1) How far do your Sims usually get, generation-wise? (Large 'hood with tons of families that slow you down or small 'hood so you can get through them quicker?)
2) What's the farthest you've gotten to ever? Do you remember their names?
3) How many kids do you typically get on average for each new generation?
4) What's the highest amount of Sims in a household you've reached?

I'm hoping to finally get past the third generation in a Sims game for once so I'm curious to what other people have to say on this topic.

Honey, I've been playing longer than you and some of the first adults I made in CAS are still alive. (Well, okay, one.) And my families are so big I think in terms of age cohorts rather than generations.

I'm still playing a neighborhood I started in 2007, however, it contains a lot of sims so the progress is slow for 8 years time. I would say the furthest generation is 4 if you count the first generation as CAS sims and then all subsequential offspring equal a new generation. the generation between 2 and 3 increased by about 5-7 sims. This newest fourth generation is popping up all sorts of twin births so it's gonna be bigger than the previous in-game born generations, I imagine. So far I have 4 new babies/toddlers to my hood for (pure) generation 4 (12 total if I count the other babies in the age group but not technically generation 4 since maybe their grandparents were CAS and added into the game to mingle with generation 2) but there's still a lot of generation 3 sims still in Uni and will probably produce kids sometime in their adult life.

I don't have any mods so the most sims in a household I have gotten to is 6.

I've gotten furthest with playing challenges. My longest family was a seven generation apocalypse family. As the lifts fell out, one of the last lifts ended up being the one that let sims move out, so it was literally a one-household neighborhood until the end, and even though I'd done nothing wrong it was still corrupted enough that I finished the last lift, extracted the sims, and trashed it.

Generationally the longest bloodline I maintained, I think, made it to 5 in a vanilla game.. It was my very first hood and it exploded right around the time gen 5 was born. I want to say the girl's name was Sally or something simple like that since I was playing young and had discovered the age up cheats in game via set to birthday. I didn't have the essential mods and the hood was destroyed and violently eaten alive by the corruption. Lol

I think the farthest I've gotten to was 5 generations, which took me about 2 years.The most sims in a household may have been 10, but I'm not sure. Not as much of a nightmare as I thought it would be.

WARNING, long reply.

Hood: Custom, Withea Dale - Pre-modern society with social classes and an alphabetic twist
Time played: Approximately a year but have been creating the draft a year before I started it.
Population: Ca: 350 playables, 100% free from townies, ca 70 households.
Character files: 947 where 99% were playables
Current Generation: 8-9 where the 9th are the current baby boom. (they are no older than children or early teen)
6-7 if excluding the founders or counting born in game only (always start with a cas elder couples and their adult kids and eventually together aunt/uncle + cousin with a total of eight sims where the extra adult siblings move out from their parents house. I've a total of 36 cas founders but added half of them later on, a few families at the time).
Average kids: 1.5 per woman or 3 per guy, max 6. or ca: 100 sims per generation.
Average playables per household: 4-6. I don't like large households (but do like large families), so I tends to move the elders when next generation approaching. So I can't really answer question 4.
(.... hmmm did I miss anytthing?
Edit: I did. I DO remember all of my sims as Ive spreedsheets and powerpoint for it. ')

Because I had the same problem with the third generation and restarted a hood oh-so-frequently, I started to play a bit differently.

Im reached the 9th generation because I don't play every houehold and age them up when I get bored.
Ive strict age synching and play them in rotation (which varies alot each time, sometimes 3, sometimes a week, sometimes 12 days in parts) and using spreedsheets to keep track on how old they are and using mods allowed me to go through a generation faster than you normally would do if you play the vanilla way or use aging off or a longer age mod. IF I wanted to play a family longer, I would just use aging off on them.

