My current game setup is Belladonna Cove + Sim State University, so that's 11 households and 23 playable sims from the get go in Belladonna Cove and another 3 households and 10 sims for Sim State (and this is ignoring the Sim State bin, which I realised I shouldn't have done since one of their bios mentions he likes to spend time with other playables), for a total of 33 playable sims. After about 3 seasons of gameplay the population of Belladonna Cove has changed to 26 (4 births, 2 townies moved in, 1 death, 2 went to uni), which isn't an awful lot of change, but in 2 years of Sim State the population has gone up to 15 (2 Belladonna teens, 3 dormies moved in), a 50% increase. Jane Stacks has just graduated, so she'll be the first to move to the main hood, but all those 15 will eventually have to leave the university subhood. I like to make important townies playable. For example, Justin Cleveland had a relationship with dormie Aurora Santos on his first year of university, so I made her playable - it wouldn't make sense to me to have Justin's kids share a dorm, possibly even date, the same sim as their father. Years of playing a BACC also made moving in townies an integral part of my gameplay (and on a slightly tangential note, I have no child or teen townies in Belladonna Cove and it's pissing me off, I don't want Sally Riley to come home after school in every single household). If this keeps going I'll reach hundreds of playables in a few generations.

So what exactly do you do to keep your population reasonable? Do you even care about that or do you like to keep expanding your hood? Note that this thread isn't about keeping character files under control, I have around 700 on a powerful machine so I'm well below the limit. I have antiredundancy but not notownie/dormieregen. This thread is specifically about playable population. Also, I guess, what is even a reasonable number of playables in a place like Belladonna Cove, a large urban environment?

You have to make dormies playable to grow them up; but you don't have to then keep them playable.

Once a sim has graduated, it's time to evaluate whether they're playworthy or not. If they aren't sufficiently integrated or interesting to be worth playing, turn them back into townies! They can then age up to elder along with their college playable friends. Once you accumulate too many elder townies, you can move them into a retirement home and develop fun rules to play that, or just let them sit till their friends die and then kill them off.

If graduates have unturned dormie friends, they can be invited over, invited to move in, made over, and then turned into townies. Unfortunately they can't just be moved in with the teleporter, they must be asked to move in, as YAs can't be moved into the main hood in any other way. They will bring money with them and leave it behind on townification, so that's something to bear in mind and develop a rule to deal with.

You could certainly make some child or teen townies if you want them. I have a mod you can buy from the catalog that generates really nice townies/downtownies in all age groups, but I can never remember the name of it. Maybe someone else knows the one I'm talking about. It looks like Prof. von Ball.

Right now, I am playing Pleasantview + Strangetown with Downtown, La Fiesta Tech, and Sim State University. I am only gradually moving in the university playables, but I have made a lot of townies playable because I wanted the variety in terms of genetics and types of households. I think it helps if not everyone is having babies at the same time. Keeps university cohorts small and there is a steady cycle of new households forming as elders are passing on. That's why I actually played Pleasantview for two rounds before starting Strangetown, to keep from having all the teens going to university and starting families at the same time.

I do all of what Peni suggests. If I make someone playable as a young adult but they don't hold my interest after graduation, they get turned into a townie or downtownie. They can come back into play if they get into a serious relationship with one of my playables.

So far, I have banished one household to the bin because I just didn't feel they added anything to my play and didn't have significant connections with anyone. They "moved away." I will do this with other families if I don't care to play them. Make sure to quit their jobs first so they don't get brought home from work.

Not everyone gets married or has kids. Young singles I often move into group living situations. I have a retirement home for poor elders to live together in. I have rules to limit babymaking, so most couples have 2, 1, or 0 children.

I actually took out most of my more dangerous mods, because I found them too destructive, but I find ways to introduce accidental deaths/murders into my gameplay. For instance, some houses may not have smoke alarms. Some Sims may not take as good care of themselves in pregnancy. Right now, Olive Specter functions as a random death dealer. She has a cowplant and she chooses one Sim every round to sacrifice to it so she can stay immortal. If it makes sense, I might have other random death dealers. Loki Beaker is a werewolf, for instance, and is working his way up to a killing spree.

