In the sims 2 whenever I try to invite a household over or host a party I am only able to invite 2 sims on my laptop. When I played on my desktop I could invite the standard 8. I heard that it depends on your RAM and hardware. My specs are an intel i5 1.8, 6 RAM, 500 HD, Windows 8.1, and nvidia gt 720m. MY secs should cause no problem, the sims 2 came out when people used 512 or 1 GB of RAM. What is with this?

Your software (Sims) thinks your hardware is worse than it is, maybe because it doesn't recognise it.

Workaround

Open your cheat window ( ctrl + shift + c ) and type:

intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims #

# = the new max number. Experiment with what you can handle.

Some people have these kind of problems with newer laptops, apparently the game doesn't recognize that your laptop can actually handle more than 2 sims.

You can either use this cheat: intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 8 (must be done on neighborhood view, or just put it on your userstartup.cheat)
Or you can download Throw Massive Parties mod at http://www.simwardrobe.com/ , on Sims 2/Fixes

I am wondering if the sim doing the inviting lives in an apartment? On my apartment lots I am only able to invite 2 sims also but in my households I am able to invite more. I have always thought this was a game feature since the apartments are smaller than houses. Just like in real life you can have a bigger party in a house than an apartment. I may be wrong though...

It's directly related to your game's perception of your machine's capacity. Apartments use up more machine resources than houses, because they're handling the imposters for all the other apartment units and tenants, the common area, and the active apartment. I often have huge parties on apartments on my desktop - but the more apartments the building has, the fewer visitors it can handle without lagging or throwing a graphical hissy fit.

It's important to understand what specs your computer has and what kind of load it can handle, as pushing it past capacity will damage the machine as well as interfere with your gameplay.

This happens to me, too - the way I get round it is to invite the two Sims the game allows me to, then use Sim Blender to teleport in the other 50* party guests. You need to assert your dominance over your computer, and nothing screams 'alpha human' more than cramming everyone in your hood onto one lot.


*Disclaimer - I would not advise actually teleporting in fifty Sims, as this may make your computer shit itself.

Alternately, in the absence of the SimBlender, you can use the party invite for the max number of guests it'll allow and then call the rest of the sims over using the phone either right before or right after you start the party call. Everyone'll arrive at about the same time.

insimenator can summon other households in base game.

Just put
intProp maxNumOfVisitingSims 20
uintProp maxTotalSims 55
uintProp maxTotalHumans 40
uintProp maxTotalPets 15
(with your own numbers used) into your user startup cheat file. Then you never have to type it again. You might not want the pet ones. I just copy and pasted that from my cheat file.

another poster mentioned that file.