Don't dead sims still count as population though?

My hood has 2176 characters and 2,20GB. When having all ep/sp the limit is over 30K characters, so why would having many playables have technical issues? Sure, some of the sub-hoods are a bit laggy at times and freeze when having too many sims in the sim-bin, but reboot within a few minutes (which is odd, because the graphics are worst on my new laptop) so that's durable and shouldn't be a huge dilemma unless you're talking about corruptions. I've no issue with maintaining a large populated hood as I use very detailed spreadsheets as memory refresher and don't play each sim eternally. It's more understandable to aim for much smaller hood if the simmer prefer longer lifespans or focusing on other part of the game. I'm just play for the genetics and shorter story lines. ;-)

Yes, Charity. Dead sims does count, but they can't reproduce over and over again which is useful when you have an urge to breed family oriented and lazy pleasure/romance sims like crazy. My new rolls/ACR adjusted make majority infertile in certain circumstances so if they are dead or infertile, they can't produce and create more character files.. I'm halfway through my 14 sim days set up and in a fresh start the characters are about 1200 with all sub-hoods.

One reason, I like adding story-lines like war, disasters or plagues. To make sure the next generation won't be ten fold bigger. Beside the alien war, I also plan to do a 10% change of tragedy of every sim each sim week. If I roll 10, these sims will die from a "mysterious" plague. I've never been a fan of fairy-tale ending, so I've no issue killing sims IF it part of a war or plague. Mwahhaha

I think that's one reason why I couldn't play a hood with that many sims. I get attached to each sim and it would be a big deal to have them die.

I like to make decisions on a sim-by-sim basis as to what aging family oriented couples will do once the children have left the home.

- If the couple had their children young (during their teen-early adulthood years) then no more children will come along (unless it's unexpected) as it's time for them to enjoy the freedom they did not have when younger. So, they get to completely focus on themselves and maybe get a makeover, take-up new hobbies that get them out of the house more (which I guess really only works well if you have a lot of interactive community lots for them to visit), have more date nights, entertain friends or neighbors by throwing a weekend party every so often, or just have a couple of friends over for a round of cards.

- If the couple had their children later in life and are still pining for more, sometimes they're allowed to adopt one (this is sometimes used as an option too if more than two miscarriages have occurred), or I roll a die to allow for a higher possibility of them having a late-in-life unexpected pregnancy (by tinkering with their ACR2 settings).

- If only one of them continues to show interest in children post their offspring growing up and/or moving out, then I tend to ignore the want of the sim wanting more kids, unless the other parent has some sort of parental type fear that I can lock-in and potentially get some drama going from should a unexpected pregnancy occur.

- If only the female (I do not allow male pregnancies in my game) has a want for more children and has had a bit of a wandering eye in the past, then there is always the possibility she could get pregnant by someone else and I will not intervene since I use Chris Hatch's mod that makes committed sims more aware when the child their partner is carrying is not theirs.

For the most part though, my gameplay is not driven by sims reproducing, as I equally enjoy playing childless households. So, things are pretty loose in terms of style of play and I like a more hands-off approach where micromanaging my sims lives are concerned...especially since freewill and autonomy enhancing mods sort of push things.

As for huge gaps between ages, that does not bother me much as in real life I was an only child until sometime in high school when my parents suddenly announced they were "expecting", and I laughed because I thought they were just kidding around...they weren't. Yeah, so...

I distinctly remember heavy sighing, then telling them that birth control was still a thing, shaking my head, then hugging them and heading out the door to go play tennis with a friend...who could not believe the news either when I told her.

With me it is more of a ....Well, why not? thing
Sometimes I think: let's adopt this one instead, you can use up some of your vacation days this way.
Or - No, man, enough is enough - one of these days, you are going to have grandchildren!

Yeah, they do, but they don't keep breeding exponentially after they're dead. I mean, this isn't TS3 where even death is not an impediment to having babies.

