Just skimmed this thread and I feel bad for the pre-patched Ottomas torture! I adore the Ottomas family, I actually just finished playing them in my current rotation. I've played this family a number of times, and this has to be my favorite. I used to always place them in an "old" cottage which made things challenging when I had to add in baby stuff but easier when it came to taking care of multiple babies. In this neighborhood I decided to treat them to a large house almost as big as the Piccolo Mansion.
Currently, Dora's grave rests in the Springwater Station Cemetery, the parents are more/less 10 days away from becoming elders, David becomes an adult in 6 days (he's skipping out on college), Sharla is a teen with the family aspiration, Tommy is a child, and the twins are children as well- named Laura and Nora. Now that there are no more babies or toddlers, the house seems even more crazy! Dora was a wonderful grandmother, especially close with Sharla, and such a big help. Everyone was devastated when she died. Samantha returned to work, which makes her an even more caring mother when she returns home. Peter isn't too close with the kids, but he is a fun dad and treats Sam like a queen.
David is such a sweet heart, dating my own Belle Ferry. They're like the picture-perfect couple, except they're going to have to work to make this relationship last. They want different things in the future and in order to want to make things work, they'll have to be certain they love each other. He is quite older than Belle, and I want them to have as much time being teens together as possible. So he's not going to college and doesn't want to. When he becomes an adult Belle will be going to college, so they can continue to have their relationship and hopefully he will end up waiting for her when she graduates. I think I currently want this relationship to happen more than they do :P
The other kids are all good, just getting settled into the swing of things in Springwater Station still. Sharla is having boy troubles, she's with Eric Ferry (Belle's twin brother) but flirts all the time with his best friend Noah Carroll. She's not even that romantically interested in either of them, just more like friends. Tommy is inseparable from his best friend Amanda, and I can totally see them getting married in the future, it's going to happen The twins just had their first day of school and so far only have each other for friends, but that's okay. Now that I changed the nursery to the twins' bedroom, Samantha and Peter wanted another baby. And it was Dora who wanted six grandchildren, so I let them Try For Baby, and of course with them being... well, them, she got pregnant! I have a rule where my sims can only Try For Baby once a day, and I don't know what to think with them having another baby at this age. Well whatever happens happens!
So I guess you can say I "punished" them by giving them a sixth child at an old age?

Like BeckyBoo8 I "adore the Ottomas Family". David O. really is a sweet Sim who is quite good with children. Sharla starts out as a bright, curious child and tends to roll the want to attend college (so does David). The twins usually end up being the best of friends. Tommy is a handsome toddler with a promising future.

I suppose "torturing" them would be:
* to keep Peter from changing careers to the one that fits his lifetime goal (usually to be a chef)
*to move elderly Dora out where she has no contact with the family she loves
*play to thier fears rather than to thier wants
*to not allow Dora to retire while at the same time expecting her to tend children, cook and clean
*leave them in the bin and never allow them to become a part of the neighborhood

Back when I played the Ottomas-family the first time one of my CAS-sims´ teenage daughter was the twins´ (boy and girl) father. It gave both her and Samantha a very queer reputation. In the end the teen´s mom raised the twins lovingly. I also decided that after Samantha´s innocense was proven the whole neighborhood found the incident terribly funny and the twins became something like celebrities. But I think the shock, the acusations and having to give up the twins to strangers were a terrible punishment to the Ottomas.

The second time I played the family I was looking forward to another funny combination. I had heard that in some people´s games a pet had been the father and secretly hoped for the same (yes, i was that innocent/fluff headed). This time I ruled that there had been rumours about that something was wrong with the pregnancy and the government took no chances. The whole family was confined to a medical lab, both to help them with any complications that should occur and to study their case. Much to my dismay the bug had been fixed by then with an EP and Peter held his sons in his arms for the first time. BOY: WAS. I. MAD. AT: THEM. Samantha and Peter then decided that they would not go through the fear again, even though the doctors had assured them that they could have more children together. They adopted a boy from the adoption pool to grant Dora her LTW and lived happily aver after.

Im running out of ideas for them, I made a new hood, and I just dont know what to do next with them....Ive made them poor, made them rich, burned everyone except Sam and the twins...in Veronaville Dora is in the Shady Pines retirement home, she will never see her family nor the twins ever again muhaha lol. I cant stand her and her ugly chin! But the ones I actually like would be Sharla, David and Tommy.
However the Ottomas are getting a little boring, having like 6 towns and trying to do something different for each one is challenging and Idk guess Im not inspired enough to torture them anymore or make them live long and successful lives...

You could make them all into townies and have little Tommy be taken by the social worker for some other family to adopt. Or just don't bother with them. Either leave in the sim bin or move them into a tiny house and forget them.

Ha okay, I guess a have an idea for my new town...

