Im talking about the CAS and the first generation kids.

In my most recent hood, I had 4 founder families who each have 6 kids each and then adding 4 more families who has each have 2kids each where three will going to have a few more (I usually start out with couples + and sometimes couple of kids in CAS). Currently the population is 72 sims after playing for 12 sim days (= four seasons, each season is 3 days). Many of these families are related through blood, so many of the kids are cousins. I play without townies and ban 2nd cousin and sibling/cousin-in-law marriages and "woohoing relatives by breaking their family ties", so I need quiet alot more CAS/born in game kids so most will find a partner. After realised it wasnot the best idea to create related founders with this many kids because I dont want their siblings marrying their other sibling in-laws (I think out of the 24 founder offspring, only 8 of them will get married to eachother, the other will marrying other kids). I will need at least 20 more families. So there will at least be 30-40-ish starting households. I feel this neighborhood will grow a little bit too fast...
Fortunately I play in 1-3 sim days rotations with shorter age span (about half of default) so playing through 30-50 households shouldnt be too challenging, but then again, this is the first hood that Im actually sticking to and didnt delete after playing it for a while.so Im worrying that I will screwing it up.

Unrelated to my own hood (yes this is the pre modern hood in the marriage custom thread, but the topics are not the same).
How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them. (Estimated is fine).
How often or when did you add new families?
How did you maintain the population? (So it wasnt too hard to handle. Ive played the maxi megahoods before,but I always find them overwhelming- )



Edit: Added an overview of my hood for those who are interested: 8 Families, 30 Kids + 10 on the way, so far,

Little Carping started out with three families - a young couple, another young couple and her mother (elder) and a single woman. There were two toddlers, one each with each of the couples. Other kids followed rapidly but so did other families.

Good thread!!

In the main neighboorhood I always start with 3-6 families, no kids, two sims per family in each (sometimes married ones, or families, only friends, etc) or singles. Wathever, what in the moment i like most. I do it this way because I like couples with chemistry (and im not talking about bolts...), and I dont like breaking relationships when they have kids, so... no kids in starter families.
When I start neighboorhoods in the Uni, I usually create 8 sims... 8 females, 8 males. xD then ACR, randomize preferences.... and then comes the real fun... yeah.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them. (Estimated is fine).
About the kids in the first generation, usually 2 born in game per family... sometimes less, more or wathever. I have ACR, so... but i dont like when they want more +4 kids, because it drives me craazy and lag, lag everywhere... well, except for family sims that have that wish of 6 married kids (but forget about the 10 kids, men!!).

How often or when did you add new families?
Never. I only do that when the kids of the first generation left to college, then I add some if some of them dont have a couple... or chemistry with anyone. Usually is just because I want to... I love playin in universities (come here chaos!)

How did you maintain the population? (So it wasnt too hard to handle. Ive played the maxi megahoods before,but I always find them overwhelming- )
I love megahoods. So, I love custom megahood, +plus if they are mine. I've had at this time... 4 custom megahoods. In the last one i've had +300 playabe sims, families, I dont remember. I just stop playing them because my game died... xDD Now im creating another. i cant control this addiction. Dammit!

Recently I've added more days to my sims lifestage (especially for toddler, because i cant really enjoy them with 4 days) , and started with rotations of 4 days and 3 days. sometimes I change it for 2-3 days when a rotation is done.

In custom hoods, I start off with between 4-8 families of either: a young couple, or a couple and a toddler. Though, I allow townie marriages. I also create new sims every once in a while too, but that's mainly when I get bored. Most sims usually have between 2-3 children, sometimes more. There's always that 1 family sim who just keeps wanting more and more and because I love babies I just keep letting her - though I've tried to cut down on this because then I end up with everyone in the neighbourhood having the same last name.
If I actually have a certain storyline in plan however I can have as many as 15 households (usually related in some way) of all ages.