In theory, neighborhoods can have 32,000-and-some Sims before the game goes "NOPE!" but in practice I doubt that you could have more than maybe 5000 without something happening that screws things up. Since populations multiply exponentially, especially if there's not enough death in the already-existing generations (which is the problem we have in the real world with "overpopulation") to counteract the births, if you don't control things by having a smaller breeding pool, then you need more death. So, population culls. This is, indeed, how I play. I don't mind at all if my pixels decide they're going to have 8 or 10 kids, but I also have many different ways for Sims of all ages to die in place, so there is some control.

Basically, I'm just suggesting balance. If you let Sims breed out of control without also increasing the amount of death, you're going to end up in an untenable situation pretty quickly, either because the game will freak out or because there simply aren't enough hours in a decade to play all those Sims and you'll get frustrated and/or bored of trying to do so.

EDIT: OK, now that I've read Florentzina's post, it seems like she's on-board with killing Sims as necessary so...She's probably good. I'd just have a war/plague sooner rather than later, if I was her. It's more of a problem if someone over-breeds and is also the kind of person who can't stand to see pixel people die.

I don't have problems killing Sims every now and then if it fits a storyline, but killing them wholesale is something i hope to still be able to avoid.

And a population doesn't have to grow exponentially. Look at Japan, for example, their population is shrinking rather than growing. Even with an average of 2 children per couple, for example, you get a population that's almost stagnating or growing/shrinking very little.

They don't have to, no, but if left to their own devices that is their general trend. It makes sense in a "nature red in tooth and claw" way in that in any species it's "expected" that more offspring will die before reproducing than to survive to do so, so lots of reproduction makes sense and if things change -- like they develop "intelligence" or predators suffer a decline for some reason -- then that system gets screwed up. Which is what happened with human population, just since the turn of the 20th century. We removed ourselves from that system, especially in the developed world and in places where things are not as affected by, for instance, religious encouragement to reproduce or at least not to inhibit reproduction. The problem in the real world is that 1) Modern medicine has greatly reduced the death rate at all ages, so there is less of a counterbalance to the birth rate and 2) Population aging. Efforts to lower the birthrate in developed countries by encouraging people to have fewer children, in an attempt to counterbalance point 1, has resulted in older generations that are much larger than the younger ones behind them, which is insupportable to varying degrees depending on the skew and is, in fact, a problem that Japan in particular faces as well as countries that were and are affected by the more draconian measures that various authoritarian regimes mandate(d). (i.e., China's "one child" policy) This is one of those trends that affects population growth, but not necessarily in a GOOD way. I mean, once it evens out when the larger generations die off, if the trend of ever-smaller generations continues, we'll possibly be looking at decreased genetic diversity in the developed world, which is bad in all kinds of ways, too. (Just ask the cheetahs.) In the end, Africa may well end up having the generally healthiest populations in the world because, on the whole and aside from things like dictators who order massacres and whatnot, they're the folks who are the most "natural." Immigration to widen gene pools helps, as well.

BUT! That's the real world. In the Sims world, it's very easy to keep things balanced and healthy because there's no moral imperative to either increase or decrease the population, aside from maybe player squeamishness about killing off chunks of the population when needed. The player decides everything, and some people like letting their Sims have large families, even if that's something they wouldn't want in real life, if only because they are more interesting/challenging to play that smaller households. The main limitation here is game mechanics. There's a part of me that wants to experiment and see exactly how many living Sims in a neighborhood that the game can handle smoothly. I mean, dead ones count, yes, but not in quite the same way as living ones do, I don't think. (Though I could be wrong about that.) But there's another, bigger, part of me that knows I wouldn't get very far before going, "This is crazy!" and killing off half the population. So maybe I'll leave that experiment to Florentzina.

This thread has gotten so interesting!

I would hate to <have> to have a war in my game. I feel like if the Silaxis population was booming out of hand, and the General was feeling threatened, and Loste actually had someone in charge who could make that call, war might be a very real outcome - but it would need to be organic and part of the story, and frankly, loss of life on that scale - even with pixels - would deeply disturb me.

I get squicked out when a parent dies and a toddler is left for the orphanage. There have been at least two occasions where I had a sudden death like that and just quit without saving - even though I personally don't tend to avoid 'natural deaths' in game. I just wasn't ready. I'm not crying you're crying.

