I have no clue what is going on with this game. I had the game working in October just fine, then I got a new computer. Of course then there was the installing game pack issue, so I gave up.

So I decided to revisit this so I could play this weekend. I was able to install the expansions "fine" or so the EA app said. Game would not launch. I then repaired the game. It showed the game repairing. Game still wouldn't work. Went into program files, which showed the last time the game was accessed by the launcher as October 2023. None of the repairing affected anything in that folder. So, I deleted the whole thing downloaded the everything fresh.

I renamed my sims 3 folder in my documents to try and generate a clean one. I launched the game from the desktop. The launcher popped up. I clicked play and the launcher just quit and the EA app popped up. I did this several times with no change. I updated the graphics rules/cards for the RTX 4070. Still no luck, but at least I was now generating exception files in the sims 3 folder, so proof that they were communicating.

I used the task manager to change the CPU affinity as someone had mentioned in another post. This actually worked...for a minute. So, I went back to my original sims 3 folder to see if that would work as well. I had to reset the affinity in task manager again. I was then able to get the game to launch. I then got an unofficial game modification error. Sigh, I haven't added new mods in years. (I did later solve that problem, as I seemed to have tried the lazy duchess mod last year and did not delete one of the files when it didn't work).

So, I renamed it, re-did the affinity and instead of launching the game, I added all my sims 3 store worlds and packs that I downloaded previously to see if I could get them to install. It worked just fine and installed everything. Then the game would not launch. I double checked that Geforce exp and EA app overlays were turned off.

tl;dr Game wouldn't launch or install sims3 packs from the store and would just quit and was generating exception files in the the sims 3 documents folder. In the end the only thing that seems to work is changing the affinity in the task manager.

So, my questions are: 1. Can you bypass the launcher at all? (I know the old way of renaming the TS3.exe does not work anymore) and if not, is there a way to make the Sims 3 launcher exe to open with a defaulted affinity in the task manager?

If your new computer has a 12th generation or higher Intel processor, which is very likely, then TS3 will not run on it at all until some steps are taken to control the use of cores during launch. This might be what you were hoping to accomplish with CPU affinity in the Task Manager, but there may be more to it than that.

Oh ok. I didn't realize that. Mine is 13th gen i9. I have heard about the issues with Alder Lake, but I'm computer stupid enough to think that Alder Lake was a name brand and not a codename for a generation of intel.

That did indeed fix my issue. Thanks so much!