Interesting breakdown of ACR, and thanks for it.

I've used that feature before, and it is very weak on making the numbers stick, so I just use the 'birth control' option, which in all regards, the natural percentage of pregnancy is 30% and you can move the percentage up or down under the settings.

But after a family has their allotted number of kids, I make sure that "Sim cannot get pregnant' feature on the BC is checked off. That's totally effective, and most times they start throwing "NOT ANOTHER BABY!" in their fear panels. I respect that and always lock that want.

The only time I broke this rule was when Dave Walton and his wife (who are both a bit mentally touched) kept rolling wants for children. In the end they had 6 children, and only then did they roll the fear. They also moved out of the house when the older kids became teens because they were such bad parents it was better off to have the kids take care of themselves.

But I have to admit that the entire Walton family has inherited their ancestor Darrell's lazy streak-it's like every single one of his offspring, and grandchildren have the lazy trait and it's gonna be a real challenge to get them to do anything in their lives.

I have a lot of sims in my hood because I love sim genetics

There's a bunch of factors involved with how many children each family has but it generally comes down to:

1. Risky woohoo (I think the mod is set to 30% chance)

2. Have a Baby Want (the only time I will actively select Try for Baby is if one of them has a Have a Baby want)

3. Likelihood this sim would be someone who would plan or limit pregnancies (family sims: no, fortune sims: yes, fortune sim who is on his 3rd marriage to someone half his age: no)

4. Sims with features I prefer, like more attractive sims, one family line has an eye shape I really like, recessive genes since I use Maxis default genetics, etc. (I haven't figured out if sims husbandry or sims eugenics sounds less terrible)

5. Story. Sometimes it's fun to let the 2 super fertile romance sims get stuck with 6 kids, or the older parents with teen children who get a late in life "oops" pregnancy and have to start over, or have to raise 10 kids in a tiny 2-bedroom apartment because they can't afford to move. Some sims players like to kill off their sims. I prefer to make them wish for death after their wife has another set of twins.

I will admit I've had several sim families with 10 kids. Occasionally more. 10 kids is usually the cutoff point where even family sims throw the "not another kid!!" fear

@simsfreq thank for the explanation, I had no idea that this feature was so iffy! I only just discovered it was a feature recently but looks like I'll have to take its selection with a grain of salt.

That's interesting, I think ACR 2 doesn't have the option to disable autonomous TFB, at least I can't find it. I thought that in practice the birth control option is 100% effective. It doesn't allow risky pregnancy at all. But the 30% has made me think because I don't think I've seen that - I will go in and check I think.

I do know if you do change any fertility stats on your sims, e.g. to simulate infertility, you need to set their token to Static, otherwise it will automatically change back to the default fertility as they age. Other settings ought to stick.

I've been playing with my numbers so I think I'm nearly done now However I have quite a few possibilities for 5/10% TFB which means I think I had better adjust my risky odds downwards - I currently have risky odds set anywhere from 2% to 12% depending on the sim's neatness. Even a 10 neat sim still has a 2% chance of failure (taken from perfect use stats for contraception on wikipedia!)

I have also changed my odds of triplets and quads right down as I was getting too many. I now have 1% quads, 2% triplets and 4% twins. It's still a 7% chance of multiple births which should be around 1 in every 14 births, I think?

In terms of rotational play, I like keeping everyone synchronised, but I dislike playing strict rotations. I figure out a way to keep track of where everyone is - the Lot Sync Timer is a great tool for this, but I do seasons in some hoods - then I play whoever I want, for as long as I want, but I do give myself some restriction on which households I can pick from, so for example if I have families anywhere from Day 12 to Day 23, I have to play all the Day 12 households, and then all the Day 13 households, etc. But I play them for as long as I want, so if I am enjoying myself and want to stick with them over a week, then I do! And if I get bored of them quickly, then I might save as soon as I get to 6pm (then they are into the next batch anyway). I can't play strict rotations because I'm not always in the mood to play different kinds of households. On the Seasons rotations, I play two seasons at a time - for example it's currently Winter in my challenge hood, so I can play any household which shows winter in the hood screen. I can play them for as long as I like but I can't let it tick over into Summer, and if I exit to neighbourhood at any time during Spring, that's it and I can't play them until the next season comes around. I like this method because during the intermediate seasons (spring and autumn) I change everyone's outfit over, which means when it's winter, every other sim I encounter is in warm-looking clothing - full length trousers and sweaters for example. People aren't wandering around in a full coat and then switching to t-shirt and shorts when they come inside. In spring, I'll see a slow change over from mostly warmer clothing to mostly cooler clothing, and nothing looks out of place anyway. And this means I can update their look roughly every 10 in-game days which means they might change their hairstyle, get more mature clothing as they age etc.