That said, culling my population is a thing. Especially in the iteration of Loste that's currently my best and worst. Nearly every one of the uni kids is pregnant and that's like 30 new sims for my hood plus the existing families who keep spawning despite restrictive measures on the birth rates. Luckily, Loki has a biotech station and might unleash a plague on all their houses. I just... don't know if I want that.

LOL I'm probably the exact test-case to avoid having too many playables because while I certainly don't play with aging off, I also don't like to actively kill my sims. I even get nervous when they sleep in the Murphy beds... That said, I don't think I've ever had more than 50 playables total before... actually Loste might have slightly more than that - I think I'm at around 120 there if you count every playable sim from baby to elder.

I'm not really into Sims having wars because...Well, I'm a pacifist IRL. I don't like wars and militaries and all that. So, my population-control-of-choice in the game is a combination of sickness (via the RealSickness mod) and predation (by modding vampire and werewolves to be potentially deadly). Basically, when the population hits about 120 or so playable Sims (meaning, not counting townies/NPCs) who are child-age and above, I "seed" a plague by making ~20% of the population sick. My tracking spreadsheet gives each "eligible" Sim a number, and I use a random number generator (so I don't play favorites) to determine which Sims will sicken, and I go through the households and use a modded object to make the chosen Sims sick. At that point, RealSickness takes over and they may recover (and if they do, they are then immune from sickness for the rest of their lives) or they die. I do not coddle sick Sims -- they get one day off from school or work and more days off from work only if they have vacation days -- so they may live or they may die, mostly depending on whether they're "smart" and sit and watch TV as opposed to...I dunno, maybe ride an exercise bike for hours on end, and of course they spread the sickness around a bit. Doing it this way, I find that I usually end up with about a 15% reduction in the child+ population, sometimes more, sometimes less. And all the while, predation by vampires and werewolves also picks off a few here and there and as a result can (but doesn't always, since they can feed on townies as well) delay me having to initiate a plague.

But, you know, I'm a cruel goddess, and I'm OK with killing pixel-people. I understand that a lot of people aren't. So for them, it's probably better to have zero net total population growth by not letting their Sims have more than one child for each person, essentially replacing themselves. Hopefully, they do it in a sex-balanced ways so that they don't run into breeding problems down the line, especially if they don't use townies. This is a perfectly viable plan for the game, not so good in real life especially when implemented suddenly, as many countries have found to their detriment. Me, I enjoy the challenge of playing larger families and find that I get bored with smaller ones quickly, so my Sims tend to have larger families. So, I need some population controls so as not to overwhelm the game OR me.

While war to slash the population is something that I have considered as a last resort if numbers in my neighbourhood become completely unmanageable, it's also something that's "too real" for me. I'm fine with playing Apocalypse challenges, Zombie outbreaks, "magic wars" between witches and warlocks and all that stuff. But really staging a war with civilian causalities and stuff like that is not something I really want to bring into my Sims game.
I might be able to stomach it if it was Medieval Warfare in a Medieval/Fantasy hood, but not the absolute horror that's modern warfare against a civilian population.
The only thing I have is that if Sims in the military career get fired because of a chance card I kill them and consider them KIA in terms of the storyline (the same is true for the other dangerous careers)



But those problems aren't really existent in the Sims, since they don't have the same retirement system as the Western World (thankfully) has, it doesn't really matter if there's twice as many Elders as Adult working Sims. And for the genepool (which again isn't as much of a problem unless everybody becomes cousins) I can always create new immigrants out of thin air in CAS. So right now I prefer my method of lowering birth rates for my Sims rather than culling them.
Once my current, large generations enter elderhood I plan to build them a retirement village

