Like say if you placed the populations of three towns in one town or perhaps even more than that how far do you think you could take it before the game just up and rage quit on you?

I think this depends a lot upon your computer hardware. Also, on what mods you use- the vanilla game will start culling sims when there are too many.

No good answer exists without a field test. Depends of particular machine, a town, loaded mods and CC, and so on. Also - there cannot be simple answer like "20 sims residents in town works 2x slower than 10" - relationships, traffic, pathfindings' problems grows in not certain linear way. Also - it depends of your expectations - something acceptable for the one would be "rage-quit" reason for the another.

According to game flaws well known, broken project (there's no reasonable data manipulation ingame implemented, no database type engine for example), simple mistakes and bugs which are in every big enough software... Don't expect miracles, even if you're dating with Cortana, at some point it will break any back

We have a regular contributor at NRaas who has been playing an insanely huge world for generations that has well over 800 residents. The steps he has to take to make that world work smoothly would make most of our heads spin, but for him it's all a labor of love.

The world I am playing in currently is Riverview with around 225 residents, emigration/culling disallowed, and it's just starting to buckle under the load. I'm sure I could take it much further if I had a stronger processor, took all kinds of other steps with it to reduce RAM usage, dialed back NRaas StoryProgression even further than the typical options allow, etc. but then I would be maintaining the world more than having fun playing in it. I loaded up a fresh copy of that world recently just to test something and was amazed at how sparsely populated it was, and of course how much more smoothly it therefore played, in the beginning.

A big part of the problem is that a large number of sims tends to magnify problems with the world. For example, many lots are defective in the sense that they have places where a sim can get stuck. For example, if a lot fails to have two square wide open corridors, horses can get stuck. These types of errors are easy to make and difficult to spot.

I remember downloading a very nice apartment complex several years ago. Unfortunately, the complex used certain custom doors. I had not loaded these cc doors into my game. So when I loaded this apartment complex into the game and assigned sims to it, many of the apartments did not have functioning doors or a means to enter or exit the apartments. This was not something I spotted right away, because I was using the apartment for a number of NPC sims. My sim lived in an entirely different building. Well, I never noticed that the NPC sims really could not go home. Why should I? I was not following them.

Then the place caught on fire. The firemen could not enter the apartments to put out the fire. What does the game do? It keeps on sending more fire trucks to the fire. Fire engine sirens are going full time.

I have seen lots where sims tend to congregate, and never go home. I have seen this in a Late Night Bar which I transplanted to my world. I have seen it in a vacant lot.

I have seen entire households which consist of nothing but grim reapers.

All of these defects, contribute to lag. As more and more sims get stuck, the game lags more and more and finally grinds to a halt. By the way, the collapse does not occur immediately. Instead, it seems to take at least a generation. That is, the first sims so placed don't seem to have problems. However, the world starts lagging as their kids grow up and bogs down entirely with their grandchildren.

You really have to playtest a world for a long time before you will start spotting errors. This means you cannot build a world today, then upload it tomorrow, which is exactly what many world builders try to do.

Custom worlds tend to suffer from these defects more than the EA worlds, but even the EA worlds have their bugs. Everytime you edit a world, you also tend to introduce errors.

The more sims you have, the greater likelihood that some of them will get stuck. Over time, it kills the game.

Personally, I think part of the solution is to limit the number of residences. Left to its own devices, the game will tend to fill every home you have in your world. At eight sims per home (assuming you do not allow overstuffed families), 20 homes will result in 160 sims. 25 homes will result in 200 sims, which seems to be pretty close to the breaking point. Along these lines, the easiest way to control population is to limit the number of homes in your world.

Now I think there are things you can do to create the illusion that there are more homes in your world. You can create a bunch of faux homes, and then change the zoning to something other than residential. But even at that, you have just created another lot where sims can get stuck. Even if you change the zoning to no sims allowed -- they will still show up and get stuck. Then there is the use of deco homes, which are just placed in the world like other deco items (not on lots where sims can get stuck), and which usually have far fewer vertices than homes built in game.

I've had far fewer issues and errors in custom worlds I use for my games than I get in most EA worlds and the custom worlds are all unpopulated in the start with no lag and few errors.I get the odd stuck pet or horse and it gets reset or starts moving again.I set the population cap very low in the early days of a town like Deery Meadows which is set in 1620 and has no school because there were no schools in North America back then.I've had games in Sunset Valley with Mods where it worked better than without Mods though there would be routing issues with the school having kids enrolled who live too far away to attend.

Say I was willing to go through the pain of maintaing an insane population...any advice on where I should start?

I don't think there is any hard-coded limit. And if there is, I would assume it'd be 2,147,483,647 Sims.

...As for oneself, I can't tolerate more than 50 Sims, even if that number doesn't make the game lag.

If you haven't already, installing the mods from Twallan/Nraas would be a great start. Particularly ErrorTrap, MasterController and DebugEnabler.

Got ErrorTrap and MasterController...DebugEnabler I don't have, the description made it sound like it just opened up either useful, seemingly useless and or literally game breaking commands from the devs. So I'm alittle lost as to how I would use it in this situation.

I use DE mostly for the "Fix Invisible Sims", "Fix Homeworld" and "Objects > Force Error" Cmds.

Whether they're of use is only up to you.

I would quickly add Overwatch, Register, GoHere, and Traffic to those suggestions, as well as some mods from other parties that take care of cleaning up the few classes of vehicles those still might leave behind and those that improve routing and/or cut through the routing failure routines. But those would be practically required for worlds of any size if being played for a long time.

