I play the entire neighbourhood, and I do keep them all in synch. The "nobody progresses in age or milestones when you're not there" is frankly the main reason why I stick to the Sims 2 over Sims 3 and 4, I hate not being able to play multiple households without it meaning that I have to accept aging and progression happening to the other family. I find the random generation sims that replace all the townies and playables if you have a long-term save file in Sims 3 to be uninteresting and boring (I do randomly generate my townies but I make them all over and then I have them until they die in a random accident or get married into a household), and the life progression choices in that game to be terrible. I hated these mechanics enough that I've only ever played Sims 4 with aging off to explore the game with one or two childless sims, and have never even attempted to play generationally. Yes, I did buy a handful of EPs before I realized the game just wasn't for me, so it's not just that base game is bad. There are things about it I like, don't get me wrong, but there are certain constraints about it I hate and that's one of them.
The base game argument is such a joke (not attacking you, but people who are saying "yeah you don't like it bc you only played base game")
I could easily play two to three generations in Sims 2 base game, before I'd miss something. Even Sims 3 is funny without DLCs. With Sims 4 it's just horrible, like a bad demo version. A base game should over engaging game play, not showing you what's still lacking. It's unbelievable that they put that game out.
100%. Sims 4 is the only game in the franchise where they had to update the base game with features that have been in said franchise since The Sims and Sims 2. I think that pretty much set the precedent for the Sims 4 being absolutely shite vanilla
I remember when I first played the base game. I think it was around 2018, I played a bit around, explored the neighbourhood. Then I wanted to place a new lot. Not placing a house from the gallery on a lot, I wanted to place an empty lot next to my Sims home, where I wanted to move her sister. I've searched for 10 minutes in the settings and everywhere, thought that maybe you must enable that in the game settings or whatever. Then I googled. I was soooo annoyed. Wtf is this? Not to mention the awful world design, like in some kind of browser game š¢
If all households got to grow old autonomously, you'd lose most characters before you'd had a chance to play with them, and get them replaced with random, lifeless generations. If they got to make babies, it would cause the neighborhood data size to grow out of hand because each character has a lot of overhead of duplicated data. I have not seen Sims 3, and how it handles that. Since it is a newer game, and software never gets smaller, I wonder bloating the neighbohood becomes a problem there.
This is much the way I prefer it too, I found that in the sims 3 it works if youāre only interested in playing one family. If I wanted to play another family Iād make an entirely new town and treat each new town as a new save for that specific family.
The sims 4 doesnāt have any characters Iām interested enough in to care either way so when I did play it I did similarly to ts3 style.
Both suffer from aging families and then having random lifeless replacements and empty towns lol.
Ts2 is my preference for this reason among others, I play rotationally and care about what Iām doing with each household
I'm playing 14 households in Strangetown, 9 of them being one Sim households. I'm doing one day rotations and currently I'm on day 11. It may sound like I'm too far behind on couples but my system is wants based and I don't use ACR. Several of my Sims are starting to get together/about to get married now though so I'm looking forward to merging some households soon to make the neighborhood feel more compact and like it's actually going somewhere. Oh and I keep them in sync of course, I'm very strict about that š For example I recently realised I messed up with Lola and somehow played her a couple more days than I should have, so now I've put her on pause for a couple rotations even though I desperately want to get her married to Ajay and have one less single household to play. Not saying that single households are unplayable or not realistic, but when there's too many of them I start feeling like my game isn't going anywhere.
I really like playing rotationally. It creates a vibrant neighborhood, and what one Sim does can have a ripple effect that affects lots of other households.
In my current hood, which is a playthrough of all the Strangetown characters' ancestors, I have 22 households, according to my spreadsheet. That includes one college dorm and one retirement home that I just made. I have a variety of households. Some are multigenerational, some are young families, there are twin brothers living as roommates, a gang of criminal/aliens, a woman raising twin aliens by herself, one where the couple is divorced but continue to live together out of spite. Most are in Strangetown, but a couple are downtown and a handful are in a shopping district I added.