One neighbourhood I use to have had 82 different households, and that started to get a bit too much, so to control the population I started limiting families to 1 child per couple. Then the whole neighbourhood got a lil' corrupted and I had to save what was left onto a memory stick and never play it again. I'm currently playing a megahood, and I'm already considering limiting families to 1-2 children per couple, because I'm having a total babyboom with lots of pregnancies resulting in quads.

Drama Acres started off with six families, canonically related - three single mothers with one teen, two couples with one teen, and one couple with two teens, a child, and a toddler. All but one of the teens was sent immediately to SSU, where I added four new students. One of the single mothers and all the married couples produced at least one more child. The Newsons and Gavigans were added relatively quickly, as were all of the SSU students who start in residences. I've always played Drama Acres in whatever way was fun for me, so I've added CAS families, townies, family and student bin sims whenever I felt like it. By now it's a bit unwieldy. But I have to have a lot of sims bouncing off each other or it's not fun, so I don't worry about it.

Widespot, of course, starts with five families ranging from 3 to eight sims each, with all categories elder to child and a new age stage on the way. I deliberately kept that one close to the bone, so people'd have plenty of room for adding their own sims, and so it could be added even to megahoods without causing too much population bloat.

Strangetown I'm trying to play in a limited way, and am only letting myself make CAS sims to seed the adoption pool. However, with the family bin, LFT, and breeding it's already starting to grow. That's just how I roll and there's no point fighting it.

I had about 20 Sims. Now I have 275iah

Pizza: Haha, I was a little bit uncertain to showing that details, I thought matching their first letter (and matching the color of the clothes) a bit silly actually. I got the idea from the alphabet challenge. When playing non-polygamy hoods, it make it easier to match them up with an suitable spouse this way. I can just look at their given name to telll which founder household they are coming from. When the kids are getting married, their children will take letter based on their same-sex parents (E.g. Adam and Denise. If boy, Alan, If their child is a girl, Danielle. No guys starting with D's). because all families are patriarch where the guys propose, so none of the males will have their wife's name. Its just to keep the neighborhood a bit erm "structured"?. :P

Not sure my figures will be helpful since I've not got far with any of mine generation wise.

In my elsewhere hood: Started with 100 sims of all ages. There are around 30-40 households, divided into 3 different categories (rich, poor, rural) which gives enough variety to me. There were twelve different family trees in the original hood (with some sims related only by marriage), and a few more sims (less than 10) who were totally single and not related to anyone.

There are townies in this hood which I will marry in if applicable, but my own townies, not the huge amount that Maxis foists upon you with all EPs. So new sims come in this way. I also roll every day in the orphanage to see if new children come in there who get created in CAS. Then, if I seem to be running out of sims I'll add some new families, but I also put sims back into the townie pool, if they become boring to play or don't seem to have many ties. I keep the townie pool moving by ageing up townies who are close to sims - best friends, lovers or relatives. When a playable has a birthday I check their panel for similarly aged townies. So far I haven't had a problem getting sims into relationships with suitable, unrelated people. But I don't worry overly about in-law relationships.

In my apocalypse challenge hood: Started with 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x4 etc up to 8, so 36 sims in total, plus five sims for the "criminal" family. I wasn't planning to add townies but they crept in due to an error. Haven't got far enough to find out if there's a population issue yet, but I had a similar configuration last time and got up to Generation 3 before everyone died.

In my nostalgia (legacy) hood, started with one sim. Brought in various townies to become playable. Currently on generation 3, added one family (2 adults 3 kids) when I got bored and another legacy founder (single sim again). But of course they all breed with townies because they are legacy families.

It really depends on my hood. In my River State neighborhood, I started with 8 adult sims (unrelated) who lived in the city, 6 adult sims who live in the village, and there'll be a couple more CAS sims who'll populate the military base. But, I play with townies in that neighborhood, so there's plenty of marriage partners to go around for the next generation. I also add CAS sims if I need more adults). How many babies I'll end up with, I don't know...probably about 2 per family on average, though there might be some that won't have kids and others who will have more than that.

