I play totally legacy style and have never had any interest in rotational play, but for those of you who do, do you actually play all the households in the world or just pick say 8 or whatever number and rotate among them? They are the households to form relationships such as friends and there are marriages between them, or whatever? I cannot imagine playing all the households in the bigger worlds.

In the majority of my worlds, rotational play begins when one or more grown children leave the nest of the original household I began playing and I do not wish to lose control over any of them. After a while, most worlds end up having 4 or 5 such households I play in rotations, some have more. And in a few cases I've begun playing a household here and there totally unrelated to the original legacy style one still all within the same one ongoing game with 16 worlds inter-connected (Traveler mod), of which 5 or so are "my" sims' homeworlds.

At no time would I ever want to play an entire world, some of them have well over 200 residents (not counting pets) and that would be far too much to even think about. So each world that acts as a homeworld as opposed to merely a vacation destination has two classes of resident sims -- the rotational ones I continue to play and "the rest of them" that NRaas SP progresses as it sees fit, under the general and town options I have set for everyone.

Over time, especially when considering a family line where one generation had 16 kids between two siblings, I do have to let some households go and progress on their own or else it would take me far too long to complete a full rotation across all of the worlds where "my" sims are living. And new households get added. Others have often heard me say that I've only ever played one ongoing TS3 game and this is true, but really I've leveraged the system to allow many different games with storyline overlap to co-exist all within the same game save. In theory eventually I could push things too far, one of these worlds might blow up and become unplayable, but then the strategy becomes get my sims out of there and move them around to the other worlds. This hasn't ever happened except for when I passed the limits of the Mac version of the game long ago and realized I had to switch to Windows or else find some other way to play. But for practical purposes, whenever I have a new idea for a storyline I add it to my one ongoing game rather than starting a brand new one.

That makes a lot of sense. I cannot imagine playing 50 or maybe more households in some of the worlds. (!) As said I play legacy style, with 2 parallel lines that originated from 2 sisters. As I have wanted tight control each of the 2 sides normally has just one child each generation to be the heir on that side. In just a few cases someone has had 2. And sometimes it has been a hard decision as to whom to play. I have moved the non heir to somewhere where I could watch them a few times just for fun even though not playing them. One moved out sister married a vampire on her own and had a bunch of kids as I recall. It was fun to send my sims across the street to visit them. I am at generation 34 I think it is even with all the constant game and CAW building I do, and having gone back to 3 after some play in 4. I still like to play that family. Love the history and I have a ridiculous amount of documentation about them.

It sounds like you have tight control of your sims and how you play them, and I think that is fun to do.

I used to keep track of all the places my family has lived but have not done that recently. I normally have moved them to the new world each time a new EP came out or I made a new one. Once in that world they stay put and are not moved around until the move to the new world. One thing that is sad is that with all the moves I have lost some pretty darn nice vacation homes I made for them. They are now buried in long lost saves.

Same here, I'm a rotational player, but only rotating the most interesting 5-6 households per neighborhood. And not because they are relatives/descendants but because they are the most interesting characters. I call it "Desperate Housewives-style gameplay" because the TV show worked exactly like this: they rotated the same 5 households, showing the other neighbors only as background "townies". I like to skip the longer uneventful periods of a family and switch to another, looking for some drama, just like DH did.

I kinda wish to start playing this kind of save, though I may afraid it may end up becoming non-enterable due to memory bloating lol. Any steps of setting up and things I should know about? I'm still novice player.

Although I'm mostly a builder, when I play it's rotational play achieved through NRaas mods, as I am a control freak. It took some time for me to tweak it to my liking and I forgot to turn off some things. In the beginning, for example, my inactive sims still gained random skills like crazy (Martial Arts was very popular), there was trash and dirty laundry in every house, and I had mermaids dying of dehydration when asked to stay the night in a house without a pool.

I don't have a high-end computer, I have heaps of CC and mods, but my game is surprisingly smooth - mostly thanks to NRaas and CCMagic. Lately I've mostly been in Legacy Island III as I find that world to be reliable and diverse enough for lazy casual play, but I want to start playing with connected worlds using Traveler. However, as established, TS3 is a laggy game in itself and rotational play can probably add to that. I've mostly had problems with stuff in inventory disappearing or appearing (I know inventory is buggy) but I can live with that. I clear my cache often, backup my saves and save often (using "Save As..."), and use "Reset Everything" in MasterController to clean up a bit extra. But so far it worked fine for me, maybe in the future I will turn on aging and story progression for families I find uninteresting to play. I also have the seasons set to the maximum number of days so it feels like time doesn't pass as quickly. With NRaas you can also keep wishes when switching families, but I suspect that could add lag.

I suspect that you are a much more sophisticated player than you give yourself credit for.

And more like bits of disjointed advice here and there than a formal sequence of steps. I've never sat down and set up a world with rotational play being the goal from the outset, it just sort of evolves that way after some gameplay takes place and usually one household at a time gets added to those I wish to control within each world. In other words, if the world being played can withstand story progression (NRaas SP of course, but AwesomeMod's version should work too although its user controls are less customizable) with one and only one household ever active, then try a rotation of two with modded protection. Then a bit later maybe three, etc.

-- The save will expand in size as this happens, but the increases should be linear, not exponential explosions. Save Cleaner or the equivalent remains a good friend to have as do all of the other tips we often prescribe to help preserve game performance.
http://www.nraas.net/community/TIPS...AME-PERFORMANCE

-- Don't let sims' scrapbooks fill up with nonsense memories by either switching the feature off or use a mod to control them. It's bad enough when this happens with one active household, but for many such it will cause game save file bloat like crazy.

