So, I was wondering what size neighbourhoods people like to play, and why? By size I mean several things, really - the amount of buildable space and/or lots in the main 'hood, the number and type of subhoods added and the population (both playable and total). What's your neighbourhood like in terms of these aspects, and do you enjoy playing it? Why (not)?

My neighbourhood is quite small. It has 28 playable sims, across 9 households of varying sizes. There are no townies, and a few NPC's, whom my sims don't interact with much. The neighbourhood map is sort of, ummmm, average sized? I play Plasticbox's Middleground, with some added lots, both residential and community. There are still a fair few empty houses and apartments, and about 10 community lots, some of which are still being developed. There are no subhoods, and I will only be adding the vacation destinations (when I need them, i.e. when a reasonably well-off sim rolls a want for a vacation), not a Downtown or shopping districts. I play university/college in the main 'hood, so my sims can still go to college, but they stay at home or move to the Hall of Residence in Middleground.

I am really enjoying playing this 'hood. Having a fairly small number of households means that rotations go by quite quickly, which means that the neighbourhood progresses reasonably fast, which I like. I am currently enjoying all of the households, so the 'hood keeps my attention well. Also, I like how interconnected the households are, and how, when I see sims on a community lot when I visit with a playable, I can generally come up with some kind of reason for why they're there with the other sims who are there. For example, sometimes sims from the same family show up together, which I like to see. Or Marshall Gavigan randomly shows up when I take his daughter to the lake (Marshall moved out of the family home after cheating on his now ex-wife, Nadine), and it's nice that he can spend some time fishing with Isabel there.

There is also some "logic" to the development of the 'hood - I build between rotations, so every so often new buildings are added - sometimes because I need them (like a church for Marlon Biggs & Erika Swain's wedding, and the duplex that they will be moving in to when they graduate) and sometimes because I want them, or think that they would look nice or maybe be useful in the future.

All in all I am really enjoying this 'hood, in part because of its "smallness". How do you feel about the 'hood(s) that you play?

I can't really make a comparison because Little Carping is large and has been for quite some time. I'm working on Polgannon atm also and though not nearly as big as LC, I think for many people it would be quite a big hood - there are 17 families (of various sizes).

As far as Little Carping is concerned, I found out quite a long time ago that I don't like having stories, getting so far and then starting someting new (I know some people like that) so I decided Little Carping wasn't a particular type of hood, just my hood and I could tell all the stories I wanted to tell in that. Without opening it up in SimPE, I can't tell off hand just how many sims there are but there are a lot - about 65 families anyway. I play in rotation. If I'm playing regularly it takes me over a month to do one round. I only play one day per lot but can remember most of the stories anyway (I use various features, like the story-telling feature to keep records). I simply like the variety, I like telling stories in small steps (Polgannon has some similar story-telling aspects) and I like seeing the characters I have created every so often and not losing them. It suits me but I guess it wouldn't suit every one.

It's hard to say. I love small little neighbourhoods - especially farming/traditional style neighbourhoods. I like to play them in the 1950s, and go through the years as the neighbourhood becomes larger due to larger families and other sims moving to the neighbourhood (townies, NPCs, CAS sims etc). I always have a goal of getting the neighbourhood to a large city style neighbourhood but I tend to get bored when I reach the 1960s. (10 years = 1 generation. I know that's not how it works in real life, but if I played 10 years as 10 years (e.g. babies born in 1950 are then mid-to-late child stage in 1960) it would go by waaaay too fast for me)

I always want to make a huge city though too! I see all these pictures of these ridiculously high buildings and skylines that people have made and I'm like "how can you even play that?" it's sooo high up! Also I remember reading some mod a while ago about making it so community lots and residential lots can be the same lot (putting one on top of the other?) and I've always wanted to do that to make more compact houses with community lots under that actually work as a community lot, but it looks like a lot of effort and work and apparently it's kinda glitchy. Though just talking about it has made me want to build another city. The only thing that ruins it is that lots are soooo far apart than what I'm use to in real life, so whenever I try to make a city it always ends up looking too spaced out for me.

Both. I like my megahood. But there are times when I want to spend more time with fewer sims, too. So yeah, I like having options.

I'm not a huge fan of townies and NPCs. I want all my sims to be played. If there were one change I'd make to Sims 2 it would be to have the NPC jobs be actual jobs that playable sims do.

Every time I try to start a small neighbourhood I end up with a large number of business hoods because I need to expand. Sigh.