In my Warwickshire challenge hood - Wyckeham - I'm starting with a lot of sims. I've got 60 sims already (in all age ranges) and still need to populate an entire Duchy. But, they're all necessary and if the population explodes too much, I'll just start a plague or a war.

In my Test of Time neighborhood, I started with 4 couples. They're making babies right now - and a lot of them - because they need to repopulate the world and it's a harsh world. In just one playround (= 1 season) most have between 2-4 babies. I've got the triplets & quads mod, and accelerate pregnancies to be only 1 day, so they can have a lot of kids. Which I'll need, because sims will be dying...probably in droves.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them. (Estimated is fine).

Well, I started with just one CAS founding family (three sisters). One sister had 9 kids, one had 7 and one had 6. But I played a bunch of the original playables in Pleasantview (and University) so I had quite a few Sims in my first generation.

I keep track of what "year" all my Sims were born and how old they are as my way of syncing my households. A generation is 30 years, and in the first generation (these would be the Sims who were adults or almost adults when I started playing), I had 30 Sims. (There were also 3 Sims I played who were older than this first generation - the Oldies and Mortimer Goth.)

How often or when did you add new families?

I added three more CAS families (2 had kids, 1 didn't) at my daughter's request. Most new Sims came by incorporating Maxis playables and townies I liked.

I don't intend to make any new Sims at this point, unless I want to add new genetic features into the neighborhood. I've also either killed off or made playable almost all the original Maxis playables and townies, so in the near future, all new Sims in my neighborhood will be born in-game.

How did you maintain the population? (So it wasnt too hard to handle. Ive played the maxi megahoods before,but I always find them overwhelming- )

Can't really answer this as my neighborhood's population has exploded, and I think it's going to take me about a year to do another rotation! I went from 30 Sims in generation 1 to 60 Sims in generation 2 and 118 Sims in generation 3 (and counting!). I think one way I'm going to make the neighborhood a little more manageable is by making some of the Sims I'm not that attached to into townies (since I don't have very many townies any more). Limiting the number of kids born would be the best way to make the keep the population manageable, but since having babies is my favorite part of playing, there's just no way I could limit my families to 1 or 2 kids. So I'm just going to continue to have an exploding neighborhood, lol.

I started my hood with 16 sims - 8 couples. Each one will have 2 kids, no more, no less, so that I can get everyone's genes passed down without booming the population. Second generation will be 32 sims, making the total playable population 48 sims. At that point I'm gonna switch to 1 kid per couple and make some more CAS sims to add genetic diversity.

Side note, I have way more pretty geneticized custom eyes than I'll ever be able to fit into the gene pool, but at least I was able to use SimPE to give all my 1st generation sims recessive eye genes. I made a test hood of sims with the custom eyes I wanted, so I could copy their IDs and add them as recessive traits to the sims in my main hood.

I also added recessive hair genes, but that was a much simpler process because there's only four values for the four options, black, brown, blonde, and red.

I have just re-start my Aridia Neighborhood, And liking it even more.
I have 4 of my 5 starter families. (planning on adding the last one in a few minutes)

The Svensson, 4 sims. A couple of elders, and their 3 children.
They own the Svensson's Fishery. A familly business that sells..fish, all 3 children work there, with their mom.
They had to be one of the first family re-created.

The Dirdam family only has Madrid..my favorite all time elder sim. (created years ago)
Madrid will own 80% of the businesses in Aridia, He owns 4, as of yet.

Madrid has an adult sister, and she married François Phillips..

The Phillips, 3 sims, 2 parents, a teen.
In my previous Aridia, i had that townie Waylon Phillips . Madrid had hired him as DJ at his club..he was handsome and all...seeing him hitting on with a teen I had, i decided to age him back to teen. But he had no parents!!! Poor baby. So i created them for him. Since Madrid had been more than a friend to him, he became his uncle...and then he needed a sister, younger than him, to be Waylon's mom. Here, now you know.

