Hi folks!

Been thinking a fair bit about neighborhood population recently and trying to find a good balance in my neighborhoods. I feel like for rotational sims players there tends to be an ideal number of sims we play with per neighborhood, and the more it expands the longer and more tedious a round can get, hence why some simmers artificially limit the number of babies born in game. I was against this for a while until I encountered the dreadful prospect of 40+ households in my current Strangetown (right now, I'm hovering around 20 and even that feels too long-- I've got 12 sims in University as well). Right now, my Strangetown has 83 playable sims running amok.

So I'm curious: do you limit population in your neighborhoods? If so, what's your system, how does it work? What's the ideal number of sims for you to play with, in one household or in the whole neighborhood?

I've just adopted a system that limits my sims' children via ACR's Ideal Family Size setting, inspired by this post and so far I'm enjoying it. My rules are as follows:

Sims will have children based on the following equation:

(Outgoing + (0.5 * Nice) / (Primary Aspiration Value + Secondary Aspiration Value) + Random Number), rounded to the nearest whole number.

Sims are assigned a number, 1-7, based on their primary and secondary aspirations. Huge Family and Hedonist (one side of the Family and Pleasure aspiration coin) are at one, while Serial Romantic and Limburger Lover (one side of Romance and one side of Grilled Cheese) are assigned seven, for example. The secondary aspiration helps in this case as I assign it when sims turn 30, and thus recalculate the sim at that time anyway to assign their secondary asp. This means with a higher overall number to divide by, a sims' ideal family size will likely go down, which I interpret as "this sim is getting older, they may already have enough kids or have decided to be more realistic about how many kids they can support. The random number (-1 to +1) is added in at the end because I don't want every aspiration combination to be the same, and can add some surprises to the mix.

The number itself is kept in my spreadsheet for reference. If a sim has already had their ideal family size met, and they become pregnant, they're flipping a coin. Heads means the baby goes to the orphanage, tails means the pregnancy is terminated (helped by the Mod for Jane Roe , which I got working properly in this iteration of my game, thank goodness!), and they receive a custom memory each time this happens because it's more fun that way.

In the case of differing ideal family sizes for spouses, I just go for an even split, rounded down. If one sim wants 3 children and the other wants 0 children, they'll get 1 child, maybe 2 in a specific situation. Looking forward to hearing your systems and ways to play!

I have a custom neighborhood that I have played for 3 and a half years. I started with 28 sims that I created as my founders, which has currently expanded to 502 playable sims ever since then, some dead, most of them alive. At the beginning of the neighborhood, I had no plan to control my population because I didn't want to limit how many babies my sims could have; in fact, I couldn't think of something I wanted to do less. Therefore, I had sims who only had 1 child, and sims who had up to 6, and I loved having that many sims to play with. It was only when I noticed that it took me like three months to play a whole round that I decided I needed to start implementing some population control; although I don't always follow it.

Basically, I decided that I was going to limit how many babies my sims had based on 2 factors; their aspiration, and how much I liked them as characters. Firstly, I decided pleasure and romance sims could only have 1 child, popularity sims could have 2, fortune and knowledge between 2 and 3, and family sims 3 or more. However, I noticed I only follow this rule with sims I don't like that much; and then I have families I've let have 4, 5, 6, 8, 11! children, and although aware of the consequences, I love having big families and a big neighborhood. It's completely unfair and biased, but that's the way I like it :D

However, I've done other things like shortening my sims' lifespans and subtracting a day from my rotations to make things go faster, which has worked quite well, since my round lasts so long. My children are only children for 5 days, but I get to see them around town and in other sims' households for way longer than that, so it doesn't feel like a short time at all. Also, I have a few mods that make sims more likely to die accidentally (more dangerous fires, death by childbirth, illness fixes), and I have recently switched to a rule where I don't plead for anyone's lives, nobody wishes for the opportunity to cheat death, and nobody gets resurrected. It's a little cruel, but I like the occasional tragedy as it'd be quite boring if everybody just died of old age, and when sims die young, they don't have offspring. and that helps out a little bit.