In the beginning I liked large hoods but now I try to keep my hoods down to around 6-10 families. Much, much easier to keep them going without having to take notes.

Small neighborhood? What's that? All my Sims who I ever actually play live in a huge megahood anchored by Pleasantview. There's about a half-dozen shopping districts, downtowns, vacation destinations, and all three universities attached to it. That includes all the Maxis-issue hoods (heavily modified by me), as well as lots of locales that I created from scratch, including Jambalaya Quarter (home to the artistic, backwoods, and eccentric Sims of the megahood) and Darkwood Hollow (a secluded forest that's been home to 6 generations of magical Sims), both of which house enough playable Sims that they could each make up an entire standard neighborhood on their own.

Trying to keep my stories straight with so many different neighborhoods is kind of a losing battle, so a few months back I realized that if I treated my Sim-world like a comic-book-universe, I could have all sorts of fun crossing over Sims from my magic neighborhood with the upscale downtown, with my sci-fi Sims taking survey expeditions into the shopping districts of the city, etc. Didn't really make keeping the stories I have in my head straight any easier, but it made it a lot more fun!

I like small to medium sized hoods. My main hood now is Plasticbox's Elsewhere although I also have Middleground downloaded as a shopping hood-if it will work. I love how there is detail out of every window and nearly every house has a view of the sea. Tightly spaced small houses give the hood a feel that larger spaced houses don't have. However I do need a bit more space than it allows for, so the shopping hood will have the 'larger houses' (that means more like 2 by 2, or 3 by 2 lots) and more businesses then the main hood will allow for. I started with 13 families and no townies and love how close they all are. I have added in two townies (tourists) since and will make a few more. Even with the double aging mod that I use the very first baby born just left for college yesterday. The attached college is Mootilda's Brainania changed up a little. It's also a smallish island to keep the theme going. He wanted to be in the police force and since they need another constable I tweaked a police station into a police academy dorm. The kids who are less brainy can attend the college on the main land. One boarding house and using a few of the community lots that I have changed around that are close to the centre of town. My last self sufficient hood on a larger template with about 45 families was just too big. I like all lots to be playable, load well without lag. I do not go above 4 by 4 or 3 stories high.

I like playing medium sized hoods. My smallest neighborhood has 17 households right now (RKC hood) with the largest just under 40. The larger neighborhoods have their fair share of townies/downtownies/dormies/tourists/etc. and subhoods (holding the businesses, community lots, etc.), while the smaller ones were built with empty templates and have less attachments, usually only a university and maybe a vacation spot. I've found that I prefer about 25-30 households per rotation. It gives me enough variety in a hood that I can play all sorts of different styles in one rotation and lets neighbors be friends with neighbors without everybody always knowing everybody else.

I always think I'm giving myself far too much building space when making a new neighborhood. However, when I get in a building mood I fill up the space with plenty of different size houses and then decorate around them - I love seeing the neighborhood map packed to the brim! I have a harder time filling up the subhoods. I like categorizing my subhoods by putting owned/potential 'sale' business lots in the shopping district, community/entertainment lots downtown, etc. but honestly prefer building residential lots.

I like to see neighborhoods grow - another generation, a few new business popping up, some new families moving in...

I like small neighborhoods-and I create them that way. No unnecessary NPC's, no townies, and things can be really simple.

In fact, I started another hood with just 4 adults, with the idea of an 'post-apocalypse' style play. It's been fun and easier to control one house. Of course it will grow, but for right now, it's just them.

Every Hood of mine is rather large. My main one has 850 characters according to SimPE.
A lot of them are the premades and townies.
With about 150 being my own creations.
(I don't use clean templates)

I generally keep a sub hood small like a village, but haven't ever achieved that with an entire hood set.

Anyone that has read my messages knows that I like small lots, on small and simplistic terrains, that is/are tied into a megahood.

small preferably but when you realize that for every typical non owned community lots style there can be multiple owned versions it tends to go larger.

im not a huge fan of adding downtowns and subhoods as the storytelling romantic in me wants everything to be in just one place so i achieve that cohesive feel i often go for but it makes map searching hard and i never did understand why maxis went with the smallest sc4 plot available for terrain making as it severly limits vision

I like both too. Sometimes it's fun to play a bustling metropolis and sometimes it's fun to play a more close knit community. The smaller ones advance quicker, of course, when you play rotationally. That's interesting. But then the larger, slower moving ones are nice too because it's almost like it gives me more time with my sims.