I think if you haven't changed the life stages, sims just don't live long enough for age imbalance to become a problem. I recently extended my adult stage by a few days because all my adults were becoming elders at the same time their eldest child went to college, which is a little off for me since most of them still had younger kids. If you have a kid right out of college, you're not going to be an elder 18 years later. In my game no sim has yet lived to become a great-grandparent--most of them are barely grandparents when they die.
I determine how many kids my sims will have by roll of a die. Family sims will roll for 1-6 kids wanted, non-Family sims 1-4, and if I roll a 5 or 6 for them it means they want 0. Then I find a compromise between each couple, so if one sim wanted 4 kids and the other wanted 2, they would have 3. It becomes a little more interesting when unexpected multiples happen (Gabriel and Genesis wanted 3 kids but got 4, since Gabriel had alien triplets) or when their numbers are farther apart (Olivia Agnarsson wants 5, her fiance Don Platz wants 2, so we'll have to let time tell whether they have 3 or 4. Olivia's mother is a twin, so that could also come into play.)
Right now the first sim of gen 5 in my 'hood has been born and at least two more are on the way. All those from gen 1 (2) and gen 2 (6) are dead, and all but two of gen 3 (16) are elders. So there's a total of 47 living playables right now. I think it helps that I started out with just one playable couple. If you want to play a neighborhood for many generations, starting small can help it last longer.

Exactly. I was speaking about the real world because you mentioned Japan. There's this general perception, in the real world, that all we have to do to stop "overpopulation" is have fewer babies, but the actual problem is one of balance between births AND deaths. You can't only address one half of an unbalanced equation just because it's more comfortable to make fewer people than it is to kill off those already here. To fix an out-of-balance situation -- if you see it as a problem that needs to be actively addressed -- you need fewer births AND more death at more or less the same time.

Before someone accuses me of being a sociopath: I'm not advocating large-scale death/killing here at all. My point is that the problem of "overpopulation" will solve itself quite soon, no matter what we do, because smaller generations are already in place and the general trend is downward still because the more prosperous a population is, the lower infant mortality is, and when you are fairly certain that your children will survive, you generally don't feel a need to have a herd of them just in case some of them die...folks like the Quiverfullers aside, that is, and their motivation isn't sheer survival anyway. Generally speaking, prosperity is increasing worldwide, so I doubt the birthrate is going to have a huge upswell unless there's some kind of large-scale war or plague. Assuming that doesn't happen, it's just a question of how healthy we will be as a population -- and in terms of climate, of course -- when things even out. I'm pretty sure Africa and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and South Asia are going to come out on top, especially if they can manage to solve the sociopolitical issues they face relatively soon. Europe, East Asia, Australia, and North America have screwed themselves, pretty much.

*ahem* Sorry, this is a favorite topic of mine. I'll shut up about it now.

ANYWAY! It's very true that in Sims you don't HAVE to have exponential generation growth. It's just that if you do -- Like Florentzina, and other people like me who enjoy paying larger families do -- you need some sort of counterbalance unless you are a glutton for punishment. Particularly if, like me, you play with longer lifespans, which means Sims hang around longer AND have a longer window in which to produce offspring. Such a counterbalance would generally be some mechanism that cuts lives short. Squeamishness about that in the real world can cause squeamishness about doing that in game, though. For me...Well, my game is in some respects a giant experiment in sociology so I don't really develop any empathetic bond to the pixel-people, so if killing off a chunk of them is necessary, I have no problem with doing it. I mean, I suppose I could "emigrate" them by sending them to the Sim Bin, but I have a feeling that a giant Sim Bin might not be a good idea, either, from a game-mechanics point of view. So plague it is, for me.

(Interestingly, when I started playing with longer lifespans, I initially limited births because of the wider reproductive window. I didn't want to be inundated with babies. Sure enough, I ended up with a large and age-skewed population after just two generations. Sims imitate life.)

iCad
Well, the 10% rules and spreedsheets, I got inspired by your BACC rules long ago.

As for the elder generation, well, I'm not sure as I didn't figure out how the elder transiition work I just added random numbers when I modified ijAgecon from Simbolical and ended up with many Elders who will live until their 100's while the premade only live a decade long. I did have the teen adoption mod, so I let an elder couple adopt a teenager who will die off when he reach for college.

For those who are interested using spoilers, I will write down how I use aging and acr settings.
My lifespan goes like this:
ACR2 settings is as follow

and finally my uberhood follow our own timeline and after the 14 days set up, they are living in year 2018 and I need to go through 1 simday each household to get into 2019.

Don't worry I'd never think someone is a "sociopath" or anything else just because of what they do with their Sims. Sims are virtual dolls, they aren't alive.
I find this discussion very interesting.