The Haunter family..only has Raoul.
Another elder, who will be close to Madrid on the scale of me loving them.
Raoul Haunter is my Gravekeeper. He is a good mix between Panoramix (Getafix, in English) and Dampé. Though..much more agreeable and less creepy.
He owns R.I.A Cemetery (Rest In Aridia) His residential lot seems to be a very deadly place...There is a Cowplant, but fenced and no one can enter. Apparently, it is better this way, they say.

So for now, I have a total of 10 playable sims, in 4 families. Easy.

The Marcossa family is next on the list, 2 parents, a teen and a child.
All the other starter sims I'll use are saved, but not re created yet.
I will add...12 young adults, I love them starting at Uni.
6 teens, they will most likely be replacing paperboys/papergirls or else...
And 2 other random sims, one elder and an adult. I might need them again, in my new improved version of Aridia.

Oh! right..so to answer the original question, I'll have 33 playables.

For most of my main hood, I really don't pay attention to how many Sims I start out with, since I'll be playing with aging off, and adding new Sims from CAS pretty frequently. However, my medieval/colonial/magical/victorian subhood, Darkwood Hollow, is played with aging on, and I didn't want to be adding new Sims beyond the first generation. Thus, that first block was pretty good-sized- 31 individual Sims, broken into 15 households (I wanted lots of family names). Once those first few families started having kids, the population really boomed- Generation 2 was about triple the size of my founder's generation. Seems to have worked though- I'm now on to the fourth generation in this neighborhood, and I haven't run into any storytelling trouble with not enough Sims available for marriages, or that kind of thing, and it's still just small enough that I have the patience to play all those households!.

Well, I didn't really create any CAS families, because, for Townie Place, I only made use of the generated townies and NPCs. Any townies and/or NPCs generated with the same surname and proper/similar genetics were put together into families and couples.

So, a the start, I had... Well, let's list the families/households:

Go (4 members)
Trimble (4 members)
Barrett (4, but 2 were out of the house)
Beckett (3)
Wolosenko (3)
Vijayakar (3)
Johnson (3)
King (3)
Miguel (3)
Ryan (4)

Plus many more, but I think those above are the very first ones, the rest were added later on bits by bits whenever I felt like I needed more sims. As for maintaining the population.... Well.. Let's just say I sucked at that, because I kept on adding more and more families without getting rid of any. But, I'm slowly starting to lose a few households, due to some of them only being inhabited by elderly couples, so, once they pass away, the household disappears from the list.

i've got 16 families that i always start with which are all different types. Some are single parent or both parents, some have grandparents or aunts or uncles, some have siblings. So my families are always Haywood, Eastwood, Windsor, Hart, Middleton, Hamilton, Taylor, Delaney, Carmichael, Simpson, Cooper, Bradshaw, Templeton, Williams, Fox and Hennessy. And they always have a main character from each family that starts out as a child. So i have Amelia and Natalie Haywood, Thea Eastwood, Tiffany Windsor, Ava Hart, Daisy and Freya Middleton, Olivia Hamilton, Ellie and Jessica Taylor, Lila Delaney, Eric Carmichael, Andrew Simpson, Nick Cooper, Adam Bradshaw, Robert Templeton, Alex Williams, James Fox and Jason and Chloe Hennessy.

My new neighborhood started off with 33 Sims, spread across 13 households. I am now up 43 Sims, spread across 16 households (not counting university Sims).

I will not be creating any more Sims to add to the neighborhood, as there are already a few Sims that are waiting at university now. They will eventually move back to the neighborhood - thus increasing the population.