-- Switches from one household to another can be Dream Catching or not. Dream Catching switches keep the Dream Managers running on the sims left behind, this is what keeps their promised wishes and opportunities intact. Too many Dream Managers running at the same time (and it's impossible to define what "too many" means as it will be different for all different worlds on various systems) will have a very negative impact on game performance. I usually use Dream Catching switches when I want a relatively quick switch out and back in again, but not for rotational progression as when we are talking about more than let's say three households (so more than say 10-15 sims on average), it's just not going to run well. Whether an active household switch is Dream Catching or not depends on the method used to switch.
http://www.nraas.net/community/Dreamer-FAQ
(scroll down a bit to see the discussion I am referring to, this is under the Dreamer mod's FAQs but the concept is the same with or without the Dreamer mod)

Periodically I will check with MC as described above to see how many Dream Managers are really running and if it's too many/more than I expected to see, then it's time to cancel all of them except of course those for the actively being played household or that which is about to be actively played.

Guess I could keep going, but really the most important thing is kind of difficult to describe. You will know what a world "feels like" when playing it and things are performing as they should. When that feeling changes, something is perhaps wrong or different and needs to somehow be investigated before it becomes a lasting effect whether it be lag, save file bloat, total lack of free will or sim autonomy suddenly working right, Error12s, etc. The never-ending balancing act between expanding and progressing worlds vs. game performance becomes part of the game to manage for so many of us after a while.

Thanks for sufficient comment. The advice for reducing the likely hood of save's impending save and (just what I needed) a link to mod that saves promised LTWishes will surely help me going about making such game

I'm one of those different players, maybe not strictly rotational, but switchy. I do what I feel like. I used to play differently long ago, playing my Sim(s) only, but I came to like playing and getting to know the premades. Some of them push me out of my comfort zone and kind of "teach" me. So lately I make it a point to "rotate" through them to "give 'em a try" and I go back to play the interesting ones, or switch for whatever other reason suits my fancy. I end up with my favorites, mediums, extras, and then just the surrounding townies. I'd never pick a strict number or anything to narrow myself down to, nor do I force myself to expand.

Sometimes I throw my own Sims in though I do that less in TS3. I no longer start with my own Sim.

The Sims are friends with mostly whom they pick and I have them romance when they can and see how it goes. I "progress" extremely slowly with mega-long, mega-modded custom timing/aging. But, hey, their time goes a lot faster than ours so I don't think it's slow, and seasons seem to pass quickly to me, but I think I've settled on a happy medium.

In some ways I hyper control things, but I like the Sims to surprise me and make their own choices, too. I don't just want control, I love to observe and want to see what's up with just about everyone, and with my "snail" play, it's mostly possible.

I'm the same. I do enjoy micro-managing my town but that doesn't mean I'm dictating everything. I usually have plans on a direction I want the sims to go in, but this can change along the way. A lot of times, when I discover one of my sims out in the world while playing a different household, that's when I get ideas of how to progress with that particular sim. Because of the long lifespans and seasons, I can "leave" a household I get bored with for a long time without there being any major inconsistency in the world timeline.

In Sims 2, rotational play is used a lot by players like myself who play what is known as an integrated or self-sufficient hood. There are rotational players who don't play in this style though, but they are still focused on an overall hood story and how all the sims interact. They don't feel forced to play all the families, they want to play all the families. The integrated hood goes a step further because each family plays an important role in running the hood. It isn't individual families in a self-contained bubble but more looking into their role in the hood.What they do influences the whole hood.
In real life if you want groceries you probably go to your local store, in integrated hood play you would send your playable sim to a grocery store owned and run by one of the other families in the rotation and they may or may not get food from a farmer to partly stock their store. Some people would use buyable food bins, some would have the grocery store owner be the farmer so it is more like a market stall, some might do a combination of both. The sim you send to the store might be one of the teachers at the local school who teaches the child of the grocery store owner. This is why it's called integrated. It's running a whole town and leaving none or little to NPC's or non-playable sims. Like the families all the lots are playable and mostly owned and run businesses. If a family isn't important or needed they wouldn't be added. If I somehow end up with a family who I felt forced to play I would either A) Turn them into townies for awhile B) Cheat them skills, job levels etc and age them up every now and then. No need to actually play families you don't like. Rotational players mostly like having control as well. Not that we can control everything, even sims 2 sims can make or break relationships with no input, but most of us like knowing the sims will be in exactly the same place when we load a family back up again. I don't think playing rotationally is any more old fasioned then having lots of sim babies or just building. Plenty of Sims 2 players don't play rotationally as well. They either ignore, kill off, townify or cheat sims they don't want to play.

I know some people play Sims 3 rotationaly, although it would not be my choice. I found when I tried that sims would have done things that I didn't want them to do. I am guessing those who play sims 3 rotationally are more interested in following the lives of all the sims rather than running a town but there may be mods for this now though, I haven't played Sims 3 since about 2012.

Sims 4 doesn't lend itself to integrated play at all. You need lots of business and lots and the 'worlds' (how can 5 lots be called a world?) are stiflingly tiny. Anytime I play sims 4 it is just the one family until I get tired of them.

Say, if I play more than two households, do I rotate in or rotate out proceeding households?

ETA: Nevermind got it. Says in "If you are playing more than two households rotationally, the concept is the same. Put the soon to be inactive household into the Rotations caste, switch, then remove the newly active household from the Rotations caste."