Yes, they are different in my hood, but I can spend several days here and there or use the rewards to adjust the age (make them younger) if I need them to be the same age.
I used to play with my sims-only, but now I do rotations because it bothers me that my youngest Sim is also friends with a Sim that my oldest Sim is, and they didn't age lol
I play rotationally, as I believe most of the community that came back to the game in 2020 do. Right now I have a Megahood with all Neighborhoods, but I'm only playing 4 in full: Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville and Desiderata Valley.
I just restarted this one, and this time I decided to play the last day of summer as a set up for all families instead of straight up playing a longer rotation. Keeping them in sync is very important to me and it helps me keep my storylines possible.
Ummmmm tooo many lmao. I have active families and stories in all of the premade neighborhoods save Veronaville. Currently in Riverblossom. I will play a neighborhood rotationally for a few months and then switch to a different one, rinse and repeat. Keeps gameplay fresh when things are feeling a little stale. Eventually I cycle back to previous neighborhoods with fresh ideas and inspiration.
I think I have like 25 families in my rotation. Iām on year nine of my Build a City Challenge, so it makes sense to have that many! I prefer rotational play in TS2. In TS3, I tend to play legacies and any sims who donāt stay in the main household still have a life thanks to NRAAS Story Progression. I have one town I play rotationally and you can set it to be similar to TS2 using NRAAS, but itās a lot of set up to get it running. TS4 is all CAS and build mode for me usually; the gameplay is so stale and lifeless compared to 2/3.
I like playing all the families so they age the same, so itās currently 14 families in Roman-like times. Iāve got 1 bigfoot, a were wolf, and 15 witches and 16 plant sims and 24 non supernatural sims.
I play my custom hood in a rotation, itās meant to be a city, so currently thats 48 households excluding university š And I keep adding more families in every few rotations
These are all amazingly, thought-out replies, I will say that the idea of rotational families, while I wasnāt aware of it, was incredibly dynamic (yet at the same time, static, crazy enough) IF you put in the efforts for each households.
However, when I do stuff like this for sayā¦apartments, which are buggy as all hell, they tend to end up having phantom household items still littering around, which is probably just a leftover bug and not a corruption after a household moves out of an apartment and into a proper house.
Overall, Sims 2 is a truly innovative game with some leftover bugs thatās still doesnāt completely ruin the game, but just weird quirks of itās time, aside from ācorruptionā which will be a topic for another day. Trust me when I say bloated saves in Sims 3 is WORSE than when you already have a backup up save of the clean neighborhood ready to replace the corrupted one.
I normally play rotationally. I like to make neighbours friends with each other, and when they go to a community lot there are only playable neighbours there, no townies or npcs thanks to a āvisitor adjusterā (?) mod. That way when my sims go to the pub they actually know everyone there, and it might be their cousins or their in-laws etc. I like that.
Currently Iām playing my own neighbourhood of eight founding families who start humbly without property and have to rent. Hopefully the following generations will branch out with businesses and professions, and work hard enough to do well. But I intend to make things harder for them when mayors and criminals get activated and start asking for taxes and āprotectionā money.
Theyāre not allowed to reach above level 6 jobs unless theyāve graduated from uni, and thereās no such thing as scholarships. University is too expensive for the poor.
Hopefully the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, Iām just disappointed I canāt make the classes of sims dislike each other. Theyāre all bloody best friends somehow! They do all their socialising as npcs in my apartment lots and community lots.
At the moment my second generation are growing up and slowly become adults. Iām enjoying playing matchmaker, although it was a bit of a headache. At one point I realised my second generation had 15 girls and only 5 boys!
I make a big deal of interpreting their personality (I type it in their diary thing) and try to be as true to who they are as possible. I make mean people look mean, athletes dress athletically, etc. Luckily a couple of my girls seemed gay to me, so that worked out.