I remember watching a Marticore video where she said she didn't want to play more than 12-ish households in a hood because it made the gameplay kind of dull, and there I was with my 50 households . I don't find it dull, but that's probably because I really enjoy playing a hood this big. I love being able to roleplay things like schools, prisons, college parties, different kinds of lots and businesses and have enough sims to make it work the way I envisioned it.

Because I'm so fascinated by genetics, I'm all about the babies! With many custom skins, and many multiple PT sets - and heavy use of modifying faces, I like to see what will happen. So my horror of a mom (in looks and personality) gets pregnant by a townie she never met? Dum Dum DUM! But yea, when the hood gets so big and I've played a few generations I get bored and the hood goes bye bye.

In Tinsel Town, I started out with 11 couples as the "Founders", who had families-I put a limit of 2 children for each couple but I also had the random ''triplets & quads" hack as well, so that meant, that if a couple had already 1 child, but they wanted another child, if they exceeded that 2 child limit with a random throw of triplets, that pretty much blew up the the family planning.
Also, I had several founders getting divorced and remarried, with subsequent families from those marriages.

So right now I have 102 pixels in my town, and it's up to the number 40 for active households, with most of the 3rd generation just starting out in their lives.

That's why I have a running set of notes and a Sims2Database set dedicated to the town. I have to keep track of these pixels..it can be confusing..but thankfully the game and the DB both track family lines and keep everyone straight.

Although I wonder how long it will be before everyone is interrelated so badly that they get to marry their 3rd cousin 5 times removed?

I do play rotationally-it's almost necessary to keep track of this town!

My current 'hood is the largest I've ever had (I started with Pleasantview, Strangetown, Veronaville, Widespot, LGU, Emerald Heights, Meadow Creek and Arbour Falls), but I don't really bother with population control. I'm using the Sun&Moon sets from Plumbob Keep and trying to run it as an integrated 'hood - I need lots of sims involved in collecting/growing resources and crafting.

Not all my sims have children, and not all my sims live long lives (mods make their lives harder/riskier), but if sims want large families I normally let them have them if they can. When the number of households gets too high or rotations become too long, I merge some households - I currently have 3 military barracks (all single adults or teens), a prison (with the warden's family and a couple of prisoners), and a fishing camp (that one has two families and 4 single adults).

I rotate seasonally so that I can see easily on the neighbourhood screen which families still need more time. However, I don't always play a family from the start of the season straight to the end - I hop around, play a day or two here or there as the mood hits. I've got a variety of houses, and a few challenge lots that I play by different rules, so I don't really find the rotations get tedious. If a household does become a drag over more than one rotation, I change how I play it.

My biggest difficulty with the large hood is that, despite notes, I sometimes forget what I was planning with one family before I get back to them in the next rotation. That usually results in me having created love triangles (or more tangled than that) by accident or a disruption in my game's supply chain - I accidentally moved the next generation of would-be miners to either farms or the military barracks over the course of a couple of rotations and now all my miners but one are elders.

My Shape Island hood has just completed 125 year-days. (One Sim day is approximately equal to one year.) I started with 50 single adults Sims (50 lots) and as they paired off, the occupied lots dwindled. It's now the beginning of Gen 5 (Gen3 has 85 living, Gen4 has 113 alive and Gen5 has 12 so far) and the total population is 215 and for the first time, my occupied lots have topped 50 with 52 currently lived in. The rotational time has increased dramatically and I found I was less motivated to play.

