These two ideas sum up nicely what I've just started on my game. It's worked, they've already had four kids (well, with a little help from CTRL-SHIFT-C ) and Straight Plains (in the downloads section here) is a wonderful map for something in the middle of nowhere.

I have a list of ideas of stuff to have in your town which you can find here .

I'm a bit late in replying here, as the thread seems to have moved on, but I start my new 'hoods really small. The minimum is a house for my first Sim(s) to live in, and a shop selling groceries and clothes (probably mootilda's minimart). The house will probably be a Maxis one or a tiny one I've built myself. The rest can come later.

Teston Woods (my test 'hood) started off with a single Sim living alone in a little house in the vast empty expanse of the Arbordale terrain. Scattered around the landscape were a shop (mootilda's) and a couple of restaurants, as the first thing I wanted to test was the non-appearance of restaurant chefs. My Sim's first friend was his paper girl -- she was almost the only person he saw! Then I created 30 townies with the townie tree, and he married one of them -- a woman he met in a restaurant who told him that she was a general. It turned out she really was a general and she went to work in a helicopter!

New Desconia started with two Sims, 4 houses, a shop and a park. The shop was of course mootilda's. Three of the four houses were Maxis, and the fourth was a copy of one I'd built for Veronaville. I actually built the park to suit the landscape.

If I want to play a large mature 'hood, with lots of Sims and lots of places to go out, then I just load up Veronaville - my first and favourite neighbourhood. If I want to do something new, I can create a new family or two. Over half of the pretty Veronaville houses are still unoccupied.

A bit like Peni, and unlike Zarathustra, I just want to get started playing, and don't want to spend a few weeks building first. I really only build when I have to.

I agree that there are a lot of good ideas in the Maxis community lots. For example I learned how to put public toilets in my own community lots by copying from the Stratford Strip ones in Veronaville. I really don't understand why some people dislike them so much. (In fact the majority of my Sims live in Maxis houses.)