Small neighborhoods grow rapidly when you like large families and university. So it's not really a consideration.

Well, my neighbourhoods start small, but they tend to get bigger, at least in terms of population. I've only ever played 5 neighbourhoods (all of which are still active). By far the most important of these is my Veronaville, which I've been playing ever since I got the game back in November 2012. It now has 87 playable Sims in 29 households. (I prefer the word "households" to "families" because some of my "families" are very unconventional, and some genetic families like the Capps and Montys extend over several households.) I envy Maxon being able to play 65 families in a month; it takes me more like a year to get round everyone in Veronaville. (I see that I last played the Downtown Capps [Cornwall, Regan and Kent] in August last year, although there's quite an interesting story there with Kent accepting that he's gay and finding a boyfriend.) Today Veronaville has two sub-'hoods: Downtown, added quite early in my game, and Bluewater Village added late last year, but I started off by just playing 3 CAS families and pretty well ignoring the pre-mades. Today I try to play everyone in loose rotations of (usually) 24 hours. With aging off and very little breeding, there's no need for me to worry about keeping their ages in synch, and I admit I do play the Sims I like best a bit more than the others. Arguably my Veronaville is a bit like Little Carping in that there are lots of different stories going on (but sometimes overlapping) at the same time, and, with loose rotations, I can choose which one to play. Chester Gieke and the Larsons are still in the Family Bin, and I haven't played all the Bluewater pre-made families yet. So Veronaville with its sub-'hoods is what I consider a large 'hood. Its disadvantage is that it takes so long to get round everyone, but there's always a lot happening there, and it's where my favourite Sims live. I sometimes have some nostalgia for the early days when I saw Andrew and Gloria every day, but I like all the Sims I've added to it too.

My other 'hoods are all comparatively small, and none of them have sub-'hoods. Of the 5 neighbourhoods I play, Pleasantview and Strangetown are the size that Maxis and Tarlia made them, with a handful of extra lots added. I played them mainly to get to know the characters I kept reading about on MTS. I added two CAS families to Pleasantview, one of them a "trailer" family to befriend the Brokes, and moved the Burbs and Oldies into empty houses. I've so far played one loose rotation there. As I like a family of my own to help me find my way in a new neighbourhood, I added one CAS family to Strangetown; the Singles and Ajay Loner are still in the bin. I haven't played all the Strangetown families yet. (I'm a bit scared of visiting Olive's house!)

My other two 'hoods are my test 'hood Teston Woods, and my island 'hood New Desconia. Teston Woods is small in population but not in area. It uses the Maxis Arbordale terrain, and initially I only had a single Sim living alone in that vast expanse of country. Today there are four families, but it still has the feel of a sparsely populated rural landscape. You don't need a small terrain to have a small population. New Desconia is also small but very different. It uses the Tiny Isle terrain. It started off with two single Romance teens (the founders) and five townies. That turned out to be too small -- everybody turned up at every community lot visit -- so I soon added 3 more townies. No children are allowed on the island, but a lot of other young Romance Sims have come, attracted by the free love lifestyle. Today there are 11 occupied houses on the island, one unoccupied one, six community lots, and a "changing hut" near the pier used for "processing" new arrivals. As a result, quite a few Sims there live in tiny houses on 1x2 or 2x1 lots. Most of the houses are clustered near the pier. It will be hard to add many more while retaining any of the island's rural character. So New Desconia is small in area, but perhaps no longer so small in terms of population.

Here in brief are the statistics for all my 'hoods:



(Maybe if I wrote shorter posts here, I'd find the time to get round all the families in Veronaville in less than a year! )

How did you build the pier? Do you have pictures of your island neighborhood? Have you added any custom content (such as harbor deco)?

There are some pictures of my island 'hood here. I might make some new ones as I've changed my in-game pics to a larger format, and there are a couple of new buildings since those pictures were taken (including a lighthouse on top of the hill). The pier was built with a few parts from Criquette's Marina set . The island can only reached by small sailing boats.

Definitely large neighborhoods! In terms of everything. My first custom neighborhood, Townie Place fits perfectly into the 'Large Neighborhood' category; it has well over 70 households, and residential lots well over that no. Community lots are growing in number. And the terrain can house a large number of lots.

