More Awesome Than You!

How many new NPCs will Bon Voyage dump in my neighborhood if I don't send sims on vacation but place BV objects in main neighborhood lots? The BV objects look great, but I don't want a ton of additional NPCs running around.

What objects are we talking about here?  If you use simple objects like furnishings, etc. there would be no additional NPCs spawned.  Use of BV build objects (roofs, floors, etc.) also would have no impact on NPCs.

If you put a hotel into your main hood, with a check in desk (the only way you can have a working hotel), it will spawn a bellhop, and requisite maids, etc.

Make sure you install the BV version of antiredundancy.package to limit the spawning of NPCs to the minimum.

If you are talking about townies, you want to build a clean neighbourhood to avoid the creation of the default BV townies.  Check the clean/empty templates thread.  You also want notownieregen.package to stop new townies from being created by the game.

For simplicity, search on the words in bold above.

I was wondering how many NPCs objects like the check-in desk, snack bar and massage table will create. Will new chefs, massage therapists and maids be spawned or will the game use existing chefs, maids and beauty shop NPCs? My game is already kind of bloated, so I'm on the fence when it comes to buying Bon Voyage.

If you put a check in desk in a hotel lot, it will spawn a bellhop/clerk.  Not sure what happens if you install a massage table on a residential lot - it would seem strange if that would come with a massage therapist.  However, a massage table on a comm lot might.

Use antiredundancy to keep NPCs to a minimum.  That way the game should use maids, gardeners, cooks, etc. already created as much as possible, rather than creating new ones.

I think each of the different food-bar thingies spawn their own type of chef.

The NPCs are not the problem, character wise, when adding vacation hoods.  The problem are all the damned tourists (48 of them) and locals.  The Service sims are a very small bunch.

Right, I forgot about them.  The thing is, even with no-spawn and no-regen hacks installed, there is no real way to completely avoid a number of required NPCs, some of which are the special NPCs which break the game if fiddled with.  On the other hand, after Uni, overpopulation has not been a major issue.  There are people who have several thousand character files in a healthy running neighbourhood.

Personally, I can live with a few extra NPCs.  It's a small tradeoff for the benefits of thatched roofs, the grand piano, the "walk to lot" feature, and the new things to do/places to go.  Just my opinion, of course.  When my hoods get too bloated, I ignore them and start a new one.

There are a LOT of NPC's, in the form of tourists and resort-neighborhood natives.  If you have all three resorts (takemizu, wikki, three lake), you will have three times the natives. 

If you have a local hotel in your main neighborhood, while you stay at the hotel, you will be visited by the tourist NPC's.  So I'm not sure if you can avoid the tourist NPC's by not installing any resort neighborhoods.

The special-function NPC's (like the masseuse and chefs) are quite few in comparison, nothing to worry about.

If you have a massage table on a commercial lot in your main neighborhood, you will get a masseuse NPC.  However, he will only perform the swedish massage.  Which is just as well, because the other three special massages you can learn on vacation lots only seem to have different animations and are otherwise not unique.

I know what you mean with your original question.  I have all the x-packs except Pets, but I try not to install the extra sub-neighborhoods because I hate all the extra NPC's they create, and all of them with those monkey-ish default faces that EA gave them.

Any extra NPC's your sims can't interact with (no socialized)- no problem at all for your game.This something like birds,penguins etc.
This is nothing more than extra kbytes(sometimes Mbytes :) thanks EAxis) in your character folder.

Did you know that Argon posted a cleaned up template for the vacation subhoods? Obviously the special characters are necessary, but his template won't spawn the gross Maxis default locals/tourists/NPCs. The thing is that BV comes with a stealth neighborhood, which is an invisible hood that gets automatically added to all of your hoods (when you first load the hood after the EP install for the first time). IIRC the stealth hood came with 50 or 60 character files this time around. And all of them were fugly (didn't use my face template replacements etc). If you're anal like me then one could make one's own (with the hacks you mentioned) or one could take notownieregen out and allow the game to make locals and tourists (but they should be generated using decustomized CC and face template replacements). Argon posted the template somewhere deep within SaraMK's cleaned out and empty templates thread. I don't know why he didn't post it as a new thread, but I don't have the energy to go digging up the specific post now.