I don't allow all Sims to have children (ACR's settings are tweaked to keep this from happening) - so there will never be too much of a neighborhood boom. And as for playing each household, it's done on a 7 day rotational and seasonal (my seasons are set for 7 days) schedule.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them. (Estimated is fine).
Usually 4 households with 3 or more individuals each, on average 15 sims per neighborhood.
How often or when did you add new families?
Very often. I wouldn´t need to, because my sims may marry townies at their leisure, but as the neighborhood progresses, new ideas plop up. Build a train station? Hey, a railwayman family would be nice. Went abroad? How about introducing ambassadors to the motherland? Oh, we haven´t had a war for some time, let´s make some enemy spys and unleash them! No way (enter family name) will send their offspring to a school - let´s make a private tutor for them!
The newly added sims are not always new arrivals, often enough I rule that they´ve already lived in the neighborhood, but only now entered the main cast. Newly added sims may get cheated to the needed wealth and skill levels as well as put into appropriate careers, but once introduced into the neighborhood they follow the same rules that I use for any other playables.
How did you maintain the population?
One might think I´d have an excess of sims in every neigborhood, because I add so often, but since I play so many different neighborhoods, each indidual 'hood hasn´t progressed very far.
The only neighborhood that needed management so far was Desiderata Valley with 150 sims, some of them in Generation 4 already. I enforced a one child policy, but since this would pay off in the long run only, an alien invasion and short period of occupation cut down the population by one third. The "culled" sims were premades, mostly. I do not think I could so easily kill off a large number of irreplaceable CAS or ingameborn sims. Most probably in this case I´d transfer the overload to another subhood, fit them with prisoner tokens and declare them banished, dead or whatever. In time the same neighborhood may host two totally unrelated chronicles.

My current neighborhood (Pleasantview) is getting a bit nuts. When I got back into Sims 2 over the summer, I thought I'd start out with just a single sim and play legacy style for a while. But my sim fell for Darren Dreamer, and for a while I just exclusively played them, but then Dirk grew up and moved out, and soon I just had to play the other premades too. And then some of them fell in love with townies. At some point I just started indiscriminately adding CAS sims whenever the mood took me or I made someone so awesome/cool that I wanted them to be part of the neighborhood. My most recent population increase was when I decided I wanted an elf community (sims with pointed ears and weird custom eye colors) in the Bluewater Village subhood with its own customs, which meant I needed to add (and still am slowly adding) a bunch of new families to make this community. I'm also building up the Downtown subhood, so my rotation now includes the main neighborhood and two subhoods.

The timeline in Pleasantview is a bit weird because I didn't start playing in rotation right away, and I picked up the premades at slightly different times, but now I've got A LOT of households that I play in a 5 sim day rotation (followed by playing the university for four semesters at a time, and keeping track of sims' ages so I can adjust correctly after they graduate). I keep track of all the households, and I've got 34 at the moment (all with at least two sims, most with more like 4-6), not counting sims at university, CAS sims I added but haven't actually played yet, and some bin/Bluewater village families (who will be added at my whim- I usually add 1-2 of them per rotation based on if my rotation families befriend them or something).

I like to track my neighborhood by how many sims there are of each aspiration (even though I use a randomizer to pick when sims age up) and how many children. There are currently 47 children (child age and younger)- won't university be fun when they all age up, haha! I always tell myself to limit the population size but I just can't. Making them have babies is too much fun. In fact, I can't bear for anyone to die without passing on their genes- this is why I will resurrect anyone who dies before having at least one kid (but any sim with at least one kid won't be resurrected, they're dead forever), and even my least family-oriented sims have at least one kid (even if they're not the one raising him/her). The hardest part for me is playing all the aged up children though university, so I figure if that gets too stressful with my current population size I'll make the university more "selective" where only really smart sims can attend, or sims with really rich parents who can afford to bribe the school, lol.