I don't find sims reading a book, snoring, digging treasures or skilling "interesting", so I tends to skip this part and play the rotations faster. Then, Ive included a plague where I create a list and randomize it each rotation to "declutter" the hood. Pregnant, Kids and young adults with no previous relationship are excluded. A chilbirth risk is also used for women with several kids or when they have kids. (how many people have twins three times in real life, seriously...? )

It's pre-modern and they have kids early so it common for the sims to their great-grand parents, and otherwise I would have 4 generation families in one lot. When the grandkids are children or if the couple only had girls who got married, the elders are moved to retirement houses and remain unplayable until its time for them to see the grim ripper. Sims joining the military will also be unplayable until its time for them to die, which is rather random. I don't brutally kill them off for fun, I do it with a storyplot in mind.
The plague force me to re-think where and with who they live with as I can get bored when playing certain family structures (couple with kids married off, singles especially). Some families got almost extincted because of the plauge. Children with no appropriate guardian are moved to an orphanage, if its a pretty teen girl, they might be moved to a brothel, to please the rich families when they are older. :giggle: (they don't live in the 21th centuary...)

Although 70 households with 4-6 sims each seems like a lot, but adding small tweaks how I play the hood make this a lot more managable. Since im the one who play the hood, I don't care if aging them up and giving them skills and careers as cheating. It's how I play the hood and find it enjoyable.

Getting stuck/bored at a certain generation means you might need to find a way to play the hood unless you ofcourse find it amusing to watch them snoore, playing in bath tube or eat their hamburger etc kind of activities, playing patiently all 24 sim hours or the vanilla way will make the playtime alot longer. For some, this fit their bill perfectly, for other, it can get boring to play.

EDIT 2: Greeeeeeeeeat. Need to re-do one generation. A stupid sim mysteriously dissappeared and doesnt exist anymore according to Hood Checker. I did notice something was wrong when I saw those scringle thoughts bubbles appear even though I didnt do any VBT's. Oh well. Better to discover it early than too late, and go back to a older back up.

I used to play with a single family, and play them until I got bored, so in the past I never really got that far with a family. But through reading here and developing my game-play, I started enjoying the game differently and actually stuck to a family. It's slowly developed to become more families that just the core one, and my hood going corrupt and the two years it took me to rebuild it has slowed the process, but the core family has started giving birth to generation five. I'm very excited about it, partially because that birth was the end of my rebuild, but also because I've never stuck with a family for this long. I'm still very much in love with generation 4, and I'm looking forward to them becoming grandparents to gen 6 in the future.

It sounds as though corruption is inevitable after five or six generations. I have never got beyond the third generation, because I always get new ideas, and often reset my neighborhoods. My present neighborhood, Rome, is only just bringing up the second-generation children, and the sims who have a LTW to have six grandchildren will probably be disappointed. I wonder what my next big idea will be?

The longest I ever went was my Mayfair Witches neighborhood. I made it up to Marie Claudette as an adult, meaning 6 generations. I think Marguerite had been born by then. Then Sims 3 got released and I didn't play 2 until the Ultimate Collection got released. It had gotten kind of boring, because between Charlotte and Julien, the family just grows with no weird accidents. Of course, doing everything by the book for Julien probably would have caused the family tree to implode...

The number of children was forced by the books. I actually still remember a lot of names for the non-plot sims. Jeanne-Louise's four older brothers were named after characters from Madame Bovary, since we were reading that in french class. Can't remember most of their children though. I do know that since the books have a grandfather, father and son all named Antoine, I decided to keep that going and named the next son Antoine as well. He had three daughters and no sons, so the youngest one was named Antoinette.

I usually make it to three gen until I have to make new blood to mix in such a hassle since I don't usually go for townies .

1 & 2) My neighbourhood is 5 generations old (Garik Jones was born on or around the start of the neighbourhood, was the father of Yorik Jones, who was the mother of Kell Jones, father of Celine Chii, mother of Seki Chii, who is now a teenager). It is rare I have 4 generations around in the same install of the game, but I consider my neighbourhood to be contiguous between installs. My neighbourhoods tend to hover around 60-80 Sims at any given time.

3) Around 3 per child-bearingfamily on average, with about 1/3 of Sims being childless for various reasons. There was one generation where 1/3 of the children (19) had the same parents (yes, Triplets & Quads was involved).