And I'm not opposed to killing large quantities of Sims, just everytime I even consider it I go like. "But I want to play with this family still... And I want to finish up that storyline with him! And she's so pretty, I wanna see what her children will look like" and so forth. I don't avoid it "protect Sims" or something, I don't do it because I don't wanna give up so many toys at once.

Likewise the reason I don't feel comfortable playing war in my game isn't because my Sims would "suffer' or anything, but...well I've looked at the War Challenge in the subforum and the way presented there with having families build bomb shelters and simulating bombing runs, rolling dice for whether they get wiped out in a direct hit is just too macabre for me to make a game out of. I rather have zombies attack.


That's interesting because your setting aren't too far different from my own. I don't calculate them in "years" but rather figured them out by trial and error and I age them up on the first opportunity (whenever that X's birthday is tomorrow dialog appears)
Mine:
Baby 1 day(unchanged)
Toddler 3 (unchanged)
Kid 7 (unchanged)
Teen 11 (reduced from 14 in vanilla)
(don't play college, just use the college adjuster so YA is not considered)
Adults: 39 days (increased from 29 in vanilla)
And Elders: Well it seems like my elders live 7-20 days? That part of Inge's otherwise wonderful mod for adjustable ages is a bit nebulous to me.

Orphalesion:
I messed around the elder bonuses with ijAgecon so that's why my elder live to their 100's if they grow up in platinum. If the hood was set in medieval that would be a bit odd, but it exist people who live to their 100's so I probably won't change that.

But now I'm debating when I should send them (or rather if I should send them) to a retirement house. They basically would live long enough to see their great-great grandchildren. (a generation is roughly 20-30 days in my game) and I've to flag them as family. (I allow cousins, step and in-laws dating with Boiling oil's mod, but sibling and grandchildren icks me - or at least pregnancy as that's mess up the family tree in the game. I had a few incest's in the game, where I forgot they were related due to different fathers, but they're not allowed to keep the baby. How they woohoo'ed? Well, I use hacks/objects from the adult version of MTS2 ).

I am truly bad at killing sims.

Because I am rather fond of the pixels (yes, all of them), I have, of course, valid reasons for no mass killings.

War? My country has not been involved in any wars for more than 2 decades (that is, of course, not counting the fist fights in parliament);
Plague? Well, that is kept under control by the mad scientists and doctors in the hood (that is what they are supposed to do, isn't it? Making medicine and stuff).
Old age? Eventually, after living some happy years in the retirement subhood, yes. Where everyone goes out with a bang and a funeral is a huge occasion. But one can get a lot of life into elders by just inviting them over/on outings/to parties/ etc. without actually playing them, and although I have a rule about them dying after they run out of elixir of life, I admit that I don't always stick to it. Because it is just fun when a widower meets his future young bride at his wife's funeral.
And have more children

I can let Sims die of old age, no problem, but I can't bring myself to outright kill them. I tried that with my original Legacy family and I did kill a few for the colored ghosts but it was just so distasteful I quit.

And the age thing is way off, a good share of the problem being three-day pregnancies. That basically means at least four to five "years" between each child and it's just too long. This is one of the reasons I use the quads mod, just have a bunch of kids at once and get it over with, then if they want more have another batch later. And you know what? That sounds so awful--my Sims have been relegated to the status of animals having litters of babies! LOL

I'm so sorry.



The thing with the elder lifestage is that its length varies depending on the Sim's aspiration level at the adult-to-elder age transition. (Don't believe what all the popups say at the other age transitions; they don't count at all.) There's a "base" number of days that elders will have if they grow up in the green (or if they are created in CAS as elders), and then there's penalties for growing up in the red and bonuses for growing up gold or platinum. That's why there's more than one number to enter for them.



You do a lot of math. I avoid that stuff because I'm not really down with the notion that Sims of a certain "type" will be more likely to be a certain way. I mean, sure, I can see some small correlations, like sloppy Sims being less likely to clean dirty toilets, but when it comes to bigger things like reproduction and stuff...not so much. I mean, in the real world (or at least in the US, which is what I'm familiar with), whether or not someone is likely to use birth control is related to:

--Their level of education, both in a general sense and specifically sex education. More education in general, and more knowledge about how babies are made and how the female reproductive cycle works in specific, and less abstinence-only "education" = more birth control and less teen/unplanned/unwanted pregnancy and whatnot.