But it's basically a free for all with me, except that once I've deemed a sim part of the rotation they get tracked and are subject to the limited rules I use. I add sims in whenever I feel the need. So far I've been having fun with that. I also have a mod that doesn't let sims get married/date/engage in romantic actions with each other until they're separated by something like 3 or 4 generations. Can't remember the exact number but I know that 2nd cousins in my game can't get together. So I need a lot of sims, given that I like letting my sims have tons of babies if they're so inclined. I haven't gotten through many generations (the grandchildren of that very first sim I started with that married Darren Dreamer are YA at the oldest, and none have kids yet), but I imagine this could make it a little harder for my sims in a generation or two, so I don't mind that I have so many random sims around town. I don't even mind a super long rotation, except the university part, which I love in small doses and as a place to find my sims romantic partners if they don't have already, but it can get reaaaallllyyy repetitive when I have too many sims there at the same time. My newest solution to that is a mod for more than 8 sims per household and sorority/fraternity houses which all my rotation sims join, so that I'm only playing two households and with so many sims I can't micromanage all of them (I have to remember in real life not everybody graduates with a perfect GPA, lol). Plus it gets nuts between sims with clashing personalities and the evil cow coming along and flirting with everyone/starting fights.

Sorry for rambling on! I've loved reading this thread, it's interesting to see how other people manage their neighborhoods compared to me

My game is extremely unorganized. There was absolutely no planning involved.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them.

I started out with exactly one household, and they weren't even in the main hood.

My first sims were four Académie Le Tour students. They were two pairs of siblings: Skylark and Starlin Morrissey, and Dylan and Alia Hannabass. The four of them started a Greek house which eventually led to me "adopting" some dormies into my playables.
Starlin and Alia eventually got married and they now have three kids (Micah, Leah, and Ashlin) and one grandkid (Ash, son of Micah and the townie Tosha Go).
Skylark, who was always my favorite, married a dormie named Lee Vu. They also have three kids (Shadow, Shia, and Shantal) and one grandkid (Crisis).
Dylan married a dormie named Anna Birmingham and they have two kids (Adam and Rose).

I guess my first household in my main hood was a lesbian couple, Shoko and Amy Hareta. They have three kids: Hikari, Li Yin, and Naiya (don't criticize my names). Hikari has one daughter with Shadow Morrissey (Crisis) and Li Yin has two twin daughters named Sakura and Sun Hee. Hikari and Shadow ended up being my two favorite 2nd-gen sims, so of course I would pair them together! They're a super-couple now.

How often or when did you add new families?

When I first installed The Sims 2 again after banishing TS3 from my life, I decided to install the EPs one at a time instead of all at once. So each time I added a new EP, I added a new family as well. The Morrissey/Hannabass household was University. The Hareta family was my Nightlife family. When I got Pets, I wanted to make a dog breeder sim, Angel Forrester. I never really liked him too much and never planned on giving him a family other than his dogs, but eventually I caved and found him a wife (Jasmyne) and 4 kids (Noel, Diamond, Pearl, and Echo).

Honestly though, I think the Forrester dogs are more important than the Forrester sims. I couldn't even tell you how many of them there are in my 'hood now. Pretty much every dog my sims have are related to the original two dogs I created with Angel. There is way too many of them. What can I say? I love pets.

I added another family after I discovered custom content and wanted to give my 'hood some fresh genetics. I found some nice alien skins and eyes and created a new family just so I could use them. Each of them had a different skintone. But later I decided I really didn't like the new skins so I replaced them with Maxis ones. Mirael, Love, and Chrice have the Maxis alien one. Hyllind has the zombie skin. And Ark and Riiyo have some skin that I created using Leh's skins as a template and one of Enayla's colors. So yeah, it's an entire family of weird-looking sims.

Generally speaking, I don't like adding new households. I get bored of them too easily. Seriously, I have killed entire families before because I don't want to play them anymore. I prefer to play born in game sims or townies that I've grown fond of.
Sometimes I'll make one new sim in CAS to be a spouse if they don't have a good candidate. Or if I find a new skin that I have to try. But right now the majority of my sims were born in game or are townies that I've made playable. Thanks to anyone who actually read all of this.

