Your ideal neighborhood?

Your ideal neighborhood?

So, I've been playing the same neighborhood since I got the Sims and I've learned so much since then ... like never make Sims just to make Sims ... my neighborhood was getting overpopulated and was filled with people I didn't really care about and yet couldn't delete because they were friends with the Sims I did like ... anyway, it was getting to be a bit of a nightmare dealing with all those people and the 25 kids I had in college, and the babies still at home ...

So, I've started over with a brand new neighborhood. I took my favorite 8 characters, 4 boys, 4 girls, and started them over as toddlers, gave them parents, and built 6 starter houses on large lots (some of them are siblings or have single moms who are roomies). Actually one of the "houses" is an outhouse with outside furniture and a phone attached to the outside wall. The mom is a single mom, living alone, and I want to see if she can raise a toddler without help ... so she needs to save money.

Anyway, I also started my town lothario in college to give him a headstart on skills, and better career options. I don't care so much about the parents of the toddlers. Gonna let them get old and die. The toddler gen, the "gypsy" mom and the lothario, both of whom I plan to make immortal, are really my "first generation ..." I thought 8 (or, actually, 10) was a good number to give the romance sims someone to romance other than NPCs ... but not so many that they aren't manageable.

I don't plan to let many of the toddler gen become family Sims, so that should keep the population down as well. Don't really care if the parents send those 3 kids off to college or not. I like romance sims and knowledge sims the best. Not so keen on popularity or money. Too many parties gets boring, too much greed ditto. I like to buy what's best for a house, not necessarily what's the most expensive ... plus, what's with all the flowerbeds?

So it got me thinking: what is your ideal neighborhood? How do you start? Do you prefer to interact with your own sims or use the NPCs? What aspirations do you prefer to play?

Just wondering ...

 

You can't delete sims ever. This does not work. They're still there.

Fortune Sims are not actually quite as bad as they were before in Post-Uni, because their lifetime wants are nearly always "Maximize a Career". It's relatively simple to do, and frees you from the tyranny of constantly buying useless crap. Maximize All Skills is a great teen LTW for Knowledge sims, and Knowledge is pretty much one of the only meaningful early aspirations. In contrast, for the College-bound, Romance is an entirely useless aspiration to choose as a teen, because you can't woohoo anyway.

I prefer my own sims, with an assortment of aspirations, although ever-mindful of the fact that a sim which has not achieved his lifetime want should never become a family sim due to the fact that nearly all family sim LTWs are highly destructive to the neighborhood and will destroy it inside of 3 generations if you pander to their absurd wants. Marry off 6 children my ***. Nobody's having 6 children, married or not. NPCs and townies, on account of the fact that they are ugly and have terrible personalities, are treated as second-class citizens at best.

 

My Neighborhood. . .

Reflects a lot about my game-play style. I created my neighborhood before TS2 came out on Sim City 4, I have it in sections with a river running through it, sortof the "town mice" and the "country mice" kindof scenerio. On the "Town" side I have nice families in which I use more cheats and mods. These people live in nice homes or townhouses. I have many diffrent types of aspirations and personalities going. Each one has their own little storyline. The families are:
1. the Spock Family of scientists
2. the Spencer family, which is "Mini-Me" and the NASCAR driver
3. the "Model" family made from Sims that I had downloaded into Body Shop when I downloaded clothes
4. The Bonypart family, which is my favorite hunk Napoleon and his offspring, scattered about with diffrent mothers.
5. The O'Brian family, which was a single mom Molly and her son Bryce, but she married Benjamin Long and had another baby, Benny. So I guess that makes them the Long family. LOL
6. The Prince Family, which is mom Stacy and her two out-of wedlock kids Will and Colby.

Then on the "bad" part of town I have my little trailer court and a community lot with a pool, park, and little shop. These families do not start out with the "motherlode" cheat, nor do I use a lot of cheats along the way. Most of these homes do not have Merola's painting in them. So these families are much more disfunctional.
1. Hicks family: My favorites, my 1st family. It is rather large and convuluted now, and mom Charlene has relocated to a house on the other side of the river when she had a short marriage to Napoleon and had 2 of his children, so I guess she's living off child support. LOL Two of the kids are in college, one has graduated and is now living in his Mom's original trailer with his wife Audrey the cheerleader, and one son was recently eaten by the cow plant.
2. Espana: Single Dad David and pretty, outgoing daughter Maria. Maria is now in college.
3. Yokel: Mavis was one of my favorites before the re-load, but this time I haven't done that much to her. I started her off in a trailer with a sister Darla, now in college, and baby Sweetums.
4. Wilcox: Another family that I didn't do alot with. The mother had an affair with Napoleon. She left her husband and moved into her own trailer. The two little girls moved in with her. Now there are three kids, Melia, Tyra, and the baby, who's name escapes me. Dad John moans and cries a lot and turns up at parties flirting with women, just like a man on the rebound. LMAO.
5. Clonch: These are the poorest, sloppiest, ugliest people in town. We have the two ugly parents, ugly son, a daughter I had designed to be pretty with high cheekbones but when she became a teenager she got some strange "sunken" look, and the new, ugly baby. The Dad went across the river to Stacey Prince's townhouse and fathered baby Colby.

