I know that each career track, including I think part-time careers, requires at least one townie to be its "boss"... so a town should support at least that many households. Any other requirements beyond that?

Heh... that sounds great, Carlos. But I am not so much asking how many SIMS to create (since the game will fill in the sims it needs), but more, how many lots with houses I need to provide, at a minimum.

I dont know if this helps you or not, but I placed a few empty lots that I set to "townie" residential lots. Even though I built nothing on the property, I followed cars around the neighborhood and it seemed like each townie lot I had created, contained an NPC. For instance a fireman and policeman. I would think that the game would somehow generate bosses and employees for all the careers, even if they didn't live in houses. Maybe if you dont actually have any lots or houses for NPCs, it will act like the Sims 2, where you could talk and interact with them and everything, but they don't actually own a home you can visit.

I assume it might work like that, although, I'm just guessing.

The service sims (firemen, policemen etc) are a special case... they ALWAYS have a special, invisible household, at least as I understand it... they never live in a visible house. Normally, sims who are assigned to be your boss/coworker etc are either assigned the job from among the available townie sims, or if there aren't enough, new sims immigrate, move into an empty house, and take on those jobs.

I guess you could be right, the boss/coworker NPCs could live in invisible houses too, if there aren't enough actual houses for em... I should just try exporting a one-house town and see what happens

OK, thanks Carlos I guess that settles it! It's not strictly necessary to build any houses on the lots.

I was test playing a first test world with only one residential lots and one community lot (a park) and while going to that park I met about 4 different sims, only one being a fireman.

The only thing I would say is that if there aren't houses for these sims they tend to just disappear and appear, rather than arriving from somewhere.

I have had similar experiences as others. In the past I've had a family living in a town with houses only on seven other lots, all the remaining lots standing bare (this was Sunset Valley). The Sim in that family who had a job had a boss and co-workers generated as needed, and none of them lived in any of the available houses.

Well in my small world the npc's started marrying my own placed sims, it was a bit annoying.....

I think 20 households is a nice, round, sustainable number. My current game started with one household (running AwesomeStory on a Sunset Valley map with additional cribs and lots). I've run a cycle of getting the adults jobs, having them meet all co-workers, switching to the co-worker families and assigning them jobs, etc.

The population has stabilized at ~60 with 19 households living in town and 1 large homeless household, plus the NPCs of course. Each career has about 3-5 sims in it, but Military has 10 (!?)

CarlosFilipePedro, I think what you want is AwesomeMod or twallan's Story Progression.

http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...board,31.0.html
http://ts3.tscexchange.com/index.php?&topic=996.0

The minimum number of households for a functioning town is 1. If the game requires more to fill any purpose, it will generate one. It is possible to create a town with no households at all, but it won't actually be playable until you make one, the one you are playing.