I am playing a new hood. I am bad at remembering names but good at remember roles. Each family is being started with a traditional CAS couple.

Farming/grocery store couple (1 toddler, 1 baby, boys)
Mayor/nurse (I toddler male)
B&B owner/Newspaper reporter couple (first about to be born)
Banker/teacher (first about to be born)
Repair/hair and fashion couple (no children yet they just got put in)
Minister/ artist couple. (1 toddler male) She doesn't have a defined role yet and yes I am getting a lot of boys!
Dr/waiter (twin girls)
Firefighter/Author(will be librarian) (1 toddler girl)
Police officer/receptionist (1 toddler boy)
Restaurant owners (first on the way)

I think that is it for now. The first gen is still being born with the eldest about to become a child. I play with double aging. Those toddlers would be kids already in a normal game.
I add in new couples as I see the need for them. I decided they really needed a repair man after two of them got electrocuted fixing broken computers.
I expect each couple to have at least two kids if they want them or not. There are no romance sims and no regular townies. I have allowed only a garden club to spawn. A few right now have jobs to bring in some money from outside as some of the business would struggle otherwise. Each couple had one decent loan to buy their business with some left over cash (except my farm and B&B family) so that the playables have money to spend at each others shops.

My general playstyle is a modified BACC style. I'll start neighborhoods with between 3 and 10 single male founders, depending on what the random number generator says. They can be teens, YAs, or adults, again depending on what the random number generator says. The rule for the founders is that they all have to procreate at least once -- which doesn't have to happen in the "old-fashioned" way. They can adopt, visit the aliens, etc. Or they can do it the old-fashioned way and find themselves a willing woman.

When I play this way, I don't usually have to add families at any point because the founders reproduce enough that it's not necessary, and the successive generations only get larger as time goes on. That said, my neighborhoods all have townies to widen the gene pool. If you play without townies, you'll obviously need more founders of both genders to ensure a viable population. In any case, here's the current main stats of one of my neighborhoods (because I'm a stat nerd), which is a non-modified BACC:



It started out with one founder but had four more added over time. It's at the end of week eight right now. The first two founders have died, the third one is an elder, and the other two are middle-aged. None of the founders had/have more than three kids so far (Although the two newest ones are still of reproducing age, so there'll probably be more Gen 1s) and the second born-in-game generation is being born/adopted. None of those is older than child yet, although the eldest is close to teen. So, you can see how my generations increased over a short time. But, again, I use townies, so maintaining a viable population is much easier because you don't have to worry about inbreedng.

As for population control, my main one is disease. I have the "real sickness" mod which makes illness pretty deadly, and I also visit plagues upon my neighborhoods wherein I will periodically kill a certain percentage of the playables while making others ill. Some of those made ill will die, thanks to "real sickness," but some will recover. Those who recover are then deemed immune to illness for the rest of their life. Since I like to play supernatural Sims, I also make it so that the immortal ones are not immune to plague, unless they become ill and recover. That way, they aren't all hanging out forever. Generally, I start to get overwhelmed when I have about 75 playables or so, so that's usually when then first "plague" hits, and I'll usually kill about 25% of the playable population at that time. I randomly choose those to be killed, so that death is spread out amongst the family lines.

Honestly I think the reason you're having problems finding spouses is your couples are having too many kids and you won't let them marry their in laws. If you were prepared to have a few less kids in the first generation I don't think you'd need more than 10 or so starting families to reach a sustainable population, with second cousin marriages it can be done with 4 families so I wouldn't think you'd need 40 families to start.

For me it all depends on what neighborhood I'm playing and where I want it to go.

