes it there. I already know playable students won't be attending "rabbit hole" classes, other than finals. The main problem, I think, is going to be the grading scheme. Likely, the way this will likely play out will result in uniformly perfect grades, and I don't want that. So, I have a feeling random number generation and the College Adjuster as well as plain old manual adjustments will be used a lot. :)

As for what happens after college...Well, like I said, I don’t like having custom careers in my game, so all graduates will have a Maxis career so that their LTWs can be fulfilled. In my mind though, they’ll actually be working in the career that they studied for, not the catch-all Maxis one. Like, for instance, in the Medical category, there’s a Health Admin major, so graduates of that “program” will indeed enter the Medical career (or the Business career, since that major is in that category, too), but they will obviously not be nurses or surgeons or chiefs of staff. And of course, graduates of ALT’s Nursing program will likely be nurses their whole lives, not suddenly become surgeons. So what will “matter” will be the level number they’re at in the career, not the actual job titles. Because, let’s face it, most of the Maxis job titles are silly. :)