So I started this challenge up again. I have the five founding families, each divided by aspiration and play style. After four seasons, here's a brief recap:
The Fauna Family have the family aspiration, can have garden plots and trees, and use the maxis "Try For Baby" (instead of ACR's). Their free time is used to strengthen family bonds. They have 5 kids (2F, 3M) and another on the way.
The Rock Family are a pleasure and romance combo. They can have garden plots and fish. I've also allowed them a small pool since they encourage fitness in their tribe. Their free time is used at their own discretion (ie. free will). They have 4 kids (4F).
The Crystal Family are fortune sims. They can only have garden plots. Their free time is minimized, as they'd rather be working towards making money. They have 4 kids (2F, 2M).
The Wood Family have the knowledge aspiration. Their food source is orchards. Free time is spent handing down knowledge (ie. writing novels). They have 4 kids (1F, 3M), with another one the way.
And, finally, the Water Family are all about friends and popularity. They throw fishing parties as frequently as they can, and rely solely on the fish for their sustenance. They have 4 kids (4M), and another on the way.
A typical afternoon in the Water tribes lands:


(Obviously no specific ToT CC, )

Does anyone know of some natural looking grass clothes for children and teens? My first Sand Tribe child just turned child and is wearing the Family Fun or store grass set but the top is bright blue so it looks more like a dress-up outfit rather than the real thing.

She's such a cutie

@joandsarah
http://modthesims.info/download.php?t=411368
These look a bit more neutral but for girls only.

@Dagwon your families sound really interesting and diverse,

@Violetpadfoot I ended up fencing off the gardens in my game to avoid that. I don't think I've had a round where a teen didn't go on a murderous rampage lol. This round a sim killed the only girl present who was unrelated to the boys and her uncle before dying.

I feel kinda bad realizing just how many sims I've killed so far in this challenge.

lbsgirl24, I downloaded those last night and just checked them in CAS a minute ago! I did a ton of searching yesterday for castaway/islander/primitive/grass clothes and they were all I could find. Although I saw someone's blog (Wish I had bookmarked it) that had clothes I've never seen anywhere before and they had no resource post. Of course they may have made them for their own game. FP's are cute but the top still looks like it was bought from Target. The pale skirts do look a lot more natural though.

That's a lot of dead sims. Do they tend to become enemies during the teen years? I only have 3 tribes and they are all BFF. I dislike killing off playables so knowing how I play I will end up with everyone living.

Some of them do become enemies as teens but most of them were murdered by a low aspiration sibling (or died after attacking a sibling while having low aspiration). Most fights have no slapping or anything just an all out brawl. A single mean and/or low aspiration teen can do a lot of damage in my game as a lot of other teens hey aren't friends with are close by. My sims fight a lot for some reason. I couldn't imagine letting all my sims live but then again a lot of my households have more than 8 kids.

I only have about six dead sims at this point, but most deaths were caused by a low aspiration child. Clifford's was b/c he really disliked Ashanti, and I really don't recall why. And Kelsi starved to death. But generally most of my "fights" stay at the poke one another level, and I don't consider that grounds for killing. Though if I did, I'd have a lot more dead sims as most of my children get poked by/poke siblings almost as soon as they become a child. Most of my older kids don't like their younger siblings due to maxis's weird "Oh a new baby. You're stealing mom and dad's attention from me. I don't like you" philosophy. I've only ignored one fight, 'cause the boy lost and I really need to even out my boy/girl ratio. So I've decided that if a boy looses and one of the instigators just aged up and has bad aspiration, then it was just a little scuffle and there are no consequences. Of course that rule will probably die once my gen 3s start getting born, but right now... ~VP

I don't know how you're still in the mindset of saving sims from fights VP you've had almost twice as many babies born as me. How do you prevent the poke wars from escalating? I don't count them either but after one sim pokes/shoves/slaps another sim they'll likely be attacked by that sim themselves (unless the other sim is insanely nice). I haven't noticed the really low relationship thing, although my new children seem to like all their siblings more than their siblings like them. I wonder if the mean sims will slowly be wiped out from my population, after all they're more likely to get into fights.

