More Awesome Than You!

Is it safe for Sims to have family ties when you make them into townies/downtownies/localies/whathaveyou? Since CAS won't let me make teens or kids without them, and I thought it would be nicer to the Burb family to make them townies instead of killing them this time... I'd like to avoid breaking my hood.

(Tried typing "townie family ties" into search and got a lot about the townie families, but not whether they can be, you know, families. Yeah.)

It doesn't seem to do any harm when I've done it in my game.

That said you do know that it is easy enough to remove the family ties in SimPE later if you want to don't you? Firstly, in 'Sim Description', you edit the relationships page to remove the family toggle and the relation-ship type (top and bottom) for all the Sims. Then you go into 'Family Ties' and remove the relationships there for all the Sims.

Actually, I never explored that in SimPE (I haven't done much with it.) Thanks for the tip :)

There is no harm in townies having family ties.  You can remove these relationships using SimPE after creating them, if you wish.  You can also make just adult sims, with no family ties, and age some of them down to teen afterwards using a hack (if you have one).

The only disadvantage with that method is if you're using something like ACR which calculates fertility based on days lived. Although aging down does reset the age it doesn't reset the days lived which means that you can end up with Sims that are technically infertile if ever you should wish to play them again.

Ye gods!  ACR has diminishing fertility built in?  Where's the fun in that?

Once again it's a matter of going into SimPE and fixing the days lived. So either method of renderign townies relationless involves some external alterations, but, as we've both said, there's no real problem with having inter-related townies.

Be careful, though; I edited those values in SimPE, because I didn't want the fertility diminish, and I ended with the hood sinking in babies.

Clearly there is some sort of balance that might be struck somewhere.

Well, in addition to changing the rate fertility declines, you'd also have to lower the chances of pregnancy.  I didn't like the way all my sims would get knocked up right out of college whether they were family sims or not, and never have any accidental babies later in life.  I didn't have access to SimPE so what I did was to let every sim try for baby any time, but lower the chance for pregnancy to 10%. 

Most couples have 2 children, some have had as many as 4 with the extended adulthood of ageduration hack, a few couples had just one child.  Surprisingly, I haven't had a single sim go autonomously childless. :D

I have one couple, both are Fortune for their first aspiration, who weren't allowed children for their first week while they built their businesses. Now they're allowed to try for baby, they're nearly through their second week and no patter of little feet yet. Very odd for sims.

Not quite autonomously childless, but odd nonetheless.