An Option to Set Gender Preference in CAS

"Dannydanbo;c-16671059" wrote:
We can't toggle people in real life, why limit our sims?

Most people IRL have a strong preference for one or the other. It’s actually more realistic to incorporate sexual orientation into the game instead of having every Sim be totally bisexual with no preference one way or the other.

"the_greenplumbob;c-16671350" wrote:
My sims never do romantic actions with random strangers autonomously, so what purpose would this serve - I know if my sims are going to gay or straight or anything in-between.

Townies sometimes do, though, which can start a romantic relationship between your Sim and them- along with autonomous flirting from your Sim and plenty of unwanted romantic whims. I’d like to see Sims reject romantic advances from Sims of the wrong gender, at least if they don’t have a solid friendly relationship beforehand.

"Dannydanbo;c-16671643" wrote:

What happens to your story telling when you want your straight sim to have a gay affair? That happens in real life more often than people want to admit.

It wouldn’t have to be some set-in-stone choice of four options. For an example of how it should be done, take a look at how it worked in TS3:

Each Sim had a value for attraction to males and attraction to females. 0 was neutral, anything above zero meant Sims of that gender were potential candidates for attraction (which also included a bunch of other factors, and I’d love to see a return of a proper attraction system like TS3 had), and anything below 0 meant the Sim was not attracted to anyone of that gender.

Each romantic interaction increased the attraction value for the target’s gender by 2 and decreased the attraction value for the opposite gender by 1. This effectively allowed the user to decide their Sim’s orientation and also made it changeable.

The player’s options were never limited by this; the attraction system never had any effect on user-directed actions. What it did affect was how the target Sim responded - Sims, including player-controlled Sims, would reject romantic socials from anyone with a low attraction score (which by default included every Sim of a gender they weren’t attracted to) unless they had a high relationship already.

Gender preference is already partially incorporated into TS4, anyway. The values are there - though they’re capped at zero this time and can’t go negative - but they don’t actually do anything yet. Manually setting the values using a mod doesn’t have any effect on anything, as far as I can tell - whether the male/female attraction values are set to 0/0, 100/100, 0/100, 100/0, or anything in between, there doesn’t seem to be any difference in whims, autonomy, acceptance/rejection of romantic socials, anything.

Like, take one of my Sims who was 100% straight, for instance. His attraction values were 100 for females and 0 for males.

Cue a conversation with the mailman. When I wasn’t paying attention for a couple seconds, I see that my Sim is suddenly Flirty. What?

He has the “Titillating Banter” moodlet and the start of a romance bar. The mailman had gone from Acquaintance to Romantic Interest.

Is it realistic to allow “straight” Sims to have same-sex affairs? Absolutely. Is it realistic for a straight man to be easily seduced by the mailman he hardly knows and suddenly start rolling whims to WooHoo with him? Absolutely not, yet it happened in my game just a couple hours ago.

This is why it should be up to the player and influenced by player-directed actions. Players should have the option to have their Sims pursue any relationship they want, but Sims should also reject advances from Townies of a gender they aren’t attracted to (unless, of course, the player decided to pursue a romantic relationship with said Townie first).

I’ve heard good things about the TS2 attraction system, so maybe some sort of attraction system taking elements from both TS3 and TS2 could be implemented in TS4?