Game Play Questions, How do YOU play?

[Emma]

My two hard rules are 1) that Emma will not woohoo/marry/date Pescado, and 2) There is no Goopy!

See, this is why Jolrei is my BFF

I tend to just go with the flow of what my sims want and relationships/love is built on ACR and TJ's crystal ball. My sims get to date their 'one sim'. Whether they stay with them is another story!

[J. M. Pescado]

But Emma and Goopy BELONG together!

[Emma]

But Emma and Goopy BELONG together!

Only in Awesomeland

[chintznibbles]

Warning: This post contains Way More About My Sims Than Anyone Wants To Know.  You've been warned.  There's also a Too Long; Didn't Read version at the bottom.

Anyway, since I started getting nerdy in another thread, I'll finish here.  I write stupid little vaguely sci-fi stories as I play the game, most likely as an offshoot of some D&D-related tendency.  It's a sort of tattered patchwork, cobbled together out of bits and pieces of other things, but it makes playing the game more fun.  Here it is in a nutshell.  (A giant, hellishly verbose nutshell.  I'm bored at work and feel like typing a lot, apparently.)

The general consensus among researchers is that some twenty-odd years ago, a great event known as the Convergence occurred: three little-known astrological stars lined up in perfect occlusive harmony, and the world as Sims knew it ceased to be.  The new world has been folded together with the Otherworld, a domain of strange fey Sims and mysterious beasts, the Elemental Planes, and a shadowy realm known as Nevermore, inhabited by all kinds of vampires, werewolves, and in fact pretty much anything that's ever been in a scary movie.  To make matters worse, the Convergence flung an Antaran Hive Ship light-years across the galaxy into neat geosynchronous orbit with Sim-Earth.  Unfortunately, the celestial forces were not kind to the ship, an ailing model of suspect provenance in the first place.  Mere days after they arrived, the Warpspace Transubstantiator blew out, nearly causing a catastrophic hull breach.  Antaran escape craft have been crashlanding into the surface like clockwork ever since, bringing the prolific greenskins and their robotic servants down planetside.

The modern world is a fair sight different than it was a mere 30 years ago.  The Convergence completely rewrote the surface geography of the planet, completely upended almost every Earthling governmental structure and, perhaps most tellingly, stranded untold thousands of faeries, elves, beastlings, elementals, aliens and robots on the planet.  To make matters worse, the years following - known as the Collapse - were scarred by mortal wars and marked by the emergence of a zombie-creating plague, shadowy incursions by vampires and spectral beings, and scattered but rising reports of werewolves stalking the countryside, savaging all they came across.  Slowly, and in spite of the doomsayers' predictions, order has begun to take hold once again: Earthlings, long numbed to the strangeness in their daily lives, have begun to rebuild their shattered world with the aid of their new neighbors.  Emeraldvale, a small town in what was once California, is the site of one such reconstruction effort; unhindered by such concerns as government and moral authorities, the shell-shocked citizens have begun building anew, slowly assembling a motley collection of houses for themselves that bear a sad similarity to their previous suburban dwellings.  Their fertile soil - and a little elven knowhow - have enabled them to become a nearly self-sufficient town, lacking only in high-tech facilities and raw materials for manufacturing.

Another nearby town, Viper Canyon, found itself almost a ghost town before the Convergence, but in the years following the Collapse, the new inhabitants of the town decided to make the best of a bad situation and converted the now-deserted factory floors that once lined the canyon walls into living spaces and greenhouses. These days, Viper Canyon has become a thriving city, having reopened many of their discarded manufacturing facilities and boasting of an active civil defense unit, the Pit Vipers.  Travel is still something of an impossibility for many, but the Pit Vipers have managed to root out enough of the bandits and monsters in the nearby area, creating enough security for the citizens of Emeraldvale lucky enough to own biofuel-burning cars - or repaired Antarian skimmer vehicles - to visit the Canyon, whether to seek employment or simply wander around, remembering what it was like to live in a real city.

No one knows what the future portends, not even Faerie royalty or the most astute Antarian scientists, but local prospects are looking up, for the first time in twenty years.  Two brothers recently reopened the once-dead Rattlegulch Mine outside of Viper Canyon, taking out fresh veins of iron, copper and Adamantium, a metal long absent from the Earth.  There's even been talk in the Viper Canyon assemblyhouse of forming a new government, a New California Republic, as it were, guarded by the Vipers' growing security force and fed by the lush fields in Emeraldvale and the surroundings.  The few that remember the horror of waking up in the Convergence, finding the world an entirely different place, and those who listen to the far-off rumblings of war and plague still fret over the coming years, but for many life as normal has returned.