Ill let Sam have the twins, and get them taken away with Tommy, david goes to college, and Im going to have Samantha and Peter swap partners with the Ramaswami family. Kill Dora. Peter has kids with his new wife, and moves in with her I forgot her name, Priya? Sanjay will marry Sam, contract aids,(my version, make them get the flu and eat nothing but rotten food while pushing them hard) and sam will get it too. Let them die, Sharla will be all alone, and she will live on free will with no fire or burglar alarms.

Toaster pastry oven fire. Only Dora and Peter are around now, as they went to work.

2014, I never played that family and I'm just reading about this now and I'm getting scared too, I don't wanna play them either xD

There is nothing wrong with the Ottomas family so long as your game is patched and it should be.

Punish? Why? I just abort Sam's pregnancy if haven't patched; just as well, her twins always turn out hideous

The Ottomases are one of my favourite families. If your game is patched then there's no issue at all - I don't think I ever played without the patch and the father has always been correctly assigned.

I like big families and they're fun. I usually move them into a house Downtown and they have a loud, chaotic household. I don't cheat, and aspiration rewards are restricted so the sixth child is never quite born before Dora dies, and they name the baby either Dora, or Doran if it's a boy, since she desperately wanted six grandchildren.

Oh, they are not hideous. And why the heck aren't you patched?

Emodarkwolf, the Ottomai are one of the biggest, most rewarding challenges in the game! The only thing that compares to them is the Newsons. As long as your game is fully patched before you first load a neighborhood, they and the Critturs (who have the same problem) are perfectly safe. If you aren't properly patched at the time they load into a neighborhood, the pregnancy controller won't be set properly to recognize Peter as the father, which causes problems - but even that can be addressed with the right editing tools, which can let you abort the pregnancy, or link the father properly. What you get with the Ottomas family is a full family that hasn't had any training, with funds that are a little tight, starting the game with a pregnant lady and increased by twins while you're still sorting them out. Things can get hairy, especially for novice baby-wranglers; but to the experienced player they can be a joy to play.

People go on and on and on about the Ottomas ugly, to which I say "Ha! I can make uglier sims with one hand tied behind my back! I could take a face one and make you wish you were looking at an Ottomas!" The following pictures show how some of my Ottomas twins have grown up (I currently have three sets, but the current toddlers are growing up in that awful bunker house in Strangetown and when I remember to take pictures they're always bad):

Lol, I like the Ottomans, I usually play them in my ugly neighborhood though.
The grandma always bothers me though o_O
Creepy old woman.

I don't really mind the Ottomai.
Dora and Peter I find super annoying, but Samantha is lovely.
To me, their storyline only seems to revolve around Samantha's pregnancy. So I made up my own: The family are, what we call over here 'chavs'. I usually put them in the run-down part of town. Peter doesn't really care too much about his kids, though he loves his wife. Samantha was brought up with proper morals and rules, Peter was the opposite - so their parenting differs drastically. Peter just leaves the kids to do whatever, though he usually ends up pressuring one of them into getting into sports/the athletic career (usually one or both of the twins). David inevitably goes into a life of crime to make ends meet. Sharla I either play as a romance sim with lots of partners and barely any money, or a fortune sim (the 'gold digging' type) wanting to marry a rich sim to get her out of poverty. Tommy I play as either a fortune or knowledge sim. He's got more traditional values like Samantha and values education and family. The Ottomas twins are really ugly, so when I enter this family in my newest hood I'm considering just terminating the pregnancy - it's early in the hood so adding in more extreme genetics would completely change my sims faces for generations to come. Their other 3 children aren't so bad, genetics wise. Since Dora is (in my game) only staying with Peter to help them while they're also raising twins, after the twins grow up (or in my newest hood - wont even happen at all), I tend to move her out and let her be a crazy cat lady. She always wanted to raise Peter to be a better father, but since that's not working she'll just look forward to seeing her grandchildren when they visit, and petting her cats all day long.

Oh, c'mon, Dora is awesome, if you can keep her from playing musical cribs with the twins (and there's a fix for that). She really just needs a makeover and time to get out of the house. She isn't always the nicest old lady in town, but she's capable of livening the place up quite a bit.

For an example of what kind of fun it's possible to have with the Ottomai, read this:
http://quinndominion.livejournal.com/7385.html#comments
(There's a more recent entry on them, but this is less dependent on a knowledge of the setting she's got them in, and includes the birth of the twins, so the unfamiliar can see both what they're up against, and the possibilities.)

Ooo Peni I love Dora's makeover. She really suits that hair and those glasses. I hope you don't mind that I'm going to have to steal that look for my game (maybe a little different, but she will definitely get glasses and a short/medium haircut).