Hope these ideas help.

I guess that depends on what you mean by 'under control'. I would consider 11 households a fledgling hood. I play integrated and I need sims to do a wide range of tasks from running shops and services.

Only one time did I feel a hood had gotten away from me and that was my first integrated hood with 60 families. I have no idea how many total sims that was only I found that it had become hard to play. Maybe your limit is much lower than mine.
I have an Uber hood with all but Desiderata Valley attached, is this too many? Not for me. I do play to 4 day seasons to keep things moving. I also age all sims who can be aged, ending up in my retirement home as elders eventually.

I no longer allow sims to have 10 kids, family sims get 4-6 depending on LTW, others get 2-3. A few singles I move in together to condense them into 'one family'. Otherwise I don't worry about it.

I do by only letting families have 2 children (although I've broken that rule once, god help us, Tinsel Town!) but it seems that because of ACR/Twins/Triplets/Quads hack, they sometimes end up with more than 2.

But when they do, that's it! I started out with 10 families and now I've got about 30 and it'll go down again as all the 3rd generation gets married..but they'll have kids too.

I never have any singletons at all. My pixels insist on having partners, so I'm forced to live with the results.

Lots of flies. And a cowplant.

What do you mean Having hundreds of playable sims is extremely fun!

Since sims can die of old age, I don't worry about them hanging around since they do die at some point.

I do nix the AL townies because I think there are too many of them and it's weird how they all wear one of 3 outfits, they look like cult members.

If I get *really* bored of playing someone, I make them into a townie. Townies age up when a playable with a significant relationship with them ages up. I have not so far had a townie die of old age in this way, but I wonder if I might not simply age them into a child instead, wipe all memories/relationships and pretend they are their own grandchild. That would keep my schools feeling busy, at least.

I forgot to say that I also took out my mod that shortened pregnancy. I find my Sims have far fewer babies if they have to spend three whole days being pregnant. By the time they get their first or second child, they are too old or are over it. Even family Sims. Meadow Dreamer (nee Thayer) has constantly had a fear of having a baby ever since her second was born.

I'm not yet sure what would be my ideal size. Too many playables and I feel like a rotation would wear me out so much that I would lose the will to play. Out of the current batch of 15 YAs all but one are guaranteed to move into the main hood: Tara deBateau and Justin Cleveland for obvious reasons, the 10 premades have intertwined stories and 2 out of the 3 dormies are important to Tara and Justin's story. The other dormie I moved in is rather disconnected with the rest (he only moved in to fulfill greek house wants), if his story stays largely irrelevant he might just rot in the sim bin.

The situation with the child townies is unfortunate. When I played my BACC hood (being a custom hood, it uses Pleasantview's townies) I had heaps of them and it was so fun growing up my playables with their townie friends! It's so sad looking at the entire teen population of Belladonna Cove and only having playables, the newspaper girl, one cashier and one other NPC I can't recall, maybe it's because of the clean templates that the game is not generating child/teen townies.

Oakbrook had a few hundred families and at least a thousand playables, so I'm honestly not too worried about my current neighbourhood.

Try shorter pregnancy, Adult life span of 74 days plus the Triplets &Quads mod.



Make some.

I'm playing three different neighbourhoods at the moment.

In Pleasantview, I have an aging mod that sets 4 sim days to 1 year (it was 12 sim days to a year, but it turned out that was too slow for me), so changes happen slowly. I also don't have a university attached (that will happen when the oldest teens are ready to go), though I have added Bluewater - but only the Jacquet and Ramirez families have joined the rotations so far. So I don't have all that many households yet. At some point I will probably have to think about it, but for now I'll just keep playing.