Backstory crap out of the way, my actual playstyle is pretty random.  I hate loading screens, so Emeraldvale sims are basically stuck in their lot unless I feel especially frisky or am allowing them their one ceremonial pilgrimage to the Town Square (my one community lot :p ), where they hang out (and have their needs cheatingly refilled) until they've met a suitable number of their neighbors that I suspect they'll find at least one two- or three-bolt sim in another house to get their romance on with (and sufficient friends if they get a city-slicker career, of course).  All sims are bisexual until they settle down preferring one gender via repeated romantic actions, so I do have quite a bit higher precedence of gay sims than would be realistic.  My sims are also largely female, mostly for convenience purposes; I like boobies, I guess.    A standard household is usually two girl-sims with a token male thrown in*.  Generally speaking, sims do not breed, because children are icky and bothersome; the youngest sims that exist are Teens and I am generally loath to let my actual sims age into elders.  Created elders are not allowed to die, generally speaking, unless I've decided I hate them or feel like trying for a ghost.  There are currently three pets in the entire neighborhood.  EV sims generally make shit with the various hobby items and stations (no robots, though; those are solely the domain of the Antarans.) and farm the hell out of their backyards, because I rarely bother buying them food.  Four sims own cars, all fortune sims of varying degrees of richness - which explains a bit of why all the carpool cars look the same, neh?  Several tinker sims have recently converted pre-Collapse junk vehicles to the new biofuel standard, though, so the mobile, city-job-having population is on the rise.

Viper Canyon is the Downtown, the sole sub-hood I have set up.  I tend to divide my playing time between the two 'hoods fairly regularly.  It's named after the preset map, fairly obviously, and populated with factory-looking lots I downloaded off of MTS2 a long time ago.  (Emeraldvale is populated with my abortive efforts at house design.  I blame my sims, of course.  They're a lazy bunch, with nary an Architect among them.)  They're played in much the same way, though they mostly have ordinary sim jobs (with a lot of Military and Police careers) and have the option of buying stuff.  They also have their choice of several comm-lots for their pilgrimage, from an exciting work-study trip to the Rattlegulch Mines to an equally informative visit to the City Hall... or even a shopping trip to the Bazaar, where sims can get their largely barter-based economy on.

In general, all the townies are Earthlings (and indeed they are most of the actual Earthlings in my game... who wants to play a boring human?), though I added a few prototypes of the major races when I nuked Goopy and his ilk.

*(I actually have backstory reasons for this, too, but like the rest they're pretty wacky. Elementals are genderless but adopt a favorite shape for convenience purposes; it'd be pretty pointless to attempt to breed with a being that is pretty much made up of fire/air/water/etc.  Sounds painful.  They can breed amongst themselves, but given that they are immortal, they rarely feel the need to do so.
Antarians have a gender system similar to honeybees: the vast majority of them are neuter female workers, followed by occasional male drones (who do most of the research and childrearing, having no other purpose in life than sitting around looking pretty for the Queen) and one or two Queens per colony shard.  Drones occasionally harvest DNA from workers who have caught their eye, largely for excelling in a particular skill or trade, but don't worry about the poor workers; most of them find the harvesting procedure to be quite enjoyable.  Queens, who are activated females, take recombinant genetic material from the drones (which they in turn enjoy quite a bit), merge it with the colony's reference pattern (the Queen's own genes), and produce eggs that they can either incubate and birth themselves or implant in practically any sim, from a willing Antarian worker to a human male.  Hence, pollination.  (The egg induces a special nutritive cyst to form if it isn't somewhere it can implant neatly, such as a worker's uterus, so the process is eminently survivable for males... but wholly unpleasant, from most accounts.  They are Ceasarian births by necessity, though lately the elves have shown some promise with their largely painless aetheric translocation techniques.  One or two babies and/or parents lost to the aether per year is still a fair sight better than the current success ratios on medically-assisted birth procedures.))

Anyway, I'll quit rambling now. At this point, I'll be surprised if anyone actually reads this.

