I absolutely love babies, toddlers, and young adults. Not too keen on elders, because in my game they just usually spend their days doing hobby enthousiasm stuff, because they're already fully skilled. Adults are cool. But I HATE teens, usually I have them do everything they have to do in about 24 sim-hours, and then ship em off to college, so they won't miss out on important achievements and yet I have to play them for a minimal amount of time. And I completely wear them down as kids, so they already have a solid set of skills/friends when they age up.

18:00-23:00 Birthday + party. At the party the sim gets his/her first date, first kiss, and (s)he's going steady with someone. (I usually already make them besties with their future spouse as kids) This makes the sim platinum for the hours to come
23:00-01:00 Get a job, apply for scholarships and get the eventual skills needed for a promotion if they don't have them already. (also make sure that they have to work that day and the following day)
01:00-04:00 Sneak out
04:00-08:30 Sleep
8:30-13:00 School
14:00-18:00 (or 18:00-21:00) Job (I make sure I have the second career lifetime reward, so that if they get a chance card, it will likely have a positive outcome)
18:00/21:00 - ? Be an overachiever, call university for the last scholarship + move out

If they don't get promoted, awww, I have to play em for ANOTHER day...

I can tolerate Babies. Thank God they're unselectable. I absolutely hate Toddlers. Yikes. They're too time consuming.

Default game rules: Adult/elder.
Modified game: Teen/elder.

Sorted in order of preference.

Teens - My most favorite age. Teens had some harsh restrictions in the default game rules, on the time of day and for moving out besides others; also they had to endure the "barrage" of college spam throughout their entire lifetimes. But I removed them all with a behavior mod, and created mini adults who can do almost everything that an adult can; and they look awesome. My big neighborhood, which I no longer have, had most of the population as teens. A big reason for this was that I wanted to preserve the exact characters that I had created (face roughness & clothing); and upon "transitioning" clothing usually cannot be kept. Since children don't have distinctive enough faces, nor have oportunities to interact, the lives of my sims "began" with teens, and remained there.

Adult - The default age. Good. Can do anything in the order the player wishes them to. Adult men look too rough; but otherwise the aesthetic qualities of adults are excellent so that they don't loose much compared to teens.

Young Adults - I hate college, and I hate scripts pushing my people around. You lose everything upon entering college (face, clothing, money, home, career, love), you lose everything again upon leaving it. Young adults have a strange slow walk style, which causes them to collide with other people (they look like they hate their lives too) for route failures galore. In my game most of this does not happen, apart from losing clothing, which I cannot alter by behavior alone, and is in the department of you awesome clothing creator artists. But still the college stage is rather set plain. You try to skill up as much as possible, but at least now life does not end upon the final exam.

Children - Not so good; mostly the same but even harsher restrictions than for teens. Children don't have much to do in the game apart from studying cooking/mechanical/cleaning. The first playthroughs I couldn't think of anything else to tell them to do, since they couldn't go to town as other people, where I can play each of them in first person without handling multiple people at once. Even then a story hole remained where a child master chef was forbidden to touch the stove. I attempted to have a child have a birthday party with his pals after everyone came home from work; but at 6 PM all of them turned on their heels, raised invisible walls around them and that was the end of it. Next I had my nanny leave at midnight (never found the code branch that made her to), I didn't think much of it, and the social worker came and took my twin children away. None of the debug tools were useful to stop this, and at that time I hadn't made any mods of my own yet to get to build mode and kill them workers.

Later in my game I made unplayed children always walk around the neighborhood in daytime, and I guess I can't say I dislike them if I did so. I can also take my own children out now, where they can have fun besides studying.

Todlers - they have a play element to them, where I can choose to have them skill up alone, or interact with them, depending on what I want. Later people, including children, hardly ever need to do anything in pairs, and are much better living alone. If intense play experience is desided, toddlers can be "used" to try to manage them. They're somewhat better than Children in default rules in that they don't feel "restricted" in any way. What they cannot do, is because they cannot reach those things, or cannot crawl far enough physically. Toddlers almost have no faces.