Strangetown is the neighbourhood that I've been playing for longest, and I use an aging mod that sets 2 sim days to 1 year, so 28 years have passed since I started. It has a university (LFT), Downtown and a custom shopping district for more space. Not counting university households, it currently has 26 households, partly thanks to a big expansion recently as several sims graduated. Some of those households just have a single sim, which does make them fairly quick to play. A few of the things I do to keep the population reasonable for me: I wait for sims to roll a want for a baby before they have one, so many couples only have the one child, and I let sims remain single if they seem happy that way. I didn't add all the sim bin sims at once - the Singles household joined immediately, but Ajay Loner waiting a few years, and then the Newson kids joined later still (adopted by Ajay and his husband) and then the Ottomas family. I also don't add all the university playables immediately - each household joins the rotations when I feel ready. So Francis Worthington went through university with Jill Smith and Brian Grunt, then Stella Terrano joined Sirius Curious, and finally the sorority and fraternity households joined Daniel Ottomas, Gabriella Newson-Loner, Orion Curious and Thomas Grunt. The others are yet to be played, but I will join the band household with the group that are starting university in a year or so.

Finally, I'm playing a custom neighbourhood called Oasis Valley Colony that started out with 14 adult sims I made. That town needs more people, so I'm trying to increase the population and it does feel a bit weird to be making sims have children that they don't particularly want to have (though Romance sim Monica has constantly had a fear of a baby ever since she had her twins, so I'm listening to that one!).

I had a similar thread about this a while back. For reference, I currently have 93 playable sims in my Strangetown, while one round ago the population was 86.

My style of population control currently involves three methods:

1. Higher mortality rates: I have several mods to make death easier and more common in my neighborhoods, and some artificial restrictions set to keep things challenging. Various fixes and tuning mods for things like death by electricity and murphy beds, random chances for a prank killing someone, More Realistic Sickness and Death by Childbirth-- it's definitely kept the population in control, and added a lot of tragedy to the storylines. I've found it increasingly uncommon for sims to reach the elder lifestage because they just don't live that long as is.

2. Ideal Family Size: I made a little spreadsheet calculator to determine how many children a sim will "want" to have. Basically it's a combination of personality points, aspirations, and a random number so all sims don't wind up feeling the same. Since I assign secondary aspiration when a sim turns 30, that also tends to greatly reduce the number of children they "want." I've had a family sim initially want 13 children and now that he's realized he's a Fortune sim that number went down to 3. How it works in gameplay is a sim is only allowed to have as many children as they want, and when it comes to a married couple they reproduce based off the average of those two numbers. If they get pregnant after that, they pregnancy is either aborted or the baby is given to the town orphanage. If Sim A wants 1 child and Sim B wants 3 children, they'll have at most, 2. Of course I make exceptions, but generally speaking this keeps my sims from breeding like rabbits. I only implemented this rule several generations into my current Strangetown, so sims like Ripp Grunt have six children when in reality they should have only had a couple. The population is still balancing out, but a slight increase each round is no sweat.

3. Incorporation: Lastly, I try to keep sims from marrying townies or NPCs unless there's no other available pairs. Part of the reason the population increased as much as it did this past round is because of a lot of townies marrying in. I also will only move a townie in if they marry or have children with a playable. Otherwise, they exist on the periphery.

Ultimately population control doesn't matter too much unless you insist on playing every one of those sims, which you don't have to do. I do because no matter how annoying it gets there are rounds where families are boring and rounds where they're exciting, and in my opinion the only way to change that is try and play them. Even something as simple as a new outfit or a new hobby can make a sim way more interesting that they were the previous round.

Wouldn't advise de-aging them that far, as there can be problems with Wants and Aspirations (children are supposed to have only the Grow Up Aspiration), but taking them down to teens should be OK.