TL;DR version: In order to retcon in all my crazy faerie/alien/beast/robot sims, I have constructed an over-elaborate backstory for my neighborhoods.  I play in a very lazy fashion that aims to minimize time spent at load screens while maximizing my enjoyment in making sims reach their little minuscule goals over and over again. 

[Clutzy]

Usually with the first generation born they tend to be het, after that it snowballs for deciding sex. I'm just stuck on sims carrying on their genes right off. After awhile though (could be the generation after, could be four down) I find myself actively deciding "Nope, not for you!" But then again, that's been not really happening ever since I discovered the "same-sex pregancy" hack and not gone cold turkey from it. However, I do notice my Romance sims have a tendency to be Bi. I think its because I just want to get that LTW of 20 Lovers over and done with, I swear I get too often. This time around though I'm just going to toss a die for the future generations to come once the current ones are done with college, and onwards. Het, Bi, and Homo will each get two numbers and whichever number it lands on will, thus, be that sim's sexuality.

In the case of pairing off, I must admit I try starting them off young in highschool for finding a good match. If there's a double bolt right off, its safe to say that will be the mate, 'less there's some competition. Or that LTW of 20Lovers, 501st Dates, 20 Woohoos. If that's the case, then its after that sim has completed his/her LTW (with the exceptions of the sims that have the personality of "Nevermind! I could get away with it!") and pick which one bolts highest. Otherwise the picking occurs in college, either by messing around with the one bolts that came along to see about upgrading their bolt or being on the look out for another Sim that s/he has better chemistry with. Some though do just find themselves hitched to a single bolt, but lord help that couple if someone higher came around.

[speedreader]

This has been such an interesting thread to follow!

I have my main neighborhood which tends to start bloating at about generation 3.  That's when I get simpotence.  At that point I usually begin a new neighborhood with one CAS and then make friends with/move in all the townies, marry them to each other, and then get bored with them.  (Once I created the Isle of Dan and every female townie had one child by my CAS Dan. Dan was very busy keeping up with all his children.)  I go back to my main hood and some form of "newness."  In the past I have used the MATY plague, a band of roving gypsys that moved in on existing lots and bedded the residents, alien takeover, and cowplants next to the sidewalk on every lot (gosh are sims dumb!)

This time my "new" tactic has been death to random sims by dice roll.  Using a list of all my sims, I rolled the dice through the entire list and marked them for death.  When I am done I will have eliminated about 30% of my neighborhood. 

I try to ensure that 10% of my neighborhood is gay to keep with national statistics (US).  With ACR I hoped they would choose for themselves, but apparently I still have to guide them.  I do use the random generator for a lot of choices, but I dislike using randomness for some choices, like sexuality, because gayness/hetero just doesn't fit everyone. 

Same with college.  If my sim wants to be a rock god, what's college got to do with it?  Just dive in there and make music. Usually my knowledge sims go to college, and those who want to have careers in appropriate fields.  Unlike Maxis, I don't think an artist needs college, but an Education Minister sure should have a degree!  And college has a cost of 5,000 simoleans/semester.  I dash them through college as they earn the necessary skills for an A

I personally love it when a sim with very little charisma wants to be mayor!  Makes it challenging.  I have also incorporated some 'rules' from a previous similar thread.  A sim with less than 8 outgoing points cannot practice charisma without a want.  Same with body (6 points required) and cleaning (5 required). To teach homework to a child the sim must have 4 skills acquired by studying (cooking, cleaning, mechanical).  Making smartmilk requires 8 in any skill.  Or they can have the new parenting skill for homework or smartmilk. (Meadow will finally be able to make smartmilk!)

I also use the lot sync timer to keep my families aging together. 

I found with The Sims that my interest flagged tremendously once the advertising for Sims2 got heavy because I couldn't see the point anymore.  I'm starting to feel that way again with the up-tick on Sims3 info.  So far I haven't seen any irresistable reason for buying Apartments so perhaps I will just spend time getting a garage sale together to get enough $$ for a new 'puter to run Sims3!  I can't believe I am still running Sims2 with expansions on my 5-year old emachines (Radeon 9000 video card)!