--Their sex. Women in general (outside of situations where they're actively trying to have a child, of course) want to avoid pregnancy because it's a temporary physical drain and a huge and long-term financial, emotional, etc. drain since child-rearing is still seen as primarily the woman's responsibility, which is reinforced by things like courts almost automatically giving child custody and child support to women in divorces, even in cases where the man wants custody. Men have to prove that they'd be good primary single parents, where it's just assumed that women will "naturally" be good, nurturing primary single parents. Which is ridiculous and based entirely on sexist assumptions about both sexes. (That's changing in the developed world, yes, but very, very slowly.) So, outside of other influences (religion, for instance), women are very likely to use birth control IF they have easy and free/low-cost access to it without requiring, say, expensive and intrusive doctor visits, much less having to jump over roadblocks put in their way by old, male politicians. Men are more likely to think that it's the "woman's problem" and are more likely to take no responsibility at all for birth control. For instance, market research has shown that more single women buy condoms than single men, and my personal speculation is that a good chunk of the men who do buy them are gay, and they're not buying them for birth control purposes. There are OF COURSE exceptions for both of the sexes, before anyone yells at me; I'm speaking just in generalities here.

--Their religious beliefs. I could say a LOT here, but my aim isn't to insult the religious. So I'll just say that the more religious a person is -- especially if they were indoctrinated as children as opposed to voluntarily joining a religion later in life -- the less sex education they generally have, and the less sex education a person has, the less likely it is that they will use birth control...or if they use it, it's more likely that they will do so in a way that reduces or negates its efficacy. In addition, many religions, especially the more extreme sects within them, actively discourage inhibiting procreation at all. And some almost deify having children. (i.e, the Quiverfullers like the Duggars.)

--Their economic status. Less money = less birth control, especially because having less money is also linked to having less education and more religious belief.

Of course, that's all real-world, which doesn't necessarily have to be reflected in one's game, but if I were to do correlations regarding reproduction, that's the sort of metrics I'd use to set up a system, not how neat or sloppy or lazy or whatever they are....although I understand why people do it that way, since they are built-in, easily-looked-at game metrics rather that ones you have to come up with yourself and track outside the game and all that. But for the most part, I have no such metrics. I set a few global ACR settings about try-for-baby and risky-woohoo percentages according to the neighborhood's rules or the kind of society I'm simulating in general. (Like if I'm simulating a very religious society that's analogous to a real-world one, there'll be a high percentage of both try-for-baby and risky woohoo.) Beyond that, I set the individual-Sim settings -- the amount of jealousy they experience, the amount of romantic autonomy they have, etc. -- randomly so that there's lots of variation.

As for lifespan, I use a version that I made of Almighty Hat's gestation-proportional age mod, which eliminates oddities that the vanilla game has like pregnancy that's 1/10 the length of the female reproductive years (in "real world" terms, that'd be about a 3.5-year-long pregnancy if you consider the female reproductive window to be between ages 16 and 50, even longer if you consider that window to be narrower) and a teenhood that's twice as long as childhood where it should be the other way around. Basically, it makes it so that 4 Sim-days = 1 year. Therefore, a three-day pregnancy is indeed nine months and the adult lifestage is 200-and-some days long so that gestation is in proper scale. Also, since you have a concrete year, you can easily determine a Sim's "real age" at any time, and therefore you can easily determine where the cutoffs ought to be for each lifestage. Infancy is one year, or four days, toddlerhood is up to school age which is generally considered to be 5, so 4 years/16 days, etc. The downside, of course, is that your Sims are alive for a very long time, and sometimes you want things to move along faster and the generations to pass more quickly. I will tend to play both with and without age-modding, depending on how quickly I want my generations to pass, though lately I do prefer the slower, more leisurely pace that a long age mod gives you.



Well, that's good...although I was speaking of the real world at that point.



