This question was asked on another forum I go to. I always find these types of question really interesting so I thought I'd ask it here too.

How many hoods/households do you play?

I play two hoods. In Jericho I have two families and then there is my main hood Midsomer.

I have around 20 households in Midsomer, but because it takes so long to get through one round right now, (I started round 14 on december 5) I'm going to change the way I play. There is about 5 or 6 households that will always get played in each rotation, but the rest, I'll play them when I feel like it.

Specially after I start my new hood. I'll move all my current sims there, but I'll also add there all EA sims that came with the EP or store worlds. So that's too many families to play in one rotation.

Because there is probably like a hundread million EA sims already if you count the population of all the worlds, what I'll do is that any sim family that has kids or teens, will get a house, so I can eventually have them grow up, and any sim I feel I do some day want to play like the Bird family, I'll also give a house but the rest, I'll turn to townies. I'd like them to live in that vast nomansland where townies come from. Because giving them all houses means I'll have no free housing for my own sims and I think it's faster for the game if I make part of them townies.

I know playing with the TS2 style ageing and not playing all households in every round means people will drop out of sync with their neighbors but that was never an issue for me. Currently I don't have a feeling my hood is progressing because it takes so long to do a round.

In Sims 3 I play one hood and usually try to play only one family. I find that if I switch to another family Story Progression has screwed up something I've done when I come back, so I avoid switching if at all possible. (I wanted to throttle Story Progression when one child grew up from child to teen with a bad trait because it just had to change her schools and her grade dropped from an A to a C or D. Another time it stole all of the Nectar out of my Sims inventory and sold it through consignment.)

I only play one per save, so if I want to try out a new family, I make a copy of a fresh edited, never played world and start with them. I do have a favorite, my self sim and her boyfriend from China. I want to try letting them get married after they finish University. She already had an oops kid from a one night stand, so I am ready to see the kids born from a foreigner and how that will play out. Time for me to stop testing out things and actually play a family.

My main game has Sunset Valley and Riverview joined up with Traveller, so I can play sims in both. I have some sims I play every round, others that I play some rounds and leave to story progression in others, and there are some that I'm not interested in at all and are always progressed on their own (ageing and story progression happen once per round, with the last family - NRaas and Awesome lets me do that beautifully).

This round in Sunset Valley I played 9 families - next round will have 11 I think. I'm currently in Riverview, where I'm playing 4 families this round.

I also have a save in Apaloosa Plains which is my Perfect Genetics challenge and at present only has one household I play, though as the next generation of perfect sims grows up I may well include a second.

There is also a save in Moonlight Falls, with just the one played family, that I started when I first got SN and didn't have an update for AwesomeMod - I keep thinking about going back to it but never actually get round to it. There is also an old Twinbrook save with 10 or so households that I got bored of and so has been abandoned for the moment.

One family spread out in 5 houses.

I always play a town, not a single family. Once I've played out a story with a family, I switch to another. In all the time that Sims 3 has been out, I've played Sunset, Twinbrook, Hidden Springs, Appaloosa Plains, and Lucky Palms, each time starting with 2-3 families that were immigrants from the previous town.

If a family's interesting to me I'll return to it again and again. I like the random pairings that NRaas story progression comes up with; I also like it when Story Progression moves sims around town. It mixes things up a bit, and when I come back to a family that's moved or that has a new husband or wife or baby in it, I play it as is. I make an effort to play sims with their traits and lifetime wishes as set by the game.

i have 10 saves....8 are EA ones where i play whatever household i want...i dont do story lines or anything like that
i just play whatever household tips my fancy for the day....

now the other 2 are my town that i made...1 is normal sims...no SN's or celebs...and the other is full of them
the normal 1 i do at least try and keep track of whose is town and what they are doing...

One family, one town. If I need a change, I'll just move that family to another town. I've been playing with the same family ever since Sims 3 base game came out. Many many generations now. I'm not a legacy player - don't care about those - but I just happen to like this certain family and haven't gotten bored with it yet.