I don't have any set "rules" for my hood regarding procreation, but I started recognizing that its population was getting out of control around year 70 and what I've done since then to rein in the population explosion is:
(1) turned off same-sex pregnancies (started in year-day 80).
(2) I've instituted an almost mandatory birth control option for teens as I use the InTeen mod. Teen pregnancies still occur but they are almost always due to the failure rate of birth control in the mod. (It isn't 100% effective.)
(3) I adjusted downwards the twins, triplets and quads chances in the Trips and Quads mod.
(4) Since my Age Duration mod adds days depending on aspiration level at the adult transition, I've made a conscious effort to reduce the number of Sims who are above green for that age-up to reduce their potential lifespans.
(5) I had been all about having the families grow, but now I find I'm starting to have adult Sims on birth control after two, or sometimes just one, child.

I'm a little confused. Shy sims and grumpy sims are considered less likely to want children? Every family has between 1-7 children or a 7 is less likely to have children? They never get to keep an accidental baby even if they want it? What if they roll a want for a baby?

I'm surprisied that a Hedonist would want kids at all. XD

Ah yes... Rotation... That mess of a playstyle... I don't get it... If it gets tedious, why do it? If you don't wanna play a family, is it really the worst thing in the world if they don't age in sync? Esp considering this world has a magic potion that de-ages people... Considering that context it's not exactly worldbreaking for sims to not all age at the same time, nevermind "chaos".

I mean I'm all for people having their own playstyles, but when someone who plays this way themself says it's tedious, I just have to ask, why??? Why play this way if you have to find workarounds to limit the tedium that you yourself are making...

Yes, shy and grumpy sims are less likely to want kids. I already have a system in place for calculating if a parent will teach toddler skills using Neat, Active, and Playfulness, so I kind of wanted to utilize all the traits available. If I had to reason it: kids take a lot of social and emotional energy, and if the sim has a short fuse or doesn't like interacting with people, I imagine they'll be less interested in having someone that constantly bugs you for attention. Having a "1" means you're more likely to have children, because it's a smaller number to divide by. The bigger the number there, the less kids you'll want.

I haven't come across that exact situation yet, but if a sim wants a baby and they've reached their cap, I just ignore it, otherwise family sims will keep wanting babies until the sun explodes! For accidental and wants, I guess it would make sense to fulfill that want, but I don't lock in Have a Baby wants anymore after they're reached their Ideal Family Size, so I think the likelihood would be pretty nill.

I read Hedonist as literally the most careless parent of all-- they don't even care if what they're doing could result in children, so they don't care how many they end up having XD

For me I find rotational gameplay way more satisfying than any other way to play. I like my game to be relatively semi-realistic, so I usually don't mess with their ages. The other thing is even if one or two households get to be tedious, sometimes something will happen or come up that makes them suddenly interesting again. If I give up and leave a certain household to the dusty corner or kill them off, then there's never any chance for them to catch my interest again!

Now I wonder if anyone tried to see if there was a point where even Family sims would say: Stop! No more! XD

I like to play rotationally, because I love to see how the neighourhood changes (for me, it's all about the hood and growing a society, as I also enjoy world builders like Cities Skylines). But I usually play very short rotations, one day per family.


With my old hood, I had no system and it got quite large and messy. I had stories planned for most of the sims and so many had kids to fit that, or not. With a newer hood I'm playing I was trying to go for wants based, so that in order for sims to have kids, both parents had to have a want for a baby. But I found that most of them just didn't want to bother! They all just wanted to have fun. I am ending up with several families of childless elders and a whole buch of zombies, and two families with a huge number of kids. So, I'm going to end up with an inbred hood! I may have to intervene...

Who rolled a want to become a zombie? XD

Those knowledge Sims be doing that.

I don't have any hard and fast rules. In my current Strangetown, I've kept it simple: it's based on the number of bedrooms in the house. That's because I hate moving house--although I did have to move Lazlo when he had twins because I didn't want to put his babies in the basement. So Jill and Buck got more children because they're living in the Smith house, but most families only get one or two at the most. I also only let them try autonomously, and they can only do that if they're married. Once they fill up the extra bedrooms, they're not allowed to try anymore. If they're unmarried, they're only going to get pregnant through risky woohoo, which happens just enough to add some challenge and surprise. Sometimes I'll add a baby in for the story--like I let Sarah Love adopt an alien baby after her boyfriend died. I can't tell if this strategy is working, as the first generation is just now becoming adults, but it hasn't seemed too overwhelming yet.