Yeah, that's why I do it randomly. But even so, if I have particular plans for a specific Sim and they get chosen as one to possibly die, I'll sometimes choose someone else instead. I try not to do that too much because I like randomness and don't want to "play favorites," but there are some exceptions. For me, though, my game over time has become, as I said, more a big sociology thought experiment than anything. Like, "What if there was a society where...I dunno...women (or men; I'm egalitarian ) were bought and sold to be used for breeding? How would that work? What would be the rules and mores for that kind of society? And how do I effectively simulate that, and what mods do I need and how do I need to use them to get where I want to be?" I guess it's because I got tired of the "standard" "happy families having happy children and happy lives and everything's happy and wonderful" thing. I mean, I DO do that sometimes, the whole "the world as I would like it to be" thing -- and those are the ones that I'll talk about on my Simblr, for instance -- but I also like imagining and playing out scenarios that other people might consider to be completely awful (and they would be, if they were real!), but that I see more as a world-building challenge and, then, as a challenge to keep such a society viable. So overall, I guess I see the pixel people more as experimental subjects and not as, for instance, storytelling vessels, and I think that also helps me to dissociate from them, allowing me to kill them off if necessary.



Yup, when all is said and done, it IS a game, and the player needs to enjoy whatever they do in it. Some people (like me! ) enjoy odd/macabre things, but it's a game. It's not necessarily reflective of what they think is OK or desirable in the real world. In general, I find most "challenges" too restrictive. I do like playing by rules, but I prefer to look at a neighborhood as an open-ended scenario and not really as a challenge with strict rules to follow and ultimate goals to achieve and points to score and all that. So what I end up doing, often, is picking and choosing stuff from lots of challenges and mashing them up to do my own thing. Like, I might have a war scenario where the "other side" are zombies, but maybe those zombies have bombers and families still need to build bomb shelters that double as defense against ground-pounding zombies, too.

iCAD, Since I play with bigger population and shorter lifespan/game-play per individual sim, I find it less overwhelming to use guideline and generic rules with some things. IF I didn't have these fertility guideline, I can assure you ALL of them will have that 10 kid want fulfilled otherwise... It may not "make sense" realistically, but this is a part where I prefer using the game mechanism instead of the real world one.

Personally, I'm a-sexual and 30 years old, haven't been dating for a half decade and still use 3 year conceptions (IUD I think). If I dated I would be too lazy to use pills, but I take birth control for medical reasons as my periods tends to be very painful, and I rather choose BC over several painkillers daily.... unlike sims, they don't have this issue. Although, I do have a period mod, but thats to enhance the ACR fertility but I doubt they need to take BC for that reason, but my lazyness is why I tends to give them generic conception rules and than use rolls to induce miscarriage, death and abortions.

Off topic, sorry:
But these personal experiences sort of affect my choices with the game.

You have to do what makes the game enjoyable for you. That's the only "have to" about Sims games, which is part of why they're awesome. I just like to exchange ideas because if a person's looking to break out of ruts, for example, they can find ideas to help them do so in these kinds of threads. I don't mean to be judgmental toward any particular way that people play their game. I'm just sharing how I do it and why I do it the way I do. It doesn't mean that my way is the "right" way. Far from it!



Speaking of periods in game....I've been playing TS3 lately, and for that game there's a mod that makes the game...Well, X-rated, with explicit animations and whatnot. I played with it for a while, mostly because I was curious, and while I really don't care for the x-rated stuff because pixel porn doesn't turn me on at all, what it DID have that I really liked was an actual, functional, realistic menstrual cycle for female Sims. As in, lengths of time where females could not conceive, with a shorter period where they likely would conceive if they had unprotected sex and weren't on birth control. You could set how long each stage was, so you could adjust it for shorter or longer life spans (which you can do in-game, without mods, with TS3, for those who don't know.) It was really pretty awesome, and I'd love to have just that, without all the "adult" stuff, for my TS3 game and something like it for TS2. I do know about that period mod but it's not really functional in the same way this one was. I'm actually trying to figure out how to implement something like this with TS2. Just ACR alone isn't going to do it, though.



