How do you play?

[treegirl17]

I've been curious on how people play.
I always make a new neighborhood. I set up a college. I make about 6 male and female sims. By the time they graduate they all have paired up for marriage. I usually have a set type for each family. The overachieving bookworms, the not-so-hardworking, and the rich family and the single parent household. I usually mix it up by making the lazy household kid become super smart and hardworking. And the bookworms kids be the complete opposite.
I also like my tradition households via 1950s. The housewife and business man with two kids or three kids. I always use family & fortune aspiration, too.

How about you?

[wrensville.co.uk]

I play the Sims by creating a new neighbourhood, adding and editing lots, commercial and residentail andfd then creating the sims, I give them a house to play in and watch their move unless I want them to gain a certain skill, depending on my writing I might add, edit or end a sims Life,
At the moment I am enjoying playing the Lewis family and Mrs Crumplebottom, she is the same as the game object.

The Lewis family will be getting married today, then I can add more detail about the Cheromots.

I tried to play the premades but my computer went reallty slow, but I love playing my new sims.

[Sammisu]

Alot of ways.

Like for instance...
1) Make one blank neighborhood
2) Make a random woman and move them in
3) Make her get a job
4) Make her house look good
5) Make her get married, preferably to another woman
6) Adopt six children
7) Move out each kid when they age up to adult
8) Delete parent's household for more room in the neighborhood
9) Repeat.

Or just completely build a new neighborhood from scratch and make everybody and build all their houses.

Or make a household with the characters from my favorite show

It sounds boring but I usually find something interesting to do and I like to make stories with them so it's not a total waste of time and I improve my writing skills.

[ani_]

I like to play the whole start from scratch, build the hood as the generations go by and the economy to be integrated. In my current hood I still have a lot of community lots I would like to have, but can't because nobody is interested in owning them nor can they afford it. My main hood I play in rotation, with tax collecting and bank loans, and any public buildings are funded with the tax money. The building itself I'll build freely, but the furnishing is via tax money.

I'm currently also playing the über megahood. Just starting out so nothing major going on there. With this hood I'm going to move everybody from the other hoods, into pleasentview. I'm not a subhood fan, and I want to see all the Sims in the main hood when I start the game. This hood will of course not start from scratch, I don't rotate, nor do I collect tax. But I did delete all community lots so all businesses can be owned by Sims. Except for a few, like library, city hall, and two parks.

[akksgurl]

Depends on my mood. Right now I have three neighborhoods - a BACC, a personalized Megahood (I killed off all the sims I don't like in The Great Plague of 2011), and a third I'm still in the process of setting up which will be a quasi-prosperity challenge hood but mostly just a hood with an integrated economy. The BACC has all sims I created, the Megahood is EAxis sims (obviously), and the other hood has a mix of sims I created and sims I downloaded (I like using those TSR challenge sims but I never do the challenges, I just yank the sims :lol: ).

[TUL]

Whenever I make a new neighborhood, I make between 4 - 7 families, complete with children, grandchildren, etc. and give them bios and a family story.
Then I build houses/place houses/etc for the families to live in and play from there.
Generally, my teens have met their love of their life by mid-teens, but if they haven't, one of the first things they do upon growing up and moving out is find someone - although it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be together forever. I rarely put my Sims though Uni, but when I do, it's usually just a chance for they to quickly get their grades up and then party and woohoo (the latter isn't my fault - ACR makes my college students so horny!)
Then, the new adults move out on their own, have kids, lather, rinse, and repeat.

[hlvspomtactfr]

I know what you mean about ACR and Uni, TUL. One of my sims who is a family/romance secondary would constantly want to get engaged in college. However, the second another pretty girl walked by he was all over her and wanting to fall in love with her too! He's been engaged three times in uni alone. lol.

I like creating new 'hoods with multiple families too. I spend so much time meticulously planning everything and of course creating really thorough bios.

I play mostly prosperity challenges. I've had a few really good ones, but the neighborhood always ends up dying. Right now I'm rebuilding a new hood, but instead of creating new sims, I'm going to transplant the ones from my favorite old Prosperity hood (using Simpe).

I also love playing the mega/uberhood. I love reading about and playing with maxis canon.

No matter which neighborhood I play, my style is kind of the same though. I totally follow their wants/fears and lifetime goals. I let ACR and chemistry choose their mate. I keep families small and everyone is always close to their family, despite moving out. I always have them call at least a few of their extended relatives over for dinner every night. That is, unless there's some reason for them not to like their family.

I always have a story for them running in my head and sometimes I'll even write it down and share it on my lj. I try to figure out what motivates their wants/fears.