But TBH if I get really board of a sim, I just make them into a townie. They can still exist but I don't have to do anything with them. They retain all their relationships and I age them up with their neighbours. I also tend to look at them again and see if I can reignite an interest and get to know them a bit more. Sims become boring to play when I make them too bland - I can have just as much fun pursuing dates as I can cleaning up nappies and bottles, trying to get as rich as possible etc but I get bored of them when I don't really have a sense of who they are. That's why I've got more into interests and aspirations recently. And I generally find that a sim who has a history, even just a single sibling, partner, friend or ex, is way more interesting than someone I have just plucked out of thin air and placed into a house. I made this mistake with a few of the sims in Elsewhere - that hood also has way too many townies so they all feel like indistinguishable extras.

I currently have 14 households in my Strangetown and around the same number in Veronaville, and that's a reasonable number to me. I don't have any mods that alter conception stuff so sims only have kids when I actively make them aside from alien abductions. Many of my sims never have kids, and those who do usually have between one and three.

In Veronaville, sims seem more keen to marry and have kids than in Strangetown, but most people have been satisfied with one child, including family sims like Hermia Capp who made it very clear she didn't want any more. Bianca Capp and her wife were both family sims and prone to roll wants to adopt, so with them I decided to only fulfill it when both had the want and no one the fear, and they ended up with three kids. Also, in Veronaville I don't add new houses besides a couple of small, cheap ones for the Monty side, and I've removed some duplicate Capp houses, so no matter the amount of sims, there are only so many households I can have there.

In Strangetown my priority is my extended Neighbour/Larsen clan. Premade households and the offspring of premade sims are part of the rotation, but I let many of them become townies, or make them townies temporarily, so I can still keep the number of households down. I'm not too bothered about syncing the ages of those sims, as long as older siblings go from one lifestage to another before their younger siblings, and twins age up at the same time.

As for my Neighbour/Larsen-sims, the founder couple had twelve kids, and the generation after that consisted of eighteeen sims. So I used to worry it would get bloated, but the three generations after that that are "finished" have all been between 13 and 14 sims, and the sixth one probably won't be more than 12, so it's been working out fine without me needing to actively restrict anything.

Actually household numbers, I do love having enormous hoods. I don't want to load up the game and count but I have some tracking documents. 97 households in an old Megahood document, and in Elsewhere (which has other subhoods attached) I had 43 in an old document and I felt it was too small I'm sure I added at least 3 to that neighbourhood based on uni sims who had grown up and become playable - I could not resist letting the cheerleader and mascot who fell in love grow up with their classmates. They now walk all over the town sometimes wearing Llama heads XD Because it felt too empty, I made a document with plans to add 14 new households to the hood, of which I have created 5.

My problem is that for example, I want to be able to say ooh look, here is this group of families who had babies at the same time and they became friends because they went to antenatal classes. Or I want to play a school and have it bustling like it does in my Megahoods. Or I want to say this group of sims all work in science-academic-type careers and got to know each other that way, or these two kids grew up next door to each other and then as teenagers they fell in love etc.

I have achieved that in tiny hoods because I was playing everyone and everyone sort of fitted together and had a role - like in Sedona, the one with the four single males, I put very high trips/quads odds on and so that was an extremely fun hood to play because I had a generation with 9 children in it, so they all grew up together and then their adult roles sort of clustered - there was a criminal organisation one of the kids started and became some kind of mini mafia boss, then another became a police officer and someone else went to work in the police career with her, so I built a jail and locked someone up for a while, who escaped and then was murdered by the beautiful scientist, nobody had yet found out about that when I lost the hood. And one of them just wanted to party all the time, one couple had a child young and ended up in this chaotic tiny house with about 5 kids, and one set of twins wound up fighting over bottles their entire toddlerhood and utterly despised each other. There were entire careers I had not got to in that hood and yet others had 3-4 sims in them so it felt all connected and cool. But this was a very unique situation because it was a challenge and everyone was mostly in sync. I don't usually get that, because I like my hoods to have the sense that there are families in all stages of life so that I have variety in who to play. Sometimes I want to play a big busy family with loads of kids to take care of and sometimes that is draining and I just want a single sim so I can focus on one thing. Sometimes one sim is too boring and I end up on triple speed wishing away their life, which is not good. So I like to have choices.

I also find it too disorientating when I have too many nondescript townies. But I think what I am thinking having read my own words, that rather than try and spam a million sims out so I can have that "small, synchronised challenge hood feel" I probably need to be more careful with my townie creation, maybe give them sort of a stereotype role or at least have a rough idea of who they are when I create them, so they can fill in some of the gaps, and then for the rest of it I can continue to corral as I have been doing - so for example, I don't use custom careers, but I am slowly editing all the Maxis careers to add more variety within them. So the total number is limited but the effect is more variety.

Since my playables usually couple up with another playable sim, and many trends to live together with either parents or other relatives, the actual new households are quite manageable. For instance if one family gets six children one or two will move back to the family home after graduation and one might bring a playable from another home, if they are two siblings one moves to the large family, the other one moves back to their parents. Four children remains, one might move to the smaller family (for example, I haven't had this particular event), three remaining ones might either find another playable to settle with or live together. Where another player might end up with 10 households in the same scenario I get three households instead. Two who existed from the start.