When we get up into the insane populations of well over 500 sims, actual human (non-pet) residents that is with actual households, not counting the likes of Service/Role NPCs, other assorted homeless sims, and animals, then we have a very different proposition on our hands. An extremely strong processor would be a requirement. So would a world with a huge, relatively flat layout to accommodate all kinds of additional residential and commercial lot building, one that is optimized as much as possible and that has absolutely no routing issues built in. Save Cleaning would be a must on a very regular basis. RAM usage would have to watched constantly for dangerous spikes above 3.0 - 3.2 GB or so.

I'm not actually sure how the player I was referencing handles story progression in detail, but I am sure he uses NRaas SP. Probably has just about every single option tweaked in some manner or other to his desires.

A good place to start might be to build up to such a monstrosity slowly. Play a relatively benign world (Riverview happens to be a good choice for EA worlds, but there are a few others). Plan on populating it at a higher level than you are accustomed to. Watch what happens as the worlds resident population is allowed to grow beyond 250, 300, etc. Things will almost certainly start to go wrong at some point, but if you can keep that one going for a while with an intended population increase of say 50 every so many sim months, you might get a feel for what's involved at troubleshooting and constantly maintaining things at an even higher level.

That is, of course, if your processor and graphics card combo can handle all the stress. Mine would never get as far as all that and my patience would likely wear out somewhere before the entire world collapses under its own weight.

My current computer is a 14 year old dinosaur so I doubt it can handle it but I'm planning on getting a new pc soon and since I'm an absolute Sims 3 addict I intend to get one that can hopefully handle it. At somepoint I'll look up advice on what kind of hardware I need to get the game to run smoothly. I also plan to look into troubleshooting and options for large worlds.

I do plan to test what my current computer can handle however...because I'm a masochist like that.

14 years means you're utilizing what? A 1.8Ghz Northwood Pentium 4? How is one even able to launch the game is a question I'd wonder.

I did that once. It got me nothing but a capacitor leaking electrolytic acid.

It's not like it hasn't been updated at all, although it might have been 10 years rather than 14 now that I think on it but I remember the one I'm using now was a copy of my brothers computer which was a custom job done by the computer guy up the road. I honestly have no idea how it's still running though and the graphics card has been known to basically go NOPE NOPE NOPE whenever I try to play Saints Row 4.

But apart from Saints Row 4, Skyrim and the Sims 3 (which as I understand it has been known to work poorly on even the best machines and seems to run OKAY on mine I had my first corrupted save just a month ago after years of playing. Nothing to do with my current project just a Midnight Sun Challenge gone sideways due to a glitch) it runs games pretty smoothly.

Interesting. I'd love to see benchmarks and see how it compares to the 3.2Ghz Prescott P4 HT\Radeon HD 4670 duo I had prior to my current computer. A computer which could barely handle the game at 40Fps.

I talked to my brother and apparently I'm remembering things wrong AGAIN! Apparently he made my current computer three years ago but used parts from my old computer (The one that was a copy of his) so it looks pretty much the same

I do remember it being worked on at one point but I remember it being earlier than three years damn it this is making me wonder if I don't need to be replaced with a new model myself I've just turn 20 yet I think I may have alzeimers

One of the problems you will start experiencing once the population approaches and then exceeds 200 sims is crowding. If a sim shows up at a swimming pool, the whole pool will be flooded with sims. If your sim needs to use the toilet, the restrooms will be crowded, with sims blocking the doors, and so forth.

The same thing will happen at schools. Your sim children will show up, along with 20 other kids. They each take their sweet time going into the school. By the time your kid gets in, the school day is over.

Then there are the mass reapings. You show up at a public lot, along with 50 other sims. Then grimmy shows up and starts reaping. Not one or two, but ten or twenty. You get all of the dirge music, sound effects and everything else associated with a reaping. Of course, going through the process for a bunch of sims takes a long time, and your game is effectively locked up while this goes on.

In other words, overpacking a game world is not a good idea. And why would you want to do it anyway?

Never said I wanted to overpack just populate massively. The difference between the two is that in one case there aren't enough facillities for the sims. Why wouldn't I do it? Assuming I can figure out all the troubeshooting, get a big enough world and find someway to deal with the lag and potential overcrowding issues as you pointed out.

Don't you think maintaining a large town might have some merit in terms of achievement and playing with the essence of the game as a god/life simulator?

Perhaps you don't think so, but I for one think it might be an interesting long term project and a fun use of my free time.

TL;DR: Don't tell me how to play my game.

Because, to some of us, pushing the limits of how far we can take this game if our systems can handle it and stepping in to manage the town when things get out of demographic balance is our idea of fun. Personally, I like some of my sims to live in towns where it's not possible to really know everyone because there are just too many folks around, not counting the silly fake friendships that come by just walking by others with high Charisma skill and the rewards in place.

One solution to the schools problem is to add more schools and manage things with mods to even out the enrollment. I have three public schools in that version of Riverview mentioned above plus many sims enrolled in custom specialty schools in Rabbit Holes around town (NRaas Careers mod). Home Schooling (same mod) is also an option if there's not enough real estate to build more schools and if custom rabbit hole rugs in place of full-sized school buildings are not attractive enough. With NRaas Tagger's map tags on (formerly provided by StoryProgression Extra but now moved to their own mod), I can easily see when venues and other community lots get too much traffic and take action to even things out. I never get 50 sims instinctively swarming around mine at lots like public pools, more like 5 or 6, maybe as many as 9 or 10 if it's a hotspot or a real fun place to be. Sometimes there just needs to be more interesting lots of other kinds to draw the inactives away from the too crowded ones.

I've never seen the massive reaping thing except after some kind of disaster that I wouldn't have played through anyway. My towns' sims seem to pass on from old age in a more evenly distributed fashion, maybe I've just been lucky.