I just moved my young adults out of the house. I got them in their own place, gave them jobs, got them pregnant, whatever, then went back to the "parent" house and saved. Then I switched households back to the kids house and did a save as and created another saved game with them as the active family. So now I have one saved game with the parents and one young adult who's staying there (to take over that lot when they're gone, plus I have horses and a huge garden and don't want to rebuild for that), one saved game for one son, one saved game for the other son, and one saved game for a daughter. Now I have 4 separate save games that they're all living in but I can play which ever family and make them live the way I want. It's like 4 alternate universes. I don't switch back and forth between households during each play though. (Unless I go to a party at one of the other family members houses and realize I forgot to give them a crib or something like that like I did yesterday.)

All the families in town; around 90 familes, 150 sims.

I have a similar strategy to Melbrewer. I like to keep a short leash on certain families, and I don't want SP fiddling with them. So I have these alternate universes where different family members take different paths.

I also have a few families in different hoods who have nothing to do with my primary family. It's nice to be able to alternate to an entirely different scenario.

I currently have about 30 saves between me and my sister and with a couple of exceptions, I only play one family per town. I like for each town to be fairly personalised to the family I'm playing there, so it would be too complicated to put them all together... Just thinking about putting them all in one town makes my OCD hit the roof!

I have two towns, Sunset Valley and Twinbrook. In Sunset Valley I always feel like home, cozy, and I find my way around, while in other towns I'm always like "Dammit, where's North again?!"
In Sunset Valley I have my main family, consisted of boyfriend and girlfriend who're currently young adults attending University. Also, this is the save I spend most of my time on. In that save there's also ONE more household I play; usually I put like all the Sims Sims from my original family are going to marry, and then I ignore them. Thanks to Awesome Mod, I get to choose which Sims/households are 'Blessed' and therefore preserved from the StoryProgression.

In Twinbrook, I got my eight-member household which is the family I use for testing. I believe I managed to corrupt Twinbrook in the progress, but still, I can't just throw my Sims away like that. And in Twinbrook I only play that household.
And in Twinbrook I made a SimBot! Lol.

Also, I like playing other worlds, too. Moonlight Falls has very similar building/architecture style as the town I live in IRL, so mind as well start building/playing there if I get the inspiration.
I'm a big fan of Bridgeport, but since it has a horrifying routing, I prefer not to play it at all.

Also, I tend to use Nraas' Traveller, to travel between non-vacation worlds. I miss the sub-hood feature Sims2 had.

my plan is always to play a single household in one neighborhood pretty much until the neighborhood explodes. my last couple neighborhoods have had issues where after about one sim year, my game will be fucking inundated with unstoppable geysers of cars, which make this plan an impossibility. entire platoons of cars spend a hundred years driving up from the ocean's depths with the singular purpose of ruining every tiny, quivering particle of my shit. they are fording the rivers and gushing from the mountains, belching trails of fiery oil-smoke. if you were to split the earth in the middle of town, cars would erupt from this blackened, sulphurous hell-maw and overrun the population, drunk on blood and murder. do you know the sound of death? it is the roar of their engines--one single, long note growling in the distance, daring you not to shit yourself in abject fear. 20,000 cars deleted in a night! 5,000 cars in half an hour. there is no escape. i create neighborhood after neighborhood and i know now that the world ends in neither fire nor ice--it ends in cars.

i dream of a world where i can actually play some of my families again, but that would require that EA release a game that actually works, which they haven't so far, so i feel like i might be SOL.

so a really roundabout answer to the question posed:

i don't play any families at all. thanks devs.

I have 3 families in SV... just started my 3rd one there 2 days ago. 2 in Riverview, 1 in Hidden Springs, 2 in Lucky Palms, 1 in TwinBrooks, 3 in Bridgeport - just started 3rd one the other night, 1 in Pounawea, 2 in Queenstown.

I only play one household in a save, though I have duplicated a few saves because I found another family in the original interesting so wanted to spend some time with them. I currently have 2 Sunset Valley saves, 1 Riverview, and 2 Lucky Palms that I play. I've found that if I have too many games going and am away from any one household for too long that I have a difficult time getting back into my groove with them.