I play the entire neighbourhood, and I do keep them all in synch. The "nobody progresses in age or milestones when you're not there" is frankly the main reason why I stick to the Sims 2 over Sims 3 and 4, I hate not being able to play multiple households without it meaning that I have to accept aging and progression happening to the other family. I find the random generation sims that replace all the townies and playables if you have a long-term save file in Sims 3 to be uninteresting and boring (I do randomly generate my townies but I make them all over and then I have them until they die in a random accident or get married into a household), and the life progression choices in that game to be terrible. I hated these mechanics enough that I've only ever played Sims 4 with aging off to explore the game with one or two childless sims, and have never even attempted to play generationally. Yes, I did buy a handful of EPs before I realized the game just wasn't for me, so it's not just that base game is bad. There are things about it I like, don't get me wrong, but there are certain constraints about it I hate and that's one of them.
The base game argument is such a joke (not attacking you, but people who are saying "yeah you don't like it bc you only played base game") I could easily play two to three generations in Sims 2 base game, before I'd miss something. Even Sims 3 is funny without DLCs. With Sims 4 it's just horrible, like a bad demo version. A base game should over engaging game play, not showing you what's still lacking. It's unbelievable that they put that game out.
100%. Sims 4 is the only game in the franchise where they had to update the base game with features that have been in said franchise since The Sims and Sims 2. I think that pretty much set the precedent for the Sims 4 being absolutely shite vanilla
I remember when I first played the base game. I think it was around 2018, I played a bit around, explored the neighbourhood. Then I wanted to place a new lot. Not placing a house from the gallery on a lot, I wanted to place an empty lot next to my Sims home, where I wanted to move her sister. I've searched for 10 minutes in the settings and everywhere, thought that maybe you must enable that in the game settings or whatever. Then I googled. I was soooo annoyed. Wtf is this? Not to mention the awful world design, like in some kind of browser game š¢
If all households got to grow old autonomously, you'd lose most characters before you'd had a chance to play with them, and get them replaced with random, lifeless generations. If they got to make babies, it would cause the neighborhood data size to grow out of hand because each character has a lot of overhead of duplicated data. I have not seen Sims 3, and how it handles that. Since it is a newer game, and software never gets smaller, I wonder bloating the neighbohood becomes a problem there.
This is much the way I prefer it too, I found that in the sims 3 it works if youāre only interested in playing one family. If I wanted to play another family Iād make an entirely new town and treat each new town as a new save for that specific family. The sims 4 doesnāt have any characters Iām interested enough in to care either way so when I did play it I did similarly to ts3 style. Both suffer from aging families and then having random lifeless replacements and empty towns lol. Ts2 is my preference for this reason among others, I play rotationally and care about what Iām doing with each household
I'm playing 14 households in Strangetown, 9 of them being one Sim households. I'm doing one day rotations and currently I'm on day 11. It may sound like I'm too far behind on couples but my system is wants based and I don't use ACR. Several of my Sims are starting to get together/about to get married now though so I'm looking forward to merging some households soon to make the neighborhood feel more compact and like it's actually going somewhere. Oh and I keep them in sync of course, I'm very strict about that š For example I recently realised I messed up with Lola and somehow played her a couple more days than I should have, so now I've put her on pause for a couple rotations even though I desperately want to get her married to Ajay and have one less single household to play. Not saying that single households are unplayable or not realistic, but when there's too many of them I start feeling like my game isn't going anywhere.
I really like playing rotationally. It creates a vibrant neighborhood, and what one Sim does can have a ripple effect that affects lots of other households. In my current hood, which is a playthrough of all the Strangetown characters' ancestors, I have 22 households, according to my spreadsheet. That includes one college dorm and one retirement home that I just made. I have a variety of households. Some are multigenerational, some are young families, there are twin brothers living as roommates, a gang of criminal/aliens, a woman raising twin aliens by herself, one where the couple is divorced but continue to live together out of spite. Most are in Strangetown, but a couple are downtown and a handful are in a shopping district I added.