4) The most Sims I've had in a house is 8 (I run the default limits). The most houses I've had for a two-generation family "unit" is three (Pollination Tech #9 Smith lived in one house with five teenagers and two older children, his wife Jenny lived with the seven babies and toddlers, and the eldest son Johnny lived with his wife Ophelia, five of Johnny's child-aged siblings and eventually their own (only) daughter Ordinary). I'm surprised nobody named any schools after the family!

I usually get to gen 2 - 3 before getting bored and moving on to a new hood.
The furthest I've got is an older neighbourhood, I can't remember what it was called but it contained me and my friends simselves. I know it got to the point where I had great-grandchildren. I've also had a legacy to get to 3rd gen too. I'm so surprised when I realize 3 is the furthest I've got... wow.

I'm not sure how many kids per generation, but all my sims have around 2-3 children, with of course a few having 1 and a few having 4+. Usually I have at least 1 family attempting to get to 10 children. The most kids a sim has ever had was around 20ish, with each letter of the alphabet but the hood corrupted when she was pregnant with Wilma/Warren.

The Dreamers currently have about 10 different sims in their household at the moment. Darren, Brandi (broke), Beau & Mark Broke (Brandi's younger two with Skip), then 6 with Darren, and then 11 if you include their dog, Marley. I've had way more sims in a household, I've had about 4 columns of icons on the left screen - which makes the game insanely slow, but most sims weren't related and were mostly for extras in stories and stuff so I don't really count that.

1) How far do your Sims usually get, generation-wise? (Large 'hood with tons of families that slow you down or small 'hood so you can get through them quicker?)
I'm playing my current hood since 2011 and started with 10 founders. It was a BaCC. The main families are the Granville-Carveres, the Martainses, the Morneau-Diopes and the Martains-Delormes. Older families are on generation 5-6 and I had lots of twins lately.
I now have 127 playables and more than 30 households. I use a modified aging mod but not a longer span mod as I like to see how genetics go through generations. I'm a dedicated player.

2) What's the farthest you've gotten to ever? Do you remember their names?
I'm still playing the hood since I love the sims who are living there. Each household is played. I remember the name of the founders and all the born in game sims. I have trouble to remember townies who moved in the hood for a short period of time (unexpected deaths).

3) How many kids do you typically get on average for each new generation?
At the beginning of the hood, sims tended to have 3 to 5 children. Now they have between 0 and 3 children. ACR is usually taking care of that for me unless I decide otherwise. It's rare though.
Sims are allowed more if they can when they have these LTW (marry off 6 children or graduate 3 children from university). Cordélia Granville-Carver is trying to fully the 6 children one but I'm not sure she'll succeed. She'll be an elder soon and none of her children are married yet (4 adults, 1 teen and 1 child).

4) What's the highest amount of Sims in a household you've reached?
I have a mod for big households but the more I've reached is 8 Sims.

My sim families usually get to the third generation before I get an idea that would require a new hood or just get bored with the first one. My hoods usually start out small (one-three families and their offspring) and then grow as time goes by.

Farthest I have ever gotten generation wise is six generations before corruption took my hood.

Each generation varies on kids, but since I added ACR my families have on average 5 children and up to 12. That makes for many many children in a generation. For instance, my Cassandra Goth that I cloned into a custom hood had eight children before she ever became an adult. She has been an adult less than a sim week, has already given birth to twins and is pregnant with another child. ACR is crazy like that.

Highest amount of sims in a household that I have reached is 19. It was a CAS couple, their five children and their spouses, as well as grandchildren. Finally I had to do something I very rarely do and that is put the women on birth control because I was unable to play that family comfortably as it was and adding more would make it far too hard to play and enjoy.

My daughter and I played a shared neighborhood together for five years. We began with 2 founding families each and made a fifth family co-operatively.

We had a lot of fun doing that - arguing over which sims should breed with who, how everyones homes should be decorated, when was our "godly justice" warranted, etc. Her friends made self sims when they came over for sleep-overs and we kept them updated on what they were up to in our town. Someone from MTS even gave us a self sim for this town and we would send them pix from time to time.
Our shared town grew to 5 generations and we played every family. I was in love with one of my founding families..two gay vampire men, and had them adopt 5 kids made using their genetics ..and one got pregnant by aliens. That was the most kids in a single generation, one family.

