I have refused playing apartments since I can remember I do like a lot of other things - and of course (unpopular opinion much?) - I love, love, love the social townies

I like a lot of AL functions, but not a fan of apartments. I've probably played more with witches, and those aren't exactly common in my game, either... (But nobody can pry the "Freeze sim" function away from me - taking pictures after AL is a breeze compared to how it was before).

I prefer playing with plain residential lots. Maybe beach lots if I have to include water in some way or another. If I once in a blue moon do something else than story pictures or whatever, you can maybe find me playing on various Uni lots and on rare occasions community lots. But apartments? Almsot never happen. I don't think I've tried building one, and reasonably sure I've only played with the prebuilds that come with the AL hood. I find them cumbersome, and would rather have full control over the lot (= regular residential).

The nice thing about apartments is that they only come with one hood, and they're easily avoidable.

I'm rather fond of apartments, I always build my own! I love watching the neighbours do stupid things.

I sometimes play with apartments, but not very often.

And that chaos in the common area gives me anxieties

I hated the apartments when I first tried playing them. They were a big part of why I decided to scale back down and only play basegame, which I did for many years - I just felt like i couldn't keep up with all the details and it was all so chaotic. Now, after a few years of playing with all the EP:s I really like them! I too enjoy watching the neighbours (and landlords, and butlers/maids/nannies) do stupid things. Ilike building apartment lots too, I'm still having fun exploring different ways of setting them up. Are they 100 % functional? Nope. And after a while they all seem to get corrupted. I don't mind, I just empty the apartment lots and put the sims somewhere else, in a villa or a new apartment lot. And I love the social class townies too, Justpetro!

I go back and forth on whether or not I really like the apartment system, mostly because I hate the social class townies. Every time I see Jason Menon or Bruce Rauscher devolving to assaulting my sims' neighbors on a daily basis...

You don't need to have social class townies if you don't want to - there is this mod:
http://www.cyjon.net/node/220
Which fills empty apartments with townies instead of the social townies.

This one allows for a mix of both:
https://modthesims.info/d/606456/mo...neighbours.html

I also really love this mod, which allows for more than one room mate- just because I love having non-playables in my apartment, contributing to the rent. There is always something to laugh at!
http://www.insimenator.org/index.ph...aa9cdq1a8148ca5
Roomies appear on the pet skewer, so if you like you can activate the control pets cheat to get them out of trouble.

Big agree about disliking the apartment system. I don't mind the social townies (I love when they fight with the landlord), but having active sims in an apartment is a pain. I don't have apartments in my game at all.

Birds and other "low-maintenance" pets. DON'T get them if you have ACR installed, because your Sims would rather WooHoo (or do anything else of a romantic nature) than take proper care of them.

I just deleted Eglamour, cage and all, from the Summerdream house in Veronaville 2.0, because it was impossible to get either Oberon or Titania to clean the cage and it was really gross. (Kids can't clean cages, and I have never seen a Maid do it.)

I used to be crazy about apartments when I returned to Sims 2 in 2022. As AL was the expansion I hadn't played when I was younger, I went on a spree building big apartments with 4+ floors and more units than neccessary. And then I never got to use half them as I kept learning, eventually settling on 4 units maximum per apartment. Lilith's cousins lived in a luxurious apartment that had gone through 3 iterations as they progressed through their adulthood, each one done away because as the issues kept appearing. (Mailbox especially, don't put it inside and keep its flanks cleared!) It was at the rotation of Lucy's passing that I had to do away with luxury apartments altogether - it was pink flashing and crashing badly.

I still use apartments, mainly the trailer parks that stood the test of time thanks to being affordable for poor households. Social classes were more likeable to me than townies and thus more were made playable. There were a few specials like Lilly Do who loved teenage boys or her roommate\lover Waylon Menon, Melon Man the victim of random misery.

Because apartments (to me) are so irredeemable, I usually try to build a multi-family housing that resembles apartments but is actually residential-just separated by doors.
I've got one I designed in Arundel for the upper class retirees, and boarding house for the middle class ones-I'm trying to recycle the houses by moving the elders into cooperative housing and moving the young people into the houses. No apartments for them!

Apartments, btw, do not conform to medieval roads-they all lose any edits to the road (special road paint) as soon as I close the lot. That's unacceptable to me and I won't play lots that don't have the edits.

Consistency is the hobgoblin of the mind, and all that, but I want to see the same road as every house has-hell, I get irritated in the winter when the curves of the roads lose their default dirt look and revert back to pavement. I can't do anything about that except avoid looking at that, but I won't tolerate that from a residential lot.

I will concede that I enjoyed playing that trailer park myself, and had some fun with it - I must have played it for at least a week, because the family was moved out when the twins were born.
Over the years, I did try out apartments once in a while (some of you build such pretty ones, I cannot resist). Normally, at the 3rd day, I had enough and moved the sims out.
I even tried moving 4 of my families into one - that lasted around 3 days too and it was a lot of work to move all of them back into their houses (which were empty, because I don't use the shrub).
The things are just too cramped - where must I now put his career reward?
As for the social townies - they are probably more fun if there are no apartments for them to live in - and I really like the networking stuff and them giving my sims things to "test out"

I've found that most apartments are too small for families, as built, which means the sims need to move in a day or three, which means no one ever lives in them long enough to pay rent the next week . . .
They work better in the neighborhood with AlmightyHat's proportional aging mod, and when I've built them myself so they have room for sims to actually live a life instead of only one or two days in it. I like to build the three story townhouses with back yards . . . I put the low divider fencing around the back porch so the back yards are all shared space and all the kids can go back and forth between houses and play equipment and everything.

It's from DJS Sims. It's one of my favourite mods, to be honest. It's much easier to refuse a computer than get rid of one when it's dropped off.

**

I love apartments, especially for single sims or sims just out of college (or moving out of their parents' basement). I use no2khandouts so sometimes a slummy apartment is the best my sims can get.

Oh, DJS Sims also has the automatic NPC scheduler, which does as advertised-for a price of 10,000 aspiration points, and they charge you after as well!
https://sims.jfade.com/index.php-ca...1&subcat=3.html

it's so handy when a pixel doesn't have the time or knowledge to fix that broken trash compactor, and it's super fun to watch them get zapped.
"I thought you were the expert!"

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet, but the reason why apartments lose their custom roads is because the lot the family lives on is treated a sublot clone of the base lot and because roads aren't technically a part of the lot itself, they get disregarded when moving a family in since the game is treating the newly moved in family's lot as a newly-placed lot. From my testing way back when I was making Shifting Sands, iirc editing the sublot (the lot the family lives) to match the base lot (what you see in build/buy mode) should fix it and keep it consistent; however, you'll have to do that for every family that moves in.

I'm not totally convinced that was/is the case. I've had it done without moving anyone in. I left the lot with the road terrain pain on, and came back to find it gone.

It's not a permanent road, which is why it disappears, I think. Only the Maxis roads are programmed as permanent roads and thus any lot that is placed in the hood will lose edits to their road if you take them out of the neighborhood or even leave them for another lot.

This is always true in my game. If I remove a lot with those edits, they will lose them every single time. So I have to replace them every single time I re-use a lot.

It's also why the roads revert to Maxis road terrains when winter sets in-generally the straight ones will keep their terrains, but the curves/corners will lose them, not being permanent or painted, even with the default road terrains being applied. (see below for what I'm talking about-the perfect example.)