I'm also playing a more freewheeling Pleasantview-Veronaville hood, and there anything goes. Most of them are rich--they can afford giant houses. Two seasons have gone by, and there have been a lot of babies, mostly Montys. I'm playing wants-based but also letting them try autonomously. I may have to move to strictly wants-based there at some point, but that hood is meant for chaotic fun, so I can see myself abandoning it or having some kind of widespread disaster.

As Sturlington says, it was family members wishing to resurrect dead relatives and knowledge sims wishing to make zombies! :D

I play rotationally, and with an added bonus, slower than the normal game runs-with Chris Hatch's "half-speed" mod. Sure, it does get tedious at times, but you can't always have chaos and expect the game to give you any pleasure or enjoyment.

My pixels often do not age in sync-but then again, nobody does in the real world.

I believe that by going rotationally through the neighborhood you're adding to the neighborhood lore, and each family's separate experiences in one day-(more like one year to me). So much can happen in one day, and I enjoy sometimes the tedium-it's in sharp contrast to the crazy times that can break out, often in the same day.

For instance, last night as I was playing Tinsel Town, there were two families I played that had the evil gnome on their lots, and people just merely thought of stealing them-voila, they were zapped, and in both instances the gnome set fire to the out side, and all hell broke loose.

Before that happened, though, the family had been having an ordinary, boring day. Not after that!

I just play whomever I feel like playing. XD

My neighborhoods have mostly consisted of families with kids that grow to adult age and then get their own families (if I don't keep them as I made them - but that's mostly if I've used them for stories/photoshoots). Nobody is in synch, nobody grows old. Back when I played Uni, I'd sometimes leave a half-baked family, go play their YA "kids" and then have those go off starting a new family.

(Not so much in TS2 any longer, as I tend to keep to the "storytelling mode", but this is still mostly my playstyle in TS4 when I've just been playing around for fun)

Complete chaos, in other words - great-grandparents would be as old as their own great-grandchildren in the end XD

As for limiting the neighborhood, it kind of self-limits to a certain point, because I run out of spaces for houses (I tend to like spaceous houses, because I also like to have sims with many kids). I've never been too afraid of it growing out of proportions, although I've had over 1000 sims in an original Pleasantview (before I installed empty hoods and all that, so at least 300+ of those weren't mine).

My current version of Pleasantview 2.0 (for storytelling purposes) currently has a population of 0, which I imagine will change as soon as I start making and moving in sims. It's been in build-only mode for a while.

My previous neighbourhood, Oakbrook, was by far my largest - I've jokingly referred to it as an uberuberhood because I had all the Maxis hoods and at least half a dozen fanmade ones. Several hundred families (!). Unfortunately, when my health went on the decline starting 2018 I found myself gradually unable to cope with it, especially the silly loading times.

My current hood, Riverbreeze, is far smaller, ~50 families and ~150 sims right now. This includes my own custom sims, the regular bin families, Bluewater Village, and all the University students (though I did relocate everyone to SSU because I didn't need three separate subhoods).

My largest custom hood had about 63 families and that did get too much. I have not counted how many are in my Uber hood, but I doubt that many yet. I changed to 4 day season rotations which has helped get through them all.



I play by season rotation and try and make sure everyone starts the new season on the same day. So Saturday will be the first day of summer next rotation. I don't find it messy? What way is it messy?

If I didn't want to play a family I would probably combine them with with another family.