[J. M. Pescado]

So far, there's nothing good I've heard about TS3 that's really THAT great compared to TS2. TS3 is not gonna be the huge leap that TS2 was over TS1. It may even be an utter flop. There is basically nothing in TS3 so far that we can't REALLY already do in TS2. That neighborhood aging thing? Guess what? It would be entirely feasible to code such a thing in TS2. Except that it seems to be a firmly DO NOT WANT thing.

[Zazazu]

I had decided that a particular couple in my game would be childless by choice. It just seemed right for them: they were both Fortune sims and the woman was the youngest (youngest set of twins, anyway) of seven children. So I'd set ACR to never try for them, but neglected the Risky Woohoo odds, which are about 10% in my game. Oops. I got hit on that couple, then on her sister's house, both with risky odds.

My gay sims don't have children as I don't have same-sex pregnancy. There is no adoption yet in TI (I may be setting it up, I'm not sure..depends on how far the Way of Cheese drama goes). So gay sims don't have kids. It's kind of sad for the Family/Family gay couple I have.

That neighborhood aging thing? Guess what? It would be entirely feasible to code such a thing in TS2.

I already do neighborhood aging, but without EAxis telling my townies to marry each other and take themselves out of the dating pool.

[speedreader]

That neighborhood aging thing? Guess what? It would be entirely feasible to code such a thing in TS2.

I already do neighborhood aging, but without EAxis telling my townies to marry each other and take themselves out of the dating pool.
[/quote]

That leaves me with 2 questions.  1) How do you age your neighborhood, and 2) In Sims3 will a byproduct of aging the neighborhood together cause townies to marry each other...

[Zazazu]

For #2 - they said that townies will take houses, grow up, have children, and marry. "They" being EA in some of the fansite interviews. You can check SnootySims or the cesspool that is TSR.

For #1- I have notownieregen and nodormieregen. I have a spreadsheet of all my townies and their age groups, plus their last round aged. When the eldest playable of a generation hits teen, all townies but half the adults (the ones that aged last round) and the current teens get summoned to my 1x1 holding zone lot and selected/aged. New teens of course get their aspirations picked by RandomStuff.  Old teens are added to college by going into one of my college 'hoods and sending them to college, then plopping them in a dorm and using Inge's teleporter to make them back into townies. Elders meet Grimmy. I then spawn some new kids from the townie creator.

I like a lot of randomness, so I don't hand-create new townies or pick their outfits. I do switch face templates between five sets I have, so each "generation" of townies comes from a different set. It sounds really complicated, but I have it down to less than half an hour now.

[witch]

I'm not nearly that organised. I've got a couple of hundred townies, because I get bored seeing the same faces, and I wouldn't know who half of them are. I did do several sets of default faces during the process, so I have a little variety. I even did a Maxis set and there are only about two I've seen that had those real frog faces - now fixed.

I like the FT feature of picking  sims to age up when a sim ages, if I'm sick of them, I age them up - or if they're a partner of one of my sims who is becoming an adult.

I like the idea of a cowplant on the sidewalk, I need some randomness and I want to start the town cemetery. Louis Aspir lives on! Dammit.

JM I'd be interested in trying something where the rest of the hood aged and changed. Partly I get sick of hoods because there are only some families that are fun to play and some are really boring. I didn't like the idea when sims 3 first mooted it, but I'm coming to see there may be some advantages to my style of play.

[Kyna]

I can see great potential for borkage in the idea that you can turn aging off in some TS3 lots.  I can see me playing 5 lots with aging off, and all the non-played sims age while I am playing each of those 5 lots - so they age 5 times as fast.  So the brought-home-from-school friend of the child in household 1 will be screwing the kid's mother by the time I get to playing household 1 again.

And what's to stop those non-played sims in other households marrying one of my non-aging sims while I'm playing another household, and moving them into their lot where aging is on?

[unregister]

So many interesting and well thought out ways of playing Sims2 have been posted here! I am so less organized and creative.

I have pretty much kept my game with happy family sims who have kids, pets, learning, and fun. Everyone gets along in my Simland. That was until recently. I added a male sim I made. He, Robin Bay Banners, is a family sim who I made a romance sim as secondary aspiration. He is pretty darn good looking and does not act like a family sim at all.

He just wants to woohoo every female he meets which now tallies at 16. They swoon for him and he for them. Happily married or single, it doesn't matter.  I just allow the sims to pursue their wants. He just might rock apart the happy simworld, he is already creating problems with getting caught by the many current lovers.