Never had more than 8 in a household at a time.

Yes, we remember ALL of them and we remember their personalities and have "in-jokes" between us about stuff that happened in our game. A great mother-daughter bonding experience. We still look at clothes sometimes and declare, simultaneously "That is something ____ would wear!"

Most families had around two or three noo-boos.

Daughter is in college now, has no time for sims but still to this day we talk about the sims bred from our original founders as if they are "real" characters we once knew. I still have them saved on an old laptop (and an external hard drive) and we peeked in on them recently for nostalgia sake.

I tend to get more attached to sims born in game than ones I make or download, so I have no problem playing one town for a long time..I don't get bored, in fact, I prefer it.

I'm hoping to reach at least the five year mark with the Sedona neighborhood I am playing alone now, so I am being very careful not to do anything corrupting. I'm already wondering if whatever OS I have 5 years out from now will be able to run sims 2!

I'm on my 4th hood (Lonely Cove). Restarts happen for various reasons, only once because of corruption.

My first hood, Pleasantview, hit 6th gen. Enjoyable, but it was starting to bloat -- some 40 odd households -- there was some corruption issues and everyone had too much money. I don't remember all the names, but I remember some of them. My main family, the Cabots, had some great characters including Safana Bricabot, my first 50 first dater.

I play under base game household limits, so yeah 8 is the norm. It's rare that I meet that, but it does happen, as I like to keep multi generations living in the same house. Which acts as a form of birth control, but it can make for complex, demanding gameplay. Smaller households are much easier to play. If need be, I'll split a household, but it's usually for character reasons and only if there's enough money (no free 20K in effect).

I tracked the demographics in my 2nd 'hood, Nova Fields, and basically found the population increased in a steady progression. No bell curves, no real bumps, just constant increase. Families usually have one kid (or adopt) and have others according to rolled wants and LTW's. Every now and then you get couples who don't seem to want children ever, but overall it's just a steady climb.

Checking my Lonely Cove notes, I seem to have 20 households in play, and 39 "children" (some are grown up now). so 1.95? But since most marriages this go around seem to be with townies for whatever reason, there's aconstant population growth.

The 2nd gen is starting to die off (beginning with Erin Erowid, who liked hats, parties, David Ottomas ... and as a child ate snow! RIP Erin. ). Her grand niece, Neira Erowid is the first 4th gen and is currently in the quantum school bus going to and back from her first day of school. I hope she make a friend.

I love this game, but I think it gets richer the further you go. The backstories can get very deep, which I find very satisfying.

You can see all my sims and generations on the link in my signature. I cant remember when I started the neighborhood though, is there a way to check that in the game files? That'd be interesting to see!

I started with two CAS sims in college as my founders then added some pre-made college sims to the mix like the Davis brothers, Stella Terrano, and a few other ones like Malcolm Landgraab.

Gcgb53191, I like the idea of those family trees..maybe I will start one for each of the Sedona families.

1) How far do your Sims usually get, generation-wise?Third generation here, because I made neighborhoods so large I needed notes to keep track of them all. Currently doing a few smaller neighborhoods, including one using a base-game-compatible mobile home park lot, so all three 'families' are all on the same lot. This not only helps keep families smaller, the next door neighbors are always available and will wander over in their pajamas at 2 AM if they wish, and there's only one set of bills.
2) What's the farthest you've gotten to ever? Do you remember their names? Third generation with multiple families. Way too many names to have been remembered.
3) How many kids do you typically get on average for each new generation? Depends on the family. I've had as many as 19 before, IIRC.
4) What's the highest amount of Sims in a household you've reached? In terms of Sims living together in the same house, 8. That I've never messed with.

You can check when your game was first added to Origin but as far as I know, you can't check when you started the neighborhood. Gameplay wise, I mean. If you include building it up, you could always go to Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Neighborhoods
and hover your mouse above the said neighborhood's folder. It'll say the date it was created on.