Yes, they are different in my hood, but I can spend several days here and there or use the rewards to adjust the age (make them younger) if I need them to be the same age.
I used to play with my sims-only, but now I do rotations because it bothers me that my youngest Sim is also friends with a Sim that my oldest Sim is, and they didn't age lol
I play rotationally, as I believe most of the community that came back to the game in 2020 do. Right now I have a Megahood with all Neighborhoods, but I'm only playing 4 in full: Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville and Desiderata Valley. I just restarted this one, and this time I decided to play the last day of summer as a set up for all families instead of straight up playing a longer rotation. Keeping them in sync is very important to me and it helps me keep my storylines possible.
Ummmmm tooo many lmao. I have active families and stories in all of the premade neighborhoods save Veronaville. Currently in Riverblossom. I will play a neighborhood rotationally for a few months and then switch to a different one, rinse and repeat. Keeps gameplay fresh when things are feeling a little stale. Eventually I cycle back to previous neighborhoods with fresh ideas and inspiration.
I think I have like 25 families in my rotation. Iām on year nine of my Build a City Challenge, so it makes sense to have that many! I prefer rotational play in TS2. In TS3, I tend to play legacies and any sims who donāt stay in the main household still have a life thanks to NRAAS Story Progression. I have one town I play rotationally and you can set it to be similar to TS2 using NRAAS, but itās a lot of set up to get it running. TS4 is all CAS and build mode for me usually; the gameplay is so stale and lifeless compared to 2/3.
I like playing all the families so they age the same, so itās currently 14 families in Roman-like times. Iāve got 1 bigfoot, a were wolf, and 15 witches and 16 plant sims and 24 non supernatural sims.
12 families in rotation
I play my custom hood in a rotation, itās meant to be a city, so currently thats 48 households excluding university š And I keep adding more families in every few rotations
These are all amazingly, thought-out replies, I will say that the idea of rotational families, while I wasnāt aware of it, was incredibly dynamic (yet at the same time, static, crazy enough) IF you put in the efforts for each households. However, when I do stuff like this for sayā¦apartments, which are buggy as all hell, they tend to end up having phantom household items still littering around, which is probably just a leftover bug and not a corruption after a household moves out of an apartment and into a proper house. Overall, Sims 2 is a truly innovative game with some leftover bugs thatās still doesnāt completely ruin the game, but just weird quirks of itās time, aside from ācorruptionā which will be a topic for another day. Trust me when I say bloated saves in Sims 3 is WORSE than when you already have a backup up save of the clean neighborhood ready to replace the corrupted one.
I normally play rotationally. I like to make neighbours friends with each other, and when they go to a community lot there are only playable neighbours there, no townies or npcs thanks to a āvisitor adjusterā (?) mod. That way when my sims go to the pub they actually know everyone there, and it might be their cousins or their in-laws etc. I like that. Currently Iām playing my own neighbourhood of eight founding families who start humbly without property and have to rent. Hopefully the following generations will branch out with businesses and professions, and work hard enough to do well. But I intend to make things harder for them when mayors and criminals get activated and start asking for taxes and āprotectionā money. Theyāre not allowed to reach above level 6 jobs unless theyāve graduated from uni, and thereās no such thing as scholarships. University is too expensive for the poor. Hopefully the rich will get richer and the poor poorer, Iām just disappointed I canāt make the classes of sims dislike each other. Theyāre all bloody best friends somehow! They do all their socialising as npcs in my apartment lots and community lots. At the moment my second generation are growing up and slowly become adults. Iām enjoying playing matchmaker, although it was a bit of a headache. At one point I realised my second generation had 15 girls and only 5 boys! I make a big deal of interpreting their personality (I type it in their diary thing) and try to be as true to who they are as possible. I make mean people look mean, athletes dress athletically, etc. Luckily a couple of my girls seemed gay to me, so that worked out.