[zumppe]

The first two years I played only my self sim + family + friends (fictional family and friends, not real); I started out in Riverblossom Hills (I didn't know anything about any hoods or any premades, so it was totally random), and stayed there (obviously, 'cause you can't move from one hood to another, and my family was already established in RBH). I created a lot of families, everybody knew eachother... the premades and townies were there (I had never heard of clean or empty templates), but weren't touched that much. A few of them got to befriend "my" sims though. This is still my main hood, with a few hundred of my own sims; I play with aging off, and the seasons are set to whatever I'm having IRL.

When I learned about clean and empty templates (and possible problems with overpopulation, due to a huge amount of NPCs and townies and such) I tried building a custom hood from scratch and cloned my family and friends from RBH. Very fast I noticed it just wasn't the same without the premades and the townies; like in real life, I want there to be strangers and strange neighbors and other "random" people and stuff, I wouldn't want to live in my RL home town with just my family and friends either... so I ditched the custom hood and went back to RBH. Home, sweeeet home.

At some point I got frustrated 'cause I never knew who the *ell people on these forums were talking about, when they discussed the premades... so I decided I'd try to play the premades in different hoods (obviously, I knew only the RBH ones). I took a quick look around in Belladonna Cove and ... ummh, Veronaville maybe..? Anyway, I was almost bored to tears, so I just quit and went back to RBH. Why would I play a bunch of total strangers, when I had a town full of "my people"?! But somewhere down the line I wanted to try out some things (like hacks and parts of the game I hadn't tried before, but didn't want to risk my own hood with), so I loaded a new savegame (so my beloved RBH would be safe), and started messing around in Pleasantview. This time I had absolutely no expectations, so it went much better than the previous time. The premade characters in PV were maybe a bit more interesting than in the other hoods, for some reason, and as time and generations went by, the sims became "my people" as well. This hood I play with aging "sort of" on; I have aging off, but age my sims up when I feel it's time (the usual sim time goes waaay too fast!). Now I'm at... ummh, gen 7 or 8, and absolutely love my Tricou, Goth and Broke descendants. I haven't created a single sim myself in this hood, they're all born ingame, by premade playables and some premade townies (no random townies, since I want to be able to recreate this hood later).

Because things went so well in PV, I thought I'd give the other hoods one more try, and now I recently started playing ...Belladonna Cove (why do I always forget the name of that hood?!). So far I'm a bit bored, but I'm waiting for the characters to grow on me. I have no idea who's who and what their storyline "should" be, just like with PV, so I'm playing them however I want. Which I often find out afterwards is totally opposite of how they "were meant to" be played. :lol: (which is fine, since I don't like the original storylines.)

[grammapat]

I've done it all: play a hood as Maxis made it, using the bios THEY wrote to direct Sims, and otherwise letting them accomplish whatever they want. OR: letting them all kill themselves, and "helping", until the hood is empty. Putting all the major players, from differant hoods, into a new hood - Smith, Curious, Pleasant, Goth, Summerdream (I have downloaded a collection of their houses). Then creating "story lines" for them. Created an alien hood, without townies,etc (using mods), and populating it with extream aliens. The totally evil, dark blue ones that want to kill everyone (with ray guns that WORK, and the plant-cow); the pale blue "fairies" that live in the woods; the green, happy "frogs" that have litters of babies - but often die. I've geneticized all my custom colors, so wind up with MANY colors. And then there are all the challenges. I often start stories, but get bored doing that (and confused about uploadine). Actually, I couldn't play Sims AT ALL without all my behavior & game mods, and all my CC - it's a totally new game!

[wthrwthoutyu]

When I learned about clean and empty templates (and possible problems with overpopulation, due to a huge amount of NPCs and townies and such) I tried building a custom hood from scratch and cloned my family and friends from RBH. Very fast I noticed it just wasn't the same without the premades and the townies; like in real life, I want there to be strangers and strange neighbors and other "random" people and stuff, I wouldn't want to live in my RL home town with just my family and friends either... so I ditched the custom hood and went back to RBH. Home, sweeeet home.


You can use the NPC and Townie Maker to spawn a different set of Maxis-type townies in a 'hood made with empty and clean templates. Turn TestingCheats on, shift click on the sim currently being played, choose Spawn, click through the menus until you find the thing (I'm not sure if it's "Townie Creator", "NPC and Townie Creator" or exactly what it's called.) Depending on your expansion packs, either a dead tree or a copy of the repo man's gun will be spawned.

You can generate townies singly or batch generate them, choose to generate NPCs, all sorts of generating options. (Just make sure when generating special NPCs to set the age and gender correct; a nanny is always an elder female; the gypsy matchmaker is always an elder female; Grand Vampires are adults, not elders or teens.)

That's what I do. Create an empty hood using empty templates and batch generate townies; I just got sick and friggin' tired of the default bunch of townies that comes with Pleasantview turning up in every neighborhood I created.

But on topic! ...

It depends.