I used to use FamilyEcho for Simming as well, but it's a pain in the butt because you take a pic of each Sim. That's not so bad at first, but if they start having twins(+)... It's a handful, really. I have trouble keeping up with my real-life one, for Pete's sake. So many relatives and so little Facebooks.

I played Sims 2 for five years, then Sims 3 came out and I only played that until UC was offered for free last year (now I play both). So I have two lots of playing to talk about.

In my recent game, Strangetown has progressed 16 years, which is less than a generation. The oldest born-in-game sim, Pascal Curious's alien son Sirius, is now a teenager, and the youngests starting sims who now have children are Johnny and Ophelia. Mortimer Thanasia (aka Nervous Subject) has the most children, with seven in total, though six of them were adopted. General Grunt is in the lead for not-adopted kids, with six. Johnny and Ophelia both want 10 children, so they'll be overtaking both in a few years time (they have five children at the moment). Many families however have only one child - I don't know what the average is.

The neighbourhood I played most in pre-Sims 3 days was a town called, I think, Finrith Island, and about two generations passed by the time I'd stopped playing (the second baby born in that neighbourhood had just become a grandfather). Sadly, I can't remember most of the names, or even who had the most children. Somewhere at my parents' house there are records... but I haven't looked at them for years. I can remember one sim called Ellen who had two children from her first marriage, then got divorced and remarried a widower with another child, and then they had twins, but I struggle to name any of the children or the husband.



Did you know you can extract the thumbnail images for each sim from SimPE fairly easily? That's what I do for my Strangetown family tree on there, and it works really well.

1) How far do your Sims usually get, generation-wise?
I'm still playing the Sims I started with. I play with aging off, and pregnancies are few and far between. I've had two birthdays since I started: Hans Moltke - toddler to child, and Tybalt Capp - teen to ... err ... Independent Teen. (He aged up to adult but I aged him back down to Independent Teen with the Sim Manipulator. I expect him to get married and move out soon.) I've never even seen the Grim Reaper in my game, and I'm in no hurry to meet him. I'm afraid it might be me he comes for first.
2) What's the farthest you've gotten to ever? Do you remember their names?
I've had 3 born-in-game babies in total. I certainly remember their names! They are Peni-Jo McBain and Peregrine McBain in Veronaville (twins), and Titus Curious in Strangetown. They're all still babies.
3) How many kids do you typically get on average for each new generation?
Insufficient data to give a meaningful answer!
4) What's the highest amount of Sims in a household you've reached?
Six. I can think of 3 families this size: The McBains (CAS plus 2 babies), the Capps (Goneril, Albany and their brood) and the Newsons. When New Desconia School is in session, there are twelve controllable Sims there, and I think that's about the limit that I and my computer can cope with. (I thought the maximum without hacks was eight.)

I don't think this questionnaire is really meant for my playstyle!

I think I reached at least 6 generations at one point, starting with a couple of pre-mades at Uni. Then the neighborhood started to get pretty filled up, and I had some troubles with the hood (that was before I figured out cache files), so I eventually gave up. Earlier I'd play with sims until they were elders. I've had several elders going out with hula-dance at the end of their lives, and a lot of them reached perma-platinum as adults, so I'm guessing they lived long lives. Most ended up being great-something-grandparents, living forever in the 'hood, usually adding to the space problem. I still remeber the couple I started with, but not the rest. I do remember I had by first real no-mod/no-cheat twins in the 3rd or 4th generation, though. Came as a big surprise. After that they just continued having twins once in a while.

I like playing with kids, so my families usually have somewhere between 3 and 12 kids of varying ages. The most common is 3-5. Earlier I often played with a bunch of twins, triplets and quads, usually several in each family. I have had about 20 babies on a lot at the same time, and I do have a couple of lots with 8 babies, but that's not families I actually play, so they're kept alive with maxmotives.

Oh boy... Most sims in a household would be around 30-40, but that's purely for testing or story purposes. Around 15-20 for story lots, and at most 10-12 for playing.

Its not too bad, I only take pictures once they're out of college and are adults otherwise constantly updating it every time they age would definitely be a pain in the butt! My older generations however are from when they're elders because I thought of the idea too late and could only use the thumbnail pictures in my sims' memories.