Single sim households exists but typically due to story reasons, the shy romance rockstar sim lives alone with her dog but invites lovers and family over almost every day (but not at the same time). And many only get one kid since they live fulfilling other wishes, like partying, taking care of a business, manage outings and look at the neighbours with six kids and not being close to maxing out on their hobbies.. if a couple wishes to move to a completely new house this might be due to relationships with the parents or wanting another type of life, and for a time they might have younger relatives or friends moving in to help out with starting the business or contribute to the household funds.

I guess I limit my population by playing so slowly. For serious I had 45 YA at uni in January 2023 (some in uni since 2017), and maybe half are now graduated and some have kids but not all but I was actually suffering a population collapse because while I love genetics I'm not fond of playing babies and toddlers. I did a census a few months ago and had 245 playable sims (and then have had 2 die + 3 born since then). I'm only in generation 5 of my oldest families and the hood is 17 years old! I also don't play a *strict* rotation. I play whoever I feel like and age them up whenever I think 'it's time.'

All those huge household numbers! I prefer to have around 3, sometimes 4 or 5, but never more. It's mostly because of my mental health, which is not always as good as it should be. In my worst times I feel better if there are just a few Sims. They're lucky I'm fine with cousin marriage, otherwise lots of Sims would have to stay alone all their life.

The biggest neighborhood I ever had had around 80-90 Sims, and I was only okay with that because every single one of them was a descendant of the founders. Then my mental health failed me again and I spreaded some diseases, which killed several of them, which made me feel bad for them and I abandoned the neighborhood. Since then I try to be very careful before adding more Sims. But the whole process of having babies and raising toddlers is kinda addictive and I still have families of at least 7 children. So I guess the ideal amount of households flows on the waves of my mental health.

When I played with Uberhoods and the Story Progression Mod, I tried to find a method of keeping the population balanced. With the SP mod, Sims would be dying like flies. Including a very low birthrate, hoods would be nearly extinct. The low population worried me so much, that I would constantly create Sims with the Tombstone of L&D and CAS. Then, I would have too many playables, and be overwhelmed. I had no townies which added more pressure to playing every family in the Uberhood. I don't think the birthrate actually increase after adding new Sims either.

Even with a mod-free game, I don't think there is permission for a true realistic population balance. I really don't.

However, I believe that are some factors that can help try:

• A long balance lifespan - What I found is that short life equals short population. Hoods with a longer lifespan seem to have better prosperity in population. The lifespan must be balance, meaning all lifestages are equal to another. Note: This may require strict rotation gameplay.
• Townies - As in the many years I not had them, I have come to learn that townies are needed for hood to have a good population. The more townies the better. Find a system that allows for new townies every once in a while.
• Adding University Dormies to your mainhood. I know, the Uni Dormies are so annoying, but they can be beneficial in the long-run, if you have them graduate with your sims. This will also help with having a good amount of playable Adults in the hood.
• Family Sims - This is a 'duh' one, but it must be noted. Having Sims with the Family Aspiration is a positive for population. This might be a reach, but each family in the hood should have at least two Family Sims.
• Healthy Sims - Another duh, but this is serious. You can't have a balance population if you have Child to Elder Sims dying from contagious illnesses. Take care of you Sims when they get ill
• Natural Deaths - Sad to say, but death is needed in this line of gameplay. Death should be of the natural (old age). If your Sims from Generation 1 is dead by the time Generation 4 is born, then your population should have some type of balance.
  

Indeed-there has to be deaths in order to expand the family lines, as a matter of fact, even though right now everyone in Tinsel Town wants to either resurrect Terrell Bishop (1st Mayor of TT) or make him into a zombie. (Come on, you bunch of pixelated ghouls! Stop that stuff!)

I'll be having another 14 founder deaths to go before the 1st generation is gone-there will be a couple for almost every other day for the next few 'days' or 'years' as I think of the time.

The 2nd generation will be almost at the retirement age, and the 3rd will be starting to have families by the time of the last Founder death.

I do have Inge's "age" mod, so that does make the lifespans a bit longer for everyone.

I've currently only got one couple living in Pleasantview in the new 17th century colonial settlement so far and more coming on sailing ships over the coming few years and some will also start their families as more couples arrive.They will mostly restrict how many babies though a few accidents may be possible as they didn't have the most reliable birth control options back then.

I had a few families with 10 kids in the early years of my current hood, when I was thinking they would be more "traditional" and also I was just trying to populate a hood And usually they had at least one set of twins if not more. I've also had a few cads who had 10 kids but not all with the same mother.

In this generation, the family in my hood with the most children is Cillian and Sahara Sharpe. They have 9 children. They both have family aspiration, so lots of Have a Baby wants, and also they're 100% in my category 3: Sims with features I prefer. Sahara has the eye shape I like and both Cillian and Sahara have recessive eye colors.

They're an anomaly though, most of my big families max out at 6 and most of my sim families have about 3 kids now.

In Oakbrook,while Samantha Ottomas rolled a fear of more children after the birth of the quads, Dora kept rolling wants for more grandchildren. WTF, Grandma?

A sim can get more grandkids even if it's not the same sim having the kids, so grandma isn't too far off her rails (as long as grandma had more than one kid herself, of course)

Dora only has one son!

Hmm, Peter is a romance sim....