I've been using Twallan's Traveler for awhile, so I only have one big ass save that takes up 1.5GB of disk space (last time I checked) which I back up periodically (weekly or monthly, depending on how often I play).
I've played at least one household in every hood and every once in awhile I'll travel back to an old hood and play an old favorite household or I'll have my current sims hook up with some old favorites.

I play one family per save. I currently have four saves at the moment. One in Riverview, one in Moonlight Falls, one in Rflong7's Legacy Island II, and one in BMC's recreation of Veronaville from Sims 2. I also have a few of my favorite families saved to the bin so I can either move them around to worlds I want to test out and see if I like them enough to start a story with, or just reuse them again in general because I love them haha.

Last edited by sunnyside83 : 27th Mar 2013 at 07:20 PM. Reason: typo

I'm surprised at all the people who only play one family per save! Why is this? Is there some tech-y reason behind it? I rotate between about 40 odd different households in my Lucky Palms save, I have a little connection with every one of my families

Who's hitting disagree buttons on everyone?...

I'm also surprised - I tend to get bored of just playing one family, and like to set up stories between them which you can't do if they're all in separate saves. And this way you don't have to choose which grown-up child to continue playing with, you can keep playing them all!

This surprises me too. I like my sims to communicate and interact with each other so when you switch families you have story-lines forming behind your back that you can then continue. But, at the same time it's nice to see how flexible this game is so everybody can find their own way of playing

We all do this for various reasons. I start out with a world.. like LP, bring in all the families I want to play in that world then save it for the 3 different families I have there. What I love to do is watch what those other families are doing while I'm playing one family because... well, all my families are friendly with each other of course I don't play any EA sims so I can concentrate on only my families. When I switch to another family in LP, the other 2 families are living completely different lives from their respective saves and for me, it makes my game interesting.

When I first started playing TS3, back when it was just the base game, I'd dump all my families into SV and do the rotation thing. Not anymore I find doing it this way I can concentrate on the family I'm playing and really enjoy it. I hated doing rotation in TS2 but had to do it to get everyone the same age. Now we don't have to do that and I've not done it for years.



Sometimes, I end up making another save of my other families because they're doing so much better than their own original saves. I make sure all my CAS sims are very friendly with each other. Since I don't like any EA sims marrying my sims, I make sure those families progeny end up marrying into my other families.

I guess I only play one family per save because I am a huge control freak. I have my storyline in my head, and I don't generally agree with SP. For example, I switched households for 10 rl minutes, and when I came back all the kids had new jobs, the daughter hooked up with a guy who had been hit by an ugly stick, they adopted a cat and a bird, and the parents got in a fight. Somehow they managed to do all of this while they were all sleeping. None of that worked with my story for them.

Besides, my active family gets into enough trouble when I give them a little free time. That's how the snowflake day massacre and the leisure day debacle happened.

Like lewisb40, I usually only play one family per save, mostly so that SP doesn't screw up the storyline of my CAS-made family. Right now I have 3 saves--one for my fae legacy, one for my witch legacy, both in MF, and the third save is where I allow myself to switch families once I get bored with the one I'm playing. I'll create a two-person family in CAS, with one being a carefully thought out Sim and the other one randomized (just so my main Sim has someone to hang with 24/7)--unless I want them to be siblings; then I usually make a twin of my non-randomized Sim. I'll use DE to make the random Sim into an NPC, so I don't have to worry about controlling him/her. I plant them in EA's newest world and then I let SP have almost full control over that family, except for wish fulfillment and opportunities. Once my main Sim either dies or turns into an elder, I stop playing with that family and create a new one to add to the same town, but I still keep tabs on my previous family to see how SP is (or isn't) screwing up their lives. Tho, due to recent circumstances, I may limit SP's control over my active family....I allowed my main Sim to sleep in the Cursed Sarcophagus of Kings one too many times and now she is an immortal mummy. I am trying to urge myself to keep playing with her, while secretly thinking of ways to put her out of her misery....