My other neighborhood, which happens to be Mountainside Valley, the terrain can also house a large number of lots, but I've only played for a little while, so the population is still small (smaller than I'd like), but it will obviously go up eventually, so no worries about that) and number of lots is as it is.

I really enjoy the size of the Maxis 'hoods, but I can never seem to fully re-create the feel of them. Belladonna Cove is all I played for a long time. :~)
Once I found out how to make my own neighborhoods, I went out of control. Recently my original BC crashed and burned (still not sure how,) so I've had to restart and salvage my family that I've been playing around with for a few months now.

Anyways, the hood that family has moved into is East York; east of their original neighborhood of York. It's pretty big. I always like to create different regions in my neighborhoods. East York has a downtown that sits atop a large hill that I've used deco to give it a real city feel, with some apartments intertwined. Then, even higher up, are the luxury homes & mansions. They're close to downtown because that's where all the businessmen & women live, the doctors, etc. Then down below it's all just your typical family homes. I also have plans to add a beach, too.

Perhaps it's because I've grown up in a city quite similar- we have our downtown with the skyscrapers & what-not, but surrounding the real "city" are smaller neighborhoods & districts that are rather close knit.

I like large neighborhood template (hood deco addict here), but normally have less than 20 home lots. I like to space homes out and place lots of hood deco trees/other deco around them. The max amount of Sims in a household never exceeds 5...really 3 in most cases. So, I guess I'm a small to medium neighborhood type of player.

Trying something different in my new neighborhood (using a cleaned Veronaville template) - there are only 17 home lots and 13 are currently occupied (ACR2's settings have been tweaked reflect the need for population control).

I've also only added one sub-hood, which is a shopping district only - there are currently 29 various community lots...this includes a university campus and two vacation spots. Lastly, two vacation neighborhoods are attached. Both of those contain only 3 lots (2 lodging and 1 community lot). Should note, that I really enjoy building community lots.

There will be no other neighborhoods added, as I wanted to keep things simple this time. All college students will remain in the main neighborhood (mod) - not playing a university hood, but being able to allow certain Sims to still go to college will really make things a lot more enjoyable for me.

In the past I primarily played large lots, so when I choose the terrain for my hood-remake (it was originally Pleasantview) I wanted one that had a lot of room for lots. I'm really happy with my edited version of veronaville. I have crazy amounts of space, and roads spaced differently so that different size lots fit in different areas.

I have quite a few lots. Most of them uninhabited, and most of them downloaded. The ones I play I often build myself, but I want the town to look like an actual town so there are lots of houses that are purely decorative. If I only had the houses my Sims live in, it'd be a ghost town, specially on such a big terrain. At some point a Sim may move into one of the empty houses, depends on my mood when I start the family. Sometimes I want to build, sometimes I really don't. It's nice to have options already if I don't want to build.

All the maxis subhoods are added (minus the desert-style university). I'm too lazy to build my own university or downtown, and Bluewater Village I added because some of my lots are "meant" to be there. I rarely go there with Sims, but I still like it to be there. And I love BV, so all three tourist destinations are a must. All Sims live in the main hood (or university), so far nobody has moved into one of the subhoods.

Population is probably quite small compared to a lot of people. Some Sims aren't played, they are there to fill a function in the hood. They are usually shop owners, but there's also the mayor and the minister of education. I have 12 households that I actually play. Since my play-style revolves around set characters and stories that I act out, I only have interest for so many at once. I have a crap-ton of townies though. I've made the game generate like 400 of them, by using testingcheats. Because I have so few households of my own, and don't like ghost-town-ness, I like lots of townies to make it seem more alive. I started out with 200 or something, but felt I saw the same ones too often, so I added more.

I love my hood. After all the re-makes due to issues I've had lots of chances to fine-tune it to my preferences, so now it's designed just the way I want it to be. The terrain is perfect for me, the lots and the population fit my preference, and everything is pretty due to lots of townified CC and mods.

I like big terrains and big community lots and actually prefer houses to be larger too - I like a lot of households, 50 or more, and I like lots of townies too. So of course at times I have too many families and I move them to new extensions. And I like plants. My town has a ridiculous number of trees and parks with native trees and Calla lilies (we call them Arum lilies) and Proteas growing in the mountains, they are also native plants. So I plant stuff left, right and centre. And ponds, because we go fishing So if I do not add enough water and trees the hood feels very empty and strange to me! Of course that sometimes cause different problems! Just wish I could use that perfect plants mod in real life too!