Am trying to populate the neighborhood with college kids, and when I think of a new charector, I now start them out in college. I have a total of 16 sims in college or in the neighborhood bin. I am resisiting the urge to make new sims or to play the regular neighborhood until I get this generation out of college and established.

 

I currently have 10 sims in college, the older ones being Juniors. Ah how my little sims grow up. I've mainly been focusing on them since I need to populate my neighborhood with some college-educated adults instead of run-of-the-mill ones. I have...four? elder Sims, with a ton of other Sims on borderline Elder-hood.

Update (since I probably posted my neighborhood's history already)

The Barkers: David Merrick is still in college, a Junior, majoring in Biology. His sister, Lora Yuna, had a baby boy named Cloud. W00t, the third generation has started!

The Smiths: Dizzy is still in college, just became a Junior, majoring in Psychology. Her brother Garrett is Cloud's daddy.

The Lockharts: Kairi and her cousins Tidus, Wakka, and Lulu are in college, Kairi=Freshman borderline Soph, majoring in Business; Tidus=Soph borderline Junior, majoring in History; Wakka=Soph borderline Junior, majoring in Art and doesn't really care that he's in college...; and Lulu=Junior, majoring in Psychology. Kairi's bro Sora is still a child...Rikku, Paine and Goopy are enjoying their oldness and about to retire (Paine probably could but she's a Mad Scientist...).

The Curiouses: Starboy and Boba Fett are in college together, Starboy a Junior and Boba a Freshman borderline Soph, and both are majoring in Literature. Starboy's father Pascal is enjoying his elderly way of life, helping his brothers Vidcund and Lazlo raise their kids. Vidcund married Lazlo's wife's sister Aerith and they had a son, Enoch, who's about to become a child. Lazlo and Yuna are raising their child Pepe in the Curious family home: the Observatory!

Other families...either I've left them alone or deleted 'em. Woo? The majority of my Sims are Knowledge, Family, Money, and Popularity Sims. I avoid Romance Sims as much as possible because I don't need the drama of adultery in my Sims' lives right now... Though Goopy's done alright in that he only wants woohoo from his wife...

 

So many different ways to play ... so little time ... I decided I didn't want all those families, so I put them back into the family bin, and yes I know that means they will wander around my neighborhood aimlessly, but that's OK. I'm starting with two college students and a married couple with one toddler. I will add the others into the game as needed for creating future gens, but each gen needs only two unrelated offspring of opposite genders, since I want to play with my gene pool ...

I was just thinking about all that potty training and ... couldn't do it.

So I picked my very favorite toddler character to stay. She is based on my super sim from my other neigbhorhood ... gave her romance parents ... like Pescado I'm wary of the family sims.

And the weirdest thing happened: I had fun playing University when I only had one character to worry about. He's a romance sim who's just about to graduate so I created his future paramour so she could also go through college by herself. They're total opposites ... he's a romance sim who used his influence to get other people to do his assignments, a laid-back kind of guy who bought a bubble blower for the dorm to share. Real rock-and-roll dude with tattoos and lots of charisma. She's a ladylike knowledge sim who would be a witch if I were allowed to have witches ... I think I'll make her a natural scientist since she has my all-time favorite lifetime want: max out 7 skills ... I want her to join the secret society and will devote her college days to figuring out how it's done ... and no I don't want to know! Half of the fun is figuring it out for myself ...

They need to have one kid for the next gen, and with any luck it'll be a boy. If not, I'll just add one more family with a built-in male toddler ...

I think keeping things small is going to be a nice change.

 

My favourite neighbourhood to play was Strangetown...probably b/c it was so strange. Anyways, now most of the orginal sims are either old and useless or dead, and the only sims left are my normal (but ugly) sims:(. So I now I don't play Strangetown anymore. So I created my own neighbourhood, complete with totally dysfunctional families. I'm now sending the teenagers of the orginal sims to college now, where the parties never end.

None of the first sims have hit elderhood yet, but they're getting there. Plus, my town is beginning to overflow with whining toddlers and babies... better plan an appointment with the social worker...