Speaking as an American, I think a lot of these attitudes are very, very regional. I think what a lot of Europeans, especially, forget is that America is huge, some single states being the size of several European countries put together, and more importantly, at its creation, the whole idea was having a small Federal government with not much power and far more powerful individual state governments, which essentially made each state its own country with just a few Federally-mandated rules. It's only quite recently -- like since the 30/40s -- that some people have been wanting more (or less) Federal control. So US states and regions differ greatly from each other both in legal terms and cultural attitudes. My primary home is a very rural (but also liberal) corner of Colorado, a western mountain state that has a pretty even balance of conservative and liberal, which is why we're called a "swing" state ('cuz we swing both ways ). Where I live, "dressed up" (for weddings or just dinner at a nice restaurant) means you wear your jeans that don't have holes in or dirt on them and you leave your skis at home or at least attached to your car. Whereas in Southern California, where I am now, which is also very liberal but not at all rural, attitudes about dress are different...which are in turn also different from also-liberal New York City. And ALL of those are very different from what will go on in, say, Kansas, which is pretty much the pinnacle of conservative, where a lot of women still won't wear pants, much less jeans. So basically, you can compare a particular state or region to another country, but you can't really compare the US as a whole to....Well, pretty much any country. The US is like a person with 50 different personalities, and most of the personalities don't like each other. Plus, America was also largely founded by religious fanatics who wanted to practice their lunacy without constraint. It's a young country compared to most, and those roots still show in places.



I think that's true for most people. I'm 50+, pansexual, and sex-positive, so that will affect what I do in my "the world as I would wish it to be" kind of neighborhoods. Just as writers tend to "write what they know," Sims players tend to "play what they know." Which is fine. I just bristle when that becomes things like, "Well, you only allow heterosexual couples in your game, so you must be a homophobe in real life." Or "You only play homosexual couples in your game, so you must be virtue signaling." Or "You only have light-skinned Sims in your game, so you must be a racist in real life." Such statements COULD be true...but they could as easily be untrue. I dislike the assumption that they are true, all the time.

iCad--Amen! Though I think you're wrong about how many personalities America has--fifty is far too few. I know of at least four just in my home state of Idaho--and from talking to Coloradans you guys have at least three.

I like to tell Europeans that I live as far from Washington DC as London is from Moscow--and neither DC nor I are on the coasts!

iCad's about a day's drive away, and I consider her as living pretty close to me, like if money and kids weren't an issue, I'd consider it totally reasonable to make that drive just to meet her (and probably make music together). Back in my college days, before marriage and kids, that was the sort of thing we did on three-day weekends.

True! But I'm thinking that dividing it just by number of states is easier to wrap non-USian heads around. Sure, European countries definitely have their subgroups, too (and sometimes awful things happen between them, which doesn't happen so much in the US), but generally speaking European countries have a much more cohesive identity, culturally and legally and all that, than the US in general does. Really, I think the closest comparison you can make is comparing the US to the European Union as a whole rather than to any individual European country. That's closer to apples-to-apples, at least.



And they often still don't really get it! I've got lots of British relatives, and especially when I was living in NYC, they'd come visit and we'd do the NYC-tourist things....and then they'd want to rent a car and take a "day trip"....to Florida. Like it was the distance from London to Brighton or something. My one cousin thought he could drive from NYC to Los Angeles in a couple of days, and he didn't mean driving at high speed for 48 hours straight with no breaks (which is doable but not very fun). He meant 2 leisurely 8- or 10-hour driving sessions because he was going to do it alone and he wanted to see things. That would get him to Chicago. Maybe.



TOTALLY! I mean, heck, you're just up in Idaho, for heaven's sake. What, 18 hour drive or so? That's about how long it takes me to drive from home to here in SoCal if I don't take the scenic route, and I think the distance is similar. So we're practically neighbors. I'll bet if I yell loud enough, you could hear me.

*ahem* Anyway, what were we talking about again?

....someone kill me. My sim population has run off to 1675 playables now and still 8 sub-hoods left to finish the baby making on...like 30 new sims per subhood

EDIT: An even 1700 now. 6 sub-hoods left to go.

You? Are a crazy person!

I mean, how long does it take you to get through playing one round with all those Sims?? I have enough problems with getting frustrated when I've got about 100, which is why I trigger plagues shortly after I reach that point.