OTOH I'm sure other people have figured out ways to do this without it causing problems. :-) It's that YMMV thing. :-)

I'm actually finishing marrying off all my in born game sims and I was thinking about the same scenario. I'm a rotational player, have stories, pictures and perfectly furnished homes, so a gameplay with more than 5 playable households is draining. All of my previous families had at least two kids, one even had 4 kids cause I pretended they're Christian fundies. I made all of those then kids and now adults have either one kid, only some have two, two were killed off and one is gay. To prevent the sims from being related to each other I make their future husband/wife/baby daddy in CAS and their parents for some backstory, but until then they can date whoever they want. I just counted the descendants from the top of my head and I currently have 12, which I a lot, but when they become older I'll see which sim will be gay or tragically die. I'll determine that by choosing one of the siblings so the lineage continues without overpopulating.

Please send me the mod, I think several times about staging deaths for my sims but I always feel bad about it.

Well you can just change their aspiration back to Grow Up. But in any case I don't usually see townies' wants so it wouldn't matter. It's not a problem for a child to have an adult aspiration, it's just that it can be a symptom of them having "stepped into" someone else's character file. If you know that it's happened because you aged someone down instead, then it's fine - it just looks weird because they roll adult wants that they might not be able to fulfil.

I have made my own townies before. I make them in CAS and then move them into an empty lot, delete all the relationships with the Sim Blender, and use the Teleporter shrub to make them into townies. Or if you want hyper-local townies, you can actually just let them stay living on the lot and never play them. Just make sure they have a phone.

You can also force the game to create child/teen townies by going to a playable sim, shift-clicking in debug mode and choosing: Spawn > Townie and NPC Gun, then click on the gun and choose > Set age > Child > Make Townie > Keep. That will give them proper surnames whereas making them in CAS means they all have the same name. (I usually go Sims 1 Style and call them "Alan Townie" "Beatrice Townie" etc.)

I remember watching a Marticore video where she explained her gameplay rules, and there she said she tends to do 2+2 families so that the population always stays the same, and that she wouldn't go past 12 households because it made the game "dull". It makes perfect sense to me, but it also seems pretty miserable for the way I like to play. It actually took me a while to come to terms with the fact that not everybody plays the same, and if you want to play with 50+ households, you can do it; since you're the one playing the game and there's no need to please anyone else.

My neighborhood has over 50 household and I have never found it dull. I love big families and having a big population, many friendship opportunities and a decent pool for finding a romantic interest, especially for gay sims because in a small population, they'd have 1 or 2 options only and I find it quite sad. With a big population I can play out different scenarios with a decent number of participants, like having full classrooms in my schools, always having different hobby sims in their hobby and career lots, elections, parties, jail, etc. I mention these because this is what I find fun in the game, and small hoods are just not for me.

Nonetheless, I am aware that as my hood grows, it saves slower, the neighborhood view crashes sometimes because of the amount of lots, and my biggest problem: my rotation lasts from 2 to 3 months, or more if I'm playing slowly or focusing on other things. Therefore, I do have some rules/plans for (very loosely) controlling my population and getting trough my rotation easily:

Which one are you looking for?

Everyone is different. To me, having the same number of children in every family would make the game dull. I like variety, and I find that I can play big hoods with a lot going on, or small hoods with only a dozen or so sims, and neither is dull, as long as there is some differentiation between families.

I am currently playtesting my ACR mod with much lower chance to TFB autonomously, and so far it seems to be working well - I have a family who are a Fortune/Pleasure couple, one is a musician and likes to spend a lot of time with her instruments, she had an "oopsie" pregnancy with her boyfriend who was the maid, but after moving him in I decided he was absolutely an artsy/cultural type as well and got him a job in the artist career - I see him as a future museum curator. Perhaps he was simply working a job as a maid to pay the bills while he tried to find an opening in the art world. He is the neatest artist I have ever had. I think he must be extremely precise, and meticulous in cleaning up after himself.

I use the ideal family size number to indicate how big/small of a family size they want - one of them didn't actually plan to have children at all, and the other was keen to have one, but no more, and they appear to be sticking to this and selecting woohoo only, rather than try for baby. It's early days because the baby has only just aged up to toddler, but it will be nice I think if it stays this way, even though I have moved them into a much-too-big house if they do only have one child! I think it could be quite nice though for their son to have this whole rambling house to himself and all the rooms can be dedicated to various creative and cultural pursuits. It will be interesting to see if he grows up to inherit their passions or perhaps he will get into something they can't understand, like sports.