Yes I do like them to age relatively in sync. Some toddlers will go to day care, some ageing to kids will be enrolled in my playable school. It's important to know when birthdays will be and when to enroll them. Once it's large enough those ageing to teen will go to my highschool. There are friendships, romances, shared uni classes. I play a very much integrated, sims run things way though.

I make sure the entire hood ages except those NPC's that can't. I have the old Ancient Highway mod that ages townies 1 day at 6pm when on the same lot as a playable. Then every now and then i age up townies. I send teens to uni, including the paper teen, adults I age to elder and they will eventually go to the retirement home and pass there.



I love having families, if sims take too long I get itchy to make them. I find with riskywhoohoo and the trips&Quads mods it a rare family that only has 1 child.

Many of my elders go to my retirement home. Then when they pass I set the lot to elder only and catch the next elder townie walking past and somehow they always say yes they would love to move in.

That's a great idea, in the mostly childless hood I already have a zombie home for all the zombies, so a retirement home would be fun! They all know each other anyway as the town is very small, that way I could watch the elders interact together. I am just going with the childless bit, I think I'll make more families if I need more population!

All this talk of retirement homes and elders spurred me to make a proper retirement home for the pixels on the cusp of becoming elder-the second generation. I'm thinking that when they grow old, they can move out of their homes to let the younger crowd take over the houses (after all, they do have more than one bedroom) and thus keep the number of houses to be visited fairly steady.

But of course, the best laid plans and all that will probably interfere with my vision, as they usually do.

I have too many household in my favourite hood (I play rotationally) but I still do not use mods for that. Sims could not became pregnant (but alien pregnant) without my approval so this is good limit. Not every sim of mine has a large family. Maybe not a family at all. Now I am also careful to make them bigger families because almost always a new sim means a new household in future.

There is also couple of families without things like fire alarm and they can repair their electricial themselves. So I take risk while playing. (But this have not kill any sim...) One of them is family of two townie and their children. Townies from frat houses or moving ins are one source of useless sims. That is why I also have a household for previous frat house townie members if I do not have use for them.

Now I think the best partner for a sim is another playable sim. They are in same household and together they would get less children like they would get with townies.

I also choose members of fraterities and sororities by genes now so I can make them marry playable sims and get beautiful children in my game. And I do not ask townies to move in those houses (or any houses) anymore if it is not necessary.

This does mean I would be strich with these rules. If moving townie to frat house, a large family, or marrying townie sounds really great idea, I would do them. I have these rules for knowing what I am doing.

(Warning, rant incoming, also I was too excited to post this so I haven't read the thread, but I will.)

Be aware that the ACR Ideal Family size modifier isn't very strong, so setting it won't influence your sims' decision to TFB very much. It also only starts inhibiting them from TFB once they have MORE than their ideal number, which IMO is a coding mistake. I've been working on modifying some of the other ACR numbers for my game, which is not ready to share yet, but I have never figured out how to get IFS to care when they already have the number they want.

So for example, if you set their IFS to 3, and they have 0 children they get a +60 modifier to the TFB chance, because they have 3 kids to go to get to their "ideal" number. But once they have 3 kids, they will have a neutral modifier. It's only once they have the fourth kid that it starts adding a penalty (of -20).

IMO this is incorrect, because it should start to add the penalty once they have achieved their perfect number of kids. You can adjust for this slightly, by e.g. if you want them to have an ideal family size of 3, then set it to 2. It just doesn't work if you want to set them to be childfree by choice/preferred family size of 0 because the -1 setting tells the game to ignore the IFS altogether. (So you may wish to set, for example, 0 and also put them on birth control, it's just that this then does not allow for risky pregnancies, which I found annoying).

The modifiers for the kids they already have are also much stronger in most cases, and IMO the starting value is set much too high. ACR will generally cause ALL MARRIED COUPLES to end up with around 3-4 kids, with some Ple/Rom couples having 1-2, and some Family couples having 4-5. This is because they all start with a very high chance to TFB, and then because existing kids slam the brakes on rather suddenly, especially once they get to child or older.

