15 generations since November?! D: I've had my game for longer and am not even half way there lol! ..And thats coming from someone who pretty much plays on a daily basis for hours xD

Do you just stop playing the elders or you just stick with one family?

@Gcgb53191
How much Sims do you got? I got just about 6 Sims per generation, play every household in rotations and got untill generation 8 in 2 months (although 8 will be bigger).

I've got a tonne of families, I usually play whichever one I feel like playing the most, which usually leaves elders to fend for themselves. I despise elders so much, at one stage I lumped them all into one lot, set the game to fast forward and left them to it for 3 hours, lol.

If I played in rotations it would obviously be far less generations, I've also had a couple of plantsim offspring's, which as anyone who plays plantsims will know, makes procreation insanely easy.

My game is very out of order at the moment, I've got sims older than their great grandparents, for example.

I made a family tree at gen 8 (or was it 9?) and tried to make a recent one, but wow, large family tree's are painful. x.x

Tell me about it. I just realized that EVERY SINGLE PERSON in Pleasantview can be placed on a single family tree.

It's kind of you to offer, but it story-telling isn't your thing, there's no need to bother. Not my thing, either. I always want to keep my sims happy. Romance sims only target other romance sims, no cheating otherwise, etc. Make my sims happy, but makes my stories boring. Also, I really can't take decent pictures to save my life.

Population control is your friend. I find that if you're going to go long, so to speak, you just have to let people go, or you'll drive yourself nuts. I have the "Real Sickness" mod, which helps because if a Sim comes home sick or catches something from a sick family member, I don't generally coddle them (No soup for you!) aside from letting them stay home from work if they have vacation days and letting a kid stay home from school for one day. So there's a pretty good chance that a sickie's disease will escalate, and they'll corpsify. Along with a good percentage of their household, of course, if the germs get spread about, and they usually do. I consider it Darwin in action.

On top of that, I also sic a "plague" on my neighborhood every 4 or 5 rotations or so, or as often as needed (I play in 7-day rotations myself, until there gets to be about 40 households or so, total across the main 'hood and all subhoods, at which point I'll switch to four-day rotations. Any shorter than that, for me, is too short.) Anyway, during a plague rotation, I kill usually about 10% of the child-and-up population, more if things are really out of hand. I let the random number generator decide who will die...although I confess that I'll "cheat" if one of my extreme favorites randomly comes up on the "cull list." Then I'll usually choose someone I don't like in his/her family to die instead.

Now, I totally understand that some people can't bring themselves to kill Sims...but I guess I'm cold and heartless. Except when it comes to my darlings, of course. But for me, I find I play best and keep going with a neighborhood longer if I've got fewer than 60-or-so households to play. Population control keeps me in the neighborhood of that number once I hit Generation 4 or so, which is usually about when I'll hit the 60 household mark if breeding is average and I started with my usual 5 households, and then onwards from there. It also means that my immortals are sometimes not-so-immortal, because they aren't immune to the "plague." Which can sometimes be a good thing because they're generally the ones I'll tend to get bored with the easiest. But then again, sometimes immortals are amongst my darlings, too.

I'm pretty sure I have that "real sickness" mod (or something similar). I won't kill them unless I have a storyline in mind for them (for example, the mass suicide of the teen-to-elder stage males in Harmony Community when the SCIA infilitrated the cult commune), but every so often, there's a huge spree of illness that seems to run through the neighbourhood. I've had entire households die that way.

I do some population control as well, but not as...extreme as iCad's (I'm too much of a wimp to deliberately kill my sims unless it's for setting up a household). Only Family aspiration sims are guaranteed to get married and procreate, everyone else is at the mercy of the random number generator for accidental pregnancy/abortion, whether they roll the want to get married, and also if they are able to find a partner. Anyone who I decide doesn't get to have children is moved in with a sibling: I hate elder-only households, and not only does this cut down on household numbers but also gives the procreating sibling an extra pair of hands or two to help with the children.

Generation-wise though, I've been playing one 'hood in strict rotation for three years with a rather exponential increase in household number, and am only just reaching generation five.