There was one instance where I kinda cheated to save the only surviving child of a family when he was killed by one of his adoptive siblings (he was taken in by his mother's lover after her death). I still killed him but I had his guardian plead for him. After he came back to life he fought the same kid again but he won that time. My gen three has just hit teen last round and I'm starting to regret my brutal policy regarding fights a little bit. At this rate all the sims who aren't related to everyone else will be killed off. But I think i'll only let up a little bit I like the idea of slowly having my death rate decrease generation by generation. And yes being an obsessive nerd I've made a spread sheet showing the death rate for age groups and boys and girls and the average number of kids and stuff.

Since I don't want an overrun of population I've decided to implement a stopping point for baby having with my neanderthal sims. If a family has 10 or more kids,the oldest surviving child having completed one season at the teen camp (or they have at least two surviving grandchildren), had at least seven pregnancies and five surviving children (at least two sons) the family line is considered secure and they may stop reproducing unless they have the wish to woohoo/have baby or ACR makes them. In keeping with watching my community begin to prosper I've also decided to extend the adult lifespan by a few days every generation or so.

I've noticed something interesting about my gameplay this time round sons are rare and I'm playing a patriarchal society, before when girls were rare I played a matriarchy. It's funny how the happenings in my game are helping to develop a culture of sorts for my sims.

I don't know of everyone here has seen this thread: http://www.modthesims.info/showthread.php?t=520266 It's all about prehistoric sims and I love the gameplay ideas of the original poster. Lots of helpful links to CC as well.

[QUOTE=lbsgirl24]I don't know how you're still in the mindset of saving sims from fights VP you've had almost twice as many babies born as me. How do you prevent the poke wars from escalating? I don't count them either but after one sim pokes/shoves/slaps another sim they'll likely be attacked by that sim themselves (unless the other sim is insanely nice). I haven't noticed the really low relationship thing, although my new children seem to like all their siblings more than their siblings like them. I wonder if the mean sims will slowly be wiped out from my population, after all they're more likely to get into fights.
/QUOTE]

I feel like my game is broken- nobody fights in TS3! The most that ever happened was a yelling match, but it seems like it takes a lot of interactions for a sim to go slap someone else- even to yell! And it's ironic, because even though I have a habit of making my CAS sims perfect little angels who are family oriented etc, the moment I stop playing a family in tot and kids are born or age up, they end up neurotic and evil! So I have all these 'evil' 'neutoric' 'emotional' sims running around and all that means is that they laugh evilly form time to time, and never even get violent!

...this is making me not want to buy TS4 when it comes out. Sims need to have out of character moments like everyone else. If my TS2 didn't take 1/2 hour to load because of all my ccs I'd consider reinstalling it for this challenge, but then I'd have to go get a bunch of ccs for it... ugh.

Oh well. If any of you play TS3 at all and want to use the world I play TOT in that I created in world editor feel free (also help me whine about it). lol... it's on the exchange. Sandsteps Isle.

http://www.thesims3.com/assetDetail...assetId=8022507

I wish my game only took half an hour to load! It's an hour at least. I can't imagine trying to play this challenge with TS3. I tried an asylum once and it was the flattest asylum ever as hardly anyone passed out, started fires or did anything interesting at all! They would pass out and nearly immediately wake up again. Sims 2 sims pass out in front of the loo or fridge and stay there -drama! So I hope they are making the sims 4 sims AI more like sims 2. if it's anything like the sims 3 AI I won't be playing it much.

I'll simply control the population rather than have a million babies and then kill them off. I can't do that. This is why I started with only 3 tribes.

Yeah, we are having fun talking about our game play over on the other thread.