Elders - least favorite. I see people turning elder as a failure on my part to guide them right where they can earn Elixir. Since all it takes to get Aspiration is to basically have sex on a Date, I see no reason to fail any person like this. If I hate a Sim so much, then I don't have patience to hurt him in Elder state, and kill him straight away. Elders have the most annoying and arrogant route failure animations. They sound like opera singers when they wave their arms (often because of their own fault to find the best object for).

Babies - not more people than any other stack object, and exempt from rating. No face at all; no selectable skin/clothing. Play, feed, sleep, play, feed, sleep, wash in sink. Repeat. Pets are better.

Good lord, j7n, are you missing out! Even given differences in playstyles, yours sounds really limited and as if you haven't discovered half the possibilities of the game! If you're having fun, fine, don't let anybody tell you you're doing it wrong, but - bounce around here reading threads (What's happening in your game right now; Funniest/strangest thing, What do you do with your (category)?, the Challenge section, for sure; plus the various picture threads) and I think you'll see things you want to try. Friendship! Romance! Friend/family networks! Rivalry! Disaster! Euphoria! Parties! Amazingly Cute Animations!

I love every life stage, myself. Yes, including babies. I've said this on this thread before, but it bears repeating. Every lifestage has its element of fun. And no sim is an island, nor does any life stage exist cut off from all the other lifestages.

Babies are great because of their effect on their households and the anticipation.

Toddlers are great because you get your first glimpse of how the genes work, because of the strain they place on the household system, and because almost every animation they have is adorable. Interactions with older siblings, pets, and visitors are especially interesting. Kids are great because they can start developing relationships outside their households and their independent personalities, plus they can join teens and adults on outings, and have lots of interactions and adorable animations not available to other age stages. (And if you're having trouble finding attractive clothes for these age stages, I've got one word for you: Fakepeeps. See the Downloads section.) The limited amount of visiting time they have is annoying, but you can mod it out. For every thing they can't do (why would you want a child master chef anyway?), they have something compensatory that adults can't do, and it's so much fun to see them learning new things.

Teens are great because they have their own funny/adorable animations (checking themselves out is my favorite but I also love noogies), continue to develop their relationships and personalities more, and you have all the wonderful discovering-who-I-am storylines; plus they can lead outings and take on responsibilities around the house, but you don't need me to sell you on teens.

YA is great because you have all this time on campus to really go to town on relationship drama, not just romance but rivalries, and prepping for adult life. And they do not "lose" their faces - I have no idea what you're talking about there! They finish growing into them, but the change isn't normally that serious, unless you're dealing with broken face templates. You can always buy them new clothes, including most adult styles - almost everything made for adults is also enabled for YA, and some outfits are YA only. Skilling is only a fraction of what there is to do at college, especially if you have a large group of playables there at once to bounce off each other. Toga parties! Serial dating! Inviting their families to visit campus! Inviting household on each other and just hanging out! Experimenting with new activities, new hairstyles, new people, new friends, new everything!

Adults are the anchors for the other ages and I don't have to sell anybody on them. The sims I'm most likely to find boring are adults living alone, but the solution to that is simple.

And elders - oh, how I love my elders! If they have families, they can be meddling, supportive, or demanding of them. If they don't, they can embark on new careers (if they get a new job right before transition, or if you mod out age discrimination), new businesses, new romances. I love seeing elders in love, and Romance elders are the bomb, showing the young folks How It's Done. They can congregate in retirement homes, live with relatives and become live-in babysitters, paint the town red, take all their grandkids on vacation and let them run wild! They can go around picking fights with their children's lovers and love rivals, and/or pressure their relatives into settling down. They can take all the Freetime perks and use the heck out of them - go see aliens every night, smooth talk their way through the neighborhood leaving chaos in their wake, cure visitors with soup, lead rowdy folks songs! Throw outrageous parties and pay heavenly bills! Get all the badges and give presents of fresh produce, fish, and useless tschotskes to everyone they meet!

Honestly, the sky's the limit!