Then I have another family who are more hippyish and they live in a rustic cabin in the woods. They had recently had their first child and my sim was pregnant when I loaded the house last night, she has now given birth to their second. They both have a planned family size of "standard" which means I expect them to have somewhere between 1-4 children, but most likely 2 or 3. One is Family, and one is Pleasure, which is quite an opposite mix in some ways, so it will be interesting to see how many children they end up with long term.

One of my favourite families in this hood is the one that ended up having three kids before I put in the adjusted mod, in a much too small and cramped house and not enough money because they started having babies before the parents were very far in their careers. They get in each others' way all the time and it's quite chaotic but a lot of fun to play.

I've found that what I tend to find boring is when I make a lot of sims without much thought as to who they will be or what their stories are - then they become boring to play.

I am not keeping my population under control. I mean - why? If necessary, I add more subhoods And more graveyards too.

I understood that you use some high mortality hood that makes dying easier.

I understand that some of you don't like the same number of kids, it reminds me of Life Stories where there was literally a two child policy and the game didn't allow you to have more than two kids. After I got rid of that game and switched to Sims 2 my sims were breeding like rabbits cause I was sick of the restriction until they reached adulthood and I didn't know what tf to do with them.

Various mods that make dying easier.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...hp?topic=8062.0
https://midgethetree.tumblr.com/pos...rth-sims-have-a
https://www.leefish.nl/mybb/showthread.php?tid=6757
http://cyjon.net/node/412
https://archive.org/details/increas...rdiebysatellite
http://cyjon.net/node/441

I don't know if I'm exactly the posterchild for keeping a population under control (side-eyes 700+ playables in my hood) but...

1. I don't use CAS once my hood is established. If I need a specific role filled like a spouse or a business owner, I pick one of my existing sims or a townie

2. If I can't figure out a story or plan for a sim by adulthood/uni graduation, I make them a townie. I can always move them back into a household if something comes up, and I can use the age-up townies to keep them in sync with their generation.

3. Not everyone has kids. I have a sim couple who both came from large families and currently have 48 nieces and nephews between them. Both are fortune sims. They just seemed like a couple who would think "You know what? There's a enough of our DNA in this hood already." Sometimes a sim's facial features won't combine well with anyone, so I decide they don't need to pass on those genes. (And sometimes they're a wealthy heiress and I Hapsburg that sh**)

4. Let sims die. I don't like accidental deaths in my game (it's never the sims I'm ok with losing!), but I rarely play with aging off and let sims age up and die of old age. I'm about to build my second retirement home because my first is at capacity. Playing elders creeping towards inevitable death is a lot more enjoyable when they get to spend their final weeks swimming in the pool, playing Mahjong and poker, and making new friends with other residents (and residential pets!) versus puttering around an empty house.

5. Don't feel beholden to use the pre-made sims. My current hood has Académie Le Tour for university and the only playables I actually used was the Sharpe household. I made all the others dormies. You don't have to play the households if you don't have a place for them in your game.

Does it bother you to townify Sims who have playable relatives? That's my only hangup. If they're a relative of one of my playable families, I feel like I have to play them out or maybe engineer a death. I have no problem townifying playables who have no connections, though. Ajay Loner and Kristen Loste were both made townies (and they both eventually got eaten by Olive's cowplant), as were a few of the La Fiesta Tech students.

One thing I have been doing with many of my elders lately is challenging myself to get them to platinum. Not always possible, considering some Sims' wants. Then I let them putter on doing whatever until they fall into the green again, and I try to boost them up. I rotate around elders who live together. It's made it more fun for me to see how many of their wants I can fulfill in a short time. Most elder homes have a pet and/or a garden as well to keep them occupied, and if they don't have a romantic partner, I'll just use the crystal ball to find them a townie elder.