I don't have an interest in Sims3, so I won't be 'getting it'. Not interested in Apartment Life either. I would rather continue to use Emma's Apartment lot. Just need to make sure that I do not have toddlers living with the wrong mothers. That just doesn't work well at all, I've found.

[rampancy]

Most of my families have a lot of things in common, based on how I play:

1- People tend to be of the lighter skin tones (I don't like the last two darkest skin tones in The Sims 2...)

2- A higher-than average amount of blondes and redheads (because, well, I like blondes and redheads, and given their recessive-trait nature, I feel I need more of them to continually pump into the system, Nwabudike Morgan style)

3- I usually have some form of goal for Sims I create, so I usually use the college-adjuster to select a lifetime want I want for them. Sometimes I'll go with what the game randomly assigns them.

4- Sims usually go permaplat, then find a lover (usually a townie that doesnt look butt-ugly) and have a kid or two.

5- All kids go to university, asap. Some people here don't like the baby stage, but my Stage of Annoyance is the teen stage. You're trying to keep their mood high to get good grades, but school + job tends to drag them down really easy, and the whole Headmaster thing just irritates me.

6- Quasi-generational: when every family that is going to have kids to send to university do, I play university until everyone graduates (or close to it), then play the home lots again to age the parents a bit, then move them back into the home lots or have them start their own houses.

[cwykes]

I tend to play one family or work at one project obsessively and then switch onto something else.  I couldn't play on rotation.  I've built whole neighbourhoods, written stories, built sets of lots & a TSR challenge.  However, the things I actually have most fun with are the surprises or the new things.  I've had enormous fun with the TSR challenges - OK partly because it suits my "obsessive" play style - but mainly because the families are different kinds of sims to those I normally make and the challenge targets usually involve things you don't normally do except by accident: Servo/sim woohoo, orphan uni scholarship, run away from home...  I've made challenges of my own and had a lot of fun with those.  I'm stalled on re-making some of them as TSR challenges.

some of the surprises I remember ......
- discovering I'd created a romance servo by accident..
- risky woohoo's effect on sims who really didn't intend to become parents then or ever..
- broke old lady fortune sim getting 3 bolts for Mortimer Goth who appeared with the welcome wagon
- finding my new pleasure sim with ikea house has a 3 bolt attraction to a rich romance sim who got his face slapped 5 times in one evening
- Consort Capp dropping dead during the HM visit just like Patrizio Monty did years ago.
- pregnant alien lady in her underwear dancing during the HM visit to their badly designed maxoid house.
- my first ever non-scripted alien abduction.

My parents all encourage niceness and activity if they can and some neatness, so my sims tend to become samey even if they weren't to start with.  Born In game sims tend to be samey than CAS sims anyway because they start out with more personality points.

[Bugger]

Sheesh.  All you others make me feel incredibly lazy.  I used to put a LOT of thought into storylines, and all that.  But lately I have been feeling ugh, and my sims suffer for it.  I am a building maniac though.  I graph out almost all of my houses before they are built in game (and have over 300 plans I believe).

I build my sims fantastical houses (the whole $20K start is useless for me) move them in, and then make their little pixelated lives as miserable as possible.  All of them, save for one - Amadan.  I think I may have an unhealthy fondness for him, even though he is a manwhore.

[notveryawesome]

Lately I've been mostly building, decorating, and arranging custom neighbourhoods, but when I do play, I'm a bit of a control freak. I alternate between the Maxis 'hoods and my custom ones, as I tend to get bored easily. My custom 'hoods are generally themed (sci-fi, Victorian, medieval/fantasy, etc.). I only have one, ATM, a sci-fi/space theme, because I like playing sims that look like space-aliens or androids and, in a sci-fi 'hood, things like woohooing a servo just make a lot more sense.