Ignoring IFS for a moment, the starting chance to try for baby, for most couples, ie 2/3 of all couples assuming an equal distribution of aspirations, is between 60-100%. The only couples who get a below 50% score are all-Pleasure/Romance couples. And remember this is EACH time they woohoo using ACR. So they are extremely likely to TFB. The only saving grace is that unmarried TFB is disabled by default - because Pleasure/Romance sims might be less likely to marry in the first place, I guess?

Even if you set the IFS, these are the actual numbers of kids I found that IFS tends to give you. Multiple births, especially triplets/quads, may skew these numbers even higher.

0 = 2 kids (maybe 3 for family)

1 or 2 = 3 kids (4-5 for family)

3 = 3-4 kids

4 = 4 kids (3 for pleasure, 5 for fam/fam - this is the only setting that works XD)

5-9 = 4-5 kids

10-12 = 6 kids

So in fact, my current workaround for my game is to calculate a "type" of family size for each sim and allocate them an IFS value based on this. My "types" are:

Childfree by choice = IFS set to 0, birth control. (I would like to figure out a risky setting for this.)
One and done/small family = IFS 0 (This results in 1, maybe 2 kids)
Standard family = IFS 1 (Typically results in 2-3 kids, maybe 1 for Ple/Rom, maybe 3-4 for Fam/Fam)
Large family = IFS 10 (Results in 4-7 kids depending on aspiration)

Because the game uses both parents' IFS and calculates an average, that means that some of my couples will end up with figures of either 8, 2, or 3, but I don't mind that, as it gives me a little more variety.

I quite like the "family size type" system I have now because of the variety based on aspiration, and my main gripe is the fact that the 0 setting doesn't work properly and the starting numbers are too high, so I think I'm going to try and figure out how I can tweak the other numbers so that it does work for me, probably with the settings 0 (none) 1 (between 0-2 but most likely 1) 2 (between 1-3) and then some large number (4+)

@simsfreq - Thank you for this detailed explanation. I use an older version of ACR, so I do not have the ideal family size setting. I think this just confirms that my current system is probably a better one for me. I've thought about upgrading ACR, but it works great now, and I don't want to take a chance on breaking it. I play on the Mac and sometimes it's not clear what won't work.

I like that Try for Baby is disabled by default for unmarried Sims. This gives them time to date and such before trying to have kids, and if you use ACR, then the older they get, the less likely they are to get pregnant because of fertility, so that's another natural way to limit families. A lot of my Sims don't end up getting married, because most of the time I require that they both have to have the want to get engaged and get married, unless there is a story reason why not. If only one of them gets the want, I'll usually have them go steady and live together. It makes sense to me that Pleasure and Romance Sims would want to live with a partner but not get married. So if one of my single Sims gets pregnant, that's because it was an oopsie or an alien abduction or I decided to get them pregnant for story reasons, and that makes the story more interesting to me.

Once they are married and start a family, I change the setting to Try for Baby Not Allowed when they get to a good family size. As I said before, I decide that based on how big their house is (which I guess is limiting it by financial status), and sometimes I'll factor in their LTW or their wants for more children. Again, sometimes there's an oopsie baby, and that presents a little surprise that adds interest to my gameplay, but it doesn't happen so frequently that I feel like I'm getting way too many Sims to play. I rarely have families with more than three kids, but most have one or two.

This is how I'm playing in Strangetown, which is more of a story-based hood, and I'm controlling things a lot more. In Pleasantview-Veronaville, though, anything goes. Try for Baby is still disabled for unmarried, but in just two seasons, I've had 15 babies born (not counting unborn baby Broke)--although 4 of those were alien abduction babies, but none were risky. A lot of couples will have a baby, then immediately get pregnant again. I agree that they seem to try for baby too much under ACR's standard settings, at least if your goal is not to have your population balloon right off the bat.