So I just had something happen in my game that I'd never seen before. I was using the ROS and on one house it told me to have a sim die of starvation and I rolled a die that had the same number as the people in the house and the mother was the unlucky choice. Then on the next house I ended up with the task of having one sim dump another so I broke up that couple and decided that the woman from that couple would then marry the guy from the other house who's wife died. So I moved her out of that house and into the other house. I'm back around to that house and trying to get their relationship score enough so they can get married. They're inside and I see her ex-husband walk onto the lot. And not a normal walk, he's being all creepy and looks like he's trying not to be seen. Then he walks up to the front door and steals the newspaper with this evil look on his face and then runs away. And it wasn't even the new one, it was the paper from like 2 days ago. Then he did it again a couple hours later. It was so funny and weird all at the same time. That's my favorite part of this challenge is that it makes me see things that in all my years of playing sims I've never experienced.

I've only had 1 fight, and I ignored it. Mostly because it was between to children, and there were several adults and teens around who would have reasonably broken up the fight long before it became fatal.

In other news my gen 3 have started to teen so it won't be long at all before I have to break out the togas.

What's to stop you initiating fights? Or deciding that slapping is rare enough for you to kill sims when it happens. You could also just play with less cc or only themed cc. I only really play with the cave sim set and the simstones clothing.

VP, I also decided to start the teen lot at the end of my Dark Ages generation. I want everyone to marry by rank, so I am creating lots for each class of Sims. I can't wait to see how all of yours work out.

I am one round away from my second generation Neanderthals and I want to change that generation a bit to make it more interesting to play.
I have thought of two options so far.

1. To sort of follow history, start an Iceage, such as Starsaphire has done
2. I'd figured that as the Neanderthal Era progressed, the people/sims would learn other ways of getting food. So I thought I'd give them farm animals like chickens and cows. Also, they'd get smarter and find ways to pass their knowledge on to later generations, so I thought I'd give them books.

I like both options, but I don't know if I can do both. An Iceage would last for about 4 seasons I think, and then there are only 2 seasons left before the Roman Stage. And I'm totally NOT gonna do another generation Neanderthal, I've been playing this challenge for forever and I'm not even through the first genereation.

Maybe I'll do the Iceage first and give them the farm animals after as some sort of introduction to the Roman Era.

Any opinions on this??

I think the ice age is a good place to give them books, if you want to. Because ice age is lots of time spent inside, and thinking, and passing on knowledge. Farm animals...personally, since you've got two seasons after the ice age, I'd introduce them then (a result of the thinking done in the ice age) and then the farming knowledge is 'complete' by the time you get to the Romans. For storytelling purposes, that order makes sense. But then again, it's your game and you need to have fun playing it, so whatever you want goes.

woah, lots to respond to! In regards to not killing sims and having TONS of babies, well I like sims. Huge households amuse me at this stage. And I plan on being utterly brutal in the roman times with my hunger games inspired arena choosing. I do realize having dozens of houses to play once my sims start marrying will be a bit annoying, and i might be less lenient on deaths then. but for now, this is working. Plus i have a shortage of boys, and the damn boys keep dying. And I want it to be as much like an actual civilization as I can, and that in my mind requires a lot of sims. That and T&Q keeps kicking my butt. I have the odds set so high right now that a lost of sims are being born. I drop the odds by a set amount at the beginning of every round, but its gonna take a bit before they drop to the point where triplets and quads aren't so prevalent. Though it would help for me to play more often. But since I can only stand NeanderSims for so long, and have adopted another challenge, my play takes forever. For a time frame, I finished my last round around Christmas (the date I updated my website is Dec 27th) and I'm about halfway through this round. My only goal is to finish this round before I move at the end of May.

As to keeping the fights from escalating, i try to interfere before it gets to the attack stage. If I notice a pair of children poking, I either distract one or both of them with fishing, or use macrotastics to make them socialize to get higher relationship scores, depending on why they're fighting.