You're right, young-adult change does not result in loss of the face because it is the same (as far as I can tell visually), but all other parts get changed. YAs have different clothing items even if they look identical. The life stages in fact are disconnected, until a mod is applied to smooth the transitions out (keep love, home and career). Notice the language used when talking about college: "starting of a new life". That is how the authors presented it. I've never been to college in real world, and only built my impression on the Eaxis depiction of it. EP1 did well in bringing some teen clothing for young adults, and EP2 further enabled some of it to full adults.

Adults and Teens beat YAs in the ability to throw parties. They have unlimited length of lives to try another party if the previous one was disturbed by the cops, and the worst part that can rarely happen to their job performance is they get fired, which is hard to arrive at. They can remain at their present job level without working towards promotion, which YAs cannot, since the semesters arrive at a preset schedule.

Children are doing well in my hood now and don't skill up that much once the have other options. I can "walk" them to community lots now. I missed seeing kids around, and made them visit until 6 pm, and stay until 8.

(I did not "disagree" with your post.)

It wouldn't have hurt my feelings if you had, but it's thoughtful of you to say so.

YAs can throw parties round the clock if they want to. All you have to do is turn off the stereo around 10 and the cops won't show up. For that matter, who cares if the cops do show? It can still be a great party! There's no game penalties for throwing a bad one, and getting a passing grade is so easy a lot of people adopt mods or rules to make it harder. You're unusual in feeling time pressure at University. Most people (not me!) find it takes too long; but that can be sped up by visiting community lots or applying a mod.

The loss of love at the YA transition is purely the result of the disabling of romance between teens and adults. That can be modded out, and even if you don't - I don't; squick! - if you want the same love back all it takes is one flirt once the second teen grows up. I find the blip convenient, as I don't necessarily want couples to remain together and this allows an amicable moving on. If a teen has multiple loves in high school, I can even let them sort it out among themselves which, if any, will become permanent.

American college has little in common with sims college. More's the pity. Like the rest of the game, it's an idealized fantasy of college. I didn't go near a Greek in college (except one party a member of my D&D group had to go to for family reasons and take a date - I was the only girl he knew!), but I love them in this game!

It can, though. I've (both purposely and subconsciously) designed my sims Uni experience like my own - they live in co-ed houses, hang out in common areas and socialize a ton. House-cest is ubiquitous. Classwork/studying is fairly important. and the food is pretty bad

Toddlers are very cute but probably my least favorite to actually play with. They are the most needy and draining on my other sims. Their needs fluctuate at too fast of speeds for others to keep up with and on top of maintaining that basic happiness you must try to teach them to use the potty/to walk/ or to talk.

Adults and Elders are my favorite because they don't have homework - can do basically anything, and have the most potential and longevity for the age range as opposed to teens and below.

No, you don't. You can ignore all that if you like. Personally I almost never do anything but pottytraining. Parental attention and skilling will keep them in plenty good enough of a mood to grow up in. It's not as if there's in-game penalties for not learning these skills. And if you have certain items (toddler blankets, pet beds, pet food bowls, a lot of bottles in inventory) you can let them run wild and not worry about most of those wildly fluctuating needs.

If you choose to mess with something you find onerous, that the game gives you an easy out from, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

I know I don't have to but I would consider it an in-game penalty for not teaching at least 2 out of the three skills because they only have 4 want slots and in a lot of cases those three wants take up my toddler's wants with the additional learn a nursery rhyme or play with a parent if they don't get their aspirations - then they grow up badly, at least it has always been that way in my game. I guess it's all in a matter of pacing because if you have your toddler in the red or low green maintained by parental attention and wait until the last day to finish out potty training then it will boost them into a good level to grow up well. You seem to pace your game well and know enough tricks so it's not an annoyance.

I do have the custom content toddler blankets and mats for them to pass out on though not every sim household of mine with a toddler has a pet to go with it so pet food bowls and pet beds aren't an option in those cases. I'm not saying it's totally onerous and that I hate playing toddlers, I am just answering why they are my least favorite to play. It's like picking my least favorite desert even though I like all the options - because I do love the game.