When starting a 'hood, I choose a template, terrain type, etc, add the necessary subhoods (using empty templates devoid of sims), add/build/remodel buildings, as necessary, and then plop down some neighbourhood decorations, especially downtown. I make my playables, then my townies, and place them where they belong. I don't like for my sims to be overly perfect, so I often choose some of the uglier face-templates but then prettify them just enough that they don't look like sideshow freaks. I have no rhyme or reason for their personalities, and tend to assign their aspirations based on looks (he looks like he'd be a mad scientist, she's definitely the artist type, etc.). Townies get offbeat turn-ons and turn-offs that are least likely to give them bolts for the playables. Conversely, playables get easy-to-match attractions, such as being turned on by black hair and glasses, turned off by facial hair. I do admit to often teaming up incompatible personalities and zodiac-signs, because it creates a much more interesting dynamic. As for gender preference, I randomise ony the townies' gender preferences, as my playables tend to be straight, for breeding purposes. Matching up mates depends on when various sims are born. If Family A has a baby, then Families B, C, and D should have babies, too. I match them up from there, based mainly on gender and genes, though personality and aspiration often play a part in the final selection process. After that, I just sort of let go. I do play on a rotation, but not a strict one. For example, if Child A grows to a teen, then Children B, C, and D must do the same. Otherwise, I don't care that much about synchronisation.

I used to micromanage my sims, but since the advent of ACR and Macrotastics, this has become largely unnecessary, and I tend to use a more hands-free playing style, as of late. I am consistently amazed at how thoroughly my sims manage to fuck up their own lives. Then again, I'm often amazed at how easily people can do this, as well.

[lefty]

I just recently moved and had to leave my old hood behind, but I started playing a new one pretty much the same way I did the old one, though this time I had two founders in seperate houses instead of one.

Started off last time with empty templates, and one sim. In the end before I had to leave that hood I was about in the 7th or 8th gen with over 50 playables, all directly linked to that first sim.

I play on rotation basis, with pescados lot timer. If I play house 1 for three days before I get bored, I then play all the other ones the same. I make sure I send the kids off to uni at the appropriate times, so theres a bit of popping around sometimes with teens who are a few days apart. Usually what happens is I get attached to one sim in a house, and pretty much ignore all the others while micromanaging that one sim. I'll usually pop in once a sim day on the other sims panels and queue up a bunch of stuff, and then let them do as they will. Sometimes I'll be bored with one gen and try to get through it quickly as possible, while in another gen I'll spend a month real time on it mucking around with them. I tend to favor romance sims as I love the drama they leave in their wake. When my last hood got pretty substantial I started moving the elders all together in a group home type setting to make room for babies since I used the twikki island lot for the hood (I like small hoods) and was running out of space for houses. The college graduates had nowhere to go but back home, and in any case having more than 20 houses on rotation was proving to drive me mad! So at that time I was trying to intermarry them all to cut down on the amount of playables.

I had one sim be a farmer and supply food, using pescados money sending thing as payment, and teleporting them over to give the food (though this time around I have the packing station thing) Same thing with a pet breeder. I'm also considering making a "maid" and "repairmen" be playable sims and port them over when things need fixing/cleaning/whatever.

When kids age up I use dice to randomize them, and this time around I'm randomizing their gender preferences (even playables) to just add more drama/hilarity which it already has.

As for uni I don't even really play it. I hate it so I just cheat them through it, slap em on a lot and adjust the lot timer for however many days they were supposed to be gone, and then eventually get them into the rotation (or ask them to move into an old house when it gets on the same day the college graduate is on).

I tend to let them choose their spouses, though I have been known to intervene when I want to merge two particular households together for whatever reason.

The worst thing is that my computer I had the old hood on is in storage, and I had forgotten just how boring the first two gens can be until things really start exploding and being interesting. I started this time around with two different founders because I wanted to see which line would be more prolific down generations. But man is the nearly empty hood boring at first!

Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. I love to keep track of the playables. I have a program that acts like a wiki that I edit, with a page for every playable (and any townies that donate their genetic material but aren't moved in) detailing things about that sim. I have seperate pages with the pictures I took with captions for myself as I get down to generation 5 and say "hey, doesn't this sim act a lot like that one sim way back when? Let me check..." and a detailed family tree made in photoshop, along with lots of misc info on my sims. I dare say I almost have as much fun working on the "database" as playing! I get a little OCD with it I think.

[marjchaos]

Posted by: lefty
"Edit: Another thing I forgot to mention. I love to keep track of the playables. I have a program that acts like a wiki that I edit, with a page for every playable (and any townies that donate their genetic material but aren't moved in) detailing things about that sim. I have seperate pages with the pictures I took with captions for myself as I get down to generation 5 and say "hey, doesn't this sim act a lot like that one sim way back when? Let me check..." and a detailed family tree made in photoshop, along with lots of misc info on my sims. I dare say I almost have as much fun working on the "database" as playing! I get a little OCD with it I think."