And I had something else I wanted to type about, but I can't remember what it was... ~VP

@samantha_kathy: the way you tell it seems like a good historical-ish storyline. I'm totally gonna do that!

if you do do an ice age be careful to keep the fish spread out (ie everyone has a lot of fish they can cook) when I did an iceage i almost lost everyone because the adults were the only ones with fish and I forgot to transfer the fish over to children when they died.

I'm also going to do an ice age to finish up my Neanderthal stage for history's sake, but mine is going to be really short, only one season. I also haven't had a lt of deaths. The social worker has been an issue but since I was informed I can get kids back with the blender, that hasn't been as bad.
I kind of altered the rules a but from the beginning in the interest of slightly fewer problems later on, I created 6 families (they dwindled to 5 after an affair, a fight/death, and a spouse who starved to death after her kids were all taken away) and I created 2 orphans for marrying later on, because I want all of my families to have family trees dating back to the same time if possible.

Soon it will be time to start marrying them all off! I'm going to have a lot of single siblings though, I can already tell lol. My game was also not equal about genders. But it works out, because someone has to stay at the house anyway, so like in my family with two identical older daughters, the eldest is getting married an leaving so her younger sister can stay in the house and be a spinster lol

Also does anyone else keep track of their family trees? I started it in a notebook but my daughter keeps coloring on it and it's not very practical long term anyway lol

I keep track of my family trees. For a while i was using MyHeritage and TribalPages to do it, but I got bored of having to enter everyone in. Now it's a list on a website. Not exactly a "tree" but it will keep track of who is who's parent and who married who. I might switch back to a family tree website in later generations, but for now this works for me. ~VP

I do keep track of my family trees. I use the family trees present in the sims game. I just make a printscreen and write names under it. It's a lot of work actually, but it does look good. I don't know if it's possible for me to use this method later on though. For now, I have 5 different family trees of the 5 founding families, but in generation 2, there will be more connections between family trees and I'd have to make one big family tree that has to be updated after every family, with new pictures as the sims get older, and all the connections would have to be clear. I think that is going to be to much work and it'd keep me from actually playing the challenge.

So if anyone has a good family tree website, which allows to upload photo's as well and makes a nice tree looking thing (so not a list like VP has), please tell me!

Family Echo, perhaps?

So, I came up with a way to avoid having the children that were taken away by the social workers just floating around in the world, not growing but alive, so that generations later I would still be able to see them roaming around as children. When the social worker takes them, I say another tribe kidnapped the kids, so I decided to create a new lot with someone to "keep the kids in line" so that they can grow up when they're supposed to, but I won't have to keep cheating and giving them back to their families. Currently he has kids from three different families, ranging from teen to newborn, but it's an interesting lot and I think I really like it. I started playing and in basically no time at all, the round was over. He'll basically be considered gen 2, but an older gen 2. He's in-between one and two age-wise but I like it.
Life is a bit harder for Sims on that lot, they only eat once a day (they can have juice as needed, but only one meal) and I won't let them have a composter or anything so no fertilizer --> worse crops, but I figured that's more realistic.
I think starting generation two, I might introduce some kind of progress for each family--some might be more skilled at cooking, some might have a higher level of fitness, etc. I still have one round left before my Gen 1-ers are elders, so... exciting! Finally getting somewhere lol

That sounds like a really interesting idea. Out of curiosity are they still marriage candiates or are you considering them removed from the gene pool?

Meanwhile in my hood I've just finished the second to last round of neanderthal (that is assuming the game doesn't decide to wipe out all my teens due to age up this season). It seems rather pointless for me to be setting up new yhouses for the teens who married last round for a single rotation. The family i thought safe from destruction has been dropping like flies. Both parents are dead so their mother's widowed sister in law had to move in to stop the kids from starving. So far i've killed 11 gen 3 sims, mostly from that same family.