In Reefside a BACC hood I started with one sim but I added in tons of CAS sims and married a lot of townies to get the population going. It's impossible for me to say how many babies the first generation had because I didn't keep track of kids, families added or even generation. They had 2-4 kids each with a few early families having 5 or so kids. Before the hood started showing signs of corruption I made a new rule to stop immigration and limit the families to 2 kids each except for accidents and cut down the ideal family size so no-one wanted more than 4 kids and those were the family sims. I was also going to start killing a few sims each round and maybe put realistic sickness in for a round or so to thin the population. Ideally I would have kept the population in check better by adding fewer CAS sims and encouraging playable marriages from the start.

In my test of time hood I started with 5 couples. According to my incomplete spreadsheet they had a total of 36 kids with an average of 7.2 kids. However I must point out that the families who didn't lose parents early on generally had closer to 10 kids it was only because I lost a couple and another sim before they could have many kids that the average is so low. Regarding population control I used realistic sickness and only healed sims at the start and end of a round and let sims fight and kill their siblings/neighbors. 65% of kids died before they became adults so not many sims made it to bringing in the next generation. I only had 6 (or was it 8?) households the next generation. I don't plan on adding any CAS sims (apart from pets) to this hood or marry townies and it doesn't look like I'll need to.

It's fairly easy to answer your questions, but my playstyle is so different to yours that I'm not sure my answers will be at all relevant. I have only created two custom 'hoods, both of which I continue to play at least on occasion. Teston Woods is, as its name implies, a test 'hood, and I play it when I've got something I want to test outside my normal game. It is based on the Maxis Arbordale terrain and is very sparsely populated. New Desconia is based on a Tiny Isle terrain from here, and is basically a paradise island retreat for hedonistic young Romance Sims.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them?
Teston Woods started with one playable, living alone in a little house in an otherwise deserted landscape. There were also 30 townies, created by the mailbox. The 'hood was originally created to test restaurants and the non-appearance of the cook, so there are various small roadside restaurants dotted around the countryside. In one of these he met a young townie woman who turned out to be a General by profession. (He should have guessed by her camouflage trousers!) They fell in love and got married.
New Desconia started with two playable teenage boys, the founders Desmond and Cony after whom the island is named. They were initially accompanied by 5 townies created in CAS, but this turned out not to be enough (they all turned up at every community lot visit) so I quickly added 3 more.
No new Sims have been born in either neighbourhood, but the founder of Teston Woods and his wife the General did once try for a baby. That's as far as it got!

How often or when did you add new families?
In Teston Woods I add new households when they are needed for something new that I want to test.
In New Desconia I add new Sims, both playables and townies whenever I feel that new Sims will add something to the life of the island. Building space on the little island is severely limited, and quite a few playables live on 1x2 or 2x1 lots (unlike the vast empty expanses of Teston Woods).

How did you maintain the population?
Simple! With no deaths and no births population is stable. Immigration (through CAS) is the only way in which population can increase.
Today there are 22 playables and 28 townies in New Desconia. Five of the playables started life as townies.
In Teston Woods there are 16 playables and 36 townies. (I added 8 teenage Romance townies for a test.) Two of the playables started as townies, and I believe one family of four is still in the Family Bin.

No real rhyme or reason.

I add families as I get bored of playing existing ones and play whoever I feel like. I can never finish a whole hood rotation because even 5 days feels too long with some Sims but too short with others.

How many did you start with and how many born in game did you have during the first generation playing them?

Right now, I'm establishing a new hood. It's got 10 families, all unrelated (before marriage) to each other. What I did was to make 10 CAS sims (5 women, 5 men) put them in their own houses, then spawned new opposite sex roomies to share the house with a hack.

That makes 20 pixels, and they're finally getting together and forming families. So far I've had 6 marriages and 2 children. I use empty templates, so I didn't have a lot of NPCs or townies-but the mailman moved into one household due to his attraction to the home owner.

Each family will have (hopefully) at least 1child, if not two..but this one I'm determined not to let overpopulation ruin the game.