If I'm doing an Apocalypse, there will be only the Apocalypse family in its own separate neighborhood.

I tend to add a Uni hood when a first playable teen is ready to go off to college. I rarely make sims in YACAS at all. I never bother adding a business or NL subhood - the NPC and Townie Maker can generate the Grand Vampires without adding a subhood and I just build my business district into the design of the main hood.

And my families may be anything. Male/female couples, same sex couples, single parents, large families, small families, sims that never have kids, serial monogamists, married and forever faithful, group of friends or elders who live in the same apartment building, career types, business owners, hard scrabblers trying to make a living off the land, plant sims, vampires, etc. In a non-Apocalypse hood, I like to have a variety of things going on.

And sometimes I have a sort of catch all hood for things I want to try out, but that I don't want to clutter my regular hood with. I have one of those at the moment. There's a family where the oldest is a teen taking care of the six younger siblings his parents adopted in a few day's time, right before they croaked. There's a guy who moved into an empty lot and promptly "lost" all his money, so he has nothing but an old radio - he doesn't even get the paper because he can't afford a subscription, so he can't get a job. There's also a celeb sim over there; I want to check out what sort of kids he'll produce before I decide whether to take a chance on adding him to my regular hood.

[nuidyaforever]

Original and varied - what most Simmers would call 'weird' but I call 'creative'. I like to have lots of different hoods with their own styles. There are a few rules I follow when setting up though. I always use custom skins and eyes for my Sims (with the exception of my oldest hood, which predates my No Human Law). No modern or historical hoods - no hoods set anywhere that even remotely resembles Earth, for that matter. Alternative science-fantasy for the most part, and always, always matriarchal. Apart from that, anything goes, and the more unusual the better.

- VT

[Josepina]

I'd like to see that nuidya. Sounds cool.

[Rawra]

I often play the pre-made characters. I like playing each family's scenario and raising the family's kids to adulthood and allowing them to marry. I dislike including townies/NPC's into the family photo albums, because they never age up and they are so annoying. Each pre-made family has a family bio and a family story. Each Sim has a Sim bio. What I love doing in my game is pause at a very special moment, arrange the camera around at a good location, and press the 'C' button. Then, I would write a short caption about that picture. I have recently reset everything and am attempting to play all the pre-made families, one by one. So far, I have done the Goths, the Pleasants, the Dreamers, and the Brokes... but I still have a lot more to go! I still have the Oldies, the Burbs, the Larsons, Chester Gieke, Malcolm Landgrabb, the Jacquets (this time, I am going to only play the Jacquets and move in Florence Delarosa), the Tinkers, the Ramirezes, the Curiouses, the Smiths, the Grunts, the Beakers, Olive Specter and Ophelia Nigmos, the Singles, Ajay Loner, the Capps, the Montys, and the Summerdreams. It may take a long time to get through all of them, but it will be worth it!


And the Calientes. :heyhey:

Me? Either I make a family of three (parents & a kid) or I make stories. Like, lots of stories. I never have the patience of playing more than two generations, so I guess I'm not that hardcore simmer.

[zumppe]

You can use the NPC and Townie Maker to spawn a different set of Maxis-type townies in a 'hood made with empty and clean templates.

Thanks, yes, I know; but I want to keep the premade ones, since like I said, I want to be able to recreate my hoods later, and also because I like them in a way... they're familiar faces, like neighbors you don't know very well but recognize when you meet them on the street. :) I don't mind them at all, the only reason for trying the empty/clean templates was because of the rumored risks of overpopulation.
The totally random townies I could live without though.

Maybe I'd grow tired of the premade townies after like 10 years of playing or something like that (I doubt it though, since the longer i "know " them, the more they seem to feel like old friends), but so far I have no problem with having the townies, as long as overpopulation doesn't kill my hood. If it becomes an issue in this hood later on, I'll have to reconsider the empty or clean templates then, for my next hood. So far so good. :)

[wthrwthoutyu]

Maybe I'd grow tired of the premade townies after like 10 years of playing or something like that...

Yeah. I've been playing the game for years, I've lost neighborhoods to computer death, boredom, glitches, etc. I've had many neighborhoods and I've seen the default townies a lot; eventually I just got to the point where I never needed to see Goopy again, so that was a factor for me.

And having a different set of townies in each neighborhood makes each hood feel more unique and that adds to the game for me. And I can skew things in interesting ways; in one hood, I set the townie gun so I could create more elder townies than usual. Now I have a bunch of crotchety old newspaper thieves all over town ;D

[smellincoffee]

I begin with the Maxis sims, but create a few families of my own. I then play the game normally, telling a neighborhood story, and add new CAS families as needed to introduce new genes or last names. The last names bit is more important, since without it I'd end up with a lot of Pleasants, Goths, and Calientes.