Just added the Ottomas family to my newest hood, decided to make Samantha give birth and age the babies up to see what they'd look like.
For Ottomai, they're not actually that bad looking. Now I feel bad that I was testing the pregnancy worked properly with UC and I didn't actually save them.
They were called Mark (right) and Cody (left) - named after the most common names for Brandi's unborn son.
2 disagrees? are they really that ugly? I've had Ottomas twins with practically no eyes before!

Have you considered adopting? I did so twice. The Ottomas are the kind of people who can love a non-blood related child as their own plus it spares Samantha another pregnancy

The Ottomi are not a good looking bunch, lol Peni your idea of good looks is a bit skewed you know. I will say though that you got Dora looking a whole lot better than I did.

In my main hood I gave Samantha another pregnancy resulting in more twins to get Dora perma plat. Now some of the kids are off married and have given her great grandchildren, but I put the eldest daughter into the nunnery as I don't need them all breeding. Dora moved into my retirement home after that and she just died last play round. Everyone cried except the one old guy she used to poke and not get on with.
She was pretty happy to go

I was refering to past situations; though, does the Ultimate Collection require the patch, cuz that's what U'm using right now

Nope, though I'd check on the stupid/random questions thread just to make sure.
The pregnancy is fine though, as stated I tested it earlier and Peter was linked to the twins, also the Crittur's have had a litter in my game that are also linked correctly.

If you're in doubt about your game being patched, try to patch it. If it tells you that it can't because the game's already patched, you're good. If it patches, you did the right thing.

I never said Dora was pretty, Jo. I said she was awesome. Not the same thing at all! All I say is, that the Ottomas Ugly is greatly exaggerated. I will continue to say so as often as people whine about it; as if some single standard of "pretty" existed, or "ugly" were an offense against humanity and simkind.

I tend to take it personally since a) I like the Ottomai and naturally resent hearing them insulted and b) my favorite sims are much, much "uglier." But at least I can tell them apart!

I love the Ottomans family. The twins grew up well in my hood, went to uni, both got married and had kids. Nothing is borked, you need to patch your games, that's all. The twins turned out to be quite awesome Sims with awesome personalities. Tommy turned into a charming romance sim, just like his dad. I had a lot of fun with them and have already moved them into a run down, but big enough, house in my new hood.

I had never played a Sims game before TS2, and I only got it very recently (when the ultimate collection was released for free), so I've been preoccupied with my own created family and not any Maxis families, but after reading this thread I had to put them into a house in Desiderata Valley (since that's where my created sims are) and have the twins born, then age them up to see the results.

They are not pretty. Helga has the squarest jaw I've ever seen, and Arnold has a permanently swollen looking face. Things actually got better for Helga as she grew (looked somewhat better as a child, improved even more as a teen and an adult), and even though she won't win any contests I don't have a "kill it with fire!" looking at her. Arnold...did not improve. His pig nose got a little less horrible, but his face seemed to become even more swollen looking.

I'm probably going to kill most of them off now, I play with aging off for the sims I'm attached to so that will be a novelty, though I might put little Tommy up for adoption. Maybe.

(Apologies for lack of pictures...I don't know how to take good pictures, I only know how to take them ingame and they're terrible quality and small. And also I don't know how to do spoiler thingies to hide the pictures anyway. I've never posted on this forum before now. :o )

Kill them with fire or more accurately install empty templates and default face templates and never play with them. I don't enjoy any of the Maxis sims or face templates.

The thing that bothers me about the Ottomas family and a lot of the Maxis sims it that they make such a caricature of certain face types, e.g. CBAN, that it comes across to me as racist and ugly because of how Maxis view them not because of the sims.

If you weren't patched when you first loaded the hood, Samantha's pregnancy controller is messed up. If you're curious about them, you could try them in a different neighborhood (you are patched now, right?).

Or, you could back up your game, place them, and use an editing tool. You should be able to set the pregnancy properly in SimPE; the trouble is, I don't know that anyone has tested this, so you'd be the guinea pig adding useful knowledge to the world of simming. I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't work, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. Or you could abort the pregnancy and use cheats or editing tools to reimpregnate her right away, which a lot of people have done without complications as long as they knew how to use the cheats and editing tools properly.

As for where to place them, I have yet to find the perfect house for them. The first time I played them, I put them in the Cape Cod from the lot bin, which was a mistake, since the second story isn't weatherproof. I kept having to change it on the fly and they never quite had enough money. My Strangetown Ottomai live in that awful bunker house and I'm going to move them first chance I get; even after extensive renovations it simply isn't working. I remodeled the Craftman's Pride for them in Widespot, and that mostly works, with the second floor filled in above the living room to make space for another bedroom, the second-floor bathroom remodeled into two, and the lower floor remodeled to have a powder room and a tiny baby nursery. They can't quite afford the Family Farmhouse, which would otherwise be a good house for them, but perhaps you could grunge it down into their price range.

My best advice is to build for them from scratch, employing your own experience to build a house that you can comfortable play them in without busting their budget.