That sounds like a pretty cool program.  Know where I can get one like that?  I keep track of my playables too, badly.  My desk is covered with scraps of paper - but only because the notebooks weren't working out.

[ingeli]

For a year now I have developed my Windlebridge hood. Its set in historical sim times, late medieval/renaissance, now on the verge to some kind of 18th century maybe. I have almost 1000 sims, oldest families are about to get to 5th gen. I play them in "classes" and groups: farmers, landowners, miners, villagers, castle inhabitants, fishermen ect - all with their rules and I generally don't allow marriage between the wrong groups/classes. There are no openly gay sims in this hood yet - there will be in the future.
Sims are most often family or popularity sims, but all sorts occur. Knowledge sims go to convent/monastery, if they are not rich. I want to develope a large working class for factories and such.. I add slowly with each rotation, mixing building with playing.
I keep a website/blog (http://portal.charlamov.com/windlebridge)for the hood built on a database - mainly for documentation. I use GenoPro as a genealogy program to show the faily ties.
I tend to use more randomness now when the hood is more developed.

[lefty]

That sounds like a pretty cool program.  Know where I can get one like that?  I keep track of my playables too, badly.  My desk is covered with scraps of paper - but only because the notebooks weren't working out.

http://notebook.wjduquette.com/svntrac.cgi/index

Just a warning, the program is pretty limited and sometimes gets on my nerves, but I've been using it so long I've gotten used to it. you could probably google something like "personal wiki" to get something better. To give you an idea here are some screenshots of how I have mine set up for my current hood, though I'm constantly revamping it as I play since the hood is so young:







though of course you can set it up however you like. For ease of editing the family tree I save the image as a psd to the main folder so I can easily manipulate the images in case I need to move them as the children marry have kids etc.

I wish I had access to my old stuff, it was crazy detailed.

[Zazazu]

I do play on a rotation, but not a strict one. For example, if Child A grows to a teen, then Children B, C, and D must do the same. Otherwise, I don't care that much about synchronisation.

Ugh, I'm anal about relative age. I write in my notes the exact day that college students have to come back to keep on sync and adjust their number of days in their first independent rotation (Aaron Vitelli keeps showing up at his cousin's house when he's supposed to be in college still, the naughty boy) just to make sure that no one is the slightest bit off.

Started off last time with empty templates, and one sim. In the end before I had to leave that hood I was about in the 7th or 8th gen with over 50 playables, all directly linked to that first sim.

Other than one attempt at a true prosperity challenge (which died in the second generation), I've always started with just one sim. 90% of the time, that one sim is female.

When my last hood got pretty substantial I started moving the elders all together in a group home type setting to make room for babies since I used the twikki island lot for the hood (I like small hoods) and was running out of space for houses.

I love group homes for elders! I think that Apartment Life is really going to make that work, since you could just make apartments that are a bedroom and bathroom and have everything else be community space. If I have a group of elder townies, I throw them in the home and they proceed to have a near-orgy since they've had their entire lives to create relationships.

I tend to let them choose their spouses, though I have been known to intervene when I want to merge two particular households together for whatever reason.

My current 'hood is aimed at absorbing the 28 townies I started with (including dormies) so I do guide a little bit more than before. I ended up changing a gay townie girl to straight because she's my favorite, Manishka something-or-other, and I needed more eligible women to marry to my typical plague of boys.

I'm trying to keep the number of offspring lower than I had in Teardrop Isle, because that 'hood got way too busy too fast. I had fourteen sims in the third generation in TI. I have seven in the third generation in Coggeshall Village, and one is decidedly gay (with three yet to decide which way they lean). Much better.

My main problem right now is that the 'hood is so huge as far as playable terrain is. My map is out of control. But the terrain is really different than anything I've done before as I designed it from a bitmap in Photoshop just making brushstrokes and filtering to death, importing to SC4, and sculpting a bit to make the paved areas nearly all flat. It made for some really cool mountain ranges:
 

[blackcat]

http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/
This program seems to be interesting. It has many options like pictures, events, nice family trees and even to-do list.
http://genealogy-software-review.toptenreviews.